The Forty-Nine Steps

A desolate cloud hangs over the last months of Walter Benjamin’s life. On the night of 23 August 1939, German radio interrupted a musical program to broadcast the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin pact. A few days later, as the Nazis were invading Poland, German refugees in Paris were made to assemble in the Colombes stadium. There were about six thousand of them, and among them was Walter Benjamin, with a suitcase and a blanket. For ten days they waited in an oppressive heat, while excrement accumulated in large buckets. On the tenth day, Benjamin was sent along with many others to an internment camp at Nevers. It was a completely empty château, with no light and no beds. Benjamin slept at the foot of a spiral staircase, in a cubicle that he had to crawl into on his hands and knees.

A survival market soon developed. Benjamin would offer lessons in philosophy to “advanced” pupils in exchange for three Gauloises or a button. But later he was to have more ambitious ideas: He wanted to found a magazine for the camp, “naturally at the highest level.” The editors got together one day for a meeting, entering the philosopher’s den on all fours. “Gentlemen, it has to do with getting an armband,” said Benjamin with some solemnity. The armband meant permission to leave the camp for a few hours in the morning. They never got it. Two months later, Benjamin was freed, thanks to the intervention of Adrienne Monnier. The idea of creating a magazine in order to get an armband seems to me to correspond to the only conception of praxis suited to Benjamin: an act that opens the possibility of emerging from an internment camp, which is then History itself. This gnostic conception is incompatible with the much more widespread one fostered by those for whom praxis primarily means transforming the world into an internment camp, thereby carrying History to its triumph.

Between his release from the Nevers camp (November 1939) and his flight to southern France (June 1940) months pass, of which we know very little. From this period comes a piece of writing, in part jotted down on newspaper wrappers. Events and the form of the writing oblige us to consider it Benjamin’s final testament: the eighteen “Theses on the Concept [Begriff] of History”—nine pages, dense and glittering, carved on a lump of lava. It is on them, more than any of his other writings, that the fury of interpreters has been unleashed as they continue their efforts to drag Benjamin in opposite directions.

. . . an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a counter-move. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called “historical materialism” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.¹

As far as theology is concerned, it is not hard to answer. A nomad and a cabalist in disguise, Benjamin had believed from the beginning that the times required that he not devote himself to the traditional problems of his doctrine but plunge into and mimic mystical categories in the boundless world of the profane. Thus he had chosen, willy-nilly, the most disparate objects as cover for his innate esoteric knowledge: obscure baroque dramas, toy collections, the writings of psychopaths, evocations of urban landscapes (like the passages of Paris), hashish hallucinations. But in treating these materials, theology each time felt protected and concealed by a copious, curving shell. Now, instead, it had acquired its thinnest, most risky covering: that puppet dressed as a Turk, who had to win his match. To the symbolic eye, the image of the match already evoked the proximity of death.

But what, then, was this puppet? Here the answer gets complicated. Not only is the “historical materialism” of which the eighteen theses speak radically different from anything that has ever been called by that name, but in a way it is the antithesis of Marx’s very theory and of the praxis that swore by that theory all over the world. Together, the theses constitute a devastating attack on what “liberal” historicists called “progress,” what Marx called “development of the forces of production,” and what German Social Democrats had celebrated for years with their most feeble-minded slogans: “Every day our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter” (Wilhelm Dietzgen). What was it that united them all, and not only in the idea of “progress” but in the connected sense of “work that ennobles” and nature as material to be exploited (and which “exists gratis,” besides, observed the undaunted Josef Dietzgen)? The conception of time as a “homogeneous, empty” sequence.

With the pathos of fierce despair, Benjamin opposed this vision of history as a continuum tied by an uninterrupted thread, whether red, black, or purple. For him, “the catastrophe is progress, and progress is the catastrophe.” In the face of History, a single gesture is called for: Halt it. And the only means for introducing this improbable discontinuity is that “weak Messianic power” with which “like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed.”² Seeking to restore “to the concept of the classless society its genuine Messianic face,” Benjamin eliminated first the features of a muscular, benevolent, and rather obtuse working class in power. That class had been deprived by its leaders of the only true revolutionary force-memory-and been swindled into accepting in exchange faith in the future and the rising course of history.

“Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current,” says the eleventh thesis.³ For Benjamin, now, the oppressed are no longer the working class or the proletariat but a vaster and more silent mass: the dead, the “nameless” killed by History. Now it is a matter not of replacing one last time the personnel in charge of that cogwheel called History but of blowing up the wheel itself. The object of Benjamin’s fury is nothing less than all of History. This is enough to separate him irrevocably from all theorists of socialism, who in their “ideals” have venerated the “locomotive of universal history” above everything else, while Benjamin would like to stop it by pulling the emergency brake. The only point on which Benjamin remained ambivalent was, as always, Marx himself, who in his image of the classless society had secularized the image of messianic time, with a gesture akin to Benjamin’s theological practices. But Benjamin also knew that in Marx the messianic image, by being secularized, had come to be confused with that of an ordinary workers’ club. It is one of Benjamin’s obvious weaknesses that he pretended not to have noticed this dreadful mix-up. And this is just what makes certain pages from his last years stiff and wooden, pages in which he persisted in exercising a calling that physiologically did not suit him: that of “historical materialist.” But having reached the testamentary threshold of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin has a flash that reestablishes stellar distances. He still speaks here, of course, in the name of “historical materialism,” but now this concept has been completely emptied from within, by the hand of the dwarf hunchback and chess master.

The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disentangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their “mass basis,” and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing.⁴

The argument cuts both ways: The traitorous politicians may be not only the German Social Democrats, long an object of Benjamin’s scorn, but also the Soviets, the newest target for his anger. Any doubt vanishes when one turns to the manuscript of the French version of the theses, written by Benjamin himself Here the violent contraction of the German text loosens enough to allow unequivocal specifics: “As for ourselves, we start from the conviction that the fundamental vices of the politics of the left sustain each other. And among these vices we point primarily to three: blind faith in progress, a blind faith in the strength, rightness, and swift reactions that take shape in the masses; a blind faith in the party.” The decisive word “party” is missing in the German text, but it echoes beneath it from beginning to end. It must surely have been very hard for Benjamin to sever his hopes of Russia, given that even in 1938 he had not dared to voice any objections to the Moscow trials.

But with the theses, Benjamin’s “historical materialism” and “dialectics” finally had to withdraw to their natural surroundings: absolute solitude, where any possible connection with an existing praxis was lacking. The ugly slogan of his friend Bertolt Brecht (“The party has a thousand eyes, the individual only two”) would no longer have any hold on him. Thus, as never before, there reemerges in the theses, almost raw, the fully paradoxical use that Benjamin reserved for the very terms he was preaching, not only “historical materialism” but also “dialectics.” Adorno was not mistaken in reproaching Benjamin for not being “dialectical” enough, despite all his declarations of faith. Actually Benjamin’s dialectics is something that was born and perhaps died with him. It too is an allegory, a reference to something other than what the word “dialectics” proclaims. How else is one to understand a dialectics that does not aim at any Hegelian or Marxian or in any way secular “overcoming” but fixes its gaze on a single point: the “Messianic cessation of happening”?⁵ An enigmatic allusion, which Benjamin illuminated by referring to a subtle passage from Focillon on the “rapid felicity” of that moment when the beam of the scale “scarcely wavers,” and we witness the “miracle of that hesitant immobility, the slight, imperceptible tremor that indicates to me that it is alive.” A good “historical materialist” would have read these lines with perplexity and dismay.

When the Nazis occupied Paris in June 1940, Stalin had flags flown in celebration on the public buildings of Moscow. Between the ninth and the thirteenth of June, two million people fled south, Benjamin among them. He had succeeded, after much effort and delay, in getting a visa for the United States. Now there was a frontier to be crossed. In Marseilles, in November, he divided his supply of morphine with Arthur Koestler, “enough to kill a horse.” On the morning of 26 September, he left with a small group to cross the Spanish border. They reached the frontier after twelve hours of painful hiking. But it had been closed on that very day. Their visas would no longer be accepted.

During the night, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine. Next morning, he sent for a woman friend and gave her a short letter for Theodor Adorno. Then he lost consciousness. His companions, after considerable negotiation, succeeded in crossing the frontier. The friend had Benjamin buried in the cemetery of Port Bou. A few months later, Hannah Arendt went looking for his grave, in vain: “The cemetery faces a small bay directly overlooking the Mediterranean; it is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have seen in my life.”⁶ Some years later, a grave would be shown, isolated from the others, with Walter Benjamin’s name scrawled on the wooden enclosure. According to Scholem, it was an invention of the cemetery attendants, eager for tips. “Certainly the spot is beautiful, but the grave is apocryphal.”⁷