Walter Benjamin Art
Walter Benjamin Art
Walter Benjamin Art
WALTER BENJAMIN
EDITED BY
Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin
TRANSLATED BY
Edmund ]ephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others
v
vi CONTENTS
IV. Photography
27. News about Flowers 271
28. Little History of Photography 274
29. Letter from Paris (2): Painting and Photography 299
30. Review of Freund's Photographie en France au dix-neuvieme
s~de 312
V. Film
31. On the Present Situation of Russian Film 323
32. Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz 328
33. Chaplin 333
34. Chaplin in Retrospect 335
35. Mickey Mouse 338
36. The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds
Expression 340
Index 411
ILLUSTRATIONS
Although Walter Benjamin had written short texts on painting and the
graphic arts during his student years, it was not until the 1920s that he
became intensely engaged with a broad range of modern media. These in~
eluded new technologies that produced changes in, and served as virtual
or actual prostheses for, human perception; instruments of mass commu-
nication such as the newspaper and the radio; new techniques of display
related to urban commodity capitalism; and artistic media such as paint-
ing, photography, and film.
Born in Berlin in 1892, Benjamin had grown up in a city deeply
marked by the rampant growth of German industry in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. Modern technologies were pervasive in the
German capital-arguably more so there than in any other European
metropolis of the era. Germany had been united as a nation only in
1871, and the period that immediately followed (known in German as
the Grunderjahre, or foundational years) was characterized by a remark-
able economic boom that reshaped the face of Berlin. The early years
of Benjamin's career as a writer) which began while he was still in high
school, were given over not to an exploration of the experience of the
modern city, but to a reevaluation of the philosophy and literature of
German Romanticism and to the development of a theory of criticism
rooted in that very Romanticism. In studies of Friedrich Schlegel's criti-
cism, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's prose, and Baroque mourning
plays, Benjamin developed a highly original theory of literature based on
concepts and practices derived from the works themselves.
The rhythms of Benjamin's practice and theory of criticism in the
years 1912-1924 interweave two movements. On the one hand, his
criticism calls for the demolition or demystification of the unified, auton-
omous work of art. In a typically striking formulation, Benjamin calls
this process of demolition or demystification the "mortification of the
work";1 scholars today, using a term from a seminal 1918 speech by the
German sociologist Max Weber, might speak of its "disenchantment."2
1
2 EDITORS' INTRODUCTION
ject of criticism as the discovery of the "truth content') of the work of art.
The dense intertwining of brilliant immanent criticism and broad-gauged
cultural theory in these works has ensured them a special status in the
history of literary theory.
In the course of the 1920s, Benjamin turned his gaze from the German
literary and philosophical tradition to a series of problems in contem-
porary culture. A key stage in this process was his involvement with art-
ists of the European and Soviet avant-gardes who had gathered in Berlin
in the early part of the decade. Crucially, this involvement with avant-
garde artists, architects, and filmmakers overlapped with Benjamin)s
brief affiliation with the university in Frankfurt as he unsuccessfully at-
tempted to have his study of the Baroque mourning play accepted as a
I-Iabilitationsschrift that would qualify him for a teaching position in a
German university. Also during this period, in 1923 he was forming
friendships with the architect, cultural critic, and film theorist Siegfried
Kracauer (1889-1.966), the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-1969),
and the chemist Gretel Karplus (1902-1993, later Gretel Adorno); and
in 1924 he began a long relationship with the Latvian journalist and
theater director Asja Lacis (1891-1979), who encouraged Benjamin to
undertake a serious study of Marxism and to whom his epochal 1928
book One- Way Street was dedicated. In late 1922 and early 1923 a new
group of international avant-garde artists came together in Berlin and
launched the publication of a journal called G:t an abbreviation of the
German word Gestaltung:t meaning "formation" or "construction.» The
artists of the "G-group" included a number of figures who would go
on to shape important aspects of twentieth-century culture: the archi-
tect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), the painter and photogra-
pher Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), the international constructivist
E1 Lissitzky (1890-1941), and the former Dadaists Raoul Hausmann
(1886-1971) and Hans Richter (1888-1976), the latter the group's dom-
inant personality and the driving force behind the journal. Benjamin,
along with his wife, the journalist Dora Sophie Pollak (1890-1964), and
his friend Ernst Schoen (1894-1960), a composer and music theorist
EDITORS' INTRODUCTION 3
Benjamin's work in this field in the 19205 is astonishing for its range
and depth. We should remember that there was no general theory of me-
dia on which Benjamin could build-only theoretical meditations on
older individual forms such as painting and photography, or local re-
flections on new forms such as radio, film, and the illustrated press.
Partly as a professional strategy (he sought in this period to establish
himself as a journalist and indeed as a leading critic of culture), partly
as a practical matter (he saw in radio a potentially lucrative outlet for
his writings), but mainly driven by new aesthetic and political commit-
ments, Benjamin aimed to establish himself as a principal commentator
on new literary directions and new media forms then emerging in Ger-
many, France, and the Soviet Union.
In the course of the 1920s, then, Benjamin increasingly combined
criticism of specific media forms with an effort to construct a more com-
prehensive theory of media-much as he had done in the case of litera-
ture and philosophy up until 1924. Yet if 1924 represents a watershed
year in Benjamin>s intellectual life, the year 1933 marks a traumatic
rupture in his personal life. Although the signs of Hitler's accession to
power in Germany had been impossible to ignore since 1932, the burning
of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, made it clear to even the most
stubbornly hopeful German intellectuals on the political left that their
native land would no longer tolerate them or their ideas. Benjamin, as
a German Jew, was under no illusions regarding the implications not
just for his work, but for his very life. A number of his closest friends and
colleagues, including Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), Ernst Bloch (1885-
1977), and Siegfried Kracauer opted immediately to go into self-imposed
exile; Benjamin himself left Berlin for Paris in Inid-March. He would
spend the remainder of the decade, and indeed the rest of his life, moving
between Paris and a series of temporary refuges that included Brecht's
house in Skovsbostrand, Denmark, his former wife's pensione in San
Remo, Italy, and, a favored place, the Spanish island of Ibiza. The impact
of exile on Benjamin'S thought in general-and on his writings on media
in particular-was pervasive and fundamentaL The famous remarks on
the relationship between aesthetics and politics with which "The Work of
Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" concludes make
plain the political urgency of Benjamin's attempt to develop something
like a "media theory" in the 19308. If fascism could aestheticize politics
and even war, communism, Benjamin asserted, was bound to respond by
politicizing art.
Tellingly, however, the politicized theory of media Benjamin devel-
EDITORS' INTRODUCTION 5
oped in the course of the 1930s did not develop exclusively out of an
engagement with contelnporary media forms. With increasing intensity
Benjamin's thoughts turned instead to history: to the period of the emer-
gence of urban, and specifically metropolitan, commodity capitalism. For
Benjamin, the construction of a massive sociocultural history of Paris in
the years after 1850 was nothing less than a study of the emergence of
modernity as such. This project bore the working title" Arcades Project"
and, had Benjamin been able to complete it, might finally have been
called "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century." The project took its
working title from the proliferation of mercantile galleries, or arcades (in
German, Passagen) in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. "These arcades, a
new invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled cor-
ridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have
joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors,
which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the
passage is a city, a world in miniature. "4 Benjamin focllses on these struc-
tures as the organizing metaphor for his study for a number of reasons:
they are a historically specific artifact of the period in question, a particu-
larly concentrated figure for the public presence and particular visual
character of nineteenth-century commodity capitalism; and the arcades
were themselves a preeminent site of, and apparatus for, the organization
of vast realms of perception for the denizens of the modern metropolis.
The organization and reconfiguration of human perception would indeed
have emerged as a central theme of the great work that Benjamin never
finished. The materials from the Arcades Project that did find their way
into finished works, most prominently a series of essays on the French
poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), included innovative reconsider-
ations of key modernist problems: the role of the urban crowd as an
optical device for the strolling fliineur; the significance of actual optical
devices such as panoramas, peep shows, and magic lanterns in the habit-
uation of city dwellers to the new conditions of metropolitan experi-
ence; and especially the modern practices of display and advertising that
emerged in Paris and would come to shape the perception of the world in
such a pervasive manner.
Benjamin's interest in this era, then, is anything but antiquarian. He
was convinced of a profound synchronicity between the dramatic changes
that took place in Europe around 1850 and the convulsive political up-
heavals marking the Europe in and about which he was writing during
the 1930s. At the center of the theory of history Benjamin developed as
part of the Arcades Project stands the notion that certain historical mo-
6 EDITORS' INTRODUCTION
ments and forms become legible only at a later moment-one that corre-
sponds to them and only to them. Certain forms analyzed in the Arcades
Project (for example, the panoramas, and the "panoramic" literature
that arose in their wake) are moments in the prehistory of a later form
such as film. "I have found," Benjamin wrote to Gretel Karplus in 1935,
"that aspect of the art of the nineteenth century which only 'now' be-
comes recognizable-it had not been so before and it will never be so
again. "5 It seems, then, that Benjamin hoped that readers of his essay
on the work of art would become aware not only of the political and
epistemological potentialities of forms of art made possible by means
of new technologies of production and reproduction, but also of their
correspondence to the artifacts and modes of perception inhabiting other
historical moments, and thus of the particular-and particularly endan-
gered-character of our own embeddedness in history. The essays in-
cluded in this volume are thus not merely indispensable contributions to
the theory of various forms of media that emerged in Benjamin's lifetime;
they are also invested with Benjamin's sense that those forms bore within
them a recognition of the "fate of art in the nineteenth century because it
is contained in the ticking of a clockwork whose hourly chiming has first
penetrated into our ears. "6
In what follows, we have eschewed the chronological organization of
Benjamin's Selected Writings as well as the generic ordering of the Ger-
man edition of his collected works, opting instead to group the essays un-
der what we hope are suggestive conceptual rubrics. The first section,
"The Production, Reproduction, and Reception of the Work of Art," in-
cludes some of Benjamin's best-known essays on the nature and status of
the work of art. These texts pose provocative questions regarding the
place of art in modern society, the perceptual and more broadly cognitive
conditions under which art is produced, and the implications of the re-
ception of art for human agency, indeed for the experiences of the human
subject as such. The section that follows, "Script, Image, Script~Image,"
explores re1ationships between the graphic element of all writing and
modern technologies of representation as they interact with human sen-
sory and cognitive capacities. These essays are united in their documenta-
tion of Benjamin's conviction that meaning takes shape and resides in the
world of urban commodity capitalism not only in discursive, systematic
form, but perhaps even more significantly in flashes that leap out from
the graphic forms of writing's "new eccentric figurativeness"7 as that
writing was bodied forth in props on a stage, an engineering diagram, or
an advertisement. These first two sections are intended to serve as the in-
troduction to broad issues that cut across media, genres, and individual
EDITORS'INTRODUCTION 7
Notes
L See Walter Benjamin, "The Ruin," Chapter 15 in this volume.
2. Max Weber, '~Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociol-
ogy, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1946), p. 155.
3. Walter Benjamin, "The Life of Students," in Selected Writings, Volume 1:
1913-1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 37.
Benjamin's understanding of these scattered shards may be derived from
the Jewish mystical concept of "Tikkun," or the shattering of the vessels.
On Benjamin's relationship to Jewish messianism, see especially Anson
Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and
Modern German Jewish .Messianism," New German Critique, 34 (Win-
ter 1985); and Irving Wohlfarth, "On the Messianic Structure of Walter
Benjamin's Last Reflections," Glyph, 3 (1978). On the conception of Tikkun
itself, see Gershom Scholem, Ma;or Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York:
Schocken, 1954), pp. 245-248. Much of what Benjamin knew of Jewish
messianism was derived fro111 conversations with his close friend Scholem,
who rediscovered the Kabbalah for modern scholarship.
4. \Valter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 31.
Benjamin quotes here, in the first fragment of The Arcades Project, from the
Guide illustre de Paris (1852) and uses the French term passage. The quota-
tion also appears on the first page of the 1935 expose of the project, "Paris,
the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (Arcades Project, p. 3).
5. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briere, voL 5 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1999), p. 171.
6. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and
Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 509
(translation modified).
7. Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street," in Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 456.
8. Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, "Naples," in Selected Writings, vol. 1,
p. 416 (translation modified).
9. See Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 731-736.
I
THE PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION l AND
9
10 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
this aspect of Riegl's work that has the most important implications for a
theory of media.
Riegl strove, over the course of his career, to develop a model of his-
torical causality that could help explain changes in style. At the heart of a
complex answer to this question is his theory of the KUl1stwollel1-the
manner in which a specific culture seeks to give form, color, and line to its
art. With the concept of "artistic volition," Riegl sought to show how art
tracked major shifts in the structure and attitudes of collectives: societies,
races, ethnic groups, and so on. Kunstwollen is the artistic projection of a
collective intention. "All human volition,)) Riegl wrote in his most influ-
ential work, Late Roman Art IndustrYJ "is directed toward the satisfac-
tory shaping of [man's] relationship to the world . . . . The formative
Kunstwollen regulates the relation of man to things as they appear to the
senses: the manner in which man wishes to see each thing shaped or col-
ored thereby comes to expression.... Man is, however, not solely a being
who takes in impressions through the senses-he is not only passive-but
also a desiring-that is, an active-being, who will interpret the world as
it reveals itself to his desire (which changes according to race, place, and
time). "4 Works of art-or rather details within the work of art-are thus
the clearest source of a very particular kind of historical information.
They encode not just the character of the artistic production of the age,
but the character of parallel features of the society: its religion, philoso-
phy, ethical structure, and institutions. When, in an essay such as "The
Author as Producer, Benjamin addresses the question of the political
l)
my head between them, and was inexorably delivered over to the voice
that now sounded, There was nothing to allay the violence that now
pierced me. Powerless, I suffered, seeing that it obliterated my conscious-
ness of time, my firm resolve, my sense of duty."7
Yet it is precisely from such violence that Benjamin imagines the enler-
gence of a new modern subject and a new modern collective. The second
path leads, then, to a new collective body, which Benjamin understands
as the proletariat that took shape in the revolts following the abdication
of the kaiser in November 1918. Indeed, it is only the paroxysm pro-
duced by the new, technologized "conditions of life n that can allow
"mankind to bring the new body under its control." While in Moholy-
work the potential of political agency is implied but never named,
Benjamin's understanding of the new forms of perception that arise in in-
teraction with modern technology never loses sight of Marx's maxim that
our task is not to understand the world but to change it.
PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION 13
Film, on this reading, trains its viewers through the use of a technolog-
ical apparatus (camera, editing, projection) to deal with the "vast appa-
ratus" in which we live, the apparatus of phantasmagoria. Some part of
this capacity is inherent in the particular manner in which forms of mod-
ern media engage with the world. Yet Benjamin's central concern in the
artwork essay is less with the specific qualities of modern media than
with a particular "ability" common to all art under modern conditions:
its reproducibility. The simple any work of art from whatever
period is today susceptible to technological reproducibility has enormous
consequences not just for its mass reception but for its inmost qualities as
well. Perhaps the most famous pages of the essay concern Benjamin's at-
tack on those very qualities that have defined the privileged status of the
individual work of art in the Western tradition: its uniqueness, authentic-
ity, and authority.
Benjamin's idea is of course a scandal and a provocation: he offers a
frontal attack on the very notion of the iconic work of culture, the prod-
uct of a great genius that by its very nature shifts our understanding of
human nature and human history. Yet this attack is the precondition for
any liberation of art from the cultural tradition-and its rootedness in
cult and ritual. For Benjamin, the "present crisis and renewal of human-
ity"-and one must recall that this text was written under the very real
threat of fascism-can come to be only on the ground produced by a
"shattering of tradition." 10
The key move in Benjamin's essay, the move that alone names this
shattering of tradition, is the distinction between auratic and nonauratic
art forms. The term "aura," which first appears in the 1929 essay "Little
History of Photography," is then fully developed in the artwork essay:
"What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique
apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the
eye-while resting on a summer afternoon-a mountain range on the
horizon or a branch that casts is shadow on the beholder is to breathe
the aura of those mountains, of that branch.l'lI A work of art may be
said to have an aura if it claims a unique status based less on quality,
use value, or worth per se than on its figurative distance from the be-
holder. Figurative, since, as the definition intimates, this distance is not
primarily a space between painting and spectator or between text and
reader but the creation of a psychological inapproachability-an author-
ity-claimed for the work on the basis of its position within a tradition.
The distance that intrudes between work and viewer is most often, then,
a temporal distance: auratic texts are sanctioned by their inclusion in a
PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION 15
MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
Notes
1. We have reproduced here the second version of Benjamin's essay, the version
that Benjamin himself considered the "master version,>' or Urtext. For a full
discussion of the status of this version in relation to the others, and for a
brilliant presentation of the problem of cinema in the artwork essay, see
Miriam Bratu Hansen, "Room for Play: Benjamin's Gamble with Cinema,"
October, 109 (Summer 2004): 3-45.
2. "What is at stake is not to portray literary works in the context of their age,
bur to represent the age that perceives them-our the age during
which they arose. It is this that makes literature into an organon of history. "
Benjamin, "Literary History and the Study of Literature" in Selected Writ-
ings, Volume 2: 1927-1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1999), p. 464.
3. On RiegPs historiography, see Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter
Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University
1987), pp. 151-163.
4. Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio
Bretschneider, 1985), p. 215.
5. Benjamin, Review of Oskar Walzel, Das Wortkunstwerk, in Gesammelte
Schriftel1} vol. 3 {Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972}, p. 50.
6. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, "Production-Reproduction," in Christopher Phillips,
ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical
Writings, 1913-1940 (New York: Metropolitan Nluseum of Art, 1989),
pp.79-82.
7. For a more general discussion of technology and the senses in Benjamin's au-
tobiographical writings, see Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Cor-
pus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), espe-
cially chs. 3 and 4.
8. See 1, sections XIII and XV, in this volume.
9. Benjamin, "Children's Literature," in Selected Writings. vol. 2, p. 251 (trans-
lation slightly modified).
10. See Chapter 1, section III.
11. See Chapter 28 in this volume for Benjamin's early use of the term "aura."
For the later definition, see Chapter 1, section IV.
12. See Chapter 1, section V.
'18 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
13. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 462-
463, Convolute N3,1.
14. Ibid., p. 463.
15. Ibid., p. 530, Convolute Qla,8.
16. Ibid., p. 845, Convolute H{\16.
The true is what he can; the false is what he wants.
-MADAME DE DURAS!
1
'The Work of Art in the Age of
Its Technological Reproducibility
SECOND VERSION
19
20 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
II
In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. Objects made
by humans could always be copied by humans. Replicas were made by
pupils in practicing for their craft, by masters in disseminating their
works, and, finally, by third parties in pursuit of profit. But the techno-
logical reproduction of artworks is something new. Having appeared in-
termittently in history, at widely spaced intervals, it is now being adopted
with ever-increasing intensity. Graphic art was first made technologically
reproducible by the woodclLt, long before written language became re-
producible by movable type. The enormous changes brought about in
literature by movable type, the technological reproduction of writing,
are well known. But they are only a special case, though an important
one, of the phenomenon considered here from the perspective of world
history. In the course of the Middle Ages the woodcut was supplemented
by engraving and etching, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century
by lithography.
Lithography marked a fundamentally new stage in the technology of
reproduction. This much more direct process-distinguished by the fact
that the drawing is traced on a stone, rather than incised on a block of
wood or etched on a copper plate-first made it possible for graphic art
to market its products not only in large numbers, as previously, but in
daily changing variations. Lithography enabled graphic art to provide an
illustrated accompaniment to everyday life. It began to keep pace with
movable-type printing. But only a few decades after the invention of li-
thography, graphic art was surpassed by photography. For the first time,
photography freed the hand from the most important artistic tasks in the
process of pictorial reproduction-tasks that now devolved upon the eye
alone. And since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw,
the process of pictorial reproduction was enormously accelerated, so that
THE WORK OF ART: SECOND VERSION 21
it could now keep pace with speech. Just as the illustrated newspaper vir-
tually lay hidden within lithography, so the sound film was latent in pho-
tography. The technological reproduction of sound was tackled at the
end of the last century. Around 1900, technological reproduction not
only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known
worl?s of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it also had captured
a place of its own among the artistic processes. In gauging this standard,
we would do well to study the impact which its two different manifesta-
tions-the reproduction of artworks and the art of film-are having on
art in its traditional form.
III
In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and
now of the work of art-its unique existence in a particular place. It is
this unique existence-and nothing else-that bears the mark of the his-
tory to which the work has been subject. This history includes changes to
the physical structure of the work over time, together with any changes
in ownership. Traces of the former can be detected only by chemical or
physical analyses (which cannot be performed on a reproduction), while
changes of ownership are part of a tradition which can be traced only
from the standpoint of the original in its present location.
The here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authen-
ticity, and on the latter in turn is founded the idea of a tradition which
has passed object down as the same, identical thing to the pres-
ent day. The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological-and of
course tIot only technological-rel)roduction. But whereas the authentic
work retains its full authority in the face of a reproduction made by
hand, which it brands a forgery, this is not the case with techno-
logical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, technological repro-
duction is more independent of the original than is manual reproduction.
For example, in photography it can bring out aspects of the original that
are accessible only to the lens (which is adjustable and can easily change
viewpoint) but not to the human eye; or it can use certain processes, such
as enlargement or slow motion, to record images which escape natural
optics altogether. This is the first reason. Second, technological reproduc-
tion can place the copy of the original in situations which the original it-
self cannot attain. Above ali, it enables the original to meet the recipient
halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in that <1 gramophone
22 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
record. The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art
lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium or in the open air is
enjoyed in a private room.
These changed circumstances may leave the artwork's other properties
untouched, but they certainly devalue the here and now of the artwork.
And although this can apply not only to art but (say) to a landscape
moving past the spectator in a film., in the work of art this process
touches on a highly sensitive core, more vulnerable than that of any natu-
ral object. That core is its authenticity. The authenticity of a thing is the
quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, rang-
ing from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it.
Since the historical testimony is founded on the physical duration, the
former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction, in which the physical dura-
tion plays no part. And what is really jeopardized when the historical tes-
timony is affected is the authority of the object, the weight it derives from
tradition.
One might focus these aspects of the artwork in the concept of the
aura, and go on to say: what withers in the age of the technological
reproducibility of the work of art is the latter's aura. This process is
symptomatic; its significance extends far beyond the realm of art. It
might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction
detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicat-
ing the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique
existence. And in lJermitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his
or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced. These two
processes lead to a massive upheaval in the domain of objects handed
down fro111 the past-a shattering of tradition which is the reverse side of
the present crisis and renewal of humanity. Both processes are intimately
related to the mass movements of our day. Their most powerful agent is
film. The social significance of film, even-and especially-in its most
positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the
liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage. This phe-
nomenon is most apparent in the great historical films. It is assimilating
ever more advanced positions in its spread. When Abel Gance fervently
proclaimed in 1927, "Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make
films .... All legends, all mythologies, and all myths, all the founders of
religions, indeed, all religions, ... await their celluloid resurrection, and
the heroes are pressing at the gates, ') he was inviting the reader, no doubt
unawares, to witness a comprehensive liquidation. 3
THE WORK OF ART: SECOND VERSION 23
IV
Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over
long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in
which human perception is organized-the medium in which it occurs-
is conditioned not only by nature but by history. The era of the migra-
tion of peoples, an era which saw the rise of the late-Roman art industry
and the Vienna Genesis, developed not only an art different from that of
antiquity but also a different perception. The scholars of the Viennese
school Riegl and Wickhoff, resisting the weight of the classical tradition
beneath which this art had been buried, were the first to think of using
such art to draw conclusions about the organization of perception at the
time the art was produced. 4 However far-reaching their insight, it was
limited by the fact that these scholars were content to highlight the for-
mal signature which characterized perception in late-Roman times. They
did not attempt to show the social upheavals manifested in these changes
in perception-and perhaps could not have hoped to do so at that time.
Today, the conditions for an analogolls insight are more favorable. And if
changes in the medium of present-day perception can be understood as a
decay of the aura, it is possible to demonstrate the social determinants of
that decay.
What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique
apparition of a distance, however near it may be. s To follow with the
eye-while resting on a summer afternoon-a mountain range on the ho-
rizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the
aura of those mountains, of that branch. In the light of this description,
we can readily grasp the social basis of the aura's present decay. It rests
on two circumstances, both linked to the increasing emergence of the
masses and the growing intensity of their movements. Namely: the desire
of the present-day masses to "get closer" to things, and their equally pas-
sionate concern for overcoming each thing's uniqueness [Oberwindung
des Einmaligen jeder Gegebenheit] by assimilating it as a reproduction.
Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at close range
in an image [Bild], or, better, in a facsimile [Abbild], a reproduction. And
the reproduction [Reprodul?tion], as offered by illustrated magazines and
newsreels, differs unmistakably from the image. Uniqueness and perma-
nence are as closely entwined in the latter as are transitoriness and re-
peatability in the former. The stripping of the veil from the object, the de-
struction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose "sense for all
24 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
v
The uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embedded ness in
the context of tradition. Of course, this tradition itself is thoroughly alive
and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for instance, ex-
isted in a traditional context for the Greeks (who made it an object
of worship) that was different from the context in which it existed for
medieval clerics (who viewed it as a sinister idol). But what was equally
evident to both was its uniqueness-that is, its aura. Originally, the
embeddedness of an artwork in the context of tradition found expression
in a cult. As we know, the earliest artworks originated in the service of
rituals-first magical, then religious. And it is highly significant that the
artwork's auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its rit-
ual function. In other words: the unique value of the "authentic" work of
art alwa')ls has its basis in ritual. This ritualistic basis, however mediated
it may be, is still recognizable as secularized ritual in even the most pro-
forms of the cult of beauty. The secular worship of beauty, which de-
veloped during the Renaissance and prevailed for three centuries, clearly
displayed that ritualistic basis in its subsequent decline and in the first se-
vere crisis which befell it. For when, with the advent of the first truly rev-
olutionary means of reproduction (namely photography, which emen~e<1
at the same time as socialism), art felt the approach of that crisis which a
century later has become unmistakable, it reacted with the doctrine of
l'art pour tart-that is, with a theology of art. 7 This in turn gave rise to a
negative theology, in the form of an idea of "pure" art, which
only any function but any definition in terms of a re(>re:senltat:tol.1al
content. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to adopt this standpoint.)!!
No investigation of the work of art in the age of its technological
reproducibility can overlook these connections. They lead to a in-
sight: for time in world history, technological reproducibility
work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To
an degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduc-
tion of a work designed for reproducibility.9 From a photographic plate,
THE WORK OF ART: SECOND VERSION 25
for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the "authen-
tic" print makes no sense. But as soon as the criterion of authenticity
ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of
art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a
different practice: politics.
VI
Art history might be seen as the working out of a tension between two
polarities within the artwork itself, its course determined by sllifts
in the balance between the two. These two are the artwork's cult
value and its exhibition value. 10 Artistic production begins with figures in
the service of magic. What is important is that they are
present, not that they are seen. The elk depicted by Stone Age man on the
walls of his cave is an instrument of magic, and is exhibited to others
only coincidentally; what matters is that the see it. Cult value as
such even tends to keep the artwork out of certain statues of gods
are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain images of the Ma-
donna remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medi-
eval cathedrals are not visible to the viewer at ground level. With the
emanci/Jation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the
opportunities for exhibiting their products increase. It is easier to exhibit
a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue
of a divinity that has a fixed place in the interior a temple. A panel
painting can be exhibited more easily than the mosaic or fresco which
preceded it. And although a mass may have been no less suited to public
presentation than a symphony, the symphony came into being at a time
when the possibility of such presentation promised to be greater.
The scope for exhibiting the work of art has increased so enormously
with the various methods of technologically reproducing it that, as hap-
pened in prehistoric times, a quantitative shift between the two poles of
the artwork has led to a qualitative transformation in its nature. Just as
the work of art in prehistoric times, through the exclusive emphasis
placed on its cult value, became first and foremost an instrument of
which only later came to be recognized as a work of art, so today,
through the exclusive emphasis placed on its exhibition value, the work
of art becomes a construct lGebilde] with quite new functions. Among
these, the one we are conscious of-the artistic function-may subse-
quently seen as incidental. This much is certain: today, film is the most
vehicle of this new understanding. Certain, as well, is the fact
26 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
when humanity's whole constitution has adapted itself to the new pro-
ductive forces which the second technology has set free. ll
VII
VIII
IX
x
To photograph a painting is one kind of reproduction, but to photograph
an action performed in a film studio is another. In the first case, what is
reproduced is a work of art, while the act of producing it is not. The cam-
eraman's performance with the lens no more creates an artwork than a
conductor's with the baton; at most, it creates an artistic performance.
This is unlike the process in a film studio. Here, what is reproduced is not
an artwork, and the act of reproducing it is 110 more such a work than in
the first case. The work of art is produced only by means of montage.
And each individual component of this montage is a reproduction of a
process which neither is an artwork in itself nor gives rise to one through
30 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
XI
In the case of film, the fact that the actor represents someone else before
the audience matters much less than the fact that he represents himself
before the apparatus, One of the first to sense this transformation of the
actor by the test performance was Pirandello. 20 That his remarks on the
subject in his novel Sigi1'a [Shoot!] are confined to the negative aspects of
this change, and to silent film only, does little to diminish their rele-
vance. For in this respect, the sound film changed nothing essential. What
matters is that the actor is performing for a piece of equipment-or, in
the case of sound film, for two pieces of equipment. '<The film actor,"
Pirandel10 writes, "feels as if exiled. Exiled not only from the stage but
from his own person. With a vague unease, he senses an inexplicable
void, stemming from the fact that his body has lost its substance, that he
has been volatilized, stripped of his reality, his life, his voice, the noises he
makes when moving about, and has been turned into a mute image that
flickers for a moment on the screen, then vanishes into silence .... The
little apparatus will play with his shadow before the audience, and he
himself must be content to play before the apparatus. ~'21 The situation
can also be characterized as follows: for the first time-and this is the ef-
fect of film-the human being is placed in a position where he must oper-
ate with his whole living person, while forgoing its aura. For the aura is
bound to his presence in the here and now. There is no facsimile of the
aura. The aura surrounding Macbeth on the stage cannot be divorced
from the aura which, for the living spectators, surrounds the actor who
plays him. What distinguishes the shot in the film studio, however, is that
the camera is substituted for the audience. As a result, the aura surround-
ing the actor is dispelled-and, with it, the aura of the figure he portrays.
32 PROD U C T ION. REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
writing in 1932, has been toward "using the actor as one of the 'props;
chosen for his typicalness and ... introduced in the proper context. "22
Closely bound up with this development is something else. The stage ac-
tor identifies himself with a role. The film actor very often is denied this
opportunity. His performance is by no means a unified whole, but is as-
sembled from many individual performances. Apart from incidental con-
cerns about studio rental, availability of other actors, scenery, and so on,
there are elementary necessities of the machinery that split the actor's
performance into a series of episodes capable of being assembled. In par-
ticular, lighting and its installation require the representation of an ac-
tion-which on the screen appears as a swift, unified sequence-to be
filmed in a series of separate takes, which may be spread over hours in
the studio. Not to mention the more obvious effects of montage. A leap
from a window, for example, can be shot in the studio as a leap from a
scaffold, while the ensuing fall may be filmed weeks later at an outdoor
location. And far more paradoxical cases can easily be imagined. Let us
aSSllme that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door.
If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient:
he could have a shot fired without warning behind the actor's back on
some other occasion when he happens to be in the studio. The actor's
frightened reaction at that moment could be recorded and then edited
into the film. Nothing shows more graphically that art has escaped the
realm of "beautiful semblance," which for 80 long was regarded as the
only sphere in which it could thrive. 23
XII
The rej),-esentation of human beings by l1'leanS of an apparatus has made
possible a highly productive use of the human being's self-alienation. The
nature of this use can be grasped through the fact that the film actoes es-
trangement in the face of the apparatus, as Pirandello describes this expe-
rience, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one's
THE WORK OF ART: SECOND VERSION 33
XIII
It is inherent in the technology of film, as of sports, that everyone who
witnesses these performances does so as a quasi-expert. Anyone who has
listened to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and dis-
cussing the outcome of a bicycle race will have an inkling of this. In
the case of film, the newsreel demonstrates unequivocally that any indi~
vidual can be in a position to be filmed. But that possibility is not enough.
An)! person today can lay claim to being filmed. This claim can best be
clarified by considering the historical situation of literature today.
For centuries it was in the nature of literature that a small number of
writers confronted many thousands of readers. This began to change to~
ward the end of the past century. With the growth and extension of the
press, which constantly made new political, religious, scientific, profes-
sional, and local journals available to readers, an increasing number of
readers-in isolated cases, at first-turned into writers. It began with the
space set aside for "letters to the editor" in the daily press, and has now
reached a point where there is hardly a European engaged in the work
process who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish some-
where or other an account of a work experience, a complaint, a report,
or something of the kind. Thus, the distinction between author and pub-
34 PROD U C T ION, REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
lic is about to lose its axiomatic character. The difference becomes func-
tional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment, the reader is ready
to become a writer. As an expert-which he has had to become in any
case in a highly specialized work process, even if only in some minor
capacity-the reader gains access to authorship. Work itself is given a
voice. And the ability to describe a job in words now forms part of the
expertise needed to carry it out. Literary competence is no longer
founded on specialized higher education but on polytechnic training, and
thus is common property.
All this can readily be applied to film, where shifts that in litera-
ture took place over centuries have occurred in a decade. In cinematic
practice-above all, in Russia-this shift has already been partly real-
ized. Some of the actors taking part in Russian films are not actors in our
sense but people who portray themselves-and primarily in their own
work process. In western Europe today, the capitalist exploitation of
film obstructs the human being's legitimate claim to being reproduced.
The claim is also obstructed, incidentally, by unemployment, which ex-
cludes large masses from production-the process in which their pri-
mary entitlement to be reproduced would lie. Under these circumstances,
the film industry has an overriding interest in stimulating the involve-
ment of the masses through illusionary displays and ambiguous specula-
tions. To this end it has set in motion an immense publicity machine, in
the service of which it has placed the careers and love lives of the stars;
it has organized polls; it has held beauty contests. All this in order to dis-
tort and corrupt the original and justified interest of the masses in film-
an interest in understanding themselves and therefore their class. Thus,
the same is true of film capital in particular as of fascism in general:
a compelling urge toward new social opportunities is being clandestinely
exploited in the interests of a property-owning minority. For this rea-
son alone, the expropriation of film capital is an urgent demand for the
proletariat.
XIV
the camera). This circumstance, more than any other, makes any resem-
blance between a scene in a film studio and one onstage superficial and ir-
relevant. In principle, the theater includes a position from which the ac-
tion on the stage cannot easily be detected as an illusion. There is no such
position where a film is being shot. The illusory nature of film is of the
second degree; it is the result of editing. That is to say: In the film studio
the apparatus has penetrated so dee/)ly into reality that a pure view of
that reality, free of the foreign body of equipment) is the result of a spe-
cial procedure-namely, the shooting by the speciall)1 adjusted photo-
grat>hic device and the assembly of that shot with others of the smne
kind. The equipment-free aspect of reality has here become the height of
artifice, and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of
technology,16
This state of affairs, which contrasts so sharply with that which ob-
tains in the theater, can be compared even more instructively to the situa-
tion in painting. Here we have to pose the question: How does the cam-
era operator compare with the painter? In answer to this, it will be
helpful to consider the concept of the operator as it is familiar to us from
surgery. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The
attitude of the magician, who heals a sick person by a laying-on of hands,
differs from that of the surgeon, who l11akes an intervention in the pa-
tient. The magician maintains the natural distance between himself and
the person treated; more precisely, he reduces it slightly by laying on his
hands, but increases it greatly by his authority. The surgeon does exactly
the reverse: he greatly diminishes the distance from the patient by pene-
trating the patienfs body, and increases it only slightly by the caution
with which his hand moves among the organs. In short: unlike the magi-
cian (traces of whom are still found in the medical practitioner), the sur-
geon abstains at the decisive moment from confronting his patient person
to person; instead, he penetrates the patient by operating.-Magician is
to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains in his
work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer pene-
trates deeply into its tissue. The images obtained by each differ enor-
mously, The painter's is a total image, whereas that of the cinematogra-
pher is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new
law. Hence, the presentation of reality in film is incomparably the more
significant for people of today, since it provides the equipment-free astJect
of reality they ate entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so
precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality
with equipment.
36 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
xv
The technological reproducibility of the artwork changes the relation of
the masses to art. The extremely backward attitude toward a Picasso
painting changes into a highly progressive reaction to a Chaplin film. The
progressive attitude is characterized by an immediate, intimate fusion of
pleasure-pleasure in seeing and experiencing-with an attitude of ex-
pert appraisal. Such a fusion is an important social index. As is clearly
seen in the case of painting, the more reduced the social impact of an art
form, the more widely criticism and enjoyment of it diverge in the public.
The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, while the truly new is criticized
with aversion. Not so in the cinema. The decisive reason for this is that
nowhere more than in the cinema are the reactions of individuals, which
together make up the massive reaction of the audience, determined by the
imminent concentration of reactions into a mass. No sooner are these re-
actions manifest than they regulate one another. Again, the comparison
with painting is fruitful. A painting has always exerted a claim to be
viewed primarily by a single person or by a few. The simultaneous view-
ing of paintings by a large audience, as happens in the nineteenth century,
is an early symptom of the crisis in painting, a crisis triggered not only by
photography but, in a relatively independent way, by the artwodc's claim
to the attention of the masses.
Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous col-
lective reception, as architecture has always been able to do, as the epic
poem could do at one time, and as film is able to do today. And although
direct conclusions about the social role of painting cannot be drawn from
this fact alone, it does have a strongly adverse effect whenever painting
is led by special circumstances, as if against its nature, to confront the
masses directly. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages, and
at the princely courts up to about the end of the eighteenth century,
the collective reception of paintings took place not simultaneously but
in a manifoldly graduated and hierarchically mediated way. If that has
changed, the change testifies to the special conflict in which painting has
become enmeshed by the technological reproducibility of the image. And
while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galler-
ies and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of orga-
nizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts
progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward atti-
tude toward Surrealism.
THE WORK OF ART: SECOND VERSION 37
XVI
XVII
It has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand
whose hour of full satisfaction has not yet come. 30 The history of every
art form has critical periods in which the particular form strains after ef-
fects which can be easily achieved only with a changed technical stan-
dard-that is to say, in a new art form. The excesses and crudities of art
which thus result, particularly in periods of so-called decadence, actually
emerge from the core of its richest historical energies. In recent years, Da-
daism has amused itself with such barbarisms. Only now is its impulse
recognizable: Dadaism attempted to produce with the means of painting
(or literature) the effects which the public today seeks in film.
Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demand will over-
shoot its target. Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the market
THE WORK OF ART: SECOND VERSION 39
XVIII
The masses are a matrix from which aU customary behavior toward
works of art is today emerging newborn. Quantity has been transformed
into quality: the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a
different l<ind of participation. The fact that this new mode of participa-
tion first appeared in a disreputable form should not mislead the ob-
server. The masses are criticized for seeking distraction [Zerstreuung] in
the work of art, whereas the art lover supposedly approaches it with con-
centration. In the case of the masses, the artwork is seen as a means of en-
tertainment; in the case of the art lover, it is considered an object of devo-
tion.-This calls for closer examination. 33 Distraction and concentration
40 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
XIX
For twenty-seven years, we Futurists have rebelled against the idea that
war is anti-aesthetic .... We therefore state: ... War is beautiful because-
thanks to its gas masks, its terrifying megaphones, its flame throwers, and
light tanks-it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machine.
War is beautiful because it inaugurates the dreamed-of metallization of the
human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with
the fiery orchids of machine-guns. War is beautiful because it combines
gllnfire) barrages, cease-fires, scents, and the fragrance of putrefaction into
a symphony. \'{!ar is beautiful because it creates new architectures, like
those of armored tanks, geometric squadrons of aircraft, spirals of smoke
from burning villages, and much more .... Poets and artists of Futurism,
42 PROD U C T ION, REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
... remember these principles of an aesthetic of war, that they may illumi-
nate ... your struggles for a new poetry and a new sculpture!J8
This manifesto has the merit of clarity. The question it poses deserves
to be taken up by the dialectician. To him, the aesthetic of modern war-
fare appears as follows: if the natural use of productive forces is impeded
by the property system, then the increase in technological means, in
speed, in sources of energy will press toward an unnatural use. This is
found in war, and the destruction caused by war furnishes proof that so-
ciety was not mature enough to make technology its organ, that technol-
ogy was not sufficiently developed to master the elemental forces of soci-
ety. The most horrifying features of imperialist war are determined by the
discrepancy between the enormous means of production and their inade-
quate use in the process of production (in other words, by unemployment
and the lack of markets). Imperialist war is an U1Jrising on the part of
technology, which demands repayment in "human material" for the nat-
ural 11'laterial society has denied it. Instead of deploying power stations
across the land, society deploys manpower in the form of armies. Instead
of promoting air traffic, it promotes traffic in shells. And in gas warfare it
has found a new means of abolishing the aura.
"Fiat ars-pereat mundus,"39 says fascism, expecting from war, as
Marinetti admits, the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by
technology. This is evidently the consummation of rart /Jour ['art. Hu-
mankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the
Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has
reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a su-
preme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as prac-
ticed by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.
Written late December 1935-beginning of February 1936; unpublished in this form in
Benjamin's lifetime. Gesammelte Schriftell, VII, 350-384. Translated by Edmund Jephcott
and Harry Zohl1.
Notes
This version of the essay "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Repro-
duzierbarkeit" (first published in Volume 7 of Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften,
in 1989) is a revision and expansion (by seven manuscript pages) of the first ver-
sion of the essay, which was composed in Paris in the autumn of 1935. The sec-
ond version represents the form in which Benjamin originally wished to see the
work published; it served, in fact, as the basis for the first publication of the es-
THE WORK OF ART: SECOND VERSION 43
say-a somewhat shortened form translated into French-in the Zcitschrift fiir
Sozialforschung in May 1936. The third version of the essay (1936-1939) can be
found in Benjamin, Selected WritingsJ Volume 4: 1938-.1940 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 251-283.
1. Madame Claire de Duras, nee Kersaint (1778-1828), the wife of Due
Amedee de Duras, field marshal under Louis XVIII, was the author of two
novels, Ourika (1823) and Edouard (1825). She presided over a brilliant sa-
Ion in Paris. Benjamin cites Madame de Dltras in the original French.
2. Karl Marx (1818-1883) analyzed the capitalist mode of production in Das
Kapital (3 vols., 1867, 1885, 1895), which was carried to completion by his
collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).
3. AbeJ Gance, "Le Temps de l'imagc est venu!" (It Is Time for the Image!),
in Leon Pierre-Quint, Germaine Dulac, Lionel Landry, and Abel
L'Al't chuJmatographique, vol. 2 (Paris, 1927), pp. 94-96. [Benjamin's note.
Ganee (1889-1981) was a French film director whose epic films }'accuse
(1919), La Roue (1922), and Napoleon (1927) made innovative use of sllch
devices as superimposition, rapid intercutting, and split screen.-Trans.]
4. AlDis Riegl (1858-1905} was an Austrian art historian who argued that dif-
ferent formal orderings of art emerge as expressions of different historical
epochs. He is the author of Stilfragen: Gnmdlegungen zu einer Geschichte
der Ornamel1tih (Questions of Style: Toward a History of Ornament; 1893)
and Die spatromische KU11st-Industrie l1ach den Funden in Osterreich-
Unga1'11 (1901). The latter has been translated by Rolf Winkes as Late Ro-
man Art Industry (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneidet; 1985), Franz Wickhoff
(1853-1909), also an Austrian art historian, is the author of Die Wiener
Genesis (The Vienna Genesis; 1895), a study of the sumptuously illumi-
nated, early sixth-century A.D. copy of the biblical book of Genesis pre-
served in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.
5. "Einmalige Erscheinung eincr Ferne, so nah sie sein mag." At stake in
Benjamin's formulation is an interweaving not just of time and space-
einmalige Erscheinung, literally "one-time appearance"-but of far and ncar,
eine Ferne suggesting both "a distance" in space or time and "something re-
mote," however near it (the distance, or distant thing, that appears) may be.
6. Benjamin is quoting Johannes V. Jensen, Exotische Novel/en, trans. Julia
Koppel (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1919), pp. 41-42. Jensen (1873-1950) was a
Danish novelist) poet, and essayist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1944. See "Hashish in Marseilles" (1932), in Benjamin, Selected Writings,
Volume 2: 1927-1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999),
p.677.
7. Applying Kant's idea of the pure and disinterested existence of the work of
art, the French philosopher Victor Cousin made lise of the phrase I 'art /Jour
/'aft ("art for art's sake") in his 1818 lecture "Du Vrai, du beau, ct du bien"
(On the True, the Beautiful, and the Good). The idea was later given cur-
44 PROD U C T ION, REP ROO U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
rency by writers such as Thcophile Gantier, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles
Baudelaire.
8. The French poet Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) was a central figure in the
Symbolist movement, which sought an incantatory language divorced from
all referential function.
9. In film, the technological reproducibility of the product is not an externally
imposed condition of its mass dissemination, as it is, say, in literature or
painting. The technological reproducibility of films is based directly all the
technology of their production. This not only mal?es possible the mass dis-
semination of films in the most direct way, but actually enforces it. It does so
because the process of producing a film is so costly that an individual who
could afford to buy a painting, for example, could not afford to buy a
tel' print of a] film. It was calculated in 1927 that, in order to make a profit, a
major film needed to reach an audience of nine miJlion. Of course, the ad-
vent of sound film [in that year] initially caused a movement in the opposite
direction: its audience was restricted by language boundaries. And that coin-
cided with the emphasis placed on national interests by fascism. But it is Jess
important to note this setback (which in any case was mitigated by dubbing)
than to observe its connection with fascism. The simultaneity of the two
phenomena results from the economic crisis. The same disorders which led,
in the world at large) to an attempt to maintain existing property relations
by brute force induced film capital, under the threat of crisis, to speed up the
development of sound film. Its introduction brought temporary relief, not
only because sound film attracted the masses back into the cinema but also
because it consolidated new capital from the electricity industry with that of
film. Thus, considered from the outside, sound film promoted national inter-
ests; but seen from the inside, it helped internationalize film production even
more than before. [Benjamin's note. By "the economic crisis," Benjamin re-
fers to the devastating consequences, in the United States and Europe, of the
stock market crash of October 1929.-Trans.]
10. This polarity cannot come into its own il1 the aesthetics of Idealism, which
conceives of beauty as something fundamentally undivided (and thus ex-
cludes anything polarized). Nonetheless, in Hegel this polarity announces it-
self as clearly as possible within the limits of Idealism. We quote from his
Vorlesungen zur Phi/osophie der Geschichte [Lectures on the Philosophy of
History J: "Images were known of old. In those early days piety required
them for worship, but it could do without beautiful images. Such images
might even be disturbing. In every beautiful image, there is also something
external-although, insofar as the image is beautiful) its spirit still speaks to
the human being. But religious worship, being no more than a spiritless tor-
por of the soul, is directed at a thing. ... Fine art arose, .. in the church ... ,
though 3rt has now gone beyond the ecclesiastical principle." Likewise, the
following passage from the Vorlesu1'lgen iJber die Asthetik [Lectures on Aes-
THE WORK OF ART: SECOND VERSION 45
thetics] indicates that Hegel sensed a problem here: "We are beyond the
stage of venerating works of art as divine and as objects deserving our wor-
ship. Today the impression they produce is of a more reflective kind, and the
emotions they arouse require a more stringent test.)' [Benjamin's note. The
German Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
accepted the chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1818. His lec-
tures on aesthetics and the philosophy of history (delivered 1820-1829)
were later published by his editors, with the text based mainly on notes
taken by his students.-Trans.]
11. The aim of revolutions is to accelerate this adaptation. Revolutions are
innervations of the collective-or, more precisely, efforts at innervation on
the part of the new, historically unique collective which has its organs in the
new technology. This second technology is a system in which the mastering
of elementary social forces is a precondition for playing [das Spiel] with nat-
ural forces. Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for
the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in its efforts at innervation,
sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on within reach.
For in revolutions, it is not only the second technology which asserts its
claims vis-a-vis society. Because this technology aims at liberating human be-
ings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field
of action [SpielraumJ, immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his
way around this space. But already he registers his demands on it. For the
more the collective makes the second technology its own, the more keenly
individuals belonging to the collective feel how little they have received of
what was due them under the dominion of the first technology. In other
words, it is the individual liberated by the liquidation of the first technology
who stakes his claim. No sooner has the second technology secured its initial
revolutionary gains than vital questions affecting the individual-questions
of love and death which had been buried by the first technology-once again
press for solutions. Fourier's work is the first historical evidence of this
demand. [Benjamin's note. Charles Fourier (1772-1837), French social the-
orist and reformer, urged that society be reorganized into self-contained
agrarian cooperatives which he called "phalansteries." Among his works are
Theorie des quatre mouvements (Theory of Four Movements; 1808) and L..e
Nouveau Monde industl'iel (The New Industrial World; 1829-1830). He is
an important in Benjamin's Arcades Project. The term Spielraum; in
this note, in note 23, and in the text, literally means "pJayspace," "space for
play."-Trans.]
12. Eugene Atget (1857-1927), French photographer, spent his career in obscu-
rity making pictures of Paris and its environs. He is widely recognized as one
of the leading photographers of the twentieth century. See Benjamin's "Little
History of Photography" (1931), in this volume.
13. A Woman of Paris (1923)-which Benjamin refers to by its French title,
46 PRO Due T ION, REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
works of art is matched by a huge gain in the scope for play [Spiel-Raum].
This space for play is widest in film. In film, the element of semblance bas
been entirely displaced by the element of play. The positions which photog-
raphy had occupied at the expense of cult value have thus been massively
fortified. In film, the element of semblance has yielded its place to the ele-
ment of play, which is allied to the second technology. Ramuz recently
summed np this alliance in a formulation which, in the guise of a metaphor,
gets to the heart of the matter. He says: "We are currently witnessing a fasci-
nating process. The various sciences, which up to now have each operated
alone in their special fields, are beginning to converge in their object and
to be combined into a single science: chemistry, physics, and mechanics are
becoming interlinked. It is as if we were eyewitnesses to the enormously
accelerated completion of a jigsaw puzzle whose first pieces took several
millennia to put in place, whereas the last, because of their contours, and
to the astonishment of the spectators, are moving together of their own
accord" (Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, nature" [peasant, Nature],
Mesure. 4 [October 1935]). These words ultimate expression to the di-
mension of play in the second technology, which reinforces that in art.
[Benjamin's note. It should be kept in mind that Schein can mean "luster»
and " as well as "semblance" or "illusion." On Hegel, see
note 10 above. The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) visited
Italy in 1786-1788 and in 1790, gaining new inspiration from his encoun-
ter with Greco-Roman antiquitYj a classically pure and restrained concep-
tion of beauty informs his creation of such female figures as Mignon in
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; 1796),
Ottilie in Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities; 1809), and Helena
in Faust, Part II (1832). Benjamin's definition of the beautiful as "the ob-
ject in its veiP' is quoted (with the italics added) from his essay "Goethe's
Elective Affinities" (1924-1925), in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1:
19.13-1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 351,
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947) was a Swiss writer resident in Paris
(1902-1914), where he collaborated with the composer Igor Stravinsky, for
whom he wrote the text of Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale; 1918). He
also published novels on rural life that combine realism with allegory.-
Tram.]
24. The change noted here in the mode of exhibition-a brought about
by reproduction technology-is also noticeable in politics. The crisis of de-
mocracies can be understood as a crisis in the conditions governing the
public tJresentation of politicians. Democracies exhibit the politician di-
rectly, in person) before elected representatives. The parliament is his pub-
lic. But innovations in recording equipment now enable the speaker to be
heard by an unlimited number of people while he is speaking, and to be
seen by an unlimited number shortly afterward. This means that priority is
50 PRODUCTION. REPRODUCTION. AND RECEPTION
ble concomitants of existence. This renews an old tradition which is far from
reassuring-the tradition inaugurated by the dancing hooligans to be found
in depictions of medieval pogroms, of whom the "riff-raff" in Grimm's fairy
tale of that title are a pale, indistinct rear-guard. [Benjamin's note. The inter-
nationally successful Mickey Mouse cartoon series developed out of the
character of Mortimer Mouse, introduced in 1927 by the commercial artist
and cartoon producer Walt Disney (1901-1966), who made outstanding
technical and aesthetic contributions to the development of animation be-
tween 1927 and 1937, and whose short animated films of the thirties won
praise from critics for their visual comedy and their rhythmic and unconven-
tional technical effects. See Benjamin's "Mickey Mouse" (1931), in this vol-
ume. "Riff-raW' translates "LumpengesindeJ," the title of a story in Jacob
and Wilhelm Grimm's collection of tales, Kil1der- und Hausmarchel1 (Nurs-
ery and Household Tales; 1812, 1815).-Trans.]
30. "The artwork," writes Andre Breton, "has value only insofar as it is alive to
reverberations of the future." And indeed every highly developed art form
stands at the intersection of three lines of development. First, technology is
working toward a particular form of art. Before film appeared, there were
little books of photos that could be made to Hit past the viewer under the
pressure of the thumb, presenting a boxing match or a tennis match; then
there were coin-operated peepboxes in bazaars, with image sequences kept
in motion by the turning of a handle. Second, traditional art forms, at cer-
tain stages in theiL" development, strain laboriously for effects which later are
effortlessly achieved by new art forms. Before film became established, Da-
daist performances sought to stir in their audiences reactions which Chaplin
then elicited more naturally. Third, apparently insignificant social changes
often foster a change in reception which benefits only the new art form. Be-
fore film had started to create its public, images (which were no longer mo-
tionless) were received by an assembled audience in the Kaiserpanorama.
Here the audience faced a screen into which stereoscopes were fitted, one for
each spectator. In front of these stereoscopes single images automatically ap-
peared, remained briefly in view, and then gave way to others. Edison still
had to work with similar means when he presented the first film strip-be-
fore the movie screen and projection were known; a small audience gazed
into an apparatus in which a sequence of images was shown. Incidentally,
the institution of the Kaiserpanorama very clearly manifests a dialectic of
development. Shortly before film turned the viewing of images into a collec-
tive activity, image viewing by the individual, through the stereoscopes of
these soon outmoded establishments, was briefly intensified, as it had been
once before in the isolated contempJation of the divine image by the priest
in the cella. [Benjamin's note. Andre Breton (1896-1966), French critic,
poet, and editor, was the chief promoter and one of the founders of the Sur-
realist movement, publishing the first Manifeste du surrealisme in 1924. In
THE WORK OF ART: SECOND VERSION 53
36. A technological factor is important here, especially with regard to the news-
reel, whose significance for propaganda purposes can hardly be overstated.
Mass reproduction is especially favored by the reproduction of the masses.
In great ceremonial processjons, giant rallies and mass sporting events, and
in war, all of which are now fed into the camera, the masses come face to
face with themselves. This process, whose significance need not be empha-
sized, js closely bound up with the development of reproduction and record-
ing technologies. In general, mass movements are more clearly apprehended
by the camera than by the eye. A bird's-eye view best captures assemblies of
hundreds of thousands. And even when this perspective is no less accessible
to the human eye than to the camera, the image formed by the eye cannot be
enlarged in the same way as a photograph. This is to say that mass move-
ments, and above aU war, are a form of human behavior especially suited to
the camera. [Benjamin's note]
37. Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), Italian writer, military hero, and political
leader, was an ardent advocate of Italy's entry into World War 1 and, a few
years later, an ardent Fascist. His life and his work are both characterized by
superstition, amorality, and a lavish and vicious violence. Futurism was an
artistic movement aiming to express the dynamic and violent quality of con-
temporary life, especially as embodied in the motion and force of modern
machinery and modern warfare. It was founded by the Italian writer Emilio
Filippo Tomaso Marinetti (1876-1944), whose "Manifeste de Futurisme"
(Manifesto of Futurism) was published in the Paris newspaper Le F'igaro in
1909; his ideas had a powerful influence in Italy and Russia. After serving as
an officer in World War I, he went on to join the Fascist party in 1919.
Among his other works are a volLlme of poems, Guerra sola igiene del
111undo (War the Only Hygiene of the World; 1915), and a political essay,
F'uturismo e F'ascismo (1924}) which argues that fascism is the natural exten-
THE WORK OF ART: SECOND VERSION 55
Theory of distraction l
Attempt to determine the effect of the work of art once its power of con-
secration has been eliminated
Parasitic existence of art as based on the sacred
In its concern with educational value [Lehl'wertj, "The Author as Pro-
ducer') disregards consumer value [KonsumwertJ2
It is in film that the work of art is most susceptible to becoming worn out
Fashion is an indispensable factor in the acceleration of the process of be-
coming worn out
The values of distraction should be defined with regard to film, just as the
values of catharsis are defined with regard to tragedy
Distraction, like catharsis, should be conceived as a physiological phe-
nomenon
Distraction and destruction [word conjectured] as the subjective and ob-
jective sides, respectively, of one and the same process
The relation of distraction to absorption must be examined·3
The survival of artworks should be represented from the standpoint of
their struggle for existence
Their true humanity consists in their unlimited adaptability
The criterion for judging the fruitfulness of their is the communica-
bility of this
The educational value and the consumer value of art may converge in
certain cases (as in Brecht), but they donlt generally coincide
The Greeks had only one form of (mechanical) reproduction: minting
coms
56
THEORY OF DISTRACTION 57
Notes
This fragment is associated with the composition of the second version of "The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (1935-1936), in
this volume.
1. See Section XVIII of the second version of "The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility" (1935-1936), in this volume. See also Sec·
tion XV of the third version of the essay (1939), in Benjamin, Selected Writ-
ings: Volume 4J 1938-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2003), pp. 251-283. Benjamin's term for «distraction" is generally
ZerstreuungJ which in this context can also mean "entertainment." In a re-
lated fragment {Gesammelte SchriftellJ VII, 678}, Benjamin writes: "The
work of art undertakes to produce entertainment in a responsible manner. II
2. See "The Author as Producer " (1934), 8 in this volume.
3. "Absorption" here translates Einverleibung, meaning more specifically "in-
gestion." Benjamin's comments on as Einverleibung in his
radio talk "Children's Literature," in Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume
2, 1927-1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999),
pp.255-256.
4. "Refunctioning" translates Umfunktionierung, a term taken from Brecht. See
"The Author as Producer" (1934), Chapter 8 in this volume.
3
To the Planetarium
58
TO THE PLANETARIUM 59
for the first time on a planetary scale-that is, in the spirit of technology.
But because lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfaction
through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a
bloodbath. The mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the pur-
pose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who pro-
claimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education?
Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship
between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of
that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the
mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man. Men
as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but
mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being
organized through which mankind's contact with the cosmos takes a new
and different form from that which it had in nations and families. One
need recall only the experience of velocities by virtue of which mankind
is now preparing to embark on incalculable journeys into the interior of
time, to encounter there rhythms from which the shall draw strength
as they did earlier on high mountains or on the shores of southern seas.
The "Lunaparks" are a prefiguration of sanatoria. The paroxysm of gen-
uine cosmic experience is not tied to that tiny fragment of nature that we
are accustomed to call "Nature.~' In the nights of annihilation of the last
war, the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the
bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first at-
tempt of mankind to bring the new body under its control. The power of
the proletariat is the measure of its convalescence. If it is not gripped to
the very marrow by the discipline of this power, no pacifist polemics will
save it. Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the
ecstasy of procreation.
Written 1923-1926; published in 1928. Excerpted from One-Way Street. Gesammelte
Schriften, IV, 146-148. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
4
Garlanded Entrance
60
GARLANDED ENTRANCE 61
this field. We are all acquainted with them. We learned our early lessons
from them. We learned from them, in the saddle, how to handle fish,
mammals, and birds; we got to know all vocations and professions
through the way they reacted when we took a shot at the target; we
even learned to measure our own strength against "Towering Jules" -the
frightening vision which, at the blow of a hammer, reared its head out of
a hollow cylinder. 6 Itinerant peddlers make their living through exhibi-
tion, and their trade is old enough to have brought them a solid store of
experience. From first to last, however, it centers on this bit of wisdom:
you must at all costs prevent people from waxing contemplative, from
engaging in detached observation-which is anathema. So there is no
show without carousels, shooting galleries, and test-your-strength ma-
chines, without love thermometers, fortune-tellers, and lotteries. Those
who come to gawk end up joining in-this is the categorical imperative
of the fairground. What lends this exhibition its particular character is
not so much its dioramas, banners, and dissolving views 7 (created, inci-
dentally, with the most primitive but rather this technique of
making the visitor participate actively.-You see the rubric "Vocational
Counseling." A head is positioned in front of a large disk, which presents
a montage of emblems and scenes from a wide variety of vocations. Set
the disk turning, and it seems (though this is an optical illusion} that
the head begins to move too, and its resigned swinging shows that it
is in a quandary. Right next door is a row of testing apparatuses on
which anyone who feels like it can assay his dexterity, his sense of color,
his "trainability," his combinatory powers. The Delphic "Know thyself"
beckons from every automatic scale. You encounter this at fairs, in the
Devil's Chamber-the black-lined stall in which the devil's distorted face
seems to move under his plumed hat. When you bend down to see who's
there, you come face to face with a mirror out of which you yourself peer.
Wigmann was clever; he took this, too, from the fairground. There is a
room devoted to countering superstition: "Who believes that?" reads a
movable panel on which pamphlets are displayed. You lift it up and see
yourself revealed in mirror behind it.
What does all this mean? It means that real presentation banishes
contemplation. In order to incorporate the visitor into the show's mon-
tage, as occurs here, the optical must be carefully controlled. Any view-
ing [AnschauungJ that lacks the element of surprise would result in a
dumbing-down of the visitor. What there is to see must never be the same
as, or even approximate, what the inscription says it is. It must bring
with it something new, a twist of the obvious which fundamentally can-
GARLANDED ENTRANCE 63
not be achieved with words. One particular exhibit concerns the quar-
terly consumption of a heavy drinker. Now, it would have been easy to
just present a sizable heap of empty wine or liquor bottles. Instead, next
to the panel of text, Joel has displayed a grimy stip of paper bearing the
traces of many folds-the quarterly bill from the wine merchant. And
while the wine bottles do indeed illuminate the text even as they them-
selves are changed very little by this juxtaposition, the document, the bill,
is suddenly seen in a new light. Because it works so perfectly in the mon-
tage, it gives the viewer a jolt.
Admittedly, you never see montage at fairs. But this show embraces
today's canonical approach to viewing: the will to the authentic. Mon-
tage is not a stylistic principle found in handicrafts. It emerged around
the end of the war, when it became clear to the avant-garde that reality
could no longer be mastered. The only means we have left, for gaining
time and keeping a cool head, is, above all, to let reality have its say-in
its own right, disordered and anarchic if necessary. In those days, the
Dadaists were the avant-garde. 8 They created montages from bits of fab-
ric, tram tickets, shards of glass, buttons, matches-and by this means
they said: You cannot cope with reality anymore. You cannot deal with
these odds and ends of rubbish any better than you can with troop trans-
ports, influenza, or Reichsbank notes. 9 When the New Objectivity ven-
tured timidly to disavow reality and establish order, this development
should have gained the firmest foothold in film, which was producing
such incalculably great documentary material. lO But the titillation indus-
try [Amusietindustrie], which develops new technical possibilities only to
hobble them, blocked this as well. After all, it trained the gaze for the au-
thentic. What, then, isn't authentic, so long as we, passing by, actually
take account of it? For one who ruthlessly makes the case against exploi-
tation, misery, and stupidity, what doesn't become a corpus delicti? For
the organizers of this exhibition, nothing was more important than this
realization and the small shock that leaps out of things along with it. In
the "Hall of Superstition" a fortune-teller is on display; almost every-
thing in the scene is real, from the money and playing cards on the table
to her yellowish-gray chignon. The viewer who stands before her doesn't
feel instructed-he simply feels found out. Even if he has never gone to a
fortune-teller before, he will Hnever go again."
Clever traps, which lure the attention and hold it fast. The texts that
remain are slogans. "The 'breakthrough' of the eight-hour day robs the
worker of the chance to participate in the achievements of culture. This is
the death of all mental hygiene. "ll-Another example: Beneath a scene
64 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
Published in Die literorische Welt, January 10, 1930, Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 557-561.
Translated by Annie Bomoellf.
Notes
both Expressionism and Dada; some of its leading exponents were former
Dadaists.
11. In November 1918, Germany's provisional government instituted the eight-
hour day, one of the labor movement's oldest demands. As early as 1923,
however, the minister of labor allowed numerous exceptions to the rule, ar-
guing that this was necessary to increase production and stabilize the econ-
omy. In 1927, still more loopholes were written into the law; many on the
left saw this as a hollowing-out of one of the most important achievements
of 1918.
5
The Rigorous Study of Art
In the foreword to his 1898 study Die klassische Kunst [Classic Art],
Heinrich Wolfflin made a gesture that cast aside the history of art as it
was then understood by Richard Muther. t "Contemporary public inter-
est" he declared, "seems nowadays to want to turn toward more spe-
cifically artistic questions. One no longer expects an art-historical book
to give mere biographical anecdotes or a description of the circumstances
of the time; rather, one wants to learn something about those things
which constitute the value and the essence of a work of art .... The natu-
ral thing would be for every art-historical monograph to contain some
aesthetics as well." A bit further on, one reads: "In order to be more cer-
tain of attaining this goal, the first, historical, section has been furnished
with a second, systematic, section as a counterpart. "2 This arrangement
is all the more indicative because it reveals not only the aims but also the
limits of an endeavor which was so epoch-making in its time. And, in
fact, WolHlin did not succeed in his attempt to use formal analysis (which
he placed at the center of his method) to remedy the bleak condition in
which his discipline found itself at the end of the nineteenth century. He
identified a dualism-a flat, universalizing history of the art of "all cul-
tures and times," on the one hand, and an academic aesthetic, on the
other-without, however, being able to overcome it entirely.
Only from the perspective of the current situation does it become evi-
67
68 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
Notes
1. Wolfflin (1864-1945), a student of Jacob Burckhardt, was the most impor-
tant art historian of his period writing in German. Richard Muther (1860-
1909) was an art historian and critic who is often cited as paradigmatic of
the "old school" of nineteenth-century art history. His work was a mixture
of religiosity, sentimentality, and eroticism.
2. Heinrich W61fflin, Die klassische Kunst: Eine Einfuhrung in die italienische
Renaissance (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1899), pp. vii-viii; translated by Linda
Murray and Peter Murray as Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Re-
naissance (London: Phaidon, 1952), pp. xi-xii.
3. Walter Muschg, "Das Dichterportrat in der Literaturgeschichte" [The Writer's
Portrait in Literary History], in Emil Ermatinger, ed. Philosophie der Litera-
turwissenschaft (Berlin: Junker und Diinnhaupt, 1930), p. 311. Compare
also Benjamin's citation of the same passage in his essay "Literary His-
tory and the Study of Literature" (1931), in Benjamin, Selected Writings,
Volume 2: 1927-1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999),
pp. 459-465. Walter M.uschg (1898-J,965) was a Swiss literary historian,
poet, and dramatist.
4. Muschg, «Das Dichterportrat," p. 314.
5. Hans Sedlmayr, "Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschafe' (Toward a Rigorous
THE RIGOROUS STUDY OF ART 73
One of the great attractions of the travel scenes found in the Imperial
Panorama was that it did not matter where you began the cycle. Because
the viewing screen, with places to sit before it, was circular, each picture
would pass through all the stations; from these you looked, each time,
through a double window into the faintly tinted depths of the image.
There was always a seat available. And especially toward the end of my
childhood, when fashion was already turning its back on the Imperial
Panorama, one got used to taking the tour in a half-empty room.
There was no music in the Imperial Panorama-in contrast to films,
where music makes traveling so soporific. But there was a small, genu-
inely disturbing effect that seemed to me superior. This was the ringing of
a little bell that sounded a few seconds before each picture moved off
with a jolt, in order to make way first for an empty space and then for the
next image. And every time it rang, the mountains with their humble
foothills, the cities with their mirror-bright windows, the railroad sta-
tions with their clouds of dirty yellow smoke, the vineyards down to the
smallest leaf, were suffused with the ache of departure. I formed the con-
viction that it was impossible to exhaust the splendors of the scene at just
one sitting. Hence my intention (which I never realized) of coming by
again the following day. Before I could make up my mind, however, the
entire apparatus, from which I was separated by a wooden railing, would
begin to tremble; the picture would sway within its little frame and then
immediately trundle off to the left, as I looked on.
The art forms that survived here all died out with the coming of the
twentieth century. At its inception, they found their last audience in chil-
75
76 P RODU CTI 0 N. REPR 0 DU CT ION. AND REG EPTIO N
dren. Distant wodds were not always strange to these arts. And it so hap-
pened that the longing such worlds aroused spoke more to the home than
to anything unknown. Thus it was that, one afternoon, while seated be-
fore a transparency of the little town of Aix, I tried to persuade myself
that, once upon a time, I must have played on the patch of pavement that
is guarded by the old plane trees of COUfS Mirabeau.
When it rained, there was no out front to survey the list of
fifty pictures. I went inside and found in fjords and under coconut palms
the same that illuminated my desk in the evening when I did my
schoolwork. It may have been a in the lighting system that sud-
denly caused the landscape to lose its color. But there it lay, quite silent
under its ashen sky. It was as though I could have heard even wind and
church bells if only I had been more attentive.
Written for the 1938 version of Berliner Kindheit 11m neunzehnhundert; unpublished in
Benjamin's lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften, VB, 388-389. Translated by Howard Eiland.
Notes
The Imperial Panorama (Kaiserpanorama) was located in an arcade, the Kaiser-
Galerie~ built in 1869-1873, that connected the Friedrichstrasse and the
Behrenstrasse. The panorama consisted of a dome-like apparatus ste-
reoscopic views to customers seated around it. For more on nineteenth-century
panoramas, see Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambrjdge, Mass.: Harvard Press, 1999), pp. 527-536,
992-993.
7
The Telephone
77
78 PROD U C T ION. REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
department on the line. But his real orgies were reserved for cranking the
handle, to which he gave himself up for minutes at a time, nearly forget-
ting himself in the process. His hand, on these occasions, was a dervish
overcome by frenzy. My heart would pound; I was certain that the em-
ployee on the other end was in danger of a stroke, as punishment for her
negligence.
At that time, the telephone still outcast settled carelessly be-
tween the dirty-linen hamper and the a corner of the back
hallway, where its ringing served to multiply the terrors of the Berlin
household. When, having mastered my senses with great effort, I arrived
to quell the uproar after prolonged fumbling through the gloomy corri-
dor, I tore off the two receivers, which were heavy as dumbbells, thrust
my head between them, and was inexorably delivered over to the voice
that now sounded. There was nothing to allay the violence with which it
pierced me. Powerless, I suffered, seeing that it obliterated my conscious-
ness of time, my firm resolve, my sense of duty. And just as the medium
obeys the voice that takes possession of him from beyond the grave, I
submitted to the first proposal that came my way through the telephone.
Written for the 1938 version of Berliner Kindheit tim neu1tzehnhundert; unpublished in
Benjamin's lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften, VII, 390-391. Translated by Howard Eiland.
The task is to win over the intellectuals to the working class by
making them aware of the identity of their spiritual enterprises and
of their conditions as producers.
-RAMON FERNAN DEZ I
8
The Author as Producer
You will rernernb(~r how Plato deals with in his ideal state: he ban-
ishes them from it in the public interest. He had a high conception of the
power of poetry, but he believed it harmful, superfluous-in a perfect
community, of course. The question of the poet's right to exist has not of-
ten, since then, been posed with the same emphasis; but today it poses it-
self. Probably it is only seldom posed in this form, but it is more or less
familiar to you all as the question of the autonomy of the poet, of his
freedom to write whatever he pleases. You are not disposed to grant him
this autonomy. You believe that the present social situation compels him
to decide in whose service he is to place his activity. The bourgeois writer
of entertainment literature does not acknowledge this choice. You must
prove to him that, without admitting it, he is working in the service of
certain class interests. A more advanced type of writer does recognize this
choice. His decision, made on the basis of class struggle, is to side with
the proletariat. This puts an end to his autonomy. His activity is now de-
cided by what is useful to the proletariat in the struggle. Such writ-
ing is commonly called tendentious.
Here you have the catchword around which has long circled a debate
familiar to YOll. Its familiarity tells you how unfruitful it has been, for it
has not advanced beyond the monotonous reiteration of arguments for
and against: on the one hand} the correct political line is demanded of the
79
80 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
poet; on the other, one is justified in expecting his work to have quality.
Such a formulation is of course unsatisfactory as long as the connection
between the two factors) political line and quality, has not been per-
ceived. Of course, the connection can be asserted dogmatically. You can
declare: a work that shows the correct political tendency need show no
other quality. You can also declare: a work that exhibits the correct ten-
dency must of necessity have every other quality.
This second formulation is not uninteresting) and, moreover, it is cor-
rect. I adopt it as my own. But in doing so I abstain from asserting it dog-
matically. It must be proved. And it is in order to attempt to prove it that
I now claim your attention. This is, you will perhaps object, a very spe-
cialized, out-of-the-way And do I intend to promote the study of
fascism with such a proof? This is indeed my intention. For I hope to be
able to show you that concept of political tendency, in the summary
form in which it usually occurs in the debate just mentioned, is a per-
fectly useless instrument of political literary criticism. I would like to
show you that the tendency of a literary work can be politically correct
only if it is also literarily correct. That is to say, the politically correct ten-
dency includes a literary tendency. And I would add straightaway: this
literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every cor-
rect political tendency of a work, alone constitutes the quality of that
work. The correct political tendency of a work thus includes its literary
quality because it includes its literary tendency.
This assertion-I hope I can promise you-will soon become clearer.
For the moment, I would like to interject that I might have chosen a dif-
ferent starting point for my reflections. I started from the unfruitful de-
bate on the relationship between tendency and quality in literature. I
could have started from an even older and no less unfruitful debate:
What is the relationship between form and content, particularly in politi-
cal poetry? This kind of question has a bad name; rightly so. It is the
textbook example of the attempt to explain literary connections un-
dialectically, with cliches. Very well. But what, then, is the dialectical ap-
proach to the same question?
The dialectical approach to this question-and here I come to the
heart of the absolutely no use for such rigid) isolated things
as work, novel, book. It has to insert them into the living social contexts.
You rightly that this has been done time and again among our
friends. Certainly. Only they have often done it by launching at once into
large, and therefore necessarily often vague, questions. Social conditions
are, as we know, determined by conditions of production. And when a
THE AUTHOR AS PRODUCER 81
about the following tasks: calling mass meetings; collecting funds to pay
for tractors; persuading independent peasants to enter the kolkhoz [col-
lective farm]; inspecting the reading rooms; creating wall newspapers and
editing the kolkhoz newspaper; reporting for Moscow newspapers; intro-
ducing radio and mobile movie houses; and so on. It is not surprising that
the book Commanders of the Field, which Tretiakov wrote following
these stays, is said to have had considerable influence on the further de-
velopment of collective agriculture.
You may have a high regard for Tretiakov, yet still be of the opinion
that his example does not prove a great deal in this context. The tasks he
performed, you will perhaps object, are those of a journalist or a propa-
gandist; all this has little to do with literature. But I cited the example of
Tretiakov deliberately, in order to point out to you how comprehensive
the horizon is within which we have to rethink our conceptions of liter-
ary forms or genres, in view of the technical factors affecting our present
situation, if we are to identify the forms of expression that channel the
literary energies of the present. There were not always novels in the past,
and there will not always have to be; there have not always trage-
dies or great epics. Not always were the forms of commentary, transla-
tion, indeed even so-called plagiarism playthings in the margins of litera-
ture; they had a place not only in the philosophical but also in the literary
writings of Arabia and China. Rhetoric has not always been a minor
form: in antiquity, it put its stamp on large provinces of literature. All this
is to accustom you to the thought that we are in the midst of a mighty re-
casting of literary forms, a melting down in which many of the opposites
in which we have been used to thinking may lose their force. Let me give
an example of the unfruitfulness of such opposites, and of the process of
their dialectical transcendence. And we shall remain with Tretiakov. For
this example is the newspaper.
One left-wing author has declared: 4
In our writing, opposites that in happier ages fertilized one another have
become insoluble antinomies. Thus, science and belles lettres, criticism
and literary production, education and politics, fall apart in disorder and
lose all connection with one another. The scene of this literary confusion is
the newspaper; its coment, "subject matter n that denies itself any other
form of organization than that imposed on it by readers' impatience. And
this impatience is not just that of the politician expecting information, or
of the speculator looking for a stock tip; behind it smolders the impatience
of people who are excluded and who think they have the right to see their
THE AUTHOR AS PRODUCER 83
own interests expressed. The fact that nothing binds the reader more
tightly to his paper than this impatience, his longing for
daily nourishment has long been exploited by publishers, who are con-
stantly inaugurating new columns to address the reader's questions, opin-
ions, and protests. Hand in hand, therefore, with the indiscriminate assim-
ilation of facts goes the equally indiscriminate assimilation of readers, who
are instantly elevated to collaborators. however, a dialectical mo-
ment lies concealed: the decline of writing in the bourgeois press proves to
be the formula for its revival in the press of Soviet Russia. For as writing
gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinction be-
tween author and public, which is upheld by the bourgeois press, begins in
the Soviet press to disappear. For there the reader is at all times ready to
become a writer-that is, a describer, or even a prescriber. As an expert-
not perhaps in a discipline but perhaps in a post that he holds-he gains
access to authorship. Work itself has its turn to And its representa-
tion in words becomes a part of the ability that is needed for its exercise.
competence is no longer founded on specialized training but is
now based on poly technical education, and thus becomes public property.
It is, in a word, the literarization of the conditions of living that masters
the otherwise insoluble antinomies. And it is at the scene of the limitless
debasement of the word-the newspaper, in short-that its salvation is be-
ing prepared.
sive processes of the last ten years in Germany that a considerable pro-
portion of its productive minds, under the pressure of economic concli-
tions, have passed through a revolutionary development in their
attitudes, without being able simultaneously to rethink their own work,
their relation to the means of production, or their technique in a really
revolutionary way. I am speaking, as you see, of so-called left-wing intel-
lectuals, and will limit myself to the bourgeois Left. In Germany the lead-
politico-literary movements of the last decade have emanated from
this left-wing intelligentsia. I shall mention two of them. Activism and
New Objectivity [Neue Sachlichkeit], using these examples to show that
a political tendency, however revolutionary it lTIay seem, has a counter-
revolutionary function so long as the writer feels his solidarity with the
proletariat only in his attitudes, not as a producer. s
The catchword in which demands of Activism are summed up is
"logocracy"; in plain language, "rule of the mind." This is apt to be
translated as "rule of the intellectuals." In fact, the concept of the intel-
lectual, with its attendant spiritual values, has established itself in the
camp of the jeft-wing intelligentsia, and domina tes its political manifes-
tos from Heinrich Mann to Doblin. 6 It can readily be seen that this
concept has been coined without any regard for the position of intellectu-
als in the process of production. Hiller, the theoretician of Activism,
means intellectuals to be understood not as "members of certa in profes-
sions" but as "representatives of a certain characterojogical type. This
))7
a young man-Dab lin calls him Herr Hocke-who had put to the fa-
mous author the question, "What is to be done?" Dablin invites him to
join the cause of socialism, but with reservations. Socialism, according to
Dablin, is "freedom, a spontaneous union of people, the rejection of all
compulsion, indignation at injustice and coercion, humanity, tolerance, a
peaceful disposition." However that may be, on the basis of this social-
ism he sets his against the theory and practice of the radical workers'
movement. "Nothing," Dablin dedares, "can come out of anything that
was not already in it-and from a murderously exacerbated dass war,
justice can come but not socialism." Dablin formulates the recommenda-
tion that~ for and other reasons, he gives Herr Hocke: "You, my
dear sir, cannot put into effect your agreement in principle with the strug-
gle [of the proletariat] by joining the proletarian front. You must be con-
tent with an agitated and bitter approval of this struggle. But you also
know that if you do more, an immensely important post will remain un-
manned ... : the original communistic position of human individual free-
dom, of the spontaneous solidarity and union of men .... It is this posi-
tion, my dear Sil; that alone falls to you. n Here it is quite palpable where
the conception of the "intellectual"-as a type of person defined by his
opinions, attitudes, or dispositions, but not by his position in the process
of production-leads. He must, as Dablin puts it, find his place beside
the proletariat. But what kind of place is this? That of a benefactor, of an
ideological patron-an impossible place. And so we return to the thesis
stated at the outset: the place of the intellectual in the dass struggle can
be identified-or, better, chosen-only on the basis of his position in the
process of production.
To signify the transformation of the forms and instruments of produc-
tion in the way desired by a progressive intelligentsia-that is~ one inter-
ested in freeing the means of production and serving the class struggle-
Brecht coined the term U111funktionierung [functional transformation].
He was the first to make of intellectuals the far-reaching demand not to
supply the apparatus of production without, to the utmost extent possi-
ble, changing it in accordance with socialism. "The publication of the
Versuche," the author writes in his introduction to the series of writings
bearing this title, "occurred at a time when certain works ought no
longer to be individual experiences (have the character of works) but
should, rather, concern the use (transformation) of certain institutes and
institutions." 10 It is not spiritual renewal, as fascists proclaim, that is
sirable: technical innovations are suggested. I shall come back to these in-
novations. Here I would like to content myself with a reference to the de-
86 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
considering it the only high art. Music without words attained its great
importance and its full extent only under capitalism." This means that
the task of changing the concert is impossible without the collaboration
of the word. It alone can effect the transformation, as Eisler formulates it,
of a concert into a political meeting. But that such a transformation does
indeed represent a peak of musical and literary technique) Brecht and
Eisler prove with their didactic play Die Massnahme [The Measures
Taken].
If you look back from this vantage point on the recasting of literary
forms that I spoke of earlier, you can see how photography and music,
and whatever else occurs to you, are entering the growing, molten mass
from which the new forms are cast. You will find this confirmed: only the
literarization of all the conditions of life provides an accurate conception
of range of this melting-down process, just as the state of the class
"I-LU.F>,FJ ....... determines the temperature at which-more or less perfectly-it
is accomplished.
I spoke of the process of a certain 1110 dish photography whereby pov-
erty is made an object of consumption. In turning to New Objectivity as
a literary movement, I must take a step further and say that it has made
the struggle against poverty an object of consumption. The political im-
portance of the movement was indeed exhausted in many cases by the
conversion of revolutionary impulses, insofar as they occurred among
bourgeoisie, into objects of distraction, of amusement, which found theif
way without difficulty into the big-city cabaret business. The transforma-
tion of the political struggle from a call-to-decision into an object of con-
templative enjoyment, from a means of production into a consumer arti-
cle, is the defining characteristic of this literature, A perceptive critic has
explained this, using the example of Erich Kastner, as follows: lS
With the workers' movement, this left-wing radical intelligentsia has noth-
ing in common. It rather, a phenomenon of bourgeois decomposition,
a counterpart of the feudalistic mimicry that the Second Empire admired
in the reserve officer. The radical-left publicists of the stamp of Kastner,
Mehring, or Tucholsky are the proletarian mimicry of decayed bourgeois
5t1'ata. 16 Their fUllction is to produce~ from the political standpoint, not
parties but cliques; from the literary standpoint, not schools but fashions;
from the economic standpoint, not producers but agents-agents or hacks
who make a great display of their poverty, and a banquet out of yawn-
ing emptiness. One could not be more cozily accommodated in an uncozy
situation.
THE AUTHOR AS PRODUCER 89
tion that prevails among musicians, writers, and critics," says Brecht,
"has immense consequences that are far too little considered. think-
ing that they are in possession of an apparatus that in reality possesses
them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any con-
trol and that is no longer, as they still believe, a means for the producers,
but has become a means against the producers."19 This theater, with its
complicated machinery, its gigantic supporting staff, its sophisticated ef-
fects, has become a "means the producers" not least in seeking to
enlist them in the hopeless competitive struggle in which film and radio
have enmeshed it. This (whether in its educating or its entertain-
ing role; the two are complementary)20 is that of a sated for which
everything it touches becomes a stimulant. Its position is lost. Not so that
of a theater that, instead of competing with newer instruments of publi-
cation, seeks to use and from them-in short, to enter into debate
with them. This debate the Epic Theater has made its own affair. It is,
measured by the state of development of film and radio, the con-
temporary form.
In the interest of this debate, Brecht fell back on the most primitive el-
ements of the theater. He contented himself, by and large, with a podium.
He dispensed with wide-ranging plots. He thus succeeded in changing the
functional connection between stage and public, text and performance,
director and actor. Epic Theatel; he declared, had to portray situations,
rather than develop plots. It obtains sllch situations, as we shall see pres-
ently, by interrupting the pJot. I remind you here the songs, which have
their chief function in interrupting the action. Here-according to the
principle of interruption-Epic Theater, as you see, takes up a procedure
that has become familiar to you in recent years from film and radio, liter-
ature and photography. I am speaking of the procedure of montage: the
superimposed element disrupts the context in which it is inserted. But
here this procedure has a special right, perhaps even a perfect right, as I
will briefly show. The interruption of action, on account of which Brecht
described his theater as "epic'" constantly counteracts illusion on the
part of the audience. For such illusion is a hindrance to a theater that
proposes to make use of elements of reality in experimental rearrange-
ments. But it is at the end, not the beginning, of the experiment that the
situation appears-a situation that, in this or that form, is always ours. It
is not brought home to the spectator but distanced frol11 him. He recog-
nizes it as situation-not with satisfaction, as in the theater of
Naturalism, but with astonishment. Epic Theater, therefore, docs not re-
produce situations; rather, it discovers them. This discovery is accom-
THE AUTHOR AS PRODUCER 91
Thus Aragon. But how did they become pioneers? Certainly not with-
out very bitter struggles, extremely difficult debates. The considerations I
have put before you are an attempt to draw some conclusions from these
struggles. They are based on the concept to which the debate on the atti-
tude of Russian intellectuals owes its decisive clarification: the concept
of the specialist. The solidarity of the specialist with the proletariat-
herein lies the beginning of this clarification-can only be a mediated
one. Proponents of Activism and of the New Objectivity could gesticu-
late as they pleased, but they could not do away with the fact that even
the proletarianization of an intellectual hardly ever makes a proletarian.
Why? Because the bourgeois class gave him, in the form of education, a
means of production that, owing to educational privilege, makes him feel
solidarity with it, and still more it with him. Aragon was thereby entirely
correct when, in another connection, he declared, "The revolutionary in-
tellectual appears and foremost as the betrayer of his class of ori-
THE AUTHOR AS PRODUCER 93
gin. n In the case of the writer, this betrayal consists in conduct that trans-
forms him from a supplier of the productive apparatus into an engineer
who sees it as his task to adapt this apparatus to the purposes of the pro-
letarian revolution. This is a mediating activity, yet it the intellectual
from that purely destructive task to which Maublanc and many of his
comrades believe it necessary to confine him. Does he succeed in promot-
ing the socialization of the intellectual means of production? Does he see
how he himself can organize intellectual workers in the production pro-
cess? Does he have proposals for the Umfunktionierung of the novel, the
drama, the poem? The more completely he can orient his activity toward
this task, the more correct the political tendency of his work will be, and
necessarily also the higher its technical quality. And at the same time, the
more exactly he is thus informed about his position in the process of pro-
duction, the less it will occur to him to lay claim to "spiritual" qualities.
The spirit that holds forth in the name of fascism must disappear. The
spirit that, in opposing it, trusts in its own miraculous powers will disap-
pear. For the revolutionary struggle is not between capitalism and spirit;
it is between capitalism and the proletariat.
Written spring :1934; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime. Gesam111elte Schriften, II, 683-
70:1. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
Notes
L The Mexican-born French literary critic Ramon Fernandez (1894-1944)
wrote for the Nouvelle Revue Pranfaise in the 19208 and 19305. In the mid-
19305, he was involved with the Communist-backed Association des
Ecrivains et Artistes Revolutionnaires.
2. That the date given in the subtitle is erroneous can be gathered from a let-
ter that Benjamin wrote to Adorno the following day (April 28, 1934), in
which he mentions that the address has not yet been presented (Gesammehe
Schriften, II, 1460-1461). Gershom Scholcm claims that the twenty-seventh
was the date of Benjamin's completion of the text, which was never pre-
sented; see The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem,
1932-1940 (New York: Schocken, 1989), p. 111n. The Institute for the
Study of Fascism (lnstitut Pour l'EtLtde du Fascisme) was a Communist ffOnt
organization.
3. Sergei Tretiakov (1892-1939) was a Russian writer whose work, based on a
"literature of facts," was agitational and propagandistic. His book Com-
manders of the Pield {1931} comprised two volumes of diaries and sketch-
books.
4. The "left-wing author" is Benjamin himself. See "The Newspaper" (1934),
Chapter 39 in this volume.
94 PROD U C T ION, REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
5. Centered around the yearbook Das Ziel (The Goal), "Activism'l was a politi-
cal stance that fused Nietzschean ideals with a pacifist socialism. Prominent
figures associated with the movement included the German author and edi-
tor Kurt Hiller (1885-1972)~ who edited the yearbook; the theater critic Al-
fred Kerr; and the novelist Heinrich Mann. The young Benjamin had been a
vocal opponent of Hiller's ideas. "New Objectivity" (Neue Sachlichkeit)
was the term coined by the museum curator G. F. Hartlaub for a new ten-
dency toward figuration in postwar German painting. It gradually came to
designate the Weimar "period style" in art, architecture, design, literature,
and film: cool, objective, analytical.
6. Heinrich Mann (1871-1950), German novelist and essayist, was the brother
of Thomas Mann. Many of the disputes between the brothers over the years
stemmed from Heinrich's left-liberal activism. Alfred Doblin (1878-1957),
German novelist, is best known for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).
He, too, was a prominent left-liberal voice in Weimar.
7. Kurt Hiller, Del' Sprung ins Helle (Leipzig: Lindner, 1932), p. 314.
8. In place of this sentence, the original manuscript contained a different one,
which was deleted: "Or, in Trotsky's words, 'If enlightened pacifists attempt
to abolish war by means of rational argument, they simply make fools of
themselves, but if the armed masses begin to use the arguments of reason
against war, this means the end of war.'"
9. Wissen lmd Verandern (Know and Change; 1931) was Doblin's apology for
his humane, party-independent, and frankly mystical socialism.
10. Bertolt Brecht, Versuche .1-3 (Berlin: Kiepenheucl', 1930).
11. In Zurich in 1916, artists, writers, and others disgusted by World War I, and
by the bourgeois ideologies that had brought it about, launched Dada, an
avant-garde movement that attempted to radically change both the work of
art and society. Dadaist groups were active in Berlin, New York, Paris, and
elsewhere during the war and into the 19208.
12. John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfelde; 1891-1968), German graphic artist,
photographer, and designer, was one of the founders of Berlin Dada. He
went on to reinvent photomontage as a political weapon.
13. Albert Renger-Patzsch, Die Welt ist schon: Einhu.ndert photograpbische
Aufnahmen (Munich: K. Wolff, 1928). In this book, the German photo-
grapher Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966) arranged his photographs of plants,
animals, buildings, manufactured goods, and industrial landscapes-often
close-ups of isolated details-around formal rhymes.
14. Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) was a German composer best known for his col-
laborations with Brecht. He became the leading composer in the German
Democratic Republic, for which he wrote the national anthem.
15. The "perceptive critic" is Benjamin himself; see his essay "Left-Wing Melan-
choly" (1931), in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-.1934 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 423-427. Erich Kastner (1899-
THE AUTHOR AS PRODUCER 95
1974) was a German satirist, poet, and novelist who is especially known
for his children's books. He was the most durable practitioner of the style
of witty, laconic writing associated with the highbrow cabaret, the Berlin
weekly Die Weltbuhne (The World Stage), and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New
Objectivity) movement of the mid-1920s.
16. Franz Mehring (1846-1919), German socialist historian and journalist, is
best known for his biography of Karl Marx. Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935)
was a German satirist and journalist whose work is emblematic of the wit
and savage irony of the Berlin cabaret.
17. E. Gunther Grundel, Die Sendung der jungen Generation: Versuch einer
umfassenden l'evolutioniirel1 Simtdeut1411g del' Krise (Munich: Beck, 1932),
p. 116. Grlindel is referring to novels by Goethe and Gottfried Keller, respec-
tively.
18. Benjamin refers to the German scientist, satirist, and aphorist Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799).
19. Brecht, Versuche 4-7 (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1930), p. 107.
20. See "Theater and Radio" (1932), in this volume.
21. Rene Maublanc (1891-1960) was a French Marxist historian whose books
include Fourier (1937) and Le Marxisme et fa Liberti (1945). Louis Aragon
(Louis Andrieux; 1897-1982) was a French poet, novelist, and essayist who,
as a prominent Surrealist, was a political activist and spokesman for com-
munism. Benjamin's earliest work on the Arcades Project was inspired by
Aragon's books Vague de reves (Wave of Dreams; 1924) and Paysal1 de Paris
(Paris Peasant; 1926).
The waters are blue, the plants pink; the evening is sweet to look on;
One goes for a walk; the grandes dames go for a walk;
behind them stroll the petites dames.
-NGUYEN TRONG HIEP, Paris, capitalede la France: Recueil
de vel'S (Hanoi, 1897), poem 25 1
9
Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century
Most of the Paris arcades come into being in the decade and a half after
1822. The first condition for their emergence is the boom in the textile
trade. Magasins de nouveautes, the first establishments to keep large
stocks of merchandise on the premises, make their appearance. 2 They
are the forerunners of department stores. This was the period of which
Balzac wrote: "The great poem of display chants its stanzas of color
from the Church of the Madeleine to the Porte Saint-Denis."3 The ar-
cades are a center of commerce in luxury items. In fitting them out,
art enters the service of the merchant. Contemporaries never tire of ad-
miring them, and for a long time they remain a drawing point for for-
eigners. An Illustrated Guide to Paris says: "These arcades, a recent
invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corri-
dors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have
joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors,
96
PARIS, THE CAPITAL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 97
which get their light from above) are the most elegant shops, so that the
passage is a city, a world in miniature." The arcades are the scene of the
first gas lighting.
The second condition for the emergence of the arcades is the begin-
ning of iron construction. The Empire saw in this techn010gy a contribu-
tion to the revival of architecture in the classical Greek sense. The archi-
tectural theorist Boetticher expresses the general view of the matter when
he says that, "with regard to the art forms of the new system, the formal
principle of the Hellenic mode" must come to prevail. 4 Empire is the style
of revolutionary terrorism, for which the state is an end in itself. Just as
Napoleon failed to understand the functional nature of the state as an in-
strument of domination by the bourgeois class, so the architects of his
time failed to understand the functional nature of iron, with which the
constructive principle begins its domination of architecture. These archi-
tects design supports resembling Pompeian columns, and factories that
imitate residential houses, just as later the first railroad stations will be
modeled on chalets. "Construction plays the role of the subcol1scious.')5
Nevertheless, the concept of engineer, which dates from the revolutionary
wars, starts to make headway, and the rivalry begins between builder and
decorator, Ecole Poly technique and Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
For the first time in the history of architecture, an artificial building
material appears: iron. It serves as the basis for a development whose
tempo accelerates in the course of the century. This development enters a
decisive new phase when it becomes apparent that the locomotive-on
which experiments had been conducted since the end of the i820s-is
compatible only with iron tracks. The rail becomes the first prefabricated
iron component, the precursor of the girder. Iron is avoided in home con-
struction but used in arcades) exhibition halls, train stations-buildings
that serve transitory purposes. At the same time, the range of architec-
tural applications for glass expands, although the social prerequisites for
its widened application as building material will come to the fore only a
hundred years later. In Scheerbart's Glasal'chitektur (1914), it still ap-
pears in the context of utopia. Ii
Under Louis Philippe)33 the private individual makes his entrance on the
stage of history. The expansion of the democratic apparatus through a
new electoral law coincides with the parliamentary corruption organized
by Guizot.-H Under cover of this corruption, the ruling class makes his-
tory; that is, it pursues its affairs. It furthers railway construction in order
to improve its stock holdings. It promotes the reign of Louis Philippe as
that of the private individual managing his affairs. With the July Revolu-
tion, the bourgeoisie realized the goals of 1789 (Marx).
For the private individual) the place of dwelling is for the first time op-
posed to the place of work. The fonner constitutes itself as the interior.
Its complement is the office. The private individual, who in the office has
to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illu-
sions. This necessity is all more pressing since he has no intention of
allowing his commercial considerations to impinge on social ones. In the
formation of his private environment, both are kept out. From this arise
the phantasmagorias of the interior-which, for the private man, repre-
sents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the
long ago. His living room is a box in the theater of the world.
Excursus on JugendstiI.JS The shattering of the interior occurs via
Jugendstil around the turn of the century. Of course, according to its own
ideology, the Jugendstil movement seems to bring with it the consumma-
tion of the interior. The transfiguration of the solitary soul appears to be
its goal. Individualism is its theory. With van de Velde, the house becomes
an expression of the personality.36 Ornament is to this house what the
signature is to a painting. But the real meaning of Jugendstil is not ex-
pressed in this ideology. It represents the last attempted sortie of an art
besieged in its ivory tower by technology. This attempt mobilizes all the
reserves of inwardness. They find their expression in the mediumistic lan-
guage of the line, in the flower as symbol of a naked vegetal nature con-
fronted by the technologically armed world. The new elements of iron
construction-girder forms-preoccupy Jugendstil. In ornament, it en-
deavors to win back these forms for art. Concrete presents it with new
possibilities for plastic creation in architecture. Around this time, the real
gravitational center of living space shifts to the office. The irreal center
makes its place in the home. The consequences of Jugendstil are depicted
in Ibsen's Master Builder: the attempt by the individual, on the strength
of his inwardness, to vie with technology leads to his downfall. 37
The interior is the asylum of art. The collector is the true resident of the
interior. He makes his concern the transfiguration of things. To him falls
the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by
taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur
value, rather than use value. The collector dreams his way not only into a
distant or bygone world but also into a better one-one in which, to be
sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in
the everyday world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of
being useful.
The interior is not just the universe but also the etui of the private in-
dividuaL To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accen-
tuated. Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in
abundance; in these, the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are im-
printed. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in
the interior. Enter the detective story, which pursues these traces. Poe, in
his "Philosophy of Furniture" as well as in his detective fiction, shows
himself to be the first physiognomist of the domestic interior. The crimi-
nals in early detective novels are neither gentlemen nor apaches, but pri-
vate citizens of the middle class. 3!!
bly to look around, but in truth to find a buyer. In this intermediate stage,
in which it still has patrons but is already beginning to familiarize itself
with the market, it appears as the boheme. To the uncertainty of its eco-
nomic position corresponds the uncertainty of its political function. The
latter is manifest most clearly in the professional conspirators, who all
belong to the boheme. Their initial field of activity is the army; later it be-
comes the petty bourgeoisie, occasionally the proletariat. Nevertheless,
this group views the true leaders of the proletariat as its adversary. The
Communist Manifesto brings their political existence to an end.
Baudelaire's poetry draws its strength from the rebellious pathos of this
group. He sides with the asocial. He realizes his only sexual communion
with a whore.
The last poem of Les Fleurs du Mal: "Le Voyage." "Death) old admiral,
up anchor now." The last journey of the flaneur: death. Its destination:
the new. "Deep in the Unknown to find the newr'43 Newness is a quality
independent of the use value of the commodity. It is the origin of the sem-
106 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
Balzac was the to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie. 62 But it was
Surrealism that first opened our eyes to them. The development of the
PARIS, THE CAPITAL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 109
exhibition halls and panoramas. They are residues of a dream world. The
realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the para-
digm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of his-
torical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to fol-
low but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within
itself and unfolds it-as Hegel already noticed-by cunning. With the
destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monu-
ments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
Written May 1935; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime. Gesammelte Schri/ten, V, 45-59.
Translated by Howard Eiland.
Notes
Benjamin wrote this essay at the suggestion of Friedrich PoHock, codirector of
the Institute for Social Research in New York, as an expose, or synopsis, of the
Arcades Project. Hence its highly concentrated, almost stenographic style. See
Benjamin's letter to Theodor W. Adorno dated May 31, 1935, in Benjamin, Se-
lected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2002), pp. 50-53.
1. Nguyen Trong Hiep (1834-1902) was a member of the Regency Council of
the French protectorate of Annam (part of present-day Vietnam) from 1889
through 1897. He visited Paris on a diplomatic mission and published a
book of thirty-six quatrains about his impressions of the city. Jules Claretie
wrote an article about the book which cites the lines Benjamin takes as his
epigraph; see Claretie, ('Une description de Paris par un annamite," Le
Temps (Paris), January 13, 1898.
2. The magasin de 110tlVeautes offered a complete selection of goods in one
or another specialized line of business; it had many rooms and several sto-
ries, with a large staff of employees. The first such store, Pygmalion, opened
in Paris in 1793. The word notlveaute means «newness" or «novelty"; in
the plural, it means "fancy goods." On the magasins de nouveautes, see
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
110 PRODUCTION. REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
35. Jugendstil is the German and Austrian variant of the Art Nouveau style of the
18905. The movement took its name from the Munich journal Die Jugend
(Youth),
36. The Belgian architect and interior designer Henry van de Velde (l863-1957},
author of V0111 neuen Stil (The Modern Style; 1907), was one of the leading
exponents of J ugendstil.
37. Henrik Ibsen's play The Master Builder was produced in 1892. See The Ar-
cades Project, pp. 221 (Convolute 14,4) and 551 (Convolute S4,6).
38. On the figure of the Parisian who "abjures virtue and laws" and "ter-
minates the contrat social forever," and on the "poetry of apachedom/' see
"The Paris of the Second in Baudelaire" (1938), in Benjamin, Se-
lected Writings, vol. 4, pp. 3-92.
39. Baudelaire, Les Fleufs du Mal (Flowers of Evil; I857).
40. See the passages from Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in nnJ(t,,:na
(The Condition of the Working Class in England) and from Poe's story "The
Man of the Crowd" cited in The Arcades Project, pp. 427-428 (Convolute
M5a,l) and 445 (Convolute M15a,2), respectively.
41. The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1971),
p. 1.37 (book 6~ line 126). Benjamin quotes the Latin.
42. "Spleen et ideal" (Spleen and Ideal) is the title of the first section of
Baudelaire's Fleul's du Mal (Flowers of Evil; 1857).
43. Baudelaire, "Le Voyage," in Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil; 1857).
44. Baudelaire, "Pierre Dupont," in Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, trans. Lois B.
Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. (University Park: Pennsylvania State Uni-
versity Press, 1964), p. 53.
45. Applying Kant's idea of the pure and disinterested existence of the work of
art, the French philosopher Victor Cousin made use of the phrase I'art lJOur
rart ("art for art's sake") in his 1.818 lecture «Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien"
(On the True, the Beautiful, and the Good). The idea was later given cur-
rency by writers such as Theophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles
Baudelaire.
46. Baudelaire's enthusiasm for \Vagner's music, which he describes as a "revela-
tion" and as specifically "modern," is expressed in his February 17, 1860,
letter to Wagner, after the composer had come to Paris to direct three con-
certs of his music, and in his 1861 essay, "Richard Wagner et Tannhauser a
Paris" (Richard Wagner and Tannhallser in Paris). See The Selected Letters
of Charles Baudelaire, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago 1986), pp. 145-146; and Baudelaire, The Painter of Modenz Life
and Other trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo, 1986),
pp.111-146.
47. Confession d'un lion devenu vieux (Confession of a Lion Grown Old; 1888)
was published anonymously by Baron Haussmann (1809-
1891). As Prefect of the Seine (1853-1870) under Napoleon III, Haussmann
carried out a large-scale renovation of Paris, which included the construc-
114 PRODUCTION. REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
tion of wide boulevards through the city and the demolition of many old Pa-
risian neighborhoods and arcades built in the first half of the century.
48. Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808-1873), known as Louis Napoleon,
was a nephew of Napoleon I. After being elected president of the Republic at
the end of 1848, he made himself dictator by a coup d'etat on December 2,
1851; a year later, he proclaimed himself emperor as Napoleon III. His
reign, the Second Empire, was marked by economic expansion, aggressive
foreign intervention, and a wavering authoritarian tone. He was deposed by
the National Assembly in 1871, following his capture at the Battle of Sedan
during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871).
49. Paul Lafargue (1842-1911) was a French radical socialist and writer closely
associated with Marx and Engels. For his comparison between the market
and the gambling house, see The Arcades Project. p. 497 (Convolute 04,1).
50. The Court of Cassation was established in 1790 as the highest court of ap-
peals in the French legal system. During the Second it tended to
serve the interests of the bourgeoisie, which had come to power under Louis
Philippe. It thus represented a check on the power of Napoleon III and
Baron Haussmann.
51. The "red bele~ was a name for the suburbs immediately surrounding Paris
proper in the later nineteenth century. These districts were populated by
many of the working class who had been displaced by Haussmann's urban
renewal.
52. The French journalist Maxime Du Camp (1822-1894) wrote Paris: Ses organes,
ses fonctions et sa vie dans fa seconde moitie du XIXe siecle (1869-1875), a
six-volume account of nineteenth-century Paris. See The Arcades Project,
pp. 90-91 (Convolute C,4), on Du Camp~s conception of this work.
53. Anonymous, Paris desert: Lamentations d'un Jeremie haussmannise
(Deserted Paris: Jeremiads of a Man Haussmannized; 1868),
54. The "February Revolution" refers to the overthrow of Louis Philippe's con-
stitutional monarchy in February 1848.
55. Engels' critique of barricade tactics is excerpted in The Arcades Project,
p. 123 {Convolute Ela,5}.
56. The verse derives from the popular lyric poet and songwriter Pierre Dupont
(1821-1870). See The Arcades Project, p. 710 (Convolute a7,3).
57. The Commune of Paris was the revolutionary government established in
Paris on March 18, 1871, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. It
was suppressed in bloody street-fighting that ended May 28,1871, leaving
20,000 Communards dead.
58. Frederic Le Play, Les Ouvriers eumpeetls: Etudes sur fes travaux, fa vie
domestique et La condition morale des populations ouvrieres de Z'Euro/Je,
precedees d'un expose de fa methode d'ohservation (European Workers:
Studjes of the Work, Domestic Life, and Moral Condition of the Laboring
Populations of Prefaced by a Statement on Observational Method;
PARIS, THE CAPITAL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 115
116
EDUARD FUCHS, COLLECTOR AND HISTORIAN 117
art is concerned, this thought challenges the unity of art itself, as well as
that of those works which purportedly come under the rubric of art. For
the dialectical historian concerned with works of art, these works inte-
grate their fore-history as well as their after-history; and it is by virtue of
their after-history that their fore-history is recognizable as involved in a
continuous process of Works of art teach him how their function
outlives their creator how the artist's intentions are left behind. They
demonstrate how the of a work by its contemporaries is part of
the effect that the work of art has on us today. They further show that
this effect depends on an encounter not just with the work of art alone
but with the history which has allowed the work to come down to our
own age. Goethe this point in a characteristically veiled manner
when, in a conversation about Shakespeare, he said to Chancellor von
Muller: "Nothing that had a great effect can really be judged any
longer."7 No statement better evokes that state of unease which
the beginning of any consideration of history worthy of being called
dialectical. Unease over the provocation to the researcher, who must
abandon the calm, contemplative attitude toward his object in order to
become conscious of the critical constellation in which precisely this frag-
ment of the past finds itself with precisely this present. "The truth will
not run away from usn-this statement by Gottfried Keller indicates ex-
actly that point in historicism's image of history where the is
pierced by historical materialism. s For it is an irretrievable image of the
past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize
itself as intimated in that image.
The more one considers Engels' sentences, the more one appreciates
his insight that every dialectical presentation of history is paid for by a re-
nunciation of the contemplativeness which characterizes historicism. The
historical materialist must abandon the epic element in history. For him,
history becomes the object of a construct whose locus is not empty time
but rather the specific epoch, the specific life, the specific work. The his-
torical materialist blasts the epoch out of its reified "historical continu-
ity," and thereby the life out of the epoch, and the work out of the
lifework. Yet this construct results in the simultaneous preservation and
sublation [Aufhebung] of the lifework in the work, of the epoch in the
lifework, and of the course of history in the epoch. 9
Historicism presents the eternal image of the past, whereas historical
materialism presents a given experience with the past-an experience
that is unique. The replacement of the epic element by the constructive el-
ement proves to be the condition for this experience. The immense forces
bound up in historicism's "Once upon a time" are liberated in this expe-
EDUARD FUCHS, COLLECTOR AND HISTORIAN 119
II
Fuchs was born in t 870. From the outset, he was not meant to be a
scholar. Nor did ever become a scholarly "type," the great
120 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
learning that informs his later work. His efforts constantly extended be-
yond the horizon of the This is true for his accomplishments
as a collector as well as for his activities as a politician. Fuchs entered the
working world in the mid-1880s, during the period of the anti-Socialist
laws. 14 His apprenticeship brought him together with politically con-
cerned proletarians, who soon drew him into the struggle of those
branded illegal at that time-a struggle which appears to us today in
a rather idyllic light. years of apprenticeship ended in 1887. A
few years later, the Miinchener Post, organ of the Bavarian Social Demo-
crats, summoned the young bookkeeper Fuchs from a printing shop in
Stuttgart. Fuchs, they thought, would be able to clear up the administra-
tive difficulties of the paper. He went to Munich, and worked closely
with Richard Calver.
The publishers of the Munchener Post also put out the Suddeutsche
Postillion, a Socialist of political humor. It so happened that
Fuchs was called to assist temporarily with the page proofs of one
and had to fill in gaps with some of his own contributions. The success of
this issue was extraordinary. That year, Fuchs also edited the journaPs
May issue, which was brightly illustrated (color printing was then in its
infancy). This issue sold 60,000 copies-when the average annual distri-
bution was a mere 2,500 copies. In this way, Fuchs became editor of a
magazine devoted to political satire. In addition to his daily responsibili-
ties, Fuchs at once turned his attention to the history of his field. These
efforts resulted in two illustrated studies-on the year 1.848 as reflected
in caricatures, and on the political affair of Lola Montez. 15 In contrast to
the history books illustrated by living artists (such as Wilhelm BIos's pop-
ular books on the revolution, with pictures by jentzsch), these were the
first historical works illustrated with documentary pictures. 16 Encour-
aged by Harden, Fuchs even advertised his work on Lola Montez in Die
ZUkUl1(t, and did not forget to say that it was merely part of a larger
work he was planning to devote to the caricature of the European peo-
ples. 17 The studies for this work profited from a ten-month prison sen-
tence he served, after being convicted of lese majeste for his publications.
The idea seemed clearly auspicious. A certain Hans Kraemer) who had
some in the production of illustrated housekeeping-books,
introduced himself to Fuchs saying that he was already working on a
history of caricature, and suggested that they combine their studies and
collaborate on the work. Kraemer's contributions, however, never mate-
rialized. Soon it became evident that the entire substantial workload
rested on Fuchs. The name of the presumptive collaborator was elimi-
EDUARD FUCHS, COLLECTOR AND HISTORIAN 121
nated from the title page of the second edition, though it had appeared
on the first. But Fuchs had given the first convincing proof of his stamina
and his control of his materiaL The long series of his major works had
begun.
Fuchs's career began at a time when, as the Neue Zeit once put it, the
"trunk of the Social Democratic Party was producing ring after ring of
organic growth." 18 With this growth, new tasks in the educational work
of the party came to light. The greater the masses of workers that joined
the party, the less the party could afford to be content with their merely
political and scientific enlightenment-that with a vulgarization of the
theory of surplus value and the theory of evolution. The party had to
rect its attention to the inclusion of historical material both in its lecture
programs in the feuilleton section of the party press. Thus, the prob-
lem of the "popularization of science" arose in its full complexity. No
one found a solution. Nor could a solution even be envisioned, so long as
those to be educated were considered a "public" rather than a class.l 9 If
the educational effort of the party had been directed toward the" class,"
it would not have lost its close touch with the scientific tasks of historical
materialism. The historical material, turned by the plow of Marxist dia-
lectics, would have become a soil capable of giving life to the seed which
the present planted in it. But that did not occur. The Social Democrats
opposed their own slogan, "Knowledge Is Power," to the slogan "Work
and Education," which Schultz-Delitzsch's piously loyaillnions made the
banner for their workers' education. 20 But the Social Democrats did not
perceive the double meaning of their own slogan. They believed that the
same knowledge which secured the domination of the proletariat by the
bourgeoisie would enable the proletariat to free itself from this domina-
tion. In reality, a form of knowledge which had no access to practice, and
which could teach the proletariat nothing about its situation as a class,
posed no danger to its oppressors. This was especially the case with the
humanities. The humanities represented a kind of knowledge quite unre-
lated to economics, and consequently untouched by the revolution in
economic theory. The humanities were content "to stimulate/' "to offer
diversion," and "to be interesting." History was loosened up to yield
"cultural history." Here Fuchs's work has its place. Its greatness lies in its
reaction to this state of affairs; its problems lie in the that it contrib-
utes to this state. From the very beginning, Fuchs made it a principle to
aim for a mass readership.21
At that time, only a few peopJe realized how much truly depended on
the materialist educational effort. The hopes and (more important) the
122 PROD U C T ION, REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
fears of those few were expressed in a debate that left traces in the Neue
Zeit. The most important of these is an essay by Korn entitled "Proletar-
iat und Klassik" [Proletariat and Classicism]. This essay deals with the
concept of heritage [ErbeJ, which has again become important today. Ac-
cording to Korn, Lassalle saw German idealism as a heritage bequeathed
to the working class. Marx and Engels understood the matter differently,
however.
They did not consider the social priority of the working class as ... a heri-
tage; rather, they derived it from the pivotal position of the working class
in the production process. How can one speak of possession, even spiritual
possession, with respect to a parvenu class such as the modern proletariat?
Every hour, every day, this proletariat demonstrates its "right" by means
of its labor, which continuously reproduces the whole cultural apparatus.
Thus, for Marx and Engels the showpiece of Lassalle's educational ideal-
namely, speculative philosophy-was no tabernacle, . . . and both felt
more and more drawn toward natural science. Indeed, for a class which is
essentially defined by the functions it performs, natural science may be
called science per se, just as for the ruling and possessing class everything
that is historical comprises the given form of their ideology. In fact, history
represents, for consciousness, the category of possession in the same way
that capital represents, for economics, the domination over past labor.22
III
This was the period in which Eduard Fuchs came of age~ and which en-
gendered decisive aspects of his work. To put it simply, his work partici-
124 PRODUCTION, R EPRODUCTIO N, AN D RECE PTI ON
IV
Against this background, the historical contours of Fuchs's work become
apparent. Those aspects of his work which are likely to endure were
wrested from an intellectual constellation that could hardly have ap-
peared less propitious. This is the point where Fuchs the collector taught
Fuchs the theoretician to comprehend much that the times denied him.
He was a collector who strayed into marginal areas-such as caricature
and pornographic imagery-which sooner or later meant the ruin of a
whole series of cliches in traditional art history. First, it should be noted
that Fuchs had broken completely with the classicist conception of art,
whose traces can still be seen in Marx. The concepts through which the
bourgeoisie developed this notion of art no longer playa role in Fuchs's
work; neither beautiful semblance [det' schone Schein], nor harmony, nor
the unity of the manifold is to be found there. And the collector's robust
self-assertion (which alienated Fuchs from classicist theories) sometimes
makes itself felt-devastatingly blunt-with regard to classical antiquity
itself. In 1908, drawing on the work of Slevogt and Rodin, Fuchs prophe-
sied a new beauty "which, in the end, will be infinitely greater than that
of antiquity. Whereas the latter was only the highest animalistic form, the
new beauty will be filled with a lofty spiritual and emotional content. "30
In short, the order of values which determined the consideration of
126 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
art for Goethe and Winckelmann has lost all influence in the work of
FuchsJI Of course, it would be a mistake to assume that the idealist
view of art was itself entirely unhinged. That cannot happen until the
disjecta membra which idealism contains-as "historical representation'~
on the one hand and "appreciation" on the other-are merged and there-
by surpassed. This effort, however, is left to a mode of historical science
which fashions its object not out of a tangle of mere facticities but out of
the numbered group of threads representing the woof of a past fed into
the warp of the present. (It would be a mistake to equate this woof with
mere causal connection. Rather, it is thoroughly dialectical. For centuries,
threads can become lost, only to picked up again by the present course
of history in a disjointed and inconspicuous way.) The historical object
removed from pure facticity does not need any "appreciation." It does
not offer vague analogies to actuality, but constitutes itself in the precise
dialectical problem [Aufgabe] which actuality is obliged to resolve. That
is indeed what Fuchs intends. If nowhere else, his intention may be felt in
the pathos which often makes the text read like a lecture. This fact, how-
ever, also indicates that much of what he intended did not get beyond its
mere beginnings. What is fundamentally new in his intention finds direct
expression primarily where the material meets it halfway. This occurs in
his interpretation of iconography, in his contemplation of mass art, in his
examination of the techniques of reproduction. These are'the pioneering
aspects of Fuchs's work, and are elements of any future materialist con-
sideration of art.
The three abovementioned motifs have one thing in common: they re-
fer to forms of knowledge which could only prove destructive to tradi-
tional conceptions of art. The concern with techniques of reproduction,
more than any other line of research, brings out the crucial importance of
reception; it thus, within certain limits, enables us to correct the process
of reification which takes place in a work of art. The consideration of
mass art leads to a revision of the concept of genius; it reminds llS to
avoid giving priority to inspiration, which contributes to the genesis of
the work of art, over and against its material character [Faktur], which is
what allows inspiration to come to fruition. Finally, iconographic inter-
pretation not only proves indispensable for the study of reception and
mass art; it prevents the excesses to which any formalism soon leads. J2
Fuchs had to come to grips with formalism. Wolfflin's doctrine was
gaining acceptance at the same time that Fuchs was laying the founda-
tions of his own work. In Das individuelle Problem [The Problem of the
Individual], Fuchs elaborates on a thesis from Wolfflin's Die klassische
EDUARD FUCHS, COLLECTOR AND HISTORIAN 127
sense of the term, though they were by no means enough to earn him the
title of dialectical thinker. The same traits can be found in Fuchs. In him
they may be even more prominent, insofar as they have been incorpo-
rated into a more expansive and sensualist talent. Be that as it may, one
can easily imagine his portrait in a gallery of bourgeois scholars. One
might hang his picture next to that of Georg Brandes, with whom he
shares a rationalistic furor, a passion for throwing light onto vast histori-
cal expanses by means of the torch of the Ideal (whether of progress, sci-
ence, or reason). On the other side, one could imagine the portrait of eth-
nologist Adolf Bastian. J7 Fuchs resembles the latter particularly in his
insatiable hunger for material. Bastian was legendary for his readiness to
pack a suitcase and set off on expeditions in order to resolve an issue,
even if it kept him away from home for months. Similarly, Fuchs obeyed
his impulses whenever they drove him to search for new evidence. The
works of both these men will remain inexhaustible lodes for research.
v
The following is bound to be an important question for psychologists:
How can an enthusiast, a person who by nature embraces the positive,
have such a passion for caricature? Psychologists may answer as they
like-but there can be no doubt in Fuchs's case. From the beginning, his
interest in art has differed from what one might call "taking pleasure in
the beautiful." From the beginning, he has mixed truth with play. Fuchs
never tires of stressing the value of caricature as a source) as authority.
"Truth lies in the extreme," he occasionally remarks. But he goes further.
To him, caricature is "in a certain sense the form ... from which all ob-
jective art arises. A single glance into ethnographic museums furnishes
proof of this statement. ".18 When Fuchs adduces prehistoric peoples or
children's drawings, the concept of caricature is perhaps brought into a
problematic context; yet his vehement interest in an artwork's more dras-
tic aspects, whether of form or content,J9 manifests itself all the more
originally. This interest runs throughout the entire expanse of his work.
In the late work Tang-Plastik [Tang Sculpture], we can still read the
following:
VI
The pathos running through Fuchs's conception of history is the demo-
cratic pathos of 1830. Its echo was the orator Victor Hugo. The echo
of that echo consists of the books in which the orator Hugo addresses
i 32 PROD U C T ION, REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
VII
Fuchs's family tree~ on the French side, is that of a collector; on the
German side, that of a historian. The moral rigor characteristic of Fuchs
the historian marks him as a German. This rigor already characterized
Gervinus, whose Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur [History of
Poetic National Literature] could be called one of the first attempts at a
German history of ideas. 62 It is typical for Gervinus, just as it is later for
Fuchs, to represent the great creators as quasi-martial figures. This results
in the dominance of their active, manly~ and spontaneous traits over their
contemplative, feminine, and receptive characteristics. Certainly, such a
representation was easier for Gervinus. When he wrote his book, the
bourgeoisie was in the ascendant; bourgeois art was full of political ener-
gies. Fuchs writes in the age of imperialism; he presents the political ener-
gies of art polemically to an epoch whose works display less of these en-
ergies with every passing day. But Fuchs's standards a.re still those of
Gervinus. In fact, they can be traced back even furthet; to the eighteenth
century. This can be done with reference to Gervinus himself, whose me-
morial speech for F. C. Schlosser gave magnificent expression to the mili-
tant moralism of the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary period. Schlosser
had been criticized for a "peevish moral rigor." Gervinus, however, de-
fends him by saying that "Schlosser could and would have answered
these criticisms as follows. Contra.ry to one's experience with novels and
EDUARD FUCHS, COLLECTOR AND HISTORIAN 135
stories, one does not learn a superficial joie de vivre by looking at life on
a large scale, as history, even when one possesses great serenity of spirit
and of the senses. Through the contemplation of history, one develops
not a misanthropic scorn but a stern outlook on the world and serious
principles concerning life. The greatest judges of the world and of hu-
manity knew how to measure external life according to their own inter-
nallife. Thus, for Shakespeare, Dante, and Machiavelli, the nature of the
world made an impression that always led them to seriousness and sever-
ity. "63 Here lies the origin of Fuchs' moralism. It is a German Jacobinism
whose monument is Schlosser's world history-a work that Fuchs came
to know in his youth. 64
Not surprisingly, this bourgeois moralism contains elements which
collide with Fuchs's materialism. If Fuchs had recognized this, he might
have been able to tone down this opposition. He was convinced, how-
ever, that his moralistic consideration of history and his historical materi-
alism were in complete accord. This was an illusion, buttressed by a
widespread opinion badly in need of revision: that the bourgeois revolu-
tions, as celebrated by the bourgeoisie itself, are the immediate source of
a proletarian revolution. 65 As a corrective to this view, it is enough to
look at the spiritualism woven into these revolutions. The golden threads
of this spiritualism were spun by morality. Bourgeois morals function un-
der the banner of inwardness; the first signs of this were already apparent
during the Reign of Terror. The keystone of this morality is conscience,
be it the conscience of Robespierre's citoyen or that of the Kantian cos-
mopolitan. The bourgeoisie's attitude was to proclaim the moral author-
ity of conscience; this attitude proved favorable to bourgeois interests,
but depended on a complementary attitude in the proletariat-one unfa-
vorable to the interests of the latter. Conscience stands under the sign of
altruism. Conscience advises the property owner to act according to con-
cepts which are indirectly beneficial to his fellow proprietors. And con-
science readily advises the same for those who possess nothing. If the lat-
ter take this advice, the advantages of their behavior for the proprietors
become more obvious as this advice becomes more dOll btful for those
who follow it, as well as for their class. Thus it is that the price of virtue
rests on this attitude.-Thus a class morality becomes dominant. But the
process occurs on an unconscious level. The bourgeoisie did not need
consciousness to establish this class morality as much as the proletariat
needs consciousness to overthrow that morality. Fuchs does not do jus-
tice to this state of affairs, because he believes that his attack must be di-
rected against the conscience of the bourgeoisie. He considers bourgeois
136 PRO Due T ION, REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
VIII
Fuchs's moralism, which has left traces in his historical materialism, was
not shaken by psychoanalysis either. Concerning sexuality, he says: "All
EDUARD FUCHS, COLLECTOR AND HISTORIAN 137
forms of sensual behavior in which the creative element of this law of life
becomes visible are justified. Certain forms, however, are evil-namely,
those in which this highest of drives becomes degraded to a mere means
of refined craving for pleasure. "69 It is clear that this moralism bears the
signature of the bourgeoisie. Fuchs never acquired a proper distrust of
the bourgeois scorn for pure sexual pleasure and the more or less fantas-
tic means of creating it. In principle, to be sure, he declares that one can
speak of "morality and immorality only in relative terms." Yet in the
same passage he goes on to make an exception for "absolute immoral-
ity," which "entails transgressions against the social instincts of society
and thus, so to speak, against nature." According to Fuchs, this view is
characterized by the historically inevitable victory of "the masses over a
degenerate individuality, for the masses are always capable of develop-
ment."7(} In short, it can be said of Fuchs that he "does not question the
justification for condemning allegedly corrupt drives, but rather casts
doubt on beliefs about the history and extent of these drives. "71
For this reason, it is difficult to clarify the sexual-psychological prob-
lem. But ever since the bourgeoisie came to power, this clarification has
become particularly important. This is where taboos against more or less
broad areas of sexual pleasure have their place. The repressions which
are thereby produced in the masses engender masochistic and sadistic
complexes. Those in power then further these complexes by delivering up
to the masses those objects which prove most favorable to their own poli-
tics. Wedekind, a contemporary of Fuchs, explored these connections. 72
Fuchs failed to produce a social critique in this regard. Thus, a passage
where he compensates for this lack by means of a detour through natural
history becomes all the more important. The passage in question is his
brilliant defense of orgies. According to Fuchs, "the pleasure of orgiastic
rites is among the most valuable aspects of culture. It is important to rec-
ognize that orgies are one of the things that distinguish us from animals.
In contrast to humans, animals do not practice orgies. When their hunger
and thirst are satisfied, animals will turn away from the juiciest food and
the clearest spring. Furthermore, the sexual drive of animals is gener-
ally restricted to specific and brief periods of the year. Things are quite
different with human beings, and in particular with creative human be-
ings. The latter simply have no knowledge of the concept of 'enough.'''73
Fuchs's sexual-psychological observations draw their strength from
thought processes in which he deals critically with traditional norms.
This enables him to dispel certain petit-bourgeois illusions, such as nud-
ism, which he rightly sees as a "revolution in narrow-mindedness."
138 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
"Happily, human beings are not wild animaJs any longer, and we ... like
to have fantasy, even erotic fantasy, play its part in clothing. What we do
not want, however, is the kind of social organization of humanity which
degrades all this. "74
Fuchs's psychological and historical understanding has been fruitful
for the history of clothing in many ways. In fact, there is hardly a subject
apart from fashion which better suits the author's threefold concern-
namely, his historical, social, and erotic concern. This becomes evident in
his very definition of fashion, which, in its phrasing, reminds one of Karl
Krans. Fashion, he says in his Sittengeschichte [History of Manners], "in-
dicates how people intend to manage the business of public morality. "75
Fuchs, by the way, did not make the common mistake of examining fash-
ion only from the aesthetic and erotic viewpoints, as did, for example,
Max von Boehn. 76 He did not fail to recognize the role of fashion as a
means of domination. Just as fashion brings out the subtler distinctions
of social standing, it keeps a particularly close watch over the coarse
distinctions of class. Fuchs devoted a long essay to fashion in the third
volume of his Sittengeschichte. The supplementary volume sums up the
essais train of thought by enumerating the principal elements of fash-
ion. The first element is determined by "the interests of class separation."
The second is provided by "the mode of production of private cap-
italism," which tries to increase its sales volume by manifold fashion
changes. Finally, we must not forget the "erotically stimulating purposes
of fashion." 77
The cult of creativity which runs through all of Fuchs's work drew
fresh nourishment from his psychoanalytic studies. These enriched his
initial, biologically based conception of creativity, though they did not of
course correct it. Fuchs enthusiastically espoused the theory that the cre-
ative impulse is erotic in origin. His notion of eroticism, however, re-
mained tied to an unqualified, biologically determined sensuality. Fuchs
avoided, as far as possible, the theory of repression and of complexes,
which might have modified his moralistic understanding of social and
sexual relationships. Just as his historical materialism derives things more
from the conscious economic interest of the individual than from the
class interest unconsciously at work within the individual, so his focus
on art brings the creative impulse closer to conscious sensual intention
than to the image-creating unconscious.7 8 The world of erotic images
which Freud made accessible as a symbolic world in his Traumdeutung
[Interpretation of Dreams] appears in Fuchs's work only where his own
inner involvement is most pronounced. 79 In such cases, this world fills
EDUARD FUCHS, COLLECTOR AND HISTORIAN 139
IX
lated the public and private life of Parisians into the language of the
agon. The athletic tension of the whole body-its muscular movements-
arouse Daumier's greatest enthusiasm. This is not contradicted by the
fact that probably no one has depicted bodily enervation and debility as
fascinatingly as Daumier. As Fuchs remarks, Daumier's conception re-
lates closely to sculpture. Thus, he bears away the types which his age has
to offer-those distorted Olympic champions-in order to exhibit them
on pedestals. His studies of judges and lawyers prove particularly amena-
ble to this kind of analysis. The elegiac humor with which Daumier likes
to surround the Greek Pantheon reveals this inspiration more directly.
Perhaps this is the solution to the riddle which the master posed for
Baudelaire: how Daumier's caricatures, with all their trenchant, penetrat-
ing power, could remain so free of rancor.83
Whenever Fuchs speaks of Daumier, all his energies come to life. No
other subject draws sllch divinatory flashes from his connoisseurship.
Here, the slightest impulse becomes important. A single drawing, so ca-
sual that it would be a euphemism to call it unfinished, suffices for Fuchs
to offer deep insight into Daumier's productive mania. The drawing in
question represents merely the upper part of a head in which the only ex-
pressive parts are the nose and eyes. Insofar as the sketch limits itself to
these features-insofar as it represents only the observer-it indicates to
Fuchs that here the painter's central interest is at play. For, he assumes,
every painter begins the execution of his paintings at precisely the point
in which he is most compulsively interested. 84 In his work on the painter,
Fuchs says: "A great many of Daumier>s figures are engaged in the most
concentrated looking, be it a gazing into the distance, a contemplating of
specific things, or even a hard look into their own inner selves. Daumier's
people look ... almost with the tips of their noses. "85
x
Daumier turned out to be the most auspicious subject matter for the
scholar. He was also the collector's luckiest find. With justifiable pride,
Fuchs mentions that it was his own initiative and not that of the govern-
ment which led to the establishment of the first collections of Daumier
EDUARD FUCHS. COLLECTOR AND HISTORIAN 141
Caricature was mass art, like the genre painting. In the eyes of conven-
tional art historians, this was enough to disgrace these already question-
able forms. Fuchs sees the matter differently. His interest in the scorned
and apocryphal constitutes his real strength. And as a collector, he has
cleared the way to these things all by himself, for Marxism showed him
merely how to start. What was needed was a passion bordering on ma-
nia; such passion has left its mark on Fuchs's features. Whoever goes
through the whole series of art lovers and dealers, of admirers of paint-
and experts in sculpture, as represented in Daumier's lithographs,
will be able to see how true this is. All of these characters resemble Fuchs,
right down to the details of his physique. They are tall, thin figures whose
eyes shoot fiery glances. It been said-not without reason-that in
characters Daumier conceived descendants of gold-diggers,
necromancers, and misers which populate the paintings the old mas-
ters. 93 As a collector, Fuchs belongs to their race. The alchemist, in his
"base" desire to make gold, carries out research on chemicals in
which planets and elements come together in images of spiritual man; by
the same token, in satisfying the « base" desire for possession, this collec-
tor carries out research on an art in whose creations the productive forces
and the masses come together in images of historical man. Even his late
works still testify to the passionate interest with which Fuchs turned to-
ward these images. He writes: "It is not the least of the glories of Chinese
turrets that they are the product of an anonymous popular art. There is
no heroic lay to commemorate their creators. ')94 \Vhether devoting such
attention to anonymous artists and to the objects that have preserved the
traces of their hands would not contribute more to the humanization of
mankind than the cult of the leader-a cult which, it seems, is to be in-
flicted on humanity once again-is something that, like so much else that
the past has vainly striven to teach us, must be decided, over and over, by
the future.
Published in the Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung fall 1937. Gesammelte Schrifteu II, 465-
J J
Notes
1. The German writer, collector, and cultural critic Eduard Fuchs (1870-1940)
joined the Social Democratic Party in 1886 and was imprisoned in 1888-
1889 for political activity. He lived in Berlin from 1900 to 1933, before emi-
grating to Paris. He was friends with Franz Mehring (see note 2 below) and
was Mehring's literary executor after his death. He is best known for his
144 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
(1898; translated as The Gothic Image: Religious Art in Prance of the Thir-
teenth Cel1ttl/')!).-Trans.]
33. Heinrich \V6Ifflin, Die klassische Kunst: Elne Eillfiihnmg in die italienische
Renaissance [Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissancel (Mu-
nich, 1899), p. 27S. IBenjamin's note. Wolfflin (1864-1945)} a student of
Jacob Burckhardt (see note 46 below), was the most important art historian
of his period writing in German. He developed his analysis of form, based
on a psychological interpretation of the creative process, in books on the Re-
naissance and Baroque periods and on Albrecht Durer, and synthesized his
ideas into a complete aesthetic system in his chief work, Kunstgeschichtliche
Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History; 1915}.-Trans.]
34. Older panel painting showed no more than the outline of a house enclos-
ing human figures. The painters of the early Renaissance were the first to de-
pict an interior space in which the represented figures have room to move
[SIJielraum]. This is what made Uecello's invention of perspective so over-
powering both for his contemporaries and for himself. From then on, the
creations of painting were increasingly devoted to people as inhabitants of
dwellings (rather than people as worshipers). Paintings presented them with
models of dwelling, and never tired of setting up before them perspectives of
the villa. The Higb Renaissance, though much more sparing in its represen-
tation of real interiors, nevertheless continued to build on this foundation.
"The Cinquecento has a particularly strong feeling for the relation between
human being and building-that is, for the resonance of a beautiful room. It
can scarcely imagine an existence that is not architecturally framed and
founded." Wblfflin, Die klassische Kunst p. 227. [Benjamin's note]
J
57. A. Max, "Zur Frage der Organisation des Proletariats der Intelligenz,"
p. 652. [Benjamin's note]
58. Karikatu1~ vol. 2, p. 238. [Benjamin's note. Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was a
French historian and professor at the College de France (1838-1851). Em-
phatically democratic and anticlerical, he was the author of such works as
Histoire de France (1833-1867) and Le Bible de l'humanite (1864). Edgar
Quinet (1803-1875) was a French writer and politician, and an associate
of Michelet. Among his works are the epic poems Napoleon (1836) and
Promithee (1838). The Communards were those involved in the revolution-
ary government established in Paris in 1871, in the aftermath of the Franco-
PrussianWar; the Commune of Paris was suppressed in bloody street-fight-
ing that ended in May 1871, leaving 20,000 Communards dead.-Trans.]
59. Mehring commented on the trial occasioned by Die Weber [The Weavers] in
EDUARD FUCHS, COLLECTOR AND HISTORIAN 153
Die Neue Zeit. Parts of the summation for the defense have regained the
topicality they had in 1893. The defense attorney "had to point out that the
allegedly revolutionary passages in question are countered by others of a
soothing and appeasing character. The author by no means stands on the
side of revolt, since he allows for the victory of order through the interven-
tion of a handful of soldiers." Franz Mehring, "Entweder-Oder" [Either-
OrL Die Neue Zeit, 11, no. 1 (Stuttgart, 1893): 780. [Benjamin's note. The
German writer Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) was a master of naturalist
drama, as exemplified by Die Weber (1892), a dramatization of the Silesian
weavers' revolt of 1844.-Tral1s.]
60. Honore de Balzac, I.e Cousin Pons (Paris, 1925), p. 162. [Benjamin's note.
See, in English, Cousin Pons, trans. Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth: Pen-"
guin, 1968), p. 146 (Chapter 14, "A Character from Hoffmann's Tales").-
Trans.]
61. Edouard Drumont, Les Heros et les pitl'es [Heroes and Fools] (Paris, 1900),
pp. 107-108. [Benjamin's note. Drumont (1844-1917) was an anti-Semitic
and anti-Dreyfusard journalist who founded and edited La Libl'e Parole. He
is the author of the influential La France juive (Jewish France; 1886).-
Trans.]
62. See Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Geschichte dey poetischel1 Nationalliteratul'
del' Deutschen, S vols. (Leipzig, 1835-1842), specifically Histol'ische
Schriften (Writings on History), vols. 2-6.
63. Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Friedrich Christoph Schlosser: Ein Nekrolog
[Obituary for Friedrich Christoph Schlosser.! (Leipzig, 1861), pp. 30-31.
[Benjamin's note. Schlosser (1776-1861) was a German historian, author of
Weltgeschichte fiir das Deutsche Volle (World History for the German Peo-
ple; 19 vols., 1843-1857).-Tral1s.]
64. This aspect of Fuchs's work proved useful when the imperial prosecutors be-
gan accusing him of "distributing obscene writings." His moralism was rep-
resented especially forcefully in an expert opinion submitted in the course of
one of the trials, all of which without exception ended in acquittal. This
opinion was written by Fedor von Zobeltitz, and its most important passage
reads: "Fuchs seriollsly considers himself a preacher of morals and an educa-
tor, and this deeply serious understanding of life-this intimate comprehen-
sion of the fact that his work in the service of the history of humanity must
be grounded on the highest morality-is in itself sufficient to protect him
from any suspicion of profit-hungry speculation. All those who know the
man and his enlightened idealism would have to smile at sllch a sllspicion."
[Benjamin's note. The passage by Zobeltitz is cited in the "Mitteilung des
Verlages Albert Langen in Mi.inchen" (Publisher's Note, from Verlag Albert
Langen in Munich), at the beginning of Fuchs, Die grossen Meister der
Er()til~ (Munich, 1930), p. 4.-Trans.]
65. This revision has been inaugurated by Max Horkheimer in his essay
154 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
the Directory has traits reminiscent of a popular ballad. "The terrible book
by the Marquis de Sade, with as crudely executed as they are infa-
mous, lay open in all the shopwindows." And the figure of Barras bespeaks
"the dissipated imagination of the shameless libertine." Karikatur, voL 1,
pp. 202,201. [Benjamin's note]
70. Karilwtu.r; vol. 1, p. 188. [Benjamin's note]
71. Max Herkheimer) "Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung," p. 166. [Benjamin's
note]
72. Many of the plays of the German dramatist Frank Wedekind (1864-1918),
such as Erdgeist (Earth Spirit; 1895) and Die Bi;chse der Pandora (Pan-
dora's Box; 1904), set up a conflict between a desiccated, hypocritical bour-
geois morality and sexual freedom.
73. E1'Otische Kunst, vol. 2, p. 283. Fuchs is on the track of something important
here. Wonld it be too rash to connect the threshold between human and ani-
mal, such as Fuchs recognizes in the orgy, with that other threshold consti-
tllted by the emergence of upright posture? The latter brings with it a phe-
nomenon unprecedented in natural history: partners can look into each
other's eyes during orgasm. Only then does an orgy become possible. What
is decisive is not the increase in visual stimuli but rather the fact that now the
expression of satiety and even of impotence can itself become an erotic stim-
ulant. [Benjamin's note]
74. Sitte1tgeschichte vol. 3, p. 234. A few pages
J this confident judgment has
faded~vidence of the force with which it had to be wrested away from
convention. Instead, we now read: "The fact that thousands of people be-
come excited when looking at a woman or man photographed in
EDUARD FUCHS, COLLECTOR AND HISTORIAN 155
the nude ... proves that the eye is no longer capable of perceiving the har-
monious whole but only the piquant cletail" (ibid., p. 269). If there is any-
thing sexually arousing it is more the idea that a naked body is being
displayed before the camera than the sight of nakedness itself. This is proba-
bly the idea behind most of these photographs. [Benjamin's note]
75. Ibid., p. 189. [Benjamin's note. The Austrian satirist and critic Karl Kraus
{l874-1936} founded the polemical review Die Fackel in 1899 and edited it
until shortly before his death. See Benjamin's essay "Karl Kraus" (1931), in
this volume.-Trans.l
76. The writer Max von Boehn (1860-1932) published an eight-volume study
of fashion from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Die Mode
(Fashion; 1907-1925). Among his other works are Biedermeier (1911),
Antike Mode (Fashion in Antiquity; 1927), and PuptJen und Puppenspiele
(Dolls and Puppets; 1929). He is cited several times in The Arcades Project.
77. Sittellgeschichte, supplementary vol. 3, pp. 53-54. [Benjamin's note]
78. For Fuchs, art is immediate sensuousness, just as ideology is an immedi-
ate offspring of interests. "The essence of aft is sensuousness [Sinnlichl<.eit].
Art is sensuousness-indeed, sensuousness in its most potent form. Art is
sensuousness become form, become visible, and at the same time it is the
highest and noblest form of sensuousness" (Erotische Kunst, voL 1, p. 61).
[Benjamin's note]
79. See Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (Leipzig and Vienna, 1900). Freud
(1856-1939), Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, devel-
oped a theory that dreams are an unconscious representation of repressed
desires, especially sexual desires.
80. Karikatul; vol. 1, p. 223. [Benjamin's note]
81. Erotische Kunst, voL 2~ p. 390. [Benjamin's note]
82. Del' Maler Datlmier, p. 30. [Benjamin's notel
83. Baudelaire discusses Daumier in his essay "Quelques caricaturistes fran<;ais"
(1857). in English, "Some French Caricaturists," in Baudelaire, The
Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (1964;
rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1986), pp. 171-180: "The hot-headed Achilles,
the cunning Ulysses, the wise Penelope, that great booby Telemachus, and
the fair Helen who ruined Troy-all of them, in fact, appear before our eyes
in a farcical ugliness reminiscent of those decrepit old tragic actors whom
one sometimes sees taking a pinch of snuff in the wings .... [Daumier'sl cari-
cature has formidable breadth, but it is quite without bile or rancor. In all his
work, there is a foundation of decency and simplicity" (pp. 178-179).
84. This should be compared to the following reflection: "According to my ...
observations, it is in an artist's erotically charged pictures that the dominant
elements of his at any particular time, emerge most clearly. Here, ...
these elements attain ... their greatest power of illumination" (Die grossen
Meister der Erotil?, p. 14). [Benjamin's note]
156 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION. AND RECEPTION
85. Der Maler Daumiel; p. 18. Daumier's famous Art Expert a watercolor that
J
exists in several versions, depicts one such figure. One day, Fuchs was shown
a previously unknown version of this work and asked to authenticate it. He
obtained a good reproduction of the picture and, focusing on the main por-
tion of the subject, embarked on a very instructive comparison. Not the
slightest deviation went unnoticed; in the case of each discrepancy, he asked
whether it was the product of the master's hand or that of impotence. Again
and again Fuchs returned to the original, yet in a manner that seemed to say
he could have easily dispensed with it; his gaze had a familiarity that could
only have come from carrying tbe picture around with him in his head for
years. No doubt this was the case for Fuchs. And only because of this was he
able to discern the slightest uncertainties in the contour~ the most inconspic-
uous mistakes in the coloring of the shadows~ the minutest derailings in the
movement of the line. As a result, he was able to identify the picture in ques-
tion not as a forgery but as a good old copy, which might have been the
work of an amateur. [Benjamin's note]
86. Paul Gavarni (Sulpice Chevalier; 1804-1866) was a French illustrator and
caricaturist, best known for his sketches of Parisian life.
87. Dachreite1; pp. 5-6. [Benjamin's noteJ
88. Jean de La (1645-1696), French moralist, was the author of one
of the masterpieces of l:;rench literature, Les Caracteres de Theophraste,
traduits du grec, avec les caracteres ou les moeurs de ce siecle (Characters, or
The Manners of This Age, with the Characters of Theophrastus; 1688), a se-
ries of satirical portrait sketches appended to bis translation of the fourth-
century B.C. character writer Theophrastus. One of La Bruyere's characters
is the print-collector Democede (not "Damochie~'), who appears in Chapter
13> "De la mode" (On Fashion). He is based on Michel de MaroHes (1600-
1681), abbe of Villeloin and an erudite translator of Latin poetry, who
amassed a collection of prints numbering 123,400 items, representing more
than 6,000 artists. This collection was acquired by the government of Louis
XIV in 1667 and is now in the Louvre's archive of prints, the Cabinet des
Estampes. Anne Claude Philippe de Tubieres, comte de Caylus (1692-1765),
archaeologist, engraver, and man of published his seven-volume
Recueil d'antiquites egyptienl1es, etrusques grecques, romaines, et gauloises
J
DoH Sternberger, Panorama, oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert [Panorama, or Views of
the Nineteenth Century] (Hamburg, 1938), 238 pages.
Among the contradictions which are not unified but which are provision-
ally clamped together in Germany today are the reactions provoked by
recollection of the Bismarck era. 1 At that time, the petty bourgeoisie en-
tered into an apprenticeship to the powers-that-be, one which has been
revived and extended under National Socialism. By comparison, the mid-
dle bourgeois strata still enjoyed much greater political power at that
time. Only when they had relinquished that power was the way cleared
for monopoly capitalism, and with it the national renewal. National So-
cialism is thus ambivalent toward the age of Bismarck. It boasts of hav-
ing eradicated the slovenliness of the age-with some justification, if one
considers the average level of security enjoyed by the lower classes in
those days. On the other hand, the National Socialist party is well aware
that it is perpetuating Wilhelmine imperialism and that the Third Reich is
basking in the reflected glory of the Second. Its training of the petty bour-
geoisie is based on this awareness. Thus, we have on one side the eyes
raised deferentially to those above, but on other the critical reserve
(an ambivalence aptly illustrated by the way the leaders of the new Reich
view those of the old army.)
Imagine this situation as a mirror image-that is, symmetrically in-
verted-and you have the outline of Sternberger's book. 2 Its attitude is
likewise ambivalent, but in the opposite direction. When he probes the
age of Bismarck critically, he touches on the features with which one feels
158
REVIEW OF STERNBERGER'S PANORAMA 159
jects. But in his book they form motifs, in the sense of whimsically ar-
ranged ornamentation.
The essayist likes to think of himself as an artist. He can then yield to
the temptation to substitute empathy (with an epoch no less than with a
way of thinking) for theory. The symptoms of this dubious state of affairs
are evident in Sternberger's language. An elevated, pretentious style of
German is allied to the moral affectation that was characteristic of the in-
gratiating family novel of the 1860s. This stylistic mimicry gives rise to
the most convoluted phrasing. "Since then, in general/' is a favorite (vac-
uous) construction; "of this kind and extent" mistakes redundancy for a
transition. Phrases such as "it's time to bring this digression to a close,"
"let us move on, however," and "it would ill befit the author" usher the
reader through the book as if through a suite of stately rooms. The au-
thoes language is a vehicle of regression.
Nowadays, regression to remote spheres that do not invite political in-
tervention is widespread in Germany. Childhood recollections and the
cult of Rilke, spiritualism and Romantic medicine succeed one another as
intellectual fads." Sternberger regresses while holding on to the motifs of
the avant-garde. His book is truly a classic case of retreating forward.
Naturally, he cannot avoid colliding with the enemy. Above all, he has to
contend with those who hesitate to cast a critical vote on the Grtinderzeit
in pursuit of their own interests. 6 The barbarism of the present was al-
ready germinating in that period, whose concept of beauty showed the
same devotion to the licked-clean which the carnivore displays toward its
prey. With the advent of National Socialism, a bright light is cast on the
second half of the nineteenth century. Those years marked the first at-
tempts to turn the petty bourgeoisie into a party and harness it to precise
political purposes. This was done by Stoecker, in the interests of the big
landowners.? Hitler's mandate came from a different group. Neverthe-
less, his ideological nucleus remained that of Stoecker's movelnent fifty
years earlier. In the struggle against an internally colonized people, the
Jews, the fawning petty bourgeois came to see himself as a member of a
ruling caste and unleashed his iInperial instincts. With National Social-
ism, a program came into force which imposed the ideals of the
Griinderzeit-glowing warmly in the light of world conflagration-on
the German domestic sphere, especially that of women. On July 18,
1937, in a speech delivered by the head of the party and inveighing
against "degenerate art," the orientation of Germany's culture was
aligned with its most servile and inferior stratum, and laid down with the
authority of the state. s In the Frankfurter Zeitung on July 19, Sternberger
REVIEW OF STERNBERGER'S PANORAMA 161
wrote that this speech "settled accounts ... with the attitudes and theo-
ries that established the public tone in the art world in the era which is
now behind us." This ~'settling of accounts'" he added, is "not yet com-
pleted." He also claimed that it had been conducted "with the weapons
of cutting irony and the methods of philosophical discussion." The same
cannot be said of this ramble through its more distant historical back-
ground.
Sternberger's book is ornate and difficult. It diligently seeks out the ar-
cane subject, but lacks the conceptual force to hold it together. He is un-
able to fonnulate definitions 9-a failing that makes him all the more in-
clined to present the disjecta membra of his text to the reader as a
meaningful symbol. This tendency is exacerbated by his disturbing
fixation on the "allegorical." Allegory is surrounded by emblems forming
a "patchwork" at its feet. Sternberger uses the term matter-of-factly in
this sense, though it carries no such elaborate connotations in normal us-
age. The attributes he ascribes to it make us doubt whether he associates
it with any clear meaning. Under the heading "The Allegory of the Steam
Engine," he assembles a number of cliches extolling the locomotive: as
swift as an eagle, an iron horse, a race-horse on wheels. Such cliches, he
believes, create "an allegorical poetry ... in the precise sense that ele-
ments of technology, when fused with others from living nature, take on
a new, autonomous existence as a Janus figure" (p. 26). This has nothing
to do with allegory. The taste guiding such language reflected the need to
escape a threat. This threat was thought to lie in the "rigid/' "mechani-
cal" qualities associated with technical forms. (In reality, it was of a dif-
ferent kind.) What was generally felt was the oppression emanating from
technology, and refuge from it was sought in Ludwig Knaus's paintings
of groups of children, Griitzner's monks, Warthmiiller's rococo figurines,
and Defreggees villagers,'O The railway was invited to join the ensem-
ble-but it was the ensemble of the genre painting. Genre painting docll-
ments the failed reception of technology. Sternberger introduces the con-
cept, but his interpretation of it is entirely flawed. "In genre painting," he
writes, "the onlooker's interest ... is always actively engaged. Just as the
scene that has been frozen, the living image, needs completion, so this in-
terested onlooker is eager to fill the gaps in the painting's patchwork ...
with the joys or tears it evokes" (p. 64). As I ha ve said, the origin of genre
painting is more tangible. When the bourgeoisie lost the ability to con-
ceive great plans for the future, it echoed the words of the aged Faust:
"Linger awhile! Thou art so fair. "11 In genre painting it captured and
fixed the present moment, in order to be rid of the image of its future.
162 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
Genre painting was an art which refused to know anything of history. Its
infatuation with the moment is the most precise complement to the chi-
mera of the Thousand-Year Reich. The connection between the aesthetic
ideals of the Griinderzeit and the vaulting artistic aims of the National
Socialist party has its basis here. n
Sternberger has not broken the theoretical monopoly of National So-
cialism. It distorts his ideas, falsifies his intentions. The falsification is
manifest most clearly in his view of the dispute over vivisection in the
1870s. In the pamphlets which set off the controversy, certain errors by
the vivisectors provided the catchwords for a obstinate rancor against
science itself. The movement against vivisection was an offshoot of petty-
bourgeois interest groups, including the opponents of immunization,
who revealed their colors so openly in the attack on Calmette.13 These
groups provided recruits for "the movement." The basis for Sternberger's
critical stance can be found Under the Third Reich, animal protec-
tion laws have been passed almost as fast as concentration camps have
been opened. There is much evidence to suggest that such fanatical
groups serve as cocoons for the sadomasochistic character in its pupal
phase. A study that concerns itself with this but refuses to recognize the
death's-head moth which has emerged from the chrysalis must expect to
go astray. That is what happens in Sternberger's case. He finds no other
way to attack the opponents of vivisection than to denigrate pity as such.
Since animal protection is the last refuge the powers-that-be have left for
pity, they are unlikely to be offended by its defamation. But in reality they
have not left it even this refuge. For them, animal rights are founded on
the mysticism of blood and soiL 14 National Socialism, which has evoked
so much animality in human beings, thinks that it has been surrepti-
tiously encircled by beasts. Its protection of animals springs from a super-
stitious fear.
One does not need to subscribe to Schopenhauer's view of pity-
namely, that it is the source of people's humanity-to be suspicious of a
definition which says that "altruism is as far removed from pity') as "rev-
elation is from feeling" (p. 84). At any rate, one would do better to speak
of true humanity before deriding what flows from pity as "genre-painting
humanity" (p. 229). Any reader who peruses the discussion of these mat-
ters-the chapter entitled "The Religion of Tears"-and attempts to ex-
tract its philosophical content will have little to show. He will have to
content himself with the assertion that pity is nothing but the "inner side
or the correlative of the anger ... felt by anyone who witnesses a scene of
cruelty" (p. 87). The sentence is obscure. All the clearer, however, is the
REVIEW OF STERNBERGER'S PANORAMA 163
fact that pity is mere froth for the person who washes his hands in inno-
cence.
The unmistakable aim of this book, the cause to which the author has
subscribed, can be summed up in a word: it is the art of covering traces.
The trace of the origins of his ideas, the trace of the secret reservations
underlying his conformist statements, and finally the trace of conformism
itself, which is the hardest of all to erase. Ambiguity is Sternberger's ele-
ment. He elevates it to the method that guides his investigations: "Con-
straint and action, compulsion and freedom, matter and spirit, innocence
and guilt cannot be disentangled in the past, whose unalterable testi-
mony, however scattered and incomplete, we have before us here. These
things are always thoroughly interwoven, but the pattern woven [das
Verwirkte] can be described" (p. 7).15-Sternberger's situation can be de-
scribed as follows: he confiscated his ideas, and then had them confis-
cated. No wonder they have a boarded-up look, just as one can speak of
a "shuttered>' gaze. These views of the nineteenth century seem designed
to block insights into the twentieth.
Written in 1938 and January 1939; submitted to the Zeitschrift fz~r Sozialforsclumg in late
1939 but unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften, Ill, 572-579. Trans-
lated by Edmund Jephcott.
Notes
L Dolf Sternberger {1907-1989}, German journalist and political scientist, was
a former student of Adorno's and personally acquainted with Benjamin. He
served after the war as president of the West German chapter of PEN (an in-
ternational association of poets, playwrights, editors, essayists, and novel-
ists).
2. Much of the tone of this review is explained by Benjamin~s conviction, ex-
pressed in a letter to Adorno and in the draft of a letter to Sternberger him-
self, that the book is little more than plagiarism. Sternberger knew Benjamin
personally; both had contributed to the Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as to
Frankfurt radio. And he had studied with Adorno at the University of
Frankfurt. In the letter to Adorno, Benjamin claims that Sternberger had
lifted not only the topic of the study but also its methodology from Adorno,
Bloch, and especially Benjamin himself. In the draft letter to Sternberger,
Benjamin writes: "You succeed, in your book) in producing a synthesis be-
tween an older world of thought (which you share with Adolf Hitler) and a
newer one (which you share with me), You have rendered unto the kaiser
that which is the kaiser's, and taken from the exile that which you could
use" (Gesammelte Schriften, III, 701).
164 PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
3. Jugendstil is the German and Austrian variant of the Art Nouveau style of the
18905. The movement took its name from the Munich journal Die Jugend
(Youth).
4. Adorno does this in his book Kier/wgaard: Konstruhtion des Asthetischen
(1933); in English as Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans.
Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
Siegfried Giedion (1888-1968) was a Swiss architect and architectural histo-
rian whose Bauen in Prank reich (Construction in France; 1928) exerted a
deep influence on Benjamin. He taught at Harvard after 1938.
5. Rainer Maria Rilke (187S-1926), Austro-German writer born in Prague, was
one of the great lyric poets in the German language. His Duineser Elegien
(Dnino Elegies) and Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus) were pub-
lished in 1923.
6. The Griinderzeit denotes the period of rapid industrial expansion and reck-
less financial speculation following the foundation of the German Empire in
1871.
7. Adolf Stoecker (183S-1909), Protestant theologian and politician, founded
the profoundly conservative Christlieh-soziale Arbeiterpartei (Christian-So-
cialist Workers' Party) in 1878. Stoecker sought to convert German workers
to the virtues of a monarchical nationalism. He is primarily remembered,
however) for his virulent anti-Semitism.
8. Hitler delivered a programmatic speech on Nazi art and cultural policy one
day before the opening of the t'GrofSe Deutsche Kunstausstellung" {Great
German Art Exhibition} at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of Ger-
man Art) in Munich. An exhibition titled "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate
Art) ran concurrently with "Great German Art"; it displayed 650 works
confiscated from 32 German museums. Examples of Expressionism, Cub-
ism, Dada, Surrealism) and Neue Sachlichkeit hung alongside drawings by
the mentally ill and photographs of handicapped individuals.
9. Sternberger is in the invidious position of having to break off the process of
thinking just where it might become fruitful. In the end, this damages his ca-
pacity for thought, as we can see from a single sentence: "It is all too easy to
laugh at something which in any case is over and done with, and should
therefore be regarded as a waste of wit, since wit tends to gain in brilliance
as it becomes rarer" (p. ISS). The first main clause contains two offenses
against clearly ordered thought. First, "in any case" is out of place, because
laughter does not alter the temporal location of its object. Second, the word
"easy" is inappropriate. For while it might be said to be too easy to laugh
about something (for example, a non sequitur) which ought rather to be an-
alyzed by a difficult process of thought, it can never be "all too easy" to
make something insignificant the subject of laughter. Laughter is not a task
in which one gains credit by overcoming difficulties. In the next clause, the
talk about a "waste of wit" makes any sense, however meager, only if "wit"
REVIEW OF STERNBERGER'S PANORAMA 165
167
168 SCRIPT, IMAGE, SCRIPT-IMAGE
Notes
1. For a suggestive reading of the idea of "flashing up" that situates the concept
in the philosophy of history and the history of photography, see Eduardo
Cadava, Words of Light: Theses 011 the Photography of History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997),
12
Attested Auditor of Books
171
172 PROD U C T ION, REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
Notes
1. The French poet Stephane MalJarmc (1842-1898) was a central figure in the
Symbolist movement, which sought an incantatory divorced from
all referential function. Benjamin refers to the typographic manipulations of
his poem U11 Coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice
Will Never Eliminate Chance; 1897).
2. In Zurich in 1916, artists, writers, and others disgusted by World War I, and
by the bourgeois ideologies that had brought it about, launched Dada, an
avant-garde movement that attempted to radically change both the work of
art and Dadaist groups were active in Berlin, New York, Paris, and
elsewhere during the war and into the 1920s.
13
These Surfaces for Rent
Fools lament the decay of criticism. For its day is long past. Criticism is
a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where per-
spectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to adopt
a standpoint. Now things press too urgently on human society. The" un-
clouded~)' "innocent" eye has become a lie, perhaps the whole naive
mode of expression sheer incompetence. Today the most real) mercan-
tile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It tears down
the stage upon which contemplation moved, and all but hits us be-
tween the eyes with things as a car, growing to gigantic proportions,
careens at us out of a film screen. And just as the film does not pres-
ent furniture and fa<;ades in completed forms for critical inspection) their
insistent, jerky nearness alone being sensational, the genuine advertise-
ment hurls things at us with the tempo of a good film. Thereby "matter-
of-factness" is finally dispatched, and in the face of the huge images
spread across the walls of houses, where toothpaste and cosmetics lie
handy for giants, sentimentality is restored to health and liberated in
American style, just as people whom nothing moves Of touches any
longer are taught to cry again by films. For the man in the street, how-
ever, it is money that affects him in this way, brings him into perceived
contact with things. And the paid reviewer, manipulating paintings in
the dealer's exhibition room, knows more important if not better things
about them than the art lover viewing them in the gallery window. The
warmth of the subject is communicated to him, stirs sentient springs.
What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not
173
174 SCRIPT, IMAGE, SCRIPT-IMAGE
what the moving red neon c;:::nrc;:--nllT the fiery pool reflecting it in
the asphalt.
Written 1923-1926; published in 1928, from One-Way Street. Gesammelte
Schriften, IV, 131-132. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
14
The Antinomies of Allegorical Exegesis
"The many obscurities in the connection between meaning and sign ...
did not deter but rather encouraged the use of ever remoter characteris-
tics of the represented object as symbols, so as to surpass even the Egyp-
tians with new subtleties. The dogmatic power of the meanings handed
down from the ancients also played a role here, so that one and the same
thing can just as easily symbolize a virtue as a vice, and therefore, in the
end, anything at all. "1
175
176 SCRIPT. IMAGE. SCRIPT-IMAGE
This fact alone should have engendered a different attitude toward alle-
gory. The undialectical mode of thought of the neo-Kantian school is
incapable of grasping the synthesis that emerges out of the struggle be-
tween theological and artistic intention, via allegorical script-a synthe-
sis not merely in the sense of a peace but also in the sense of a treuga dei
between the conflicting opinions. 12
Written in 1925; published in 1928. Gesammelte Schl'iftel1, I, 350-353. Excerpted from
Origin of the German Tmuerspiei, section 3, "Allegory and Trauerspiel." Translated by Mi-
chael W. Jennings. A previous translation by John Osborne (London, (977) was consulted.
Notes
1. Giehlow, "Die Hieroglyphenkunde," p. 127. [Benjamin's note. See Karl
Giehlow, "Die Hieroglyphenkunde des HumanismllS in der Allegorie der
Renaissance, besonders der Ehrellpforte Kaisers Maximilian I: Ein
Versuch," Jahrbuch del' kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhochsten
Kaiserhauses, 32, no. 1 (1915): 1-232. This quotation concludes the preced-
ing chapter, which bears the title "Examples and Evidence."-Trans ..1
2. The subject of Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1925), from
which this text has been excerpted, is the seventeenth-century Gennan
TrauerstJielJ or "mourning play." Important Trauerspiele which Benjamin
treats include Catharina von Georgien (1657), by Andreas Gryphius;
Mal'iamne (1670), by Johann Christian I-Iallmann; and Agrippina (1665),
by Daniel Casper von Lohenstein. Benjamin's study is available in English as
The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne {London: Verso,
1998}.
3. The German term Schrift has a wide field of connotation. It can mean "text"
or even "scripture/' but also refers to the material, graphic inscription of a
text. In these excerpts, we have, unless otherwise noted, translated Schrift as
"script. "
4. Cf. Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism, p. 105. [Benjamin's note. See "The
Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" (1920), in Benjamin, Se-
lected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926 {Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1996}, p. 677.- Trans.,!
5. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Versuch einer Allegorie besonders fiir die
Kunst, Saclliarallsg. (from the personal copy of the author, with many pas-
sages added by hand, and with previously unedited letters of Winkelmann
and notes by his contemporaries regarding his last hours), ed. Albert
Dressel, with a preliminary remark by Constantin Tischendorf (Leipzig,
1866), pp. 143ff. [Benjamin's note. \Vinckelmann's Versuch einer AUegorie
(Attempt at an Allegory; 1766) is available in English in Winckelmann,
Writings 011- Art, ed. David Irwin (London: Phaidon, 1972), The German
THE ANTINOMIES OF ALLEGORICAL EXEGESIS 179
When, with the Trauerspiel, history wanders onto the scene, it does so
as script. "History" stands written on nature's countenance in the sign-
script of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of natural history,
which is brought onstage in the Trauerspiel, is actually present as ruin.
In the ruin, history has merged sensuously with the setting. And so con-
figured, history finds expression not as a process of eternal life, but rather
as one of unstoppable decline. Allegory thereby proclaims itself beyond
beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the
realm of things. Thus the Baroque cult of the ruin. Borinski, less exhaus-
tive in his argument than accurate in his report on factual matters, knows
of this cult. l "The broken pediment, the ruined columns should bear
witness to the miraculous fact that the holy edifice has withstood even
the most elemental forces of destruction-lightning and earthquake. The
artificially ruined appears, then, as the last inheritance of an antiquity
still visible in the modern world only in its material form, as a pictur-
esque field of rubble."2 A footnote adds: "The rise of this tendency can
be traced to the ingenious practice of Renaissance artists who displace
the birth and adoration of Christ from the medieval stable into the ruins
of an antique temple. In a work by Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florence,
Accademia), the ruins still consisted of flawlessly preserved showpieces;
in the sculptural, colorful representations of the Nativity, the ruins be-
come an end in themselves as picturesque settings for transient splen-
dor."3 The most contemporary feeling for style asserts itself here far
~nore powerfully than the reminiscences of a false antiquity [antikischen
Reminiszenzen]. What lies shattered amid the rubble, the highly sig-
180
THE RUIN 181
nificant fragment, the scrap: this is the noblest Inaterial of Baroque cre-
ation. For it is a common feature of Baroque literature to heap up frag-
ments-incessantly and without any strict idea of a goal-and, in the
unremitting expectation of a miracle, to view stereotypes as instances
of intensification. Baroque writers must have regarded the work of art
as a miracle in just this sense. And if the artwork, on the other hand,
beckoned to them as the calculable result of this heaping up, these two
conceptions are no less commensurable than is that of the longed-for, mi-
raculous work with the theoretical recipes in the mind of an al-
chemist. The experimentation of the Baroque poets resembles the prac-
tices of the adepts. What antiquity left behind is, for them, piece for
piece, the elements from which the new whole is to be blended. No-is to
be constructed. For vision of this new thing was: ruin. The
bombastic mastering of antique elements in an edifice that, without unit-
ing them into a whole, would still, in destroying them, prove superior to
the harmonies of antiquity~ this is the purpose of the technique that ap-
plies itself separately, and ostentatiously, to realia, rhetorical flowerings,
and rules. Literature should be called ars inveniendi. 4 The notion of the
man of genius, the master of ars inveniendi, is that of a man who could
operate in sovereign fashion with existing models. "Imagination," what
the moderns call creative capacity, was unknown as the measure of a hi-
erarchy of mental traits. "The noblest reason that no one in German po-
etry has yet able to approach our Opitz, let alone surpass him
(which will not occur in the future either), is that, besides the remarkable
agility of the excellent nature that inhabits him, he is as well read in the
Latin and Greek texts as he is proficient in formulating and inventing."5
The German language, however, as the grammarians of the age saw
is in this sense only another "nature" alongside that of the ancient mod-
els. Hankamer explains their view in the following way: "Linguistic na-
ture, like material nature, already contains every secret." The writer
"brings no power to it, creates no new truth out of the self-creating soul
that seeks expression. "6 The writer was not supposed to conceal his
combinatory practice, since the center of all intended effects was not
the mere whole but rather the work's manifest constructed ness. Thus
the ostentation of the craftsmanship that, especially in Calderon, shows
through like the masonry wall on a building whose plaster has begun to
crumble. 7 Nature has thus remained, one might say, the great teacher for
the writers of this period. Yet nature appears to them not in the bud and
blossom but in the overripeness and decay of its creations. Nature looms
before them as eternal transience, in which the saturnine gaze of those
182 SCRIPT, IMAGE. SCRIPT-IMAGE
generations was the only one that recognized history. Dwelling in their
monuments (the ruins), as Agrippa von Nettesheim put it, are the satur-
nine beasts.s In decay, solely and alone in decay, historical occurrence
shrivels up and disappears into the The quintessence of those de-
caying things is the extreme opposite of idea of a transfigured nature
as conceived by the early Renaissance. Burdach has shown that the latter
idea of nature is "in no way related to ours.)) "For a long time it re-
mained dependent on the linguistic usage and thought of the Middle
Ages, even if the valorization of the term 'nature' and the idea of nature
visibly improve. The theory of art of the fourteenth to sixteenth centu-
ries, in any case, understands the imitation of nature as the imitation of a
nature formed by God. "9 This nature, though, which bears the imprint of
the course of history, is fallen nature. The Baroque preference for apothe-
osis runs counter to that period's characteristic mode of observing things.
With the authority of their allegorical significance, things bear the seal of
the all-too-earthly. Never do they transfigure from within.
Thus their illumination by the limelight of apotheosis. There has hardly
ever been a literature whose virtuosic illusionism more thoroughly ex-
punged from its works that transfiguring lustrous appearance [Schein]
with which people had once sought, rightly, to define the essence of art-
istry. The lusterless ness of Baroque lyric can be seen as one of its primary
characteristics. The drama is no different. "Thus, one must press forward
through death into that life / That turns Egypes night into Goshen's day
for us / And grants us the pearl-studded robe of eternity!" 10 This is how
Hallmann paints eternal life from the standpoint of the prop room. A
stubborn clinging to props thwarted the portrayal of love. Unworldly
lasciviousness, lost in its own fantasy, holds sway. "A lovely woman,
adorned with a thousand ornaments, is an inexhaustible table that satis-
fies the many; / An eternal spring that always has water / indeed
milk of life; As if lithe sugar / ran in a hundred canes. It is the
1.""Cl.'-Uj'UF1
nal. This alone makes it possible to understand how, and with what liber~
ating sweetness, the first dalliances of the new century seduced the reader,
and how, for the Rococo period, chinoiserie became the counter-
image to hieratic Byzantinism. If the Baroque critic speaks of the
Gesamtkul1stwerk [total work of art] as the summit of the period's aes~
thetic hierarchy and as the ideal of Trauerspiel itself,12 he thereby re-
inforces in a new way this spirit of heaviness. As an accomplished cll1ego-
rist, Harsdorffer was, among many theorists, the most thorough
advocate for the interweaving of all the arts.J3 For it is precisely this
that the ascendancy of allegorical contemplation dictates. Winckelmann
makes the connection only too clear when, with polemical exaggeration,
he remarks: "Vain is . . . hope of those who believe that allegory
might be taken so far as to enable one to paint even an ode." 14 Something
even stranger must be added. How do the literary works the century
introduce themselves? Dedications, forewords and afterwords (by the
writer, as well as by others), testimonials, and commendations of the
great masters are the rule. Like heavy, ornate framework, these short
texts inevitably surround the contents of the larger volumes and the edi-
tions of collected works. For the gaze that took satisfaction in the object
itself was a rarity. Amid the welter of daily affairs, people thought to
acquire works of art; and their engagement with them was, far less than
in later periods, a private matter free of calculation. Reading was obliga-
tory and formative [bildend].15 The range of the works, their intentional
bulkiness and lack of mystery, should be understood as the correlative of
such an attitude among the public. These works seemed destined less to
be disseminated by growing over time than to fill their place in the here-
and-now. And in many respects they forfeited their reward. But just for
this reason, criticism, with rare clarity, lies unfolded in their continued
duration. From the very beginning, they aimed for that critical decompo-
sition which the passage of time inflicted on them. Beauty has, for the un-
initiated, nothing unique about it; and for such people) the German
Trauerspiel is less accessible than almost anything else. Its lustrous sem-
blance has died because of its extreme coarseness. What endures is the
odd detail of allegorical reference-an object of knowledge nesting in the
thought-out constructions of rubble. Criticism is the mortification of
works. The essence of these works accommodates this more readily than
does any other form of production. Mortification of works: not there-
fore-as the Romantics have it-the awakening of consciousness in liv-
ing works,16 but ensettlement of knowledge in those that have died
away. Beauty that endures is an object of knowledge. And though it is
184 SCRIPT. IMAGE. SCRIPT-IMAGE
questionable whether the beauty that endures still deserves the name, it is
nevertheless certain that nothing is beautiful unless there is something
worthy of knowledge in its interior. Philosophy must not attempt to deny
that it reawakens the beautiful in works. "Science cannot lead to the na-
ive enjoyment of art, any more than geologists and botanists can awaken
a feeling for the beauty of landscape":I? this assertion is as unconvinc-
ing as the analogy that aims to support it is misguided. The geologist
and the botanist are perfectly capable of doing just this. Without at least
an intuitive grasp of the life of the detail, as embedded in a structure,
all devotion to the beautiful is nothing more than empty dreaming. In
the last analysis, structure and detail are always historically charged. The
object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic
form is precisely this: to make historical material content [Sachgehaltel,
the basis of every significant work of art, into philosophical truth con-
tent [Wahrheitsgehalten].18 This restructuring of material content into
truth content makes the weakening of effect, whereby the attractive-
ness of earlier charms diminishes decade by decade, into the basis for a
rebirth in which all ephemeral beauty completely falls away and the
work asserts itself as a ruin. In the allegorical constructions of the Ba-
roque Trauerspiel, these ruined forms of the redeemed work of art have
always stood out clearly.
Notes
1. Karl Borinski (1861-1922) was a German literary scholar who wrote on the
reception and adaptation of classical art theory in German literature.
2. Borinski, Die Anti/~e, I, pp. 193-194. [Benjamin's note. See Karl Borinski,
Die Antike in Poetik ul1d KUl1sttheorie von Ausgallg des /dassischen
Altertums his auf Goethe und Wilhelm von Humboldt, vol. 1: Mittelalter,
Renaissance, Barock (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1914).-Tral1s.]
3. Ibid., pp. 305-306n. [Benjamin's note]
4. A rs inveniendi is Latin for" art of inventing."
S. August Buchner, Wegweiser zur deutschel1 Ticht/wltst [Guide to German Lit-
erature] (.Jena, n.d. [1663]), pp. 80ff.; quoted from Borcherdt, Augustus
Buchner. p. 81. [Benjamin's note. See Hans Heinrich Borcherdt, Augustus
Buchner tmd seine Bedeutung fiir die Literatur des siebzehnten Jahrhtmderts
(Munich: Beck, 1919). The Silesian poet and civil servant Martin Opitz
(1597-1639) wrote the Buch von der deutschel1 Poeterey (Book of German
THE RUIN 185
187
188 SCRIPT, IMAGE, SCRIPT~IMAGE
The words reveal themselves as fateful even in their isolation. Indeed one
might say, the very fact that-isolated though they are-they still mean
something lends a threatening quality to the remnant of meaning they
have retained. Language is shattered in this way so that it might acquire,
in its fragments, a changed and heightened expressiveness. The Baroque
naturalized the capital letter in German orthography. Not only the aspi-
ration to pomp but also the dismembering, dissociative principle of alle-
gorical contemplation finds its sphere of validity in the capital letter.
Without doubt, many of the capitalized words gave readers their first ac-
cess into the allegorical. The decimated language, in its individual parts,
ceased to serve as mere communication; it had its dignity, as a newborn
object, alongside that of the gods, rivers, virtues, and other similar natu-
ral forms that shimmered into the allegorical. This happens in a particu-
larly drastic way, as has been said, in the work of the young Gryphius.
Though there is no counterpart to the incomparable passage in Calderon
anywhet'e in German literature, still the force of a Gryphius does not fare
badly in comparison with the Spaniard's refinement. For he has mastered
to an astonishing extent the art of allowing his characters to joust as if
with bits of speech that have broken free. In the "second treatise" of Leo
Arminius, for example:
Leo: This house will stand, so long as the enemies of the hOllse fall.
Theodosia: If their fall does not injure those that surround this house.
Leo: Surround it with the sword.
Theodosia: With which they protect us.
Leo: Which they have drawn on us.
Theodosia: Who have supported our throne.2
When the exchanges become angry and violent, one finds a preference for
accumulations of dismembered parts of speech. They are more numer-
ous in Gryphius than in later authors'~ and conform well, alongside the
abrupt laconic phrases, to the overall stylistic trend of his dramas; for
both convey an impression of the broken and the chaotic. Despite the
success with which this technique of representing theatrical commotion
DISMEMBERMENT OF LANGUAGE 189
Notes
1. Calderon) Schauspiele (trans. Gries), III, 316 (Eifersucht das grolSte Schellsal,
II). [Benjamin's note. Benjamin cites Johann Diederich Gries's translation
of Calderon's plays, published in Berlin in 1815. The Spanish dramatist
Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) is a major figure in Benjamin's
Trauerspiel book. See also "Calderon's El Mayor Monstruo" Los Celos, and
Hebbel's Herodes ul1d Marianme" (1923), in Benjamin, Selected Writings.
Volume 1: 19.13-1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996),
pp.363-386.-Tral1s.]
2. Gryphius, Trauerspiele, p. 62 (Leo Armenius, II, 455ff.). [Benjamin's note.
See Andreas Gryphius, TrauerSfJiele, cd. Hermann Palm (Tiibingen:
Litterarischer Verein in Stuttgart, 1882). The Silesian poet and dramatist
DISMEMBERMENT OF LANGUAGE 191
Today scientific graphology is a good thirty years old,l With certain res-
ervations, it can undoubtedly be described as a German achievement;
and 1897, when the German Graphological Society was founded in Mu-
nich, can be deemed the year of its birth. It is a striking fact that academic
science still withholds recognition, even though this technique has been
providing proofs of the precision of its principles for the past three de-
cades. To this day, no German university has established a chair for the
interpretation of handwriting. But it is worthy of note that one of the free
colleges, the Lessing-Hochschule in Berlin, has now taken the step of
adopting the Central Institute for Scientific Graphology (under the direc-
tion of Anja Mendelssohn},2 Evidently this fact has also been acknowl-
edged abroad as a milestone in the history of graphology. At any rate,
the oldest living representative of this science, Jules Crc:!pieux-Jamin, ar-
rived from Rouen to attend the opening of the institute. 3 We found him
to be an elderly, somewhat unworldly gentleman who at first glance
looked like a doctor. An important practical doctor, that is, rather than
a pioneering researcher. And this would also be an apt description of
Crepieux-Jamin and his disciples' position in graphology. He inherited
the mantle of his teacher, ,Michon, who in 1872 had published his
Geheimnis der Handschrift [Secret of Handwriting], in which the con-
cept of graphology appears for the first time. 4 What teacher and pupil have
in common is a sharp eye for handwriting and a large dose of healthy
common sense, in conjunction with a gift for ingenious inference. All of
this shows to advantage in their analyses, which for their part do more to
satisfy the requirements of practical life than those of a science of charac-
192
GRAPHOLOGY OLD AND NEW 193
ter. The demands of the latter were first articulated by Ludwig Klages in
his fundamental works Prinzipien der Charal?terologie [The Principles of
Characterology] and Handschrift und Charakter [Handwriting and Char-
acterJ.s Klages takes aim at the so-called sign theory of the Ft'ench school,
whose proponents linked qualities of character to quite specific written
signs that they used as stereotypes on which to construct their interpreta-
tions. In contrast, Klages interprets handwriting fundamentally as gesture,
as expressive movement. In his writings, there is no talk of specific signs;
he speaks only of the general characteristics of writing, which are not re-
stricted to the particular form of individual letters. A special role is as-
signed to the analysis of the so-called formal level-a mode of interpreta-
tion in which all the characteristic features of a specimen of handwriting
are susceptible to a dual evaluation--either a positive or a nega tive interpre-
tation-and where it is the formal level of the script that decides which of
the two evaluations should be applied in each case. The history of modern
German graphology can be defined essentially by the debates surrounding
Klages' theories. These debates have been initiated at two focal points. Rob-
ert Saudek criticized the lack of precision in Klages' findings concerning the
physiological features of handwriting, as well as his arbitrary preoccupa-
tion with German handwriting style. 6 He himself has attempted to produce
a more differentiated graphological analysis of the various national
scripts, on the basis of exact measurements of handwriting motion. In
Saudek, characterological problems recede into the background; whereas
in a second trend, which has recently taken issue with Klages, they stand
at the center of attention. This view objects to his definition of handwrit-
ing as expressive movement. Max Pulver and Anja Mendelssohn, its lead-
ing representatives, are seeking to create a space for an "ideographic" in-
terpretation of handwriting-that is to say, a graphology that interprets
script in terms of the unconscious graphic elements, the unconscious image
fantasies, that it contains'? The backgrOLU1d to Klages' graphology is the
philosophy of life of the George circle, and behind Saudek's approach we
can discern Wundt's psychophysics; whereas in Pulver's endeavors the in-
flUCllCe of Freud's theory of the unconscious is undeniable. s
Published in the Sudwestdeutsche Rundfullkzeittmg, November 1930. Gesamm.elte
Schriften, IV, 596-598. Translated by Rodney Livingstone.
Notes
1. Benjamin was himself an amateur graphologist. See also his review of the
Mendelssohns' Del' Mensch in der Handschrift, in Benjamin, Selected Writ-
194 SCRIPT, IMAGE, SCRIPT-IMAGE
195
196 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
The untitled fragment known as "Painting and the Graphic Arts" and
the related essay "On Painting, or Sign and Mark,>' which were com-
posed during the summer and fall of 1917, represent a response to some
of the most ambitious and challenging art of the day-including Cubism,
particularly the work of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), and the paintings
ofWassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Paul Klee (1879-1940), who were
both associated with the Munich-based artists' group Der Blaue Reiter
in the early 19105. Despite their brevity and their variously unfinished
states, these texts also attempt to categorize painting (Malerei) and the
graphic arts (Graphilc) in terms of the essential features of each medium.
Benjamin's interest in the history and theory of the visual arts was evident
as early as 1915, when he attended, and expressed his extreme disap-
pointment with, lectures by the art historian Heinrich W6lfflin (1864-
1945) at the university in Munich. ' His admiration for the work of the
PAINTING AND GRAPHICS 197
Viennese art historian Alois Riegl (1853-1905) emerged around the same
time, and the first line of the untitled 1917 fragment-"A picture wants
to be held vertically before the viewer" -suggests a connection to Riegl's
concept of Kunstwollen, which is typically translated as "artistic voli-
tion," and which in later works Benjamin would cite explicitly, for exam-
ple in the unpublished 1929 text "Some Remarks on Folk Art." Crucial
in Benjamin's use of the concept of Kunstwollen is that term's evocation
not only of a collective human will to produce art in particular forms but
also of diverse instances of will, volition, or intentionality as embodied in
works of art and thus rendered potentially comprehensible to those who
view the works, including historians as well as amateurs considering ob-
jects made in the distant past.
The untitled 1917 fragment on painting and graphics sets out to es-
tablish that "from the human point of view, the level of drawing is hori-
zontal, that of painting, vertical. "2 Benjamin speaks in this regard of two
"sections" or "cuts" (his word is Schnitt) through the "substance of the
world": the "longitudinal section of painting and the transverse section
of certain graphic works." The longitudinal section of painting "seems
representational" insofar as it appears to "contain things," while the
transverse section (or cross-section) of drawings and other graphic works
seems "symbolic" insofar as it contains "signs." Although Benjamin ac-
knowledges that it is possible to view some drawings or other graphic
works by holding them out in front of us such that their vertical orienta-
tion appears analogous to that of a painting hanging on a wall (indeed
his opening line suggests that all pictures have a will to be "held vertically
before the viewer"), he notes that others, including children's drawings
and the drawings of the German artist and future Berlin Dadaist George
Grosz (1893-1959), will appear meaningless unless arranged for view-
ing in a horizontal position-a position, Benjamin implies, that is analo-
gous to the one in which we would set out a text to be read. This turn to
what he calls, with emphasis, "our reading" leads to a consideration of
whether there might have existed an "originally verticaF' position of
writing or script (Schrift), perhaps in the form of engra ving on stone.
All this is to say that Benjamin's earliest meditations on the media of
painting and the graphic arts (and on "pictures~) and "signs)) broadly
conceived) acknowledge-even as they move to establish "the simple
principle that pictures are set vertically and signs horizontally"-that our
habits of viewing and reading are historically determined. For Benjamin,
it therefore follows that any analysis of works of art and of our modes of
apprehending pictures and signs has to take into account the "changing
198 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
Max Ernst, frontispiece to Paul Eluard, Repetitions (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1922).
Color halftone reproduction of a circa-1920 "overpainting" of gouache and ink on a
printed page from a German teaching-aids catalogue (KataJog del' kainer LehrmiUel-
Anstait). Photograph courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University; reproduced
by permission of ARS.
"creature" outfitted internally with figures of the recent past as the sub-
ject of the dreams as well as the avant-garde art and literature of his own
day. A variant ending appended by Benjamin to a manuscript copy of
"Dream Kitsch" further describes the moblierter Mensch as "the body
'furnished' [meuble] with forms and apparatuses, in the sense that, in
French, one has long spoken of the mind 'furnished' [meuble] with
dreams or with scientific knowledge." Derived as it is from moblierter
Herr-a figurative, idiomatic term that refers to a tenant of furnished
rooms as a "furnished gentleman"-the moblierter Mensch of "Dream
Kitsch" might be said to be "furnished" specifically with "forms and ap-
paratuses" of a past of which Benjamin took the "furnished gentleman)'
who dwelled in rented rooms to be an avatar. In his writings of the late
19208 and in the Arcades Project, Benjamin would continue to explore
actual as well as potential correspondences among furnished dwellings,
"furnished" minds, and "furnished') bodies in the cultural history of
nineteenth-century Paris and the modernity of his own era.
Even if, in writing about a reproduction, he was unaware that phrases
from the teaching-aids catalogue page were legible beneath the gouache
in Ernst's original overpainting, Benjamin's choice of a picture of a group
of boys in a classroom hardly seems arbitrary, given the larger claims of
"Dream Kitsch." His conviction that the Surrealists were in pursuit of
"things" -and that it was in the context of this pursuit that the sig-
nificance of their composition of poems and pictures recalling the max-
ims and illustrations in nineteenth-century children's books emerged-
links the treatment of Surrealism in "Dream Kitsch" to the aims of
Al1schauungsunterricht in its original as well as its updated forms.
Anschauungsul1tel'richt is the name Pestalozzi gave to a method of teach-
ing he developed in the context of his efforts to make primary educa-
tion available to children of the lower social classes. Variously called,
in the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century progressive
education in the United States, "object teaching" or "object lessons,)'
Anschauungsunterricht is a pedagogical method that stresses the pri-
macy of perception (Anschauu11g) in the development of the human ca-
pacity to acquire knowledge of the world, and that accordingly orga-
nizes its lessons first with a focus on concrete sensory experiences of
things and then with an emphasis on the perceptual and cognitive appre-
hension of representations of things in the form of captioned illustrations
presented in picture books and primers, as well as on wall charts and var-
ious forms of hand-held cards and tablets.? Benjamin often refers to
Anschauungsunterricht in the context of the "education of the masses"
202 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
lii···~·.ti~i··~.
13'f\d[f'b~i~eP
tJaaiitiglun3 p~anlQMdji fiillltrlJuid ilit3ri6ttjflljj ra ~11B 6td
"Clle .l3ruii.l:&arljci:j arc Wall/t ~til~ lii3cidjntffja', gelWl mila
'!rlu, Bimm"attricUilariril~ .qfui'!in5ii fOill1l ~ttuB~ gemadjt
fji1&1rI wre6r~rei IInB 6U~d/lltml{lIrO~MtfitUbad mO,lt~, ~Jicljll~
iIIla .ntulf~~ rci14 ouji~q)elJ)6ljnlicfJ fIljane .u1l~~6Utf)tC ~t~
~nn6t11, 6r~ 6~ t1~rn,~ m~u '1Il,~I3M~ ,{Jltfl~ln (lmd,m. $Jit
lJtilijtC ~f)i~lIi.' ISI:l4olfll~ ,1nll~!!ln"81I,' .St160rln6, JJid!II!~,
l1Uilenpftt6,' un~, ,Stl6o!(n~ (jntllfin8ct' unB tofltll Ie 5 fllnl't,
pal' J?~iJolin-JTo rl~~, J3~,.lin8!1T~8 ".
Walter Benjamin, "Aussicht ins Kinderbuch" (A Glimpse into the World of Children's
Books), Die litel'arische Welt, December 1926. Photograph courtesy of the Univer-
sitatsbibliothek cler Freien Universitat, Berlin.
204 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
Wang Yuanqi, Landscape in the Styles of Ni Zan and Huang GDlzgUJang. Hanging
scroll, ink and light colors on paper, 37 18 in. X 17 % in. Present location unknown;
formerly in the collection of Jean-Pierre Dubosc. As reproduced in Jean-Pierre
Dubosc, Great Chinese Painters of the Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties, XV to XVIII Cen-
turies: A Loan Exhibition (New York: Wildenstein, 1949}, catalogue no. 49.
PAINTING AND GRAPHICS 213
the Arcades Project lacks any sustained engagement with the great mod-
ernist painters of Paris in the nineteenth century, Edouard Manet (1832-
1883) foremost among them. 17 The absence is striking, and not to be ex-
plained away as merely a minor flaw in Benjamin's proposed approach to
the Arcades Project and the century that was to be its subject.
In this context it bears noting that in turning not only to the likes of
Wiertz, Redon, Grandville, and Guys (the last by means of his inten-
sive engagement with the writings of Baudelaire, who famously dubbed
Guys "the painter of modern life," a gesture perhaps recapitulated in
Benjamin's nomination of Wiertz as "the painter of the arcades"), but
also to illustrated children's books and colportage, Benjamin began in the
late 1920s to conceive categories of works whose ambitions and effects
(above all, effects of Anschaulichkeit-perceptibility, vividness, graphic-
ness) he associated with Anschauungsunterl'icht as a type of pedagogy
and a set of representational practices potentially to be put to more gen-
eral use.
"Chinese Paintings at the Bibliotheque Nationale," a review essay
originally published in French in 1938, returns to a number of key
themes and topics addressed in the earlier writings in Part III. In his en-
counter with paintings of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911)
periods, Benjamin finds an occasion to address works that, as he puts
it, have been "grouped together under the sign of decadence," specifically
in relation to classical Chinese painting of the Song (960-1279) and
Yuan (1271-1368) periods. Benjamin's interest in reconceptualizing the
cultural values and aesthetic achievements of periods of decadence or
decline reaches back to his study of the German Baroque Trauerspiel in
the mid-1920s and once again connects his work to that of the art histo-
rian Riegl. In this regard it bears noting that Jean-Pierre Dubosc (1904-
1988), the French diplomat and connoisseur of Chinese painting whose
collection formed the basis of the October 1937 Bibliotheque Nationale
(Paris) exhibition Benjamin reviewed, lamented the tendency in Western
scholarship of the first half of the twentieth century to disparage the
"sometimes 'baroque' tendencies" of the paintings of the Ming and Qing
periods, which he believed instead "should speak in their favor." 18
As in the Origin of the German Trauerspiel, in the review of Chinese
paintings relations al110ng images, script, and modes of perception and
cognition emerge as key concerns. Benjamin writes in particular of the
significance of the calligraphic inscriptions (legendes) rendered by Chi-
nese painters within their pictures. In the Ming and Qing periods those
inscriptions often made reference to the styles, and sometimes to specific
works, of artists of earlier epochs; in the case of the Qing-period hang-
214 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
ing scroll reproduced here, an inscription by the artist Wang Yuanqi indi-
cates his admiration and emulation of two masters of the Yuan period
whose styles he has attempted to combine in the painting. Dubosc
suggests in an essay about his collection that what we might call the
"citational" mode invoked by the inscriptions in Ming- and Qing-period
paintings can be understood by means of a comparison to French paint-
ing of the nineteenth century. "We should remember," Dubose writes,
"that Manet, in some of his most famous paintings, reproduced very ex-
actly compositions by Vehizquez."19 That the question of copying or re-
production is central to the Chinese paintings that captured Benjamin's
attention in the late 1930s points to a connection to the concerns of the
artwork essay, while the citational mode of the calligraphic inscriptions
suggests a link to the Arcades Project.
Benjamin's thoughts on the paintings in the Bibliotheque Nationale
exhibition culminate in his consideration of "an antinomy which finds
its 'resolution' in an intermediary element that, far from constituting
a balance [un juste milieu] between literature and painting, embraces inti-
mately the point at which they appear most irreducibly opposed-
namely, thought and image" or, in French, "la pensee et l'image." Later
in the review Benjamin uses the term image-pensee, which would seem to
relate to the German Denkbild, a word he used to describe the genre of
his own brief, meditative writings, and which is usually translated as im-
age de pensee in French. Following the art historian Georges Salles and
citing the Chinese term xieyi, Benjamin refers to the art of Chinese paint-
ing as "first and foremost the art of thinking" ("l'art de peindre est avant
tout l'art de penser") or an "idea painting" ("peinture d'idee"), the latter
a notion he associated, in less elevated terms, with Wiertz, whom he de-
scribed in the "Little History of Photography" as an "ungainly painter of
ideas" ("ungeschlachter Ideenmaler"). In the "ink-play" of the so-called
"literati-artists," in which calligraphy figures prominently as a medium
integral to Chinese painting, Benjamin discovers a capacity to impart to
the marks that make up the image a fixity and stability that is also and at
the same time fluid and changing.
"Thinking, for the Chinese painter, means thinking by means of re-
semblance," he writes, invoking a modality of thought central to his own
work, from his earliest writings on language to the essays "On the Mi-
metic Faculty" and "Doctrine of the Similar" (both 1933). And since
"nothing is more fleeting than the appearance of a resemblance, the
fleeting character and the imprint of variation of these paintings coin-
cides with their penetration of the real. That which they fix never has
PAINTING AND GRAPHICS 215
more than the fixity of clouds." "~Why do landscape painters live to such
advanced old age?' asks a painter-philosopher. 'Because the mist and the
clouds offer them nourishment.' Monsieur Dubose's collection inspires
these reflections." For their part, Benjamin's writings on modern media
were everywhere marked by his awareness that the landscapes of Western
modernity offered no such sustenance.
BRIGID DOHERTY
Notes
A picture wants to be held vertically before the viewer. A floor mosaic lies
horizontally at his feet. Despite this distinction, it is customary simply to
view a work of graphic art as a painting. There is, however, a very impor-
tant and far-reaching distinction to be made within the graphic arts: it is
possible to look at the study of a head, or a Rembrandt landscape, in the
same way as a painting, or in the best case to leave the sheets in a neutral
horizontal position. Yet consider children's drawings: setting them before
oneself vertically usually contravenes their inner meaning. It is the same
with Otto GroR's drawings: 1 they have to be placed horizontally on the
table. Here a profound problem of art and its mythic roots presents itself.
We might say that there are two sections through the substance of the
world: the longitudinal section of painting and the transverse section of
certain graphic works. The longitudinal section seems representational-
it somehow contains things; the transverse section seems symbolic-it
contains signs. Or is it only in our reading that we place the pages hori-
zontally before us? And is there such a thing as an originally vertical posi-
tion for writing-say, for engraving in stone? Of course, what matters
here is not the merely external fact but the spirit: Is it actually possible to
base the problem on the simple principle that pictures are set vertically
and signs horizontally, even though we may follow the development of
this through changing metaphysical relations across the ages?
Kandinsky's pictures: the simultaneous occurrence of conjuration and
manifestation [Beschworung und ErscheinungJ.
Written in 1917; unpublished in Benjamin'S lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften, II, 602-603.
Translated by Rodney Livingstone.
219
220 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
Notes
1. The printed text in Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften has "GroW'; that text
is based on a handwritten copy of Benjamin's untitled fragment which was
made by his friend Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), a philosopher and his-
torian of Jewish mysticism. According to the editors of the Gesammelte
Schriften, in Scholem's manuscript the artist's last name is spelled "GrozR."
In this instance, Benjamin was surely not referring to the Austrian psycho-
analyst and anarchist Otto Gross (1877-1920), who was connected to the
circles around the Berlin-based journals Die Aktion, edited by Franz
Pfemfert (1879-1954), and Neue ]uge1'ld edited and published by the poet
J
Neue ]uge12d and Herzfelde's Malik Verlag in Berlin in late 1916, Grosz's
drawings of the period 1915-1917, which Benjamin would have known, re-
sembled children's drawings as well as what at that time was commonly
called "the art of the insane."
19
On Painting, or Sign and Mark
A. The Sign
The sphere of the sign comprises diverse fields which are characterized by
the various meanings that "line" has within them. These meanings are:
the geometric line, the line of script, the graphic line, and the line of the
absolute sign (the magical line as such-that is to say, not a line made
magical by whatever it happens to represent).
a., b. The line of geometry and the line of script will not be considered
in what follows.
c. The graphic line. The graphic line is determined in opposition to the
surface [die Flachel. This opposition has not only a visual but a meta-
physical dimension. The ground [der UntergrundJ situates itself in
relation to the line. The graphic line designates the surface, and in so do-
ing determines it by attaching itself to it as its ground. Conversely, the
graphic line can exist only upon this ground, so that a drawing that com-
pletely covered its ground would cease to be a drawing. The ground is
thereby assigned a specific position that is indispensable to the meaning
of the drawing, so that in a graphic work two lines can establish their re-
lationship to each other only relative to the ground-an occurrence, inci-
dentally, in which the difference between the graphic line and the geomet-
ric line emerges especially clearly.-The graphic line confers an identity
on its ground. The identity of the ground of a drawing is completely dif-
ferent from that of the white surface on which it is located, and of which
it would be deprived if one wanted to apprehend the paper surface as a
surge of white waves (though these might not even be distinguishable to
the naked eye). The pure drawing will not alter the graphically meaning-
221
222 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
B. The Mark
Notes
1. In Advent (1899), a play by the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849-
1912), a judge and his wife are pursued by solkatten (literally "sun cats")-
sunbeams that remind them of their past sins.
2. See the Book of Daniel, chapter 5.
A soft green glow in the evening red.
-C. E HEINLE
20
A Glimpse into the World of Children's Books
226
A G LIM P S E I NT a THE WaR L D a F CHI L D R EN'S B a OKS 227
light: not a glimpse into but a guide to children's books. At a stroke, the
words throw on their costumes and in the blink of an eye they are caught
up in a battle, love scenes, or a brawl. This is how children write their
stories, but also how they read them. And there are rare, impassioned
ABC-books that playa similar sort of game in pictures. Under Plate A,
for example, one finds a higgledy-piggledy still-life that seems very myste-
rious until one realizes what is happening and what Apple, ABC-book,
Ape, Airplane, Anchor, Ark, Arm, Armadillo, Aster, and Ax are all doing
in the same place. Children know such pictures like their own pockets;
they have searched through them in the same way and turned them inside
out, without neglecting the smallest thread or piece of cloth. And if, in
the colored engraving, the child's imagination sinks dreamily into it-
self, the black-and-white woodcut, the plain prosaic illustration, draws it
back out of itself. Such pictures, with the urgent demand for description
that lies within them, rouse the word within the child. Just as the child
describes [beschreibt] the pictures with words, so, too, does he "inscribe"
[beschreibt] them in a more literal sense. He scribbles on them. Unlike the
colored pictures, the surface of the black-and-white illustration is ar-
ranged only suggestively and has a capacity for a certain condensation
[Verdichtung]. So the child composes into the picture. At the same time
as he learns language from them, he also learns writing [Schrift]: hiero-
glyphics. It is under this sign that, still today, the first words learned from
primers are supplemented with line drawings of the things they refer to:
egg, hat. The genuine value of such simple graphic children's books is far
removed from the blunt urgency that led rationalist pedagogy to recom-
mend them. "The way the child marks out a little place for himself," ex-
plores his picture landscape with his eyes and finger, can be seen in this
paradigmatic nursery rhyme from an old picture-book, Steckenpferd and
Puppe [Hobby-Horse and Doll], by J. P. Wich (Nordlingen, 1843):
Moral sayings from the book by Jesus Sirach, Nuremberg. Collection of Walter Benjamin.
use a house roof as a coat. These carnivals overflow even into the more
serious space of speHing- and reading-books. In the first half of the last
century, [Paul] Renner in Nuremberg published a set of twenty-four
sheets in which the letters were introduced in disguise, as it were. F steps
out in the dress of a Franciscan, C as a Clerk, P as a Porter. The game was
so pleasurable that variations on these old motifs have survived to this
day. Last, the rebus rings in the Ash Wednesday of this carnival of words
and letters. It is the unmasking: from the midst of the resplendent pro-
cession, the motto-the gaunt figure of Reason-gazes out at the chil-
230 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
The Baal? of Tales for Daughters and Sons of the Educated Classes, by Johann Peter
Lyser. With eight copperplate illustrations. Leipzig: Wigand'sche Verlags-Expedition,
1834. Collection of Walter Benjamin.
dren. The rebus (a word that, curiously, was formerly traced back to
rever instead of to res) has the most distinguished origins: it descends di-
rectly from the hieroglyphics of the Renaissance, and one of its most pre-
cious printed works, the Hypnerotomachia PoliphiLi, may be described as
its patent of nobility [Adelsurkunde]. It was perhaps never as widely
known in Germany as in France, where around 1840 there was a fashion
for charming collections of printed sheets on which the text was printed
in picture writing [BilderschriftJ. Even so, German children, too, had
delightful "pedagogical" rebus books. From the end of the eighteenth
century, at the latest, comes the Sittenspruche des Buchs Jesus Sirach
fur Kinder and junge Leute aus allen Standen mit Bildern welche die
vornehmsten Warter ausdl'ucken [Moral Sayings from the Book of
Ecclesiasticus for Children and Young People of All Classes, with Pic-
tures that Express the Most Important Words]. The t'ext is delicately
engraved in copper, and wherever possible all the nouns are represented
by small, beautifully painted pictures that were either matter-of-fact
A G LIM P S E I NT 0 THE W 0 R L D 0 F CHI L D R EN I S BOO K S 231
The Magical Red Umbrella: A New Tale for Children. Neuruppin Printers, and Verlag
von Gustav Kiihn. Collection of Walter Benjamin.
tury, probably did not result solely from the concrete pedagogical under-
standing of the day (which was in some respects superior to that of to-
day), but, even more, emerged out of everyday bourgeois life as an aspect
of that life. In a word, it emerged from tbe Biedermeier period. Even the
smallest cities contained publishers whose most ordinary products were
as elegant as the modest household furniture of the time, in the drawers
of which their books lay untouched for a century. This is why there are
A G LIM P S E I NT a THE WaR L 0 0 F CHI LOR EN'S BOO K S 233
children's books not just from Berlin, Leipzig, Nuremberg, and Vienna;
for the collector, works published in Meissen, Grimma, Gotha, Pirna,
Plauen, Magdeburg, and Neuhaldensleben have a much more promising
ring. Illustrators were at work in almost all of those towns, though the
majority have remained unknown. From time to time, however, one of
them is rediscovered and acquires a biographer. This was the case with
Johann Peter Lyser, the painter, musician, and journalist. A. L. Grimm's
Fabelbuch [Book of Fables] (Grimma, 1827), with Lyser's illustrations,
the Buch der Mdhrchen fur Tochter and S6hne gebildeter Stdnde [Book
of Fairy Tales for Daughters and Sons of the Educated Classes] (Leipzig,
1834), with text and illustrations by Lyser, and Linas Mahrchenbuch
[Lina's Book of F~iry Tales] (Grimma, n.d.), with text by A. L. Grimm
and illustrations by Lyser, contain his most beautiful work for children.
The coloring of these lithographs pales beside the fiery coloring of the
Biedermeier period, and matches better the haggard and often careworn
figures, the shadowy landscape, and the fairy-tale atmosphere which is
not without an ironic-satanic streak. The craftsmanship in these books
was fully committed to the everyday life of the petty bourgeoisie; it was
not there to be enjoyed but was to be used like cooking recipes or house-
hold maxims. It represents a popular, even childlike variant of the dreams
that assumed their most exaggerated forms in the works of the Roman-
tics. This is why Jean Paul is their patron saint.l The central-German
fairy-world of his stories has found expression in their pictures. No writ-
ing is closer to their unpretentiously resplendent world of colors world
than his. For his genius, like that of color itself, rests on fantasy, not cre-
ative power. When the eye sees colors, the perceptions and intuitions of
the imagination [Phantasieanschauung], in contrast to creative conceits
[schopferischer Einbildung], manifest themselves as a primal phenome-
non. All form, every contour that human beings perceive, corresponds to
a faculty within them that ena bles them to reproduce it. The body in
dance, the hand in drawing imitate that contour and appropriate it. But
this faculty finds its limits in the world of color: the human body cannot
produce color. It establishes a correspondence to it not creatively but re-
ceptively: in the eye shimmering with color. (Anthropologically, too, sight
is the watershed of the senses because it perceives form and color simul-
taneously. Thus, the body possesses, on the one hand, faculties of active
correspondences-form-seeing and movement, hearing and voice-and,
on the other, those of an passive sort: the seeing of color belongs to the
sensory realms of smell and taste. Language itself synthesizes this group
into a unity in words like "looking," "smelling," "tasting/' which apply
234 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
In their illumination and their obscurity, the transparent colors are with-
out limits, just as fire and water can be regarded as their zenith and nadir.
. . . The relation of light to transparent color is, when you come to look
into it deeply, infinitely fascinating, and when the colors flare up, merge
into one another, arise anew, and vanish, it is like taking breath in great
pauses from one eternity to the next, from the greatest light down to the
solitary and eternal silence in the deepest shades. The opaque colors, in
contrast, are like flowers that do not dare to compete with the sky, yet are
concerned with weakness (that is to say, white) on the one side, and with
evil {that is to say, black} on the other side. It is these, however, that are
able ... to produce such pleasing variations and such natural effects that
... ultimately the transparent colors end up as no more than spirits play-
ing above them and serve only to enhance them. 2
Notes
GLOSS ON SURREALISM
No one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower.' Whoever awakes as
Heinrich von Ofterdingen today must have overslept. 2 The history of the
dream remains to be written, and opening up a perspective on this sub-
ject would mean decisively overcoming the superstitious belief in natural
necessity by means of historical illumination. Dreaming has a share in
history. The statistics on dreaming would stretch beyond the pleasures of
the anecdotal landscape into the barrenness of a battlefield. Dreams have
started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the
propriety and impropriety-indeed, the range-of dreams.
No longer does the dream reveal a blue horizon. The dream
grown gray. The gray coating of dust on things is its best part. Dreams
are now a shortcut to banality. Technology consigns the outer image of
things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their
value. It is then that the hand retrieves this outer cast in dreams and,
even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours. It
catches hold of objects at their most threadbare and timeworn point.
This is not always the most delicate point: children do not so much clasp
a glass as snatch it up. And which side does a thing turn toward dreams?
What point is its most decrepit? It is the side worn through by habit and
garnished with cheap maxims. The side which things turn toward the
dream is kitsch.
Chattering, the fantasy images of things fall to the ground like leaves
from a Leporello picture book, The Dream. 3 Nlaxims shelter under every
236
DREAM KITSCH 237
leaf: "Ma plus belle maitresse c'est la paresse," and "Une medaille vernie
pour Ie plus grand ennui," and "Dans Ie corridor il y a quelqu'un qui me
veut a la mort."4 The Surrealists have composed such lines, and their al-
lies among the artists have copied the picture book. Repetitions is the
name that Paul Eluard gives to one of his collections of poetry, for whose
frontispiece Max Ernst has drawn four small boys. They turn their backs
to the reader, to their teacher and his desk as well, and look out over a
balustrade where a balloon hangs in the air. A giant pencil rests on its
point in the windowsill. The repetition of childhood experience gives us
pause: when we were little, there was as yet no agonized protest against
the world of our parents. As children in the midst of that world, we
showed ourselves superior. When we reach for the banal, we take hold of
the good along with it-the good that is there (open your eyes) right be-
fore you.
For the sentimentality of our parents, so often distilled, is good
providing the most objective image of our feelings. The long-windedness
of their speeches, bitter as gall, has the effect of reducing us to a crimped
picture puzzle; the ornament of conversation was full of the most abys-
mal entanglements. Within is heartfelt sympathy, is love, is kitsch. "Sur-
realism is called upon to reestablish dialogue in its essential truth. The in-
terlocutors are freed from the obligation to be polite. He who speaks will
develop no theses. But in principle, the reply cannot be concerned for the
self-respect of the person speaking. For in the mind of the listener, words
and images are only a springboard." Beautiful sentiments frOln Breton's
Surrealist Manifesto. They articulate the formula of the dialogic misun-
derstanding-which is to say, of what is truly alive in the dialogue. "Mis-
understanding" is here another word for the rhythm with which the only
true reality forces its way into the conversation. The more effectively a
man is able to speak, the more successfully he is misunderstood.
In his Vague de reves [Wave of Dreams], Louis Aragon describes how
the mania for dreaming spread over Paris. Young people believed they
had come upon one of the secrets of poetry, whereas in fact they did away
with poetic composition, as with all the most intensive forces of that pe-
riod. 5 Saint-Pol-Raux, before going to bed in the early morning, puts up
a notice on his door: "Poet at work. " h _This all in order to blaze a way
into the heart of things abolished or superseded, to decipher the contours
of the banal as rebus, to start a concealed William Tell from out of
wooded entrails, or to be able to answer the question, "Where is the
bride?" Picture puzzles, as schemata of the dreamwork, were long ago
discovered by psychoanalysis. The Surrealists, with a similar conviction,
238 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
are less on the trail of the psyche than on the track of things. They seek
the totemic tree of objects within the thicket of primal history. The very
last, the topmost face on the totem pole, is that of kitsch. It is the last
mask of the banal, the one with which we adorn ourselves, in dream and
conversation, so as to take in the of an outlived world of things.
What we used to call art begins at a distance of two meters from the
body. But now, in kitsch, the world of things advances on the human be-
ing; it yields to his uncertain grasp and ultimately fashions its figures in
his interior. The new man bears within himself the very quintessence of
the old forms, and what evolves in the confrontation with a particular
milieu from the second half of the nineteenth century-in the dreams, as
well as the words and images, of certain artists-is a creature who de-
serves the name of "furnished man. "7
Written in 1925; published in Die neue Rtmdschau, January 1927. Gesammelte Schriften,
II, 620-622. Translated by Howard Eiland.
Notes
1. The subtitle, "Gloss on Surrealism," was used as the title of the published ar-
ticle in 1927.
2. Heinrich von Ofterdingen is the title of an unfinished novel by the German
poet Navalis (Friederich von Hardenberg; 1772-1801), first published in
1802. Von Ofterdingen is a medieval poet in search of the mysterious Blue
Flower, which bears the face of his unknown beloved.
3. Leporello is Don Giovanni's servant in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. He
carries around a catalogue of his master's conquests, which accordions out
to show the many names. In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a German
publishing house, Leporello Verlag, which produced such pop-out books.
4. "My loveliest mistress is idleness." "A gold medal for the greatest boredom."
"In the hall, there is someone who has it in for me."
5. Reference is to the years 1922-1924. Une vague de reves was first published
in the fall of 1924; along with Aragon's Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant;
1926), it inspired Benjamin's earliest work on the Arcades Project.
6. Saint-Pol-Raux is the pseudonym of Paul Raux (1861-1940), French Sym-
bolist poet.
7. Benjamin's term here is "der m6blierte Mensch." A variant ending of "Dream
Kitsch" in a manuscript copy of the essay reads:
"The new man bears within himself the very quintessence of the old
forms, and what evolves in the confrontation with a particular milieu from
the second half of the nineteenth century-in the dreams, as well as the
words and images, of certain artists-is a creature who deserves the name of
DREAM KITSCH 239
'furnished man': the body 'furnished' [meuble] with forms and apparatuses,
in the sense that, in French, one of the mind 'furnished' [meuble] with
dreams or with scientific knowledge."
See Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II, p. 1428. The term "der moblierte
Mensch" is also a play on "der moblierte Herr" {"the furnished gentle-
man "}, a colloquial German expression that refers to the (male) tenant of a
furnished room or apartment and that Benjamin put to llse elsewhere in his
writings of the late 1920s. Ideas about furniture and furnishing, and about
habits of modern dwelling in would come to occupy an important
in the Arcades Project.
22
Moonlit Nights on the Rue La Boetie
At first, it is like entering an aquarium. Along the wall of the huge dark-
ened hall, runs what appears to be a strip of illuminated water behind
glass, broken at intervals by narrow joints. The play of colors in deep-
sea fauna could not be more fiery. But what reveals itself here are
supra terrestrial, atmospheric miracles. Seraglios are mirrored in moonlit
waters; nights in abandoned parks expose themselves. In the moonlight
one recognizes the chateau of Saint Leu, where a hundred years ago the
body of the last Conde was discovered hanged in a window. l Somewhere
a light is still burning behind the curtains. A few shafts of sunlight fall at
intervals. In the purer rays of a summer morning, you can peer into the
stanze of the Vatican, as they appeared to the Nazarenes. 2 Not far off, the
whole of Baden-Baden constructs itself; and if the sun were not dazzling,
one might be able to recognize Dostoevsky on the casino terrace among
the doll-like figures on a scale of 1:10,000. But even candlelight comes
into its own. In the twilit cathedral, wax candles form a sort of chapelle
ardente surrounding the murdered duc de Berry; and the lamps in the
silken skies of an island of love almost put chubby Luna to shame. 3
This is a unique experiment in what the Romantics called the "moon-
lit night of magic." It emerges triumphantly in its noble essence from ev-
ery conceivable test to which its specific form of poetry has been sub-
jected here. It is almost frightening to think of the power it must have had
in its cruder, more massive state-in the magic pictures of the fairs and in
dioramas. Or was this watercolor painting (done on paper that was
scraped and rubbed, cut out in different places, given an underlay, and
finally covered with wax in order to achieve the desired transparency)
240
MOONLIT NIGHTS ON THE RUE LA BOETIE 241
never popular because the technique was always too expensive? Nothing
is known about that. For these forty transparencies stand here in com-
plete isolation. Nothing similar to them is known, and one knew nothing
even of the present ones llntil recently, when they were discovered in
someone's estate. They belonged to a collection assembled by a wealthy
aficionado, the great-grandfather of their present owner. Every piece was
made individually and specifically for him. Great artists like Gericault,
David, and Boilly are said to have been involved to a greater or lesser de-
gree. Other experts believe that Daguerre worked on these plates before
created his famous diorama (which burned down in 1839, after seven-
teen years}.4
Whether the greatest artists really were involved or not is important
only for the American who sooner or later will pay the one and a half
million francs for which the collection can be had. For this technique has
nothing to do with '<art" in strict sense-it belongs to the practical
arts. Its place is somewhere among a perhaps only provisionally unor-
dered set that extends from the practices of vision to those of the electric
television. In the nineteenth century, when children were the last audi-
ence for magic, these practical arts all converged in the dimension of play.
Their intensity was not thereby diminished. Anyone who takes the time
to linger before the transparency of the old spa of Contrexeville soon
feels as if a hundred years ago he had often strolled along this sunny path
between the poplars, had brushed up against the stone wall - modest
magical effects for domestic use, of a sort one otherwise only experiences
in rare cases-Chinese soapstone groups, for example, or Russian lac-
quer paintings.
Published in Die literarische We/t, March 1928. Gesammelte Schriftell, IV, 509-511. Trans-
lated by Rodney Livingstone.
Notes
1. "The last Conde" is the traditional name for Louis Henri-Joseph, due de
Bourbon (1756-1830). Having played a minor role on the side of the aris-
tocracy in the French Revolution, he led a dissolute life in England and re-
turned to France with his mistress, Sophie in 1814. After he was
found hanged in his chateau, Dawes was of the murder; she was,
however, released order of Louis Philippe, and the crime remained un~
solved.
2. The Nazarenes were a group of young painters, inc1udirm Friedrich Overbeck
(1789-1869) and Franz Pforr (1788-1812), who first met at the Academy of
242 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
Fine Arts in Vienna. The group relocated to Rome in 1810, where they stud-
ied Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican. Taking fifteenth- and early sixteenth-
century German and Italian art as a model of spiritual sincerity, they devel-
oped an archaizing style of painting.
3. In Catholicism, a chapelle ardente is a darkened room, illuminated with can-
dles, in which the body of a deceased person lies until placed in a casket.
Charles Ferdinand de Bourbon, due de Berry (1778-1820), served in the
prince de Conde's army against the French Revolution, was exiled to En-
gland, and, after his return to France in 1815, was assassinated by Louis-
Pierre Louvel, a worker obsessed with, in his own words, "exterminating the
Bourbons."
4. Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1787-1851) was a French painter and the
inventor of the daguerreotype. In 1822, he opened the Diorama in Paris-a
panorama in which pictures were painted on cloth transparencies illumi-
nated with various lighting effects. See Benjamin's "Paris, the Capital of the
Nineteenth Century" (1935), in this volume.
23
Chambermaids' Romances of the Past Century
243
244 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
"Swear!"
This illustration is from a medieval tale of ghosts and chivalry entitled Adelma,. lJon
Perlstein, the Knight of the Golden Key; ()1~ The Twelve Sleeping Maidens, Protectors
of tbe Enchanting Young Man.
Notes
Once the nineteenth century is Baedeker-ready and its ruins are ripe
for moonlight, the Musee Antoine Wiertz in Brussels will be one of the
obligatory destinations for honeymooners. 1 Wiertz lived from 1806 to
1865. His work has little to do with great painting-but it is all the more
interesting to connoisseurs of cultural curiosities and to physiognomists
of the nineteenth century. Some titles from the catalogue of Wiertz's
oeuvre will convey an idea of his specialty: The Suicide; The Overhasty
Burial; Hunger, Madness, and Crime; The Burnt Child. Wiertz himself
wrote the museum's catalogue, though admittedly without signing it.
From this catalogue-published posthumously in 1870-we take the fol-
lowing text. It is, so to speak, the "caption" [Beschriftung] to his great
triptych, Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head.2 The report deserves
to be rescued from obscurity, not only because of its tendentious-
ness but also because of its grandiose costuming [Einkleidung] and its
compositional power.
- WALTER BENJAMIN
Just moments ago, several heads fell under the scaffold. On this occasion,
it occurred to the artist to pursue inquiries on the following question:
249
250 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
Does the head, after its separation from the trunk, remain for a few sec-
onds capable of thought?
This is the report of that investigation. In the company of Monsieur
... and Monsieur D, an expert magnetopath, I was allowed onto the
scaffold. There I asked Monsieur D to put me in rapport with the cut-
off head, by means of whatever new procedures seemed appropriate to
him) Monsieur D acquiesced. He made some preparations and then we
waited, not without excitement, for the fall of a human head.
Hardly had the inevitable moment come when the dreadful blade
plunged down, shaking the entire scaffold, and the head of the con-
demned man rolled into the terrible red sack.
Our hair stood on at that moment, but there was no time left for
us to distance ourselves. Monsieur D took me by band (I was under
his magnetic influence), led me before the twitching head, and asked,
"What do you feel? What do you see?" Agitation prevented me from an-
swering him on the But right after that 1 cried in the utmost horror,
"TerribJe! The head thinks!" Now I wanted to escape what I had to go
through, but it was as if an oppressive nightmare held me in its spell. The
head of the executed man saw, thought, and suffered. And I saw what he
saw, understood what he thought, and felt what he suffered. How long
did it last? Three minutes, they told me. The executed man must have
thought: three hundred years.
What the man killed in this way suffers, no human language can ex-
press. I wish to limit myself here to reiterating the answers I gave to all
questions during the time that I felt myself in some measure identical to
the severed head.
The pressure has turned into a slicing. Now the executed man first be-
comes conscious of his situation.-He measures with his eyes the space
separating his head from the body and says to himself: So, my head is ac-
tually Cllt off.
The raging delirium increases. It seems to the executed man that his
head is Durning, and circling around itself.... And in the middle of this
raging fever an ungraspable, insane, unnamable thought seizes the dying
brain. Can one believe it? The man whose head is cut off continues hope.
All his remaining blood pulses faster through his living veins and clings
to this hope.
Now comes the moment when the executed man thinks he is stretch-
his cramped, trembling hands toward the dying head. It is the same
instinct that drives us to press a hand against a gaping wound. And it oc-
curs with the intention, the dreadful intention, of setting the head back on
the trunk, to preserve a little blood, a little life .... The eyes of the mar-
tyred man roll in their bloody ... The body becomes stiff as granite.
That is death ...
No, not yet.
Notes
The text Benjamin presents here is a partial translation of the caption (legende)
that the late-Romantic Belgian painter. Antoine Joseph Wiertz (1806-1865) com-
posed for his 1853 triptych, Pensees et visions d'une tete coupee, as published
posthumously in Wiertz's Oeuvres litteraires (Brussels: Parent et Fils, 1869),
pp. 491-495. Benjamin was working from an edition published in Paris (Librairie
Internationale, 1870). The Legende also appears within the triptych itself in the
form of a painted inscription on a trompe-l'oeil frame, the latter a device Wiertz
frequently used in his work.
In his translation, Benjamin abbreviates sections of Wiertz's text and omits
the artist's introductory remarks on the painting, as well as his lengthy descrip-
tions of the visions of the subject (a guillotined man) in the last two sections. Al-
though Benjamin's translation renders Wiertz's title as "Gedanken und Gesichte
eines Gekbpften" (Thoughts and Visions of a Beheaded Man), the present En-
glish translation returns to Wiertz's original French in referring to "a severed
head" ("une tete coupee"). This choice was made for two reasons: first, because
Benjamin's translation of "d'une tete coupee" as "cines Gekopften" in the Ger-
man title is both inaccurate and inconsistent with the rest of his translation of
Wiertz's text; and, second, because an accurate translation of "cines Gekopften,"
which refers to the person (and the body) of the executed man ("a beheaded
one"), rather than to a severed head (as in the French "une tete coupee"), would
have introduced into the English title an awkwardness present neither in the orig-
inal French nor in the inaccurate but felicitous German. See the introduction to
Part IV of this volume for some remarks on what may be at stake in the inconsis-
tency of Benjamin's translation of Wiertz's text.
1. A branch of the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique since 1868, the
Musee Wiertz is housed in Brussels at 62 rue Vautier-a neoclassical build-
ing which the Belgian government constructed for Wiertz in 1850 as a stu-
dio-museum, in exchange for a number of his monumental history paintings
and the promised bequest of the entire body of work in his possession.
Wiertz maintained his studio in tbe building until the time of his death, at
which point his estate became national property.
Benjamin cites Wiertz's 1855 essay on photography in The Arcades Pro-
ject, where he describes the artist as "the painter of the arcades" and "the
first to demand, if not actually foresee, the use of photographic montage
for political agitation." Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 845,671 (Convolute Y1,t), and 6. See
also the references to Wiertz in "Letter from Paris (2)" and "Little History
of Photography," in this volume.
2. The triptych, which today hangs behind a counter in the main gallery of the
Musee Wiertz, where postcards as well as copies of Wiertz's [egende are dis-
played for sale, is made up of three panels of roughly equal size. The first
ANTOINE WIERTZ 253
shows spectators pointing up at the headless body on the scaffold. The sec-
ond) from another vantage point, shows the executioner hoisting the body
up from the scaffold as the head, which emits rays that may signal a rapport
between the head and the author of the text, rolls to the ground. The third
shows smoke and flames swirling in a location that is no longer identifiable.
Using a process of his own invention, Wiertz blended his pigments with
turpentine rather than oil to achieve a matte surface. The triptych is now in
poor condition due to the instability of the medium.
There were widespread doubts in the nineteenth century as to whether
death by guillotine-favored by the Jacobins during the French Revolution
as a speedy, egalitarian, and therefore "humane" means of execution-was
really instantaneous, along with speculations as to whether consciousness
could abide in a severed head.
3. In the nineteenth century, in the wake of the theories of "animal magnetism"
promulgated by Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) and others, the phe-
nomena of hypnotism and magnetism were understood as closely linked,
and the language of magnetism was often used to describe hypnotic rapport
and influence.
5
Son1e Remarks on Folk Art
Folk art and kitsch ought for once to be regarded as a single great move-
ment that passes certain themes from hand to hand, like batons, be-
hind the back of what is known as great art. They both depend on
great art at the level of individual works, but apply what they have
taken in their own way and in the service of their own goals, their
Kunstwollen. 1
What is the direction of this Kunstwollen? Well, certainly not toward
art, but toward something far more primitive, yet more compelling. If we
ask ourselves what "art" in the modern sense means to folk art on the
one hand and to kitsch on the other, the answer would be: all folk art
draws the human being into itself. It him only so that he must
answer. Moreover, he answers with questions: "Where and when was
it?" The idea in him that this space and this moment and this po-
sition of the sun must have existed once before. To throw the situation
that is brought to mind here around one's shoulders, like a favorite old
coat-this is the deepest temptation awakened by the refrain of a folk
song, in which a basic feature of all folk art may be perceived.
It is not just that our image of our character is so discontinuous, so
much a matter of improvisation, that we are eager to fall in with every
suggestion made by the graphologist, the palm-reader, and similar practi-
tioners. Rather, our destiny may be said to be governed by the same in-
tensive imagination that illuminates in a flash the dark corners of the self,
of our character, and creates a space for the interpolation of the most un-
expected dark or light features. When we are in earnest, we discover our
conviction that we have experienced infinitely more than we know about.
254
SOME REMARKS ON FOLK ART 255
This includes what we have read, and what we have dreamed, whether
awake or in Ollr sleep. And who knows how and where we can open up
other regions of our destiny?
What we have experienced unconsciously echoes, after its own fash-
ion, wherever we enter the world of primitives: their furniture, their or-
naments, their songs and pictures. "After its own fashion"-this means
in an entirely different manner from the way in which great art affects us.
As we stand in front of a painting by Titian or Monet, we never feel the
urge to pull out our watch and set it by the position of the sun in the pic-
ture. But in the case of pictures in children's books, or in Utrillo's paint-
ings, which really do recuperate the primitive, we might easily get such
an urge. This means that we find ourselves in a situation of kind we
are used to, and it is not so much that we compare the position of the sun
with our watch as that we use the watch to compare this position of the
sun with an earlier one. The deja vu is changed from the pathological ex-
ception that it is in civilized life to a magical ability at whose disposal
folk art (and kitsch no less so) places itself. It can do so because the deja
vu really is quite different from the intellectual recognition that the new
situation is the same as the old one. It would be more accurate to say: is
fundamentally the old one. But even this is mistaken. For the situation is
not experienced as if by someone standing outside it: it has pulled itself
over us; we have encased ourselves within it. However one grasps it, it
amounts to the same thing: the primal fact of the mask. In this way the
primitive, with all its devices and pictures, opens us to an endless arsenal
of masks-the masks of our fate-by means of which we stand apart
from moments and situations that have been lived through ullconsciously
but that are here finally reintegrated.
Only impoverished, uncreative man knows of no other way to trans-
form himself than by means of disguise. Disguise seeks the arsenal of
masks within us. But for the most part, we are very poorly equipped with
them. In reality, the world is full of masks; we do not Sllspect the extent
to which even the most unpretentious pieces of furniture (such as Ro-
manesque armchairs) used to be masks, too. Wearing a mask, man looks
out on the situation and builds up his figures within it. To hand over
these masks to us, and to form the space and the figure of our fate within
it-this is what folk art approaches us with. Only from this vantage point
can we say clearly and fundamentally what distinguishes it from actual
"art," in the narrower sense.
Art teaches us to see into things.
Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
256 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
Notes
257
258 PAINTING AND GRAPHICS
of naming even a single one of these painters. No one bothered. The con-
demnation fell wholesale on "Ming painting,)) on "Qing painting"-
grouped together under the sign of decadence.
Yet Monsieur Georges Salles, who has earned our gratitude for intro-
ducing us to Monsieur Dubose's collection, stresses that the more recent
painters maintained the ancient mastery.4 They practiced, he says, "an art
that became a fixed profession-Mallarmean facets cut skillfully onto the
old alexandrine. "S
This exhibition interested us from another perspective as well, one
more closely tied to the personality of the collector himself. Monsieur
Dubose, who lived for about ten years in China, became an eminent con-
noisseur of Chinese art by virtue of an aesthetic education that was essen-
tially Western. His preface makes clear in an unobtrusive way how valu-
able the teachings of Paul Valery, in particular, were for him.6 We are not
surprised, then, to learn that he was interested in the literary profession,
which, in China, is inseparable from the profession of the painter.
Here is a fact that is at once of utmost importance and somewhat
strange in the eyes of Europeans: the link that has been revealed between
the thought of a Valery, who says that Leonardo da Vinci "takes painting
as his philosophy, and the synthetic view of the universe which is char-
II
Notes
1. Jean-Pierre Dubose (1904-1988) was a French diplomat and connoisseur of
Chinese painting whose collection formed the basis of the October 1937 ex-
hibition at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
2. Osvald Siren (1879-1966) was a prominent Swedish art historian who spe-
cialized at the outset of his career in the painting of the early Italian Renais-
sance and later became an internationally renowned expert on Chinese art.
Benjamin refers here to Siren's catalogue An Exhibition of Chinese Paintings
in the National Museum, Stockholm, April-May 1936, National Museum
exhibition catalogue no, 54 (Stockholm: Nordisk Rotogravyr, 1936).
3. Arthur Waley (Arthur David Schloss, 1.889-1966) was a distinguished British
sinologist. He acquired his knowledge of Chinese painting while serving as
Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum
beginning in 1913; he was later a lecturer at the School of Oriental and Afri-
can Studies, London. He is best known for his translations of Chinese and
Japanese poetry. Benjamin presumably refers here to An Introduction to the
Study of Chinese Painting (New York: Scribner's, 1923).
4. Georges Salles (1889-1966) was curator of Asian art at the Musee du Lou-
vre, where in April 1937 he organized an exhibition of ancient Chinese art
that Benjamin probably visited; see the exhibition catalogue Arts de la Chine
ancienne, intro. Georges Salles (Paris: Musee de l'Orangerie, 1937). From
1941 to 1945 he was director of the lvlusee Guimet, and from 1945 to 1957
he was director of the Musees de France. Salles's work was important to
Benjamin in the late 1930s, See Benjamin's review of Le Regard: La Collec-
tion-Ie musee-Ia fouille-une journee-l'ecole (Paris: PIon, 1939), which
appeared in the Gazette des Amis des Livres in May 1940. Benjamin,
Gesammelte Schriften, III, pp. 589-595.
CHI N ESE PA I NT I N G S AT THE BIB LI 0 THE QUE N AT ION ALE 261
5. The French poet Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) was a central figure in the
Symbolist movement.
6. Paul Valery (1871-1945), French poet and essayist, is best known for essay-
istic fictions such as La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste (1896) and major poems
of the Symbolist and post-Symbolist period.
7. Lin Yutang (1895-1976), a prolific Chinese poet, novelist, historian, and cul-
tural critic, was educated in China, the United States, and Germany. His in-
terpretations of Chinese culture and customs for a Western audience were
widely read and enormously influential. Benjamin may be quoting here from
the French translation of My Country and My People (New York: Reynal &
Hitchcock, 1935),
IV
PHOTOGRAPHY
263
264 PHOTOGRAPHY
every detail of the sitters and their clothing were imbued with an unmis-
takable "permanence." But Benjamin makes clear in the "Little Historf'
that this permanence, as well as other class attributes such as the ability
to generate an "animated conviviality,)) were also objective attributes of
the class, and not merely photographic artifacts. "These pictures were
made in rooms where every client was confronted, in the person of the
photographer, with a technician of the latest school; whereas the photog-
rapher was confronted, in the person of every client, with a member of a
rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of
the man's frock coat or floppy cravat.)1
The aura, in other words, is at one and the same time the" breathy
halo~' so evident in many daguerreotypes and early salt prints and an ob-
jective attribute of a class that developed at a particular historical mo-
ment. As Benjamin puts it, "in this early period subject and technique
were as exactly congruent as they became incongruent in the period of
decline that immediately followed."
That "period of decline" was the period of modernist photography;
the incongruence contrasts the ongoing decline of human history into
barbarism with the increasing ability of modernist photographers to use
photographic technique for social and political ends. If the first part of
the essay is given over to an examination of photography as the represen-
tative form of the bourgeoisie in the mid-nineteenth century, the latter
half attempts to provide examples of photographic practices that are
turned back against the hegemonic class. Two modern photographers are
here made to occupy exemplary positions: Eugene Atget emerges as the
liberator of the world of things from thrall in which they are held by
aura, and August Sander wrenches the representation of the human
countenance free from the musty conventions of bourgeois portraiture.
Atget's 4,000 images of Paris and its surroundings capture not its
beauty or picturesqueness, but its empty spaces and discarded objects.
His dispassionate survey of a terrain substitutes for the "exotic, romanti-
cally sonorous" texture of early photography a "salutary estrangement
between man and his surroundings. " Benjamin's Atget steps forth from
his images as a kind of photographic Brecht, able to shake the observer
free from the participatory reverie suggested by earlier photographs, and
to create, by defamiliarizing the most familiar things, a neutral space for
the development of critical capacities.
August Sander's photographic practice in some ways parallels that of
Atget. He had produced, by the early 1930s, thousands of images of Ger-
mans from every social group and employment type. The great taxonomy
PHOTOGRAPHY 267
of German society that Sander hoped to produce bore the working title
Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Citizens of the Twentieth Century). In
these remarkable images, Sander draws upon the appeal of the human
face in all its singularity in order to achieve something seemingly very dif-
ferent: a characterization of that face's representativeness. Benjamin saw
in Sander's typological approach a powerful political tooL His images
were a "training manual" that could provide political operatives with vi-
tal information on a citizen's "provenance" during "sudden shifts of
power." Photography, in other words, marks the site of a shift toward a
politics genuinely attuned to collective concerns and collective power.
The final pages of the "Little History" deal, surprisingly, with the is-
sue of art as photography and photography as art. Freed from political
and social interest, photography becomes "creative" and serves only to
confirm things as they are. The concluding section begins with a glancing
attack on "creative" photography-a critique that is developed at greater
length in other essays included in this volume: the specific polemic
against Albert Renger-Patzsch, a proponent of the photography of "New
Objectivity," and against his influential photo book Die Welt ist schon is
taken up again in "The Author as Producer"; and the problem of "art
photography" stands at the center of the essay "Letter from Paris (2):
Painting and Photography." In the "Letter from Paris," Benjamin shows,
for the first time anywhere, that "photography's claim to be art was con-
temporaneous with its emergence as a commodity." Photography's abil-
ity to represent commodities) and to reproduce and disseminate such rep-
resentations, ensured that certain goods were placed into circulation
"which had more or less escaped it up to then." Just as photography
holds the potential to open the optical unconscious to the viewer and in
so doing open the door to a reform of perception that might lead to social
change, so too does it hold the potential to make '(segments of the field of
optical perception into saleable commodities."
In the "Little History" and in "Letter from Paris," Benjamin con-
cludes his consideration of photography by opening a tantalizing vantage
point toward what he sees as its future. He puts the problem confront-
the medium succinctly. The images produced by the camera have a
"shock effect" that "paralyzes the associative mechanisms in the be-
holder." Benjamin here derives a set of claims from what is most often as-
cribed to photography as its sole capacity: the ability to capture things
'(as they are" and in so doing to replicate the apparently fixed, immuta-
ble quality of the world in a fixed and immutable sensory apparatus in
the beholder. How, though, are we to see the world "otherwise"? That is,
268 PHOTOGRAPHY
Whoever has [possibility-sense] does not say, for instance: Here this or that
has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that
might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it
is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the
sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of
everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance
to what is than to what is not. 6
MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
Notes
1. Josef Maria Eder had published a technical history of photography, based on
extensive research into photochemistry, as early as 1905; but the end of the
19205 and the early 1930s saw the first real surge of interest in the history of
the medium. Georges Potonnie's Histoire de la decouverture de la
photographie (History of the Discovery of Photography; 1925) and Wilhelm
Doses Vorliiufer der Photographie (Precursors of Photography; 1932) inves-
tigated the early history of the medium; and Beaumont Newhall's History of
Photography, the first comprehensive history of the medium, appeared a few
years later, in 1937. For a comprehensive survey of photographic histories,
see Douglas R. Nickel, "History of Photography: The State of Research,"
Art Bulletin, 83, no. 3 (September 2001): 548-558.
2. On the capacity of the artwork to make history present, see the general intro-
duction to this volume.
3. Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof," excerpt
from Capital, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York:
Norton, 1972), pp. 215-216.
PHOTOGRAPHY 269
271
272 PHOTOGRAPHY
pathbreaker here. It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ig-
norant of photography who will be the illiterate of the future."2 Whether
we accelerate the growth of a plant through time-lapse photography or
show its form in forty-fold enlargement, in either case a geyser of new
image-worlds hisses up at points in Ollr existence where we would least
have thought them possible.
These photographs reveal an unsuspected horde of analogies
and forms in the existence of plants. Only the photograph is capable of
this. For a bracing enlargement is necessary before these forms can shed
the veil that our stolidity throws over them. What is to he said of an ob-
server to whom these forms already send out signals from their veiled
state? Nothing can better portray the truly new objectivity of his proce-
dure than the comparison with that highly personal but ever so bril-
liant procedure by means of which the equally revered and misunder-
stood Grandville, in his Fleurs animees, made the entire cosmos emanate
from the world of plants. 3 Grandville took hold of the procedure-God
knows, not gently-from the opposite end. He stamped the punitive
mark of creatureliness, the human visage, directly onto the blossom of
these pure children of nature. This great pioneer in the field of the adver-
tisement mastered one of its fundamental principles, graphic sadism, as
hardly any other of its adepts has done. Isn't it odd now to find an-
other principle of advertisement, the enlargement of the plant world into
gigantic proportions, gently healing the wounds opened by caricature?
Originary Forms of Art-certainly. What can this mean, though, but
originary forms of nature? Forms, that is, which were never a mere
model for art but which were, from the beginning, at work as originary
forms in all that was created. Moreover, it must be food for thought in
even the most sober observer that the enlargelllent of what is large-the
plant, or its buds, or the leaf, for example-leads us into a wholly differ-
ent realm of forms than does the enlargement of what is small-the plant
cell under the microscope, say. And if we have to tell ourselves that new
painters like Klee and even more Kandinsky have long been at work es-
tablishing friendly relations between us and the realms into which the mi-
croscope would like to seduce us-crudely and by force-we instead en-
counter in these enlarged plants vegetal "Forms of Style."4 One senses a
gothic parti pris in the bishop'S staff which an ostrich fern represents~
in the larkspur, and in the blossom of the saxifrage, which also does
honor to its name in cathedrals as a rose window which breaks through
the wall. The oldest forms of columns pop up in horsetails; totem poles
appear in chestnut and maple shoots enlarged ten times; and the shoots
of a monk's-hood unfold like the body of a gifted dancer. Leaping to-
NEWS ABOUT FLOWERS 273
ward us from every calyx and every leaf are inner image-imperatives
[Bildnotwendigkeiten], which have the last word in all phases and stages
of things conceived as metamorphoses. This touches on one of the deep-
est, most unfathomable forms of the creative, on the variant that was
always, above all others, the form of genius, of the creative collective,
and of nature. This is the fruitful, dialectical opposite of invention: the
Natura non facit saltus of the ancients. S One might, with a bold supposi-
tion, name it the feminine and vegetable principle of life. The variant is
submission and agreement, that which is flexible and that which has no
end, the clever and the omnipresent.
We, the observers, wander amid these giant plants like Lilliputians. It
is left, though, to fraternal great spirits-sun-soaked eyes, like those of
Goethe and Herder-to suck the last sweetness from these calyxes.
PubUshed in Die literarische Welt, November 1928. Gesammelte Schl'iften, III, 151-153.
Translated by Michael W. Jennings.
Notes
1. Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German photographer and art teacher
whose entire photographic output was devoted to the representation of
plant parts: twig ends, seed pods, tendrils, leaf buds, and so on. These he
meticulously arranged against stark backgrounds and photographed with
magnification, so that unfamiliar shapes from the organic world were re-
vealed as startling, elegant architectural forms. Blossfeldt originally pro-
duced his work as a study aid for his students at the Berlin College of Art; he
believed that the best human art was modeled on forms preexisting in na-
ture.
2. Benjamin refers to the Hungarian photographer and painter Laszlo Moholy-
Nagy (1895-1946).
3. Grandville is the pseudonym of Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gerard (1803-1847),
a caricaturist and illustrator whose work appeared in the periodicals Le
Charivari and La Caricature; his book Les Fleurs animees was published in
1847.
4. Benjamin is referring to Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der
Ornamentik (Questions of Style: Toward a History of Ornament; 1893), a
work by the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl (1858-1905). It traces the in-
fluence of natural forms such as the acanthus through a series of stylistic pe-
riods in the ancient world.
S. Natura non facit saltus: Latin for "nature does not make a leap." In rational-
ist philosophy, the phrase expresses the notion that God leaves no gaps in
nature.
28
Little History of Photography
274
LITTLE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 275
ground connection with the crisis of capitalist industry. But that does not
make it any easier to use the charm of old photographs, available in fine
recent publications,3 for real insights into their nature. Attempts at theo-
retical mastery of the subject have so far been entirely rudimentary. And
no matter how extensively it may have been debated in the last century,
basically the discllssion never got away from the ludicrous stereotype
which a chauvinistic rag, the Leipziger Stadtanzeiger, felt it had to offer
in timely opposition to this black art from France. "To try to capture
fleeting mirror images," it said, "is not just an impossible undertaking, as
has been established after thorough German investigation; the very wish
to do such a thing is blasphemous. Man is made in the image of God, and
God's image cannot be captured by any machine of human devising. The
utmost the artist may venture, borne on the wings of divine inspiration, is
to reproduce man's God-given features without the help of any machine,
in the moment of highest dedication, at the higher bidding of his genius."
Here we have the philistine notion of "art" in all its overweening obtuse-
ness, a stranger to all technical considerations, which feels that its end is
nigh with the alarming appearance of the new technology. Nevertheless,
it was this fetishistic and fundamentally antitechnological concept of art
with which the theoreticians of photography sought to grapple for al-
most a hundred years, naturally without the smallest success. For they
undertook nothing less than to legitimize the photographer before the
very tribunal he was in the process of overturning. Far different is the
tone of the address which the physicist Arago, speaking on behalf of
Daguerre's invention, gave in the Chamber of Deputies on July 3, 1839. 4
The beautiful thing about this speech is the connections it makes with
all aspects of human activity. The panorama it sketches is broad enough
not only to make the dubious project of authenticating photography in
terms of painting-which it does anyway-seem beside the point; more
important, it offers an insight into the real scope of the invention. "When
inventors of a new instrument," says Arago, "apply it to the observation
of nature, what they expect of it always turns out to be a trifle com-
pared with the succession of subsequent discoveries of which the instru-
ment was the origin." In a great arc Arago's speech spans the field of new
technologies, from astrophysics to philology: alongside the prospects for
photographing the stars and planets we find the idea of establishing a
photographic record of the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Daguerre's photographs were iodized silver plates exposed in the cam-
era obscura, which had to be turned this way and that until, in the
proper light, a pale gray image could be discerned. They were one of a
276 PHOTOGRAPHY
kind; in 1839 a plate cost an average of 2S gold francs. They were not
infrequently kept in a case, like jewelry. In the hands of many a painter,
though, they became a technical adjunct. Just as seventy years later
Utrill0 5 painted his fascinating views of Paris not from life but from
picture postcards, so the highly regarded English portrait painter David
Octavius Hill based his fresco of the synod of the Church of
Scotland in 1843 on a long series of portrait photographs. But these
pictures he took himself. And it is unpretentious makeshifts meant
for internal lise, that gave his name a in history, while as a painter
he is forgotten. Admittedly a number of lead even deeper into
the new technology than this series of portraits-anonymous images~
not posed subjects. Such figures had the subjects of painting.
Where the painting remained in the of a particular family,
now and then someone would ask a bout person portrayed. But after
two or three generations this interest fades; the pictures, if they last~ do so
only as testimony to the art of the With photography, however,
we encounter something new and strange: in Hill's Newhaven fishwife,
her eyes cast down in sllch indolent, seductive modesty, there remains
something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer's art~ some-
thing that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know
what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is
still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in "art."
And I ask: How did the beauty of that hair,
those eyes, beguile our forebears?
How did that mouth kiss, to which desire
curls up senseless as smoke withollt fire?6
spicuous place where, within the suchness [Sosein] of that long-past min-
ute, the future nests still today-and so eloquently that we, looking back,
may rediscover it. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera
rather than to the eye; "other)) above all in the sense that a space in-
formed by human consciousness gives way to one informed by the un-
278 PHOTOGRAPHY
Karl Dauthendey (Father of the Poet), with His Fiancee. Photo by Karl Dauthendey.
ment where, as Kracauer has aptly noted, the split second of the exposure
determines "whether an athlete becomes so famous that photographers
start taking his picture for the illustrated papers." Everything about these
early pictures was built to last. Not only the incomparable groups in
which people came together-and whose disappearance was surely one
of the most precise symptoms of what was happening in society in the
second half of the century-but the very creases in people's clothes held
their shape longer. Just consider Schelling's coat. It will surely pass into
immortality along with him: the contours it has borrowed fro111 its
wearer are not unworthy of the creases in his face. In short, everything
suggests that Bernard von Brentano was right in his view that "a photog-
rapher of 1850 was on a par with his instrumenf'-for the first time) and
for a long while the last. 9
To appreciate the powerful impact made by the daguerreotype in the
age of its discovery, one should also bear in mind that plein air painting
was then opening up entirely new perspectives for the most advanced
painters. Conscious that in this very area photography had to take the
baton from painting, even Arago, in his historical review of the early
attempts of Giovanni Battista Della Porta, explicitly commented: "As re-
gards the effect produced by the imperfect transparency of our atmo-
sphere (which has been inaptly termed 'atmospheric perspective'), not
even experienced painters expect the camera the copying
of images appearing in it-"to help them render it accurately." 10 At the
moment when Daguerre succeeded in fixing the images of the camera
obscura, painters parted company on this point with technicians. The
real victim of photography, howevel; was not landscape painting but
the portrait miniature. Things developed so rapidly that by 1840 most of
the innumerable miniaturists had already become professional photogra-
phers, at first only as a sideline, but before long exclusively. Here the ex-
perience of their original livelihood stood them in good stead, and it is
not their artistic background so much as their training as craftsmen that
we have to thank for the high level of their photographic achievement.
This transitional generation disappeared very gradually; indeed, there
seems to have been a kind of biblical blessing on those first photogra-
phers: the Nadars, Stelzners, Piersons, Bayards all lived well into their
eighties and nineties. ll In the end, though, businessmen invaded profes-
sional photography from every side; and when, later on, the retouched
negative, which was the bad painter's revenge on photography, became
ubiquitous, a sharp decline in taste set in. This was the time photograph
albums came into vogue. They were most at home in the chilliest spots,
282 PHOTOGRAPHY
rings out. The painter and the photographer both have an instrument at
their disposal. Drawing and coloring, for the painter, correspond to the
violinist's production of sound; the photographer, like the pianist, has the
advantage of a mechanical device that is subject to restrictive laws, while
the violinist is under no such restraint. No Paderewski will ever reap the
fame, ever cast the almost fabulous spell, that Paganini did. "14 There is,
however-to continue the metaphor-a Busoni of photography, and that
is Atget. l5 Both were virtuosos, but at the same time precursors. The
combination of unparalleled absorption in their work and extreme preci-
sion is common to both. There was even a facial resemblance. Atget was
an actor who, disgusted with the profession, wiped off the mask and then
set about removing the makeup from reality too. He lived in Paris poor
LITTLE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 285
useless to anyone but the merchant. And the day does indeed seenl to be
at hand when there will be more illustrated magazines than game mer-
chants. So much for the snapshot. But the emphasis changes completely if
we turn from photography-as-art to art-as-photography. Everyone will
have noticed how much more readily apprehensible a picture, above all a
sculpture, and indeed also architecture are in a photo than in reality. It is
all too tempting to blame this squarely on the decline of artistic apprecia-
tion, on a failure of contemporary sensibility. But one is brought up short
by the way the understanding of great works was transformed at abollt
the same time the techniques of reproduction were being developed. Such
works can no longer be regarded as the products of individuals; they
have become a collective creation, a corpus so vast it can be assimi-
lated only through nliniaturization. In the final analysis, methods of me-
chanical reproduction are a technique of diminution that helps people to
achieve a degree of mastery over works of art-mastery without which
the works could no longer be put to use.
If one thing typifies present-day relations between art and photogra-
phy, it is the unresolved tension between the two introduced by the pho-
tography of works of art. Many of those who, as photographers, deter-
mine the current face of this technology started out as painters. They
turned their back on painting after making attempts to bring its means of
expression into a living and unequivocal connection with modern life.
The keener their feel for the temper of the times, the more problematic
their starting point became for them. For once again, as eighty years be-
fore, photography has taken the baton from painting. As Moholy-Nagy
has said:
The creative potential of the new is for the most part slowly revealed
through old forms, old instruments and areas of design which in their es-
sence have already been superseded by the new, but which under pressure
from the new as it takes shape arc driven to a euphoric efflorescence. Thus,
for example~ futurist (static) painting brought forth the clearly defined
problematic of the simultaneity of motion, the representation of the in-
stant, which was later to destroy it-and this at a time when film was al-
ready known but far from being understood .... Similarly, some of the
painters (neoclassicists and verists) today lIsing representational-objective
methods can be regarded-with caution-as forerunners of a new repre-
sentational optical form which will soon be making use only of mechani-
cal, technical methods. 22
And Tristan Tzara, 1922: "When everything that called itself art was
stricken with palsy, the photographer switched on his thousand-
LITTLE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 291
For some years now the glory of OUI' age has been a machine which daily
amazes the mind and startles the eye. Before another century is out, this
machine will be the brush, the palette, the colors, the craft, the experience,
the patience, the dexterity, the sureness of touch, the atmosphere, the
luster, the exemplar, the perfection, the very essence of painting .... Let no
one suppose that daguerreotype photography will be the death of art ....
When the daguerreotype, that infant prodigy, has grown to its full stature,
when all its art and strength have been revealed, then will Genius seize it
by the scruff of the neck and shout: "Come with me-you are mine now!
We shall work together!"
the future."29 But mustn't the photographer who is unable to read his
own pictures be no less deemed an illiterate? Isn)t inscription bound
to become the most essential component of the photograph? These are
the questions in which the span of ninety years that separates contempo-
rary photography from the daguerreotype discharges its historical ten-
sion. It is in the illumination of these sparks that the first photographs
emerge, beautiful and unapproachable, from the darkness of our grand-
fathers' day.
Published in Die literariscbe Welt, September-October 1931. Gesmnmelte Schriftel1, II,
368-385. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shortet~
Notes
cian, was active in the study of light. He devised an experiment that proved
the wave theory of light and contributed to the discovery of the laws of light
polarization.
5. Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955), French painter, was known for his
Montmartre street scenes.
6. Stefan George, Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum tmd Tod
(The Carpet of Life and the Songs of Dream and Death), "Standbilder, das
Sechste," verses 13-16.
7. Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst: Photographische Pflmtzel1bildel~ edited
and with an introduction by Karl Niercndorf (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth,
1928), with 120 plates. [Benjamin's note. Blossfeldt (1865-1932), a profes-
sor of drawing and painting in Berlin, created a sensation in the 1920s with
the publication of his magnified photos of plant parts; see "News about
Flowers" (1928), in this volume.-Trans.]
8. Emil Orlik, Kleine Aufsatze (Berlin: Propylaen Verlag, 1924), pp. 38ff. Orlik
(1870-1932) was a German graphic artist and painter whose work was in-
fluenced by Jugendstil (Art Nouveau).
9. Bernard von Brentano (1901-1964), leftist novelist and journalist, wrote
for the Frankfurter Zeitul1g and the Berliner Tageblatt. He is perhaps best
known for the historical novel Theodor Chilldlel; which depicts the transi-
tion from the empire to the Weimar Republic.
10. Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Della Porta (1535-1615) was an Italian
physicist and dramatist whose works contain descriptions of the camera
obscura, as well as of a special lens he developed for it.
11. Carl Ferdinand Stelzner 1805-1895) was a German painter and photog-
rapher who, like many miniaturist painters, turned to daguerreotypy; to-
with Hermann Biow, he shot some of the earliest news photographs.
Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822-1913) was a prominent French studio portrait-
ist; his firm, Mayer and Pierson, catered to high society and the court. In
1862 Pierson and his partners, the brothers Leopold Ernest Mayer and
LOllis Frederic Mayer, were named official photographers to Napoleon III.
Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887), French photographer, was active as an in-
ventor in the earliest days of photography. He is widely regarded as one of
photography~s first significant artists, and held the first known photographic
exhibition, displaying thirty of his own works.
12. Orlik, Kleine Aufsatze. p. 38.
13. Paul Delaroche, cited in Schwarz, David Octavius Hill, p. 39. Delaroche
(1757-1859) was a French academic painter who specialized in historical
subjects.
14. Eugene Atget, Lichtbildel; with an introduction by Camille Recht (Paris and
Leipzig, 1930), p. 10. [Benjamin's note]
15. Eugene Atget (1857-1927), French photographct; spent his career in obscu-
rity making pictures of Paris and its environs. He is widely recognized as one
of the leading photographers of the twentieth century.
LITTLE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY 297
the borders of the group around the journal G, which included Moholy-
Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, Hans Richter, El Lissitzky, and Walter Benjamin.
He created the photomontage for the book jacket of Benjamin's
Eil1balmstrafSe (One-\Vay Street; 1928).
25. Germaine Krull (1897-1985), German photographer, emigrated to Paris in
1924, where she became known for her work in portraiture, as well as in ar-
chitectural, industrial, and fashion photography.
26. Die Welt ist schon (The World Is Beautiful) is the title of a photo volume pub-
lished in 1928 by the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-
1966); it became the most influential of all the photo essays published in the
Weimar Republic. In this book, Renger-Patzsch arranged his photographs of
plants, animals, buildings, manufactured goods, and industrial landscapes-
often close-ups of isolated details-around formal rhymes. Benjamin was in-
volved in a long-standing polemic against his work. See especially "The Au-
thor as Producer" (1934), in this volume.
27. The Krupp works at Essen was the original plant in the Krupp steel, arma-
ments, and shipbuilding empire, founded in 1811 by Friedrich Krupp. The
AEG is the Allgemeine Elektricitats GeseHschaft, or General Electric Com-
pany, founded in Berlin in 1833 by the industrialist Emil Rathenau; it was
largely responsible for building the electrical infrastructure of modern Ger-
many.
28. Antoine Joseph Wiertz (1806-1865) was a Belgian painter of colossal histori-
cal scenes, lampooned by Baudelaire. See Benjamin's "Antoine Wiertz"
(1929) and "Letter from Paris (2)" (1936), in this volume.
29. Benjamin is paraphrasing Moholy-Nagy here; see Benjamin's "News About
Flowers," in this volume.
29
Letter from Paris (2)
299
300 PHOTOGRAPHY
for Louis Philippe, They did not hesitate to photograph the sculptor
Callimachus in the act of inventing the Corinthian capital as he caught
sight of an acanthus plant; they composed a scene in which "Leonardo"
is seen painting the Mona Lisa, and then photographed that ,....... ' .
11L •• -
A few years ago a machine was born to us which is the glory of our age,
and which daily am,azes our minds and startles our eyes. Before another
306 PHOTOGRAPHY
century has passed, this machine will be the paintbrush~ the palette, the
paints, the skill, the experience, the patience, the dexterity, the accuracy,
the color sense, the glaze, the maciel, the perfection, the essence of paint-
... Let no one believe that the daguerreotype will kill art .... Once the
daguerreotype, this titan child, has grown up, Ollce all its art and strength
have been unfolded, genius will grab it by the nape of the neck and cry:
"This way! You're mine now. We're going to work together."2.'i
Anyone who has Wiertz's grand paintings before him will know that the
genius he refers to is a political one. In the flash of a great social inspira-
tion, he believed, painting and photography must one day fuse together.
There was truth in his prophecy; yet it is not within works but within ma-
jor artists that the fusion has taken place. They belong to the generation
f-Ieartfield, and have changed from painters into photographers
by politics.
The same generation has produced painters like George Grosz and
Otto Dix, who have worked toward the same Painting has not
lost its function. The important thing is not to block our own view of this
function-as Christian Gaillard does, for example: "If social struggles
were to be the subject of my work," he says, "I would need to be moved
by them visually" (La Querelle p. 190). For contemporary fascist states,
J
where "peace and order') reign in the towns and villages, this is a very
problematic formulation. Shouldn't Gaillard have the opposite experi-
ence? Shouldn't his social emotion be converted into visual inspiration?
Such is the case with the great caricaturists, whose political knowledge
permeates their physiognomic perception no less deeply than the experi-
ence of the sense of touch imbues the perception of space. Masters like
Bosch, Hogarth, Goya, and Daumier pointed the way. "Among the most
important works of painting," wrote Rene Creve!, who died recently,
"have always been those which, merely by pointing to corruption, in-
dicted those responsible. From Griinewald to Dali, from the putrid
Christ to the Stinking ... painting always been able to
cover new truths which were not truths of painting alone" (La Querelle,
p.154).
It is in the nature of the situation in western Europe that
where painting is most accomplished it has a destructive, purging
This may not emerge as clearly in a country which sti1l 2H has democratic
freedoms as it does in countries where fascism is in control. In the latter
countries, there are painters who have been forbidden to paint. (And it is
usually the artists' style, not their subject matter, which brings the prohi-
LETTER FROM PARIS (2) 307
bition-so deeply does their way of seeing strike at the heart of fascism.)
The police visit these painters to check that nothing has been painted
since the last roundup. The painters work by night, with draped win-
dows. For them the temptation to paint "from nature" is slight. And the
paJJid landscapes of their paintings, populated by phantoms or monsters,
are taken not from nature but from the class state. Of these painters there
was no mention in Venice-or, sadly, in Paris. They know what is useful
in the image today: every public or secret mark which demonstrates that
within human beings fascism has come up against limits no less insupera-
ble than those it has encountered across the globe.
Written November-December 1936; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime. Gesammelte
Schriften, III, 495-507. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
Notes
This was the second of two reports Benjamin prepared on contemporary Parisian
arts and letters. The first "Pariser Brief," subtitled "Andre Gide und sein neuer
Gegner" (Andre Gide and His New Adversary), originally published in 1936, is
reprinted in Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften, 111,482-495.
1. Entretiel1s: I.;Art et la realite; e Art et fetat (Conversations: Art and Real-
ity; Art and the State), with contributions by Mario Alvera, Daniel Baud-
Bnvy, Emilio Bodrero, et al. (Paris: Institut Internationale de Cooperation
Intellectllelle, 1935). La Querelle du realisme: Deux debats par
[,Association des lJeintures et sculptures de la maison de la culture (The
Question of Realism: Two Debates Presented by the Association of Painting
and Sculpture at the Maison de la Culture), with contributions by Lur\=at,
Granaire, et al. (Paris: Editions Socialistes Internationales, 1936).
[Benjamin's note]
2. The French painter and critic Andre Lhote (1885-1962) was associated with
Cubism.
3. Alexandre Cingria (1879-1945), a Swiss-born painter, mosaicist, and glass-
maket; was the author of La Decadence de l'art sacre (The Decadence of Sa-
cred Art; 1917) and Souvenirs d'un peintre ambulant (Memoirs of an Itiner-
ant Painter; 1933).
4. Le Corbusier (Charles Edollard Jeanneret; 1887-1965) was one of the most
important twentieth-century architects and city planners, known for his dis-
tinctive combination of functional and expressive forms. He is the author of
Apres Ie Cubisme (After Cubism; 1918), Vers tine architecture (Toward a
New Architecture; 1923), and Urbanisme (The City of Tomorrowj 1925).
5. Thomas Mann (1875-1955) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929 and
left Germany for the United States in 1933. He is the author of
308 PHOTOGRAPHY
Study of the history of photography began about eight or ten years ago.
We have a number of publications, mostly illustrated, on its infancy and
its early masters. But only this most recent study has treated the subject
in conjunction with the history of painting. Gisele Freund's study de-
scribes the rise of photography as conditioned by that of the bourgeoisie,
successfully illustrating the causal connection by examining the history of
the portrait.' Starting from the expensive ivory miniature (the portrait
technique most widely used under the ancien regime), the author de-
scribes the various procedures which contributed to making portrait pro-
duction quicker and cheaper, and therefore more widespread, around
1780, sixty years before the invention of photography. Her description of
the "physiognotrace" as an intermediate form between the portrait min-
iature and the photograph shows in exemplary fashion how technical
factors can be made socially transparent. 2 The author then explains how,
with photography, technical development in art converged with the gen-
eral technical standard of society, bringing the portrait within the means
of wider bourgeois strata. She shows that the miniaturists were the first
painters to fall victim to photography. Finally, she reports on the theoreti-
cal dispute between painting and photography around the middle of the
century.
312
REVIEW OF FREUND'S PHOTOGRAPHIE EN FRANCE 313
Written ca. November 1937; published in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforsclnmg, fall 1938.
Gesammelte Schriften, Ill, 542-544. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
Notes
1. This review is an adaptation of a section of Benjamin's "Letter from Paris
(2)" (1936), in this volume. Gisele Freund (1908-2000) studied sociology
with Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim before working as a photographer
in Berlin. She emigrated to France in 1933, becoming friends with Benjamin,
whom she photographed.
2. The physiognotrace, invented in 1783-1784 by Gilles-Louis Chretien, was a
machine for tracing a subject's profile, which it reproduced mechanically on
a piece of paper affixed to the center of the instrument.
3. On the nineteenth-century French debate about the artistic status of photog-
raphy, see Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 671-
692 (Convolute Y, "Photography").
4. In his "Letter from Paris (2}," Benjamin cites a French translation of the po-
lemic in question: Georgi Plekhanov, "Les Jugements de Lanson sur Balzac
et Corneille," Commune, 16, series 2 (December 1934): 306. The work
of Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918), Russian political theorist
and Menshevik revolutionary, was a major influence on the development of
Marxist aesthetics. Gustave La11son (1857-1934), French critic, was the au-
thor of Histoire de ta litterature franfaise (1894) and other works of literary
history.
v
FILM
For Walter Benjamin the category of the aesthetic, the focus of much of
his work, must be understood not in the simple sense of a theory of the
(beautiful) arts but rather in terms of the original meaning of the Greek
root aisthetikos ("of sense perception") which comes from aisthal1esthai
("to perceive"). For it is as a theory of perception (Wahrnehmung) that
aesthetics is so central to Benjamin's oeuvre and-in light of a modernity
where perception has increasingly been shaped by technology-has effec-
tively become the study of media. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility" Benjamin is explicit on this matter, insist-
ing that "film ... proves to be the most important subject matter, at pres-
ent, for the theory of perception which the Greeks called aesthetics" (sec-
tion XVIII). Moreover, as Benjamin remarked in a note jotted down
during the composition of the artwork essay: "So long as art theory is un-
able to find an example in film for everyone of its elements, it is in need
of improvement." 1 The question therefore is not whether film is art but
rather, as Benjamin reminds us, how our very conception and practice of
art has changed in light of the cinema,
One of the many issues that the still rather new medium of film
brought so sharply into focus in the late 1920s and early 1930s was the
historicity of human sense perception. As Benjamin noted on numer-
ous occasions, major historical shifts in our mode of existence (from agri-
cultural to industrial, for example) are paralleled by equally dramatic
changes in the very way we see the world.2 Among the signature features
of the modern "mode of existence" is, of course, technology, The ques-
tion of how to conceptualize the reciprocal determinations between his-
315
316 FILM
Why does [Schmitz] make such a fuss about the political deflowering of
art? ... The claim that political tendencies are implicit in every artwork of
every epoch-since these are, after all, historical creations of consc1OUS-
FILM 317
ness-is a platitude. But just as deeper layers of rock come to light only at
points of fracture [Bruchstellen], the deeper formation of a political posi-
tion [Tendenzl becomes visible only at fracture points in the history of art
(and in artworks). The technical revolutions-these are fracture points in
artistic development where political positions, exposed bit by bit, come to
the surface. In every new technical revolution, the political position is
transformed-as if 011 its own-from a deeply hidden element of art into a
manifest one. And this brings us ultimately to film.
Among the points of fracture in artistic formations, film is one of the
most dramatic.
r
action [Spielraum {section XVI}. This field of action is the space in
which a cinematic audience is transformed through "simultaneous collec-
tive reception" into a mass-indeed, a mass that bears the potential for
social change. As he did in "Little History of Photography," Benjamin re-
marks on the effects-slow motion, close-ups, enlargement, and so on-
that make all this possible, and subsumes them under the notion of the
"optical unconscious."15 In the artwork essay, though, he ascribes to the
optical unconscious not just the power of disenchantment (the unmask-
ing of "the necessities governing our lives" and with them phantasmago-
ria) but the power to inform masses of viewers, schooled in distraction,
of the political powers that lie open to them: a political power derived
from discovering the explosive potential of that which is inconspicuous
and apparently meaningless-in short, the stuff of a habituated yet tactile
and immediate experience of the modern world.
"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility"
plays, then, on a series of reversals: the seemingly banal and worthless
work that has been technologically reproduced is favored over the privi-
leged, autonomous work; a habituated and distracted mode of reception
is favored over the kind of concentration and absorption long held to be
the only reception adequate to the demands of high art. Benjamin effects
these reversals for explicitly political ends, as makes plain in section
XVIII of the essay: "The tasks which face the human apparatus of per-
ception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical
means-that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually-
taking their cue from tactile reception-through habit."
THOMAS Y. LEVIN
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, Gesarnmelte Scbriften VII, p. 678.
J
The greatest achievements of the Russian film industry can be seen more
readily in Berlin than in Moscow. What one sees in Berlin has been prese-
lected, while in Moscow this selection still has to be made. Nor is obtain-
ing advice a simple matter. The Russians are fairly uncritical about their
own films. (For example, it is a well-known fact that Potemkin owes its
great success to Germany.)! The reason for this insecurity in the matter
of judgment is that the Russians lack European standards of compari-
son. Good foreign films are seldom seen in Russia. When buying films,
the government takes the view that the Russian market is so important
for the competing film companies of the world that they really have to
supply it at reduced prices with what are in effect advertising samples.
Obviously, this means that good, expensive films are never imported.
For individual Russian artists, the resulting ignorance on the part of
the public has its agreeable side. Iljinsky works with a very imprecise
copy of Chaplin and is regarded as a comedian only because Chaplin is
unknown here. 2
At a more serious, general level, internal Russian conditions have a
depressing effect on the average film. It is not easy to obtain suitable sce-
narios, because the choice of subject matter is governed by strict controls.
Of all the arts in Russia, literature enjoys the greatest freedom from cen-
sorship. The theater is scrutinized much more closely, and control of the
film industry is even stricter. This scale is proportional to the size of the
audiences. Under this regimen the best films deal with episodes from the
Russian Revolution; films that stretch further back into the Russian past
constitute the insignificant average, while, by European standards, come-
323
324 FILM
dies are utterly irrelevant. At the heart of the difficulties currently facing
Russian producers is the fact that the public is less and less willing to fol-
low them into their true domain: political dramas of the Russian civil
war. The naturaJistic political period of Russian film reached its climax
around a year and a half ago, with a flood of films full of death and ter-
ror. Such themes have lost all their attraction in the meantime. Now the
motto is internal pacification. Film, radio, and theater are all distancing
themselves from propaganda.
The search for conciliatory subject matter has led producers to resort
to a curiolls technique. Since film versions of the great Russian novels are
largely ruled out on political and artistic grounds, directors have taken
over well-known individual types and built up new stories around them.
Characters from Pushkin, Gogol, Goncharov, and Tolstoy are frequently
taken over in this way, often retaining their original names.·1 This new
Russian film is set by preference in the far eastern sections of Russia. This
is as much as to say, "For us there is no 'exoticism.''' "Exoticism" is
thought of as a component of the counterrevolutionary ideology of a co-
lonial nation. Russia has no use for the Romantic concept of the '(Far
East.}' Russia is close to the East and economically tied to it. Its second
message is: we are not dependent on foreign countries and natures-Rus-
sia is, after all, a sixth of the world! Everything in the world is here on
our own soil.
And in this spirit the epic film of the new Russia, entitled The Soviet
Sixth of the Ea1'th~ has just been released. It must be admitted that
Vertov, the director, has not succeeded in meeting his self-imposed chal-
lenge of showing through characteristic images how the vast Russian
nation is being transformed by the new social order.4 The filmic coloniza-
tion of Russia has misfired. What he has achieved, however, is the demar-
cation of Russia from Europe. This is how the film starts: in fractions of
a second, there is a flow of images from workplaces (pistons in motion,
laborers bringing in the harvest, transport works) and from capitalist
places of entertainment (bars, dance halls, and clubs). Social films of re-
cent years have been plundered for fleeting individual excerpts (often just
details of a caressing hand or dancing feet, a woman's hairdo or a glimpse
of her bejeweled throat), and these ha ve been assembled so as to alternate
with images of toiling workers. Unfortunately, the film soon abandons
this approach in favor of a description of Russian peoples and land-
scapes, while the link between these and their modes of production is
merely hinted at in an all too shadowy fashion. The uncertain and tenta-
tive nature of these efforts is illustrated by the simple fact that pictures of
cranes hoisting equipment and transmission systems are accompanied by
o NTH E PRE SEN T SIT U AT ION 0 F R U S S I AN F Il M 325
"With onr faces toward the village! ') In film as in writing, politics pro-
vides the most powerful motivation: the Central Committee of the party
hands down directives every month to the press, the press passes them on
to the clubs, and the clubs pass them on to the theaters and cinemas, like
runners passing a baton. By the same token, however, such slogans can
also lead to serious obstacles. The slogan "Industrializationr~ provided a
paradoxical instance. Given the passionate interest in everything techni-
cal, it might have been expected that the slapstick comedy would be
highly popular. In reality, however, for the moment at least, that passion
divides the technical very sharply from the comic, and the eccentric com-
edies imported from America have definitely flopped. The new Russian is
unable to appreciate irony and skepticism in technical matters. A further
sphere denied to the Russian film is the one that encompasses all the
themes and problems drawn from bourgeois life. Above all, this means:
They won't stand for dramas about love. The dramatic and even tragic
treatm.ent of love is rigorously excluded from the whole of Russian life.
Suicides that result from disappointed or unhappy love still occasionally
occur, but Communist public opinion regards them as the crudest ex-
cesses.
For film-as for literature-all the problems that now form the focus
of debate are problems of subject matter. Thanks to the new era of social
truce, they have entered a difficult stage. The Russian film can reestablish
itself on firm ground only when Bolshevist society (and not just the
state!) has become sufficiently stable to enable a new "social comedy" to
thrive, with new characters and typical situations.
Published in Die literarische Welt, March 1927, Gesammelte Schriften, II, 747-751. Trans-
lated by Rodney Livingstone.
Notes
1. Benjamin refers to Battleship Potemhin (1925), directed by the Soviet film-
maker and theorist Sergei 1vlikhailovich Eisenstein (1898-1948). Eisen-
stein's farge body of work includes the films Strike (1925), October (1927),
Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible (released in two parts, 1944
and 1958).
2. Igor Vladimirovich Iljinsky (1901-1987) was a Russian actor, well known for
his comic portrayals of buffoons} vagabonds) rogues, and urban hustlers.
The London-born actor and director Charlie Chaplin {Charles Spencer
Chaplin; 1889-1977} came to the United States with a vaudeville act in
1910 and made his motion picture debut there in 1914, eventually achieving
o NTH E PRE SEN T SIT U A TI 0 N 0 F R U S S I A NFl L M 327
There are replies that come close to being an act of impoliteness toward
the public. Shouldn't we simply allow our readers to make up their own
minds about a lame argument full of clumsy concepts? In this instance,
they would not even need to have seen Battleship Potemkin. 1 Any more
than Schmitz did. 2 For whatever he knows about the film he could have
gleaned from the first newspaper notice that came to hand. But that
is what characterizes the cultural Philistine: others read the notice and
think themselves duly warned; he, however, has to "form his own opin-
ion. " He goes to see the film and imagines that he is in a position to trans-
late his embarrassment into objective knowledge. This is a delusion. Bat-
tleship Potemkin can be objectively discussed either as film or from a
political point of view. Schmitz does neither. He talks about his recent
reading. Unsurprisingly, this leads him nowhere. To take this rigorous de-
piction of a class movement that has been wholly shaped according to
the principles of the film medium and try to see how it measures up to
bourgeois novels of society betrays an ingenuousness that is quite dis-
arming. The same cannot quite be said of his onslaught on tendentious
art. Here, where he marshals some heavy artillery from the arsenal of
bourgeois aesthetics, plain speaking would be more appropriate. Why
does he make such a fuss about the political deflowering of art, while
faithfully tracking down all the sublimations, libidinous vestiges, and
complexes through two thousand years of artistic production? How long
is art supposed to act the well-brought-up young lady who knows her
way around all the places of ill-repute yet wouldn't dream of asking
about politics? But it's no use: she has always dreamed about it. The
328
REPLY TO OSCAR A. H. SCHMITZ 329
claim that political tendencies are implicit in every artwork of every ep-
och-since these are, after all, historical creations of consciousness-is a
platitude. But just as deeper layers of rock come to light only at points of
fracture, the deeper formation of a political position becomes visible only
at fracture points in the history of art (and in artworks). The technical
revolutions-these are fracture points in artistic development where po-
litical positions, exposed bit by bit, come to the surface. In every new
technical revolution, the political position is transformed-as if on its
own-from a deeply hidden element of art into a manifest one. And this
brings us ultimately to film.
Among the points of fracture in artistic formations, film is one of the
most dramatic. We may truly say that with film a new realm of con-
sciousness comes into being. To put it in a nutshell, film is the prism
in which the spaces of the immediate environment-the spaces in which
people live, pursue their avocations, and enjoy their leisure-are laid
open before their eyes in a comprehensible, meaningful, and passion-
ate way. In themselves these offices, furnished rooms, saloons, big-city
streets, stations, and factories are ugly, incomprehensible, and hopelessly
sad. Or rather, they were and seemed to be, until the advent of film. The
cinema then exploded this entire prison-world with the dynamite of its
fractions of a second, so that now we can take extended journeys of ad-
venture between their widely scattered ruins. The vicinity of a house, of a
room, can include dozens of the most unexpected stations, and the most
astonishing station names. It is not so much the constant stream of im-
ages as the sudden change of place that overcomes a milieu which hasre-
sisted every other attempt to unlock its secret, and succeeds in extracting
from a petty-bourgeois dwelling the same beauty we admire in an Alfa
Romeo. And so far, so good. Difficulties emel'ge only with the "plot."
The question of a meaningful film plot is as rarely solved as the abstract
formal problems that have arisen from the new technology, And this
proves one thing beyond all others: the vital, fundamental advances in art
are a matter neither of new content nor of new forms-the technological
revolution takes precedence over both. But it is no accident that in film
this revolution has not been able to discover either a form or a content
appropriate to it. For it turns out that with the untendentious play of
forms and the untendentious play of the plot, the problem can be re-
solved only on a case-by-case basis.
The superiority of the cinema of the Russian Revolution, like that of
the American slapstick comedy, is grounded on the fact that in their dif-
ferent ways they are both based on tendencies to which they constantly
330 FILM
recur. For the slapstick comedy is tendentious too, in a less obvious way.
Its target is technology. This kind of film is comic, but only in the sense
that the laughter it provokes hovers over an abyss of horror. The obverse
of a ludicrously liberated technology is the lethal power of naval squad-
rons on maneuver, as we see it openly displayed in Potemkin. The inter-
national bourgeois film, on the other hand, has not been able to discover
a consistent ideological formula. This is one of the causes of its recurrent
crises. For the complicity of film technique with the milieu that consti-
tutes its most essential project is incompatible with the glorification of
the bourgeoisie. The proletariat is the hero of those spaces that give rise
to the adventures to which the bourgeois abandons himself in the movies
with beating heart, because he feels constrained to enjoy "beauty" even
where it speaks of the annihilation of his own class. The proletariat,
however, is a collective, just as these spaces are collective spaces. And
only here, in the human collective, can the film complete the prismatic
work that it began by acting on that milieu. The epoch-making impact of
Potemkin can be explained by the fact that it made this clear for the first
time. Here, for the first time, a mass movement acquires the wholly archi-
tectonic and by no means monumental (i.e., UFA) quality that justifies its
inclusion in film.3 No other medium could reproduce this collective in
motion. No other could convey such beauty or the currents of horror and
panic it contains. Ever since Potemkin, such scenes have become the un-
dying possession of Russian film art. What began with the bombardment
of Odessa in Potemkin continues in the more recent film Mother with the
pogrom against factory workers, in which the suffering of the urban
masses is engraved in the asphalt of the street like running script. 4
Potemkin was made systematically in a collective spirit. The leader of
the mutiny, Lieutenant Commander Schmidt, one of the legendary figures
of revolutionary Russia, does not appear in the film. That may be seen as
a "falsification of history," although it has nothing to do with the estima-
tion of his achievements. Furthermore, why the actions of a collective
should be deemed unfree, while those of the individual are free-this ab-
struse variant of determinism remains as incomprehensible in itself as in
its meaning for the debate.
It is evident that the character of the opponents must be made to
match that of the rebellious masses. It would have been senseless to de-
pict them as differentiated individuals. The ship's doctor, the captain, and
so on had to be types. Bourgeois types-this is a concept Schmitz will
have nothing to do with. So let us call them sadistic types who have been
summoned to the apex of power by an evil, dangerous apparatus. Of
REPLY TO OSCAR A. H. SCHMITZ 331
Notes
1. Benjamin refers to Battleship Potemkin (1925), directed by the Soviet film-
maker and theorist Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1898-1948).
Eisenstein's large body of work includes the films Strike (1925)) October
(1927), Alexander Nevsky (1938)) and Ivan the Terrible (released in two
parts, 1944 and 1958).
332 FILM
333
334 FILM
Notes
1. The London-born actor and director Charlie Chaplin (Charles Spencer Chap-
lin; 1889-1977) came to the United States with a vaudeville act in 1910 and
made his motion picture debut there in 1914, eventually achieving world-
wide renown as a comedian. Besides The Circus (1928), he starred in and di-
rected such films as The Kid (1921), City Lights (1931), Modem Times
(1936), and The Great Dictator (1940). See also Benjamin's "Chaplin in
Retrospect" (1929), in this volume.
34
Chaplin in Retrospect
The Circus is the product of the art of film that is also the product of
1
old age. Charlie grown older since his last film. But he also acts old.
And the most moving thing about this new film is the feeling that Chaplin
now has a clear overview of his possibilities and is resolved to work ex-
clusively within these limits to attain his goal. At every point the varia-
tions on his greatest themes are displayed in their full glory. The chase is
set in a maze; his unexpected appearance would astonish a magician; the
mask of noninvolvement turns him into a fairground marionette ....
The lesson and the warning that emerge from this great work have led
the poet Philippe Soupault to attempt the first definition of Chaplin as a
historical phenomenon. In November the excellent Paris review Europe
(published by Rieder, Paris), to which we shall return in greater detail,
presented an essay by Soupault containing a number of ideas around
which a definitive picture of the great artist will one day be able to crys-
tallize. 2
What he emphasizes there above all is that Chaplin's relation to the
film is fundamentally not that of Chaplin the actor, let alone the star. Fol-
lowing Soupault's way of thinking, we might say that Chaplin, consid-
ered as a total phenomenon, is no more of an actor than was William
Shakespeare. Soupault insists, rightly, that "the undeniable superiority of
Chaplin's films ... is based on the fact that they are imbued with a poetry
that everyone encounters in his life, admittedly without always being
conscious of it." What is meant by this is of course not that Chaplin is the
"author" of his film scripts. Rather, he is simply the author of his own
films-that is to say, their director. SOllpault has realized that Chaplin
335
336 FILM
was the first (and the Russians have followed his example) to construct a
film with a theme and variations-in short, with the element of composi-
tion-and that all this stands in complete opposition to films based on
action and suspense. This explains why Soupault has argued more force-
fully than anyone else that the pinnacle of Chaplin's work is to be seen in
A Woman of Paris. This is the film in which, as is well known, he does
not even appear and which was shown in Germany under the idiotic title
Die Nachte einer schonen Frau [Nights of a Beautiful Woman]. (The
Kamera Theater ought to show it every six months. [t is a foundation
document of the art of film.)
When we learn that 125,000 meters ofBlm were shot for this 3,000-
meter work, we get some idea of the capital that this man requires, and
that is at least as necessary to him as to a Nansen or an Amundsen if he is
to make his voyages of discovery to the poles of the art of £1lm. 3 We must
share Soupault's concern that Chaplin's productivity may be paralyzed
by the dangerous financial claims of his second wife, as well as by the
ruthless competition of the American trusts. It is said that Chaplin is
planning both a Napoleon-film and a Christ-film. Shouldn't we fear that
such projects are no more than giant screens behind which the great artist
conceals his exhaustion?
It is good and useful that at the moment old age begins to show itself
in Chaplin's features, Soupault should remind us of Chaplin's youth and
of the territorial origins of his art. Needless to say, these lie in the metrop-
olis of London.
In his endless walks through the London streets, with their black-and-red
houses, Chaplin trained himself to observe. He himself has told us that the
idea of creating his stock character-the fellow with the bowler hat, jerky
walk, little toothbrush moustache, and walking stick-first occurred to
him on seeing office workers walking along the Strand. What he saw in
their bearing and dress was the attitude of a person who takes some pride
in himself. But the same can be said of the other characters that surround
him in his films. They, too, originate in London: the shy, young, winsome
girl; the burly lout who is always ready to use his fists and then to take to
his heels when he sees that people aren't afraid of him; the arrogant gentle-
man who can be recognized by his top ha t.
Notes
1. The London-born actor and director Charlie Chaplin (Charles Spencer Chap-
lin; 1889-1977) released The Circus in 1928. Chaplin came to the United
States with a vaudeville act in 1910 and made his motion picture debut there
in 1914, eventually achieving worldwide renown as a comedian. He starred
in and directed such films as The Kid (1921), City Lights (1931), Modern
Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940). See also Benjamin's "Chap-
lin" (1929), in this volume.
2. Philippe Soupault, "Charlie Chaplin," Europe: Revue Mensuelle 18 (No- J
338
MICKEY MOUSE 339
Notes
1. Gustav Gluck (1902-1973), perhaps Benjamin's closest friend during the
19305, was director of the foreign section of the Reichskreditgese1l5chaft
(Imperial Credit Bank) in Berlin until 1938. He was able to arrange the
transfer to Paris of the fees Benjamin received from his occasional contribu-
tions to German newspapers until 1935. In 1938 Gluck emigrated to Argen-
tina; after World War II, he was a board member of the Dresdner Bank. The
Gennan composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) is best known for his collabora-
tions with Bertolt Brecht, including Die Dreigroschenoper (The
Opera; 1928) and tmd Pall del' Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of
the City of Mahagonny; 1930).
2. Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), Belgian writer and dramatist, was one
of the leading of the Symbolist movement at the end of the nineteenth
century. The German dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman (1886-
1973) developed an style of dance. She and her company often
performed in silence or to percllssion only; the idea was that the of the
dance would emerge from the dancer's own rhythmic movement.
3. Benjamin refers to one of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm,
"The Boy Who Left .Home in Order to Learn the Meaning of Fear."
36
The Formula in Which the Dialectical
Structure of Film Finds Expression
340
THE DIALECTICAL STRUCTURE OF FILM 341
Notes
1. The London-born actor and director Charlie Chaplin (Charles Spencer Chap-
lin; 1889-1977) came to the United States with a vaudeville act in 1910
and made his motion picture debut there in 1914, eventually achieving
worldwide renown as a comedian. He starred in and directed such films as
The Kid (192l}~ The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), Modem Times
(1936), and The Great Dictator (1940). See Benjamin's short pieces "Chap-
lin" (1929} and "Chaplin in Retrospect" (1929), in this volume.
VI
THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
343
344 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
(Cbapter 12 above) and thus the concept of script, as well as the notion
of "poly technical training" toward a new form of spectatorship de-
scribed in the artwork essay. 8
HLiterarization" is thus a textual condition in which readers of all
classes are exposed to "flashes" of insight that might themselves make
recognizable the otherwise hidden, fundamental contradictions in the
"conditions of living." And this recognition is the precondition for any
form of social change. Thus, the dense passage quoted above suggests
that the reading public might become more than passive receivers of in-
formation (or rather ideology disguised as information): it might prog-
ress to a state in which it becomes a public of producers and readers of
script-the graphic that may bear an emancipatory Such a
transformation, for Benjamin, would constitute a revolution in the con-
trol of the apparatus production. 9
ture with a massive capital C)l and grasped it instead as a means to ex-
plore daily life, to undertake the analysis of current events-in short, to
assume the challenge posed by being political. Radio, Benjamin insisted,
should take up the mantle from earlier political stage cabarets, such as Le
Chat Noir in Paris and Die Elf Scharfrichter in Munich, but in a manner
specific to the new medium. It was just this challenge that Hans Flesch
effectively attempted to translate into reality when he took over the direc-
tion of Radio Berlin, instituting a department for current events, broad-
casting important trials) parliamentary debates, and local from new
mobile radio studios, and producing the very first on-air political
debates. While Benjamin's comparatively modest innovations were not
on the order of such fundamental institutional interventions~ his broad-
casts-with titles like "Postage Stamp Scams," "The Tenements," "True
Stories about Dogs," and "Visit to a Brass Factory/' to take just a few
examples-did push the boundaries of his ostensibly literary rubric in
the direction of what today we would call "cultural criticism." He also
coauthored with Wolf Zucker a new type of nonliterary radio play called
a Hormodell ("listening model))} which, unlike the traditional Horspiel
("listening play"), focused on practical problems of contemporary life
presented in a "casuistic" fashion. One of the first of these was
"Gehaltserhohung?! Wo denken Sie hin?" (A Raise?! Where Did You Get
That Idea?), which explores techniques for negotiating an increase in pay
and does so by staging two contrasting versions of the same situation. In
a typescript that refers to this listening model and two others-"Der
Junge sagt einem kein wahres Wort" (The Boy Tells Nothing But Lies)
and "Kannst du mir bis Donnerstag aushelfen?" (Can You Help Me Out
Till Thursday?)-and that may have served as an introduction to the
broadcast by Radio Frankfurt of all three pieces in 1931-1932, Benjamin
explains their common structural logic as follows:
the end the speaker compares the incorrect method with the correct one
and formulates a conclusion. Thus, no listening model has more than four
principle roles: (1) the speaker; (2) the model figure, who 1s the same in the
first and the second parts; (3} the clumsy partner in the first part; (4) the
smart partner in the second part. IS
from his Berlin Childhood around 1900. It aired on January 29, 1933,
the day before the German airwaves transmitted the very first nation-
wide live broadcast, violating every rule and censorship dictate of the
medium-the Nazi torchlight parade celebrating the appointment of Hit-
ler as chancellor of Germany. It is hardly surprising that Benjamin's
last commissioned radio play, a "cross-section~~ through the work of
the Enlightenment writer, astronomer, and physicist Georg Christopb
Lichtenberg (1742-1799), had to be completed in February 1933 in exile
on the Balearic Islands and was never broadcast. Set on the Moon, in a
lunar crater actually named after Lichtenberg, this ironic diasporic alle-
gory tells the tale of the meeting of the "Moon Committee for Earth Re-
search" which is studying the human race, as exemplified by Lichtenberg.
Perplexed by the fact that mankind has amounted to so little, the com-
mittee members review Lichtenberg's case and decide that his achieve-
ments do in fact merit recognition. As Benjamin writes in a corrosive
draft that makes clear the political stakes of this interplanetary perspec-
tive: "The Moon Committee recalls the appropriate manner of celebrat-
ing honored citizens of the Earth who indeed depend on this, so long as
the earth itself is not yet at a stage where it is able to accord its subjects
their civic rights.)'17
It is against this background that we must situate Benjamin's last text
on radio, "On the Minute" (Chapter 45}-a retrospective meditation on
his very first in-studio performance, published in the Frankfurter Zeitung
on December 6, 1934, under the pseudonym Detlef Holz. Beyond its as-
tute characterization of the medium-specific differences between a lecture
delivered to an audience and one spoken over the radio, ~'On the Min-
ute" describes the dramatic consequences of his nervous misreading of
the studio clock. In light of Benjamin's serious interest in new media in
general, and his rather fraught engagement with the medium of radio in
particular, it is tempting to read this account as an allegory of his failed
attempt to transform-that is, politicize-the medium. The essay con-
cludes with a remark by a friend who heard the broadcast and mistook
Benjamin's performative failure (a long silence in the course of his deliv-
ery) as merely an all-too-familiar malfunction of the radio medium: he
assumed that the silence was due simply to a faulty receiver.
But what is this, if not a comment on how what is perceived as a tech-
nological failure is in fact the result of human deficiency? In other words,
the failings of Weimar radio were not a (mal- )function of the technology,
but a result of an all-too-human failure to develop the medium's substan-
tial potential. This fact would also explain Benjamin's curious silence
THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO 351
about his large corpus of radio broadcasts. His reticence thus bespeaks
not an ambivalence about the medium as such, but rather his enormous
frustration at his inability-despite passionate engagement-to trans-
form it into the empowering vehicle he knew it could be.
THOMAS Y. LEVIN AND MICHAEL W. JENNINGS
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Ba ude1aire," in Selected
Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2003), p. 13.
2. Ibid., p. 21. Benjamin often used Bertolt Brecht's term umfunktionieren ("to
refunction"), which means to wrest a tool, an idea, a phrase from its original
context and, while retaining its "use value," to invest it with a new, usually
political capacity.
3. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 364,
Convolute J77,L
4. Benjamin, "Surrealism," in Selected Writings; Volume 2: 1927-1934 (Cam~
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 216-217. IG Farben
(the acronym for Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG, or "Syndi-
cate of Dyestuff Corporations") was a conglomerate of German companies,
founded in the wake of World War I, which expanded from its initial con-
centration on paints and dyes to become the dominant chemical industry. It
was infamous for its manufacture of the poison gas Zyklon B, used in Ger-
man concentration camps during the National Socialist regime.
5. Benjamin, "Karl Kraus," Chapter 40 in this volume.
6. The direct, engaged, "Brechtian" element of Benjamin's thought became,
in the course of the 1930s, a source of tension between Benjamin and his
Frankfurt School colleagues Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. For
an account of these tensions, see Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, et aL, Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Tayim;
afterword by Fredric Jameson (London: New Left Books, 1977).
7. Benjamin, "Notes from Svendborg, Summer 1934," Selected Writings, voL 2,
p.783.
8. See the introductions to Parts I and II in this volume.
9. On the problem of "recognizability," see especially Convolute N of The Ar-
cades Project, and the essay "On the Concept of History" in Selected Writ-
ings, voL 4.
10. Ernst Schoen (1894-1960)-the successor to Hans Flesch, the pioneering first
director of the Radio Frankfurt station, who had left to run the Funk-Stunde
AG (Radio Hour Ltd.) in Berlin-was one of the very few friends Benjamin
352 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
had kept from his schooldays. They remained close despite Schoen's affair
with Benjamin's wife, Dora, in the early 1920s.
11. Besides "Reflections on Radio" (Chapter 41 below), "Theater and Radio"
(Chapter 42 below), "Two Types of Popularity" (Chapter 44 below), and
"On the Minute" (Chapter 45 below), Benjamin's writings on radio include
the fragmentary sketch "Situation im Rundfunk" and an exchange of letters
between Benjamin and Schoen in April 1930 dealing with broadcast mat-
ters. See Gesammelte Schriften, II, 1497ff. (April 4 and April 10, 1930).
12. Sabine Schillcr-Lcrg's pathbreaking 1984 study Walter Benjamin und der
Rtmdfunk: Programmarbeit zwischen Theorie und Praxis (Munich: Saur)
1984} remains the definitive resource on the radiophonic dimension of
Benjamin's corpus; see also her essay "Walter Benjamin, Radio Journalist:
Theory and Practice of Weimar Radio," Journal of Communication inquiry,
13 (1989): 43-50. To the extent that they have survived, Benjamin's texts
for radio are collected in Gesammelte Schriften, VII, 68-294. Examples of
Benjamin's radio broadcasts in translation include "Children's Literature"
(1929), "An Outsider Makes His Mark" (1930), "Bert Brecht" (1931),
"Unpacking My Library" (1931), "Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen
Mauer" (1931), "The Lisbon Earthquake" (1931), and "The Railway Disas-
ter at the Firth of Tay" (1932), in Selected Writings, vo1. 2, pp. 250-256,
305-311,365-371, 486-493, 494-500~ 536-540,563-568. See also Jeffrey
Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
13. Late in his life, Zucker published an account of his radio collaborations with
Benjamin: Wolfgang M. Zucker, "So entstanden die Hormodelle," Die Zeit,
47 (November 24, 1972), Literary Supplement, p. 7.
14. On the history of Weimar radio, see Winfried B. Lerg, Rundfunkpolitik in der
Weimarer Republik, vol. 1 of Hans Bausch, ed., Rundfunk in Deutschland
(Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980). For a discussion of early
German radio in its contemporary cultural context, see Christopher Hailey,
"Rethinking Sound: Music and Radio in Weimar Germany," in Bryan
Gilliam, ed., Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 13-36.
15. Benjamin, "Hormodelle," Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 628.
16. For Brecht's position on radio, see his 1932 text ('The Radio as an Appara-
tus of Communication," in Anton Kaes et aI., eds., The Weimar Republic
Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 615-616.
17. Commissioned by Radio Berlin, which paid Benjamin for the piece even
though it never aired, "Lichtenberg: Ein Querschnitt'~ (Lichtenberg: A
Cross-Section) grew out of a vast bibliography of Lichtenberg'S writings
which Benjamin had been working on since 1931 for the lawyer and
Lichtenberg collector Martin Domke (1892-1980), whom he had known
from his schooldays. See Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 696-720; and VII, 837-
845.
37
JournaliSnl
Alongside all the solemnity that frames Lindbergh's flight across the At-
lantic, we may allow ourselves the arabesque of a joke-the amusing
pendant to the regrettable frivolity with which the Paris evening papers
prematurely announced the triumph of Nungesser and Coli.! The same
papers are now exposed for the second time. They owe this to an idea
conceived by a student at the Ecole Normale-an idea that Karl Kraus
might envy.! As is well known, this Ecole Norma Ie is the celebrated
French state school that every year admits only an elite group of appli-
cants, after the stiffest entrance examinations. On the afternoon of the
first day Charles Lindbergh spent in Paris, someone telephoned all the
newspaper editors with the news that the Ecole Normale had resolved to
declare the aviator «a former student." And all the papers printed the an-
nouncement. Among the medieval Scholastics, there was a school that
described God's omnipotence by saying: He could alter even the past, un-
make what had really happened, and make real what had never hap-
pened. As we can see, in the case of enlightened newspaper editors, God
is not needed for this task; a bureaucrat is all that is required.
Published in Die literarische Welt, June 1927. Gesammelte Schriftell, IV, 454. Translated by
Rodney Livingstone.
Notes
1. On May 21, 1927, the American aviator Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902-
1974) landed in Paris, winning the prize of $25,000 offered by the hotel
owner Raymond Orteig for the first nonstop flight between New York and
353
354 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
Paris. Less than two weeks before Lindbergh's arrival) the French avia-
tors Charles Nungesser (1892-1927) and Franc;ois Coli (1881-1927) disap-
peared over the North Atlantic during their attempt to win the prize.
2. Benjamin refers to the Austrian satirist and critic Karl Kraus {1874-1936}.
See Benjamin's "Karl Kraus" (1931» in this volume.
38
A Critique of the Publishing Industry
Writers are among the most backward sectors of the population when it
comes to exploiting their own social experience. They regard one another
simply as colleagues; their readiness to form judgments and protect their
own interests is, as in all people concerned with status, far prompter to-
ward those beneath them than toward those higher up. They do some-
times manage to obtain a good deal from a publisher. But for the most
part they are unable to give an account of the social function of their
writing, and it follows that in their dealings with publishers they are no
better able to reflect on their function to any effect. There are undoubt-
edly publishers who take a naive view of their own activities and who
genuinely believe that their only moral task is to distinguish between
good books and bad, and that their only commercial task is to distin~
guish books that will sell from those that will not. In general, however, a
publisher has an incomparably clearer idea of the circles to whom he is
selling than writers have of the audience for whom they write. This is
why they are no match for him and are in no position to control him.
And who else should do that? Certainly not the reading public; the activi-
ties of publishers fall outside their field of vision. This leaves the retailer
as the only court of appeal. It is superfluous to remark how problelnatic
retailers' control must be, if only because it is irresponsible and secret.
What is called for is obvious. That it cannot happen overnight, and
that it can never be fully implemented in the capitalist economic system,
should not prevent us from stating it. As a prerequisite for everything
else, what is indispensable is a statistical survey of the capital at work in
the publishing world. From this platform, the investigation should pro-
355
356 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
manuscripts; on the other, "the' reading public. But this view is false
through and through, because the publisher is not in a position to form
an opinion in a vacuum about either the ideal value or the commer-
cial value of a book. In the final analysis, a publisher has to have a close
relationship with specific literary fields-within which he does not need
to follow any particular line-because this is the only way for him to
maintain contact with his reading public) without which his business is
doomed to failure. Obvious though this is, it is no less striking that in
Germany, which possesses a number of physiognomically clearly defined
publishing houses-Insel, Reclam, S. Fischer, Beck, and Rowohlt-no at-
tempt has ever been made to undertake a sociological study, let alone a
critique of these institutions. Yet this would be the only way to measure
the gulf that divides our great publishing houses from those dilettantish
private operations that disappear every year by the dozen, only to be re-
placed by similar firms that open up in their wake. Moreover, it would be
hard to resist the observation that even the straightforward commercial
satisfaction of demand would be, if not exactly laudable, at any rate far
more respectable than a pretentious idealism that floods the market with
meaningless books, tying up capital in them that could be much better in-
vested for nonliterary purposes.
Only experience will enable us to discover the benefits of an annual
critical survey of German publishing policy. Such a critique, in which
literary standards would have to take a back seat to sociological ones-
which, themselves, would be only one aspect-would lay bare the
antinomy between what might be called constructive and organic pub-
lishing policies. A publisher may construct his operations so as to encom-
pass and establish certain sectors. But he can also let his business develop
organically out of loyalty to particular authors or schools. These two ap-
proaches cannot always go hand in hand. This very fact ought to lead a
publisher to make a definite business plan and approach writers with spe-
cific projects. Not that such an approach is entirely unknown. But in an
age in which both economic production and intellectual production have
been rationalized, it should become the norm. One reason there is no sign
of it at present lies in the general underestimation of the role of publish-
ers' referees. The time when a Julius Elias or a Moritz Heimann could ex-
ercise a decisive influence on a publisher appears to be over.' But publish-
ers are making a great mistake when they treat their referees merely as
gatekeepers or else as naysayers, instead of as experts in publishing pol-
icy who are intelligent enough to solicit usable manuscripts rather than
merely sifting through useless ones. And for their part, the editors are
358 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
Notes
1. Julius Elias (1861-1927), German historian of art and literature, was a cham-
pion of Impressionism and the editor of Ibsen's collected works. Moritz
Heimann (1868-1925), senior editor at Fischer Verlag, furthered the ca-
reers of such authors as Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas
Mann.
39
The Newspaper
In our writing, opposites that in happier ages fertilized one another have
become insoluble antinomies. I Thus, science and belles lettres, criticism
and literary production, culture and politics, fall apart in disorder and
lose all connection with one another. The scene of this literary confusion
is the newspaper; its content, "subject matter" that denies itself any other
form of organization than that imposed on it by the reader's impatience.
For impatience is the state of mind of the newspaper reader. And this im-
patience is not just that of the politician expecting information, or of the
speculator looking for a stock tip; behind it smolders the impatience of
people who are excluded and who think they have the right to see their
own interests expressed. The fact that nothing binds the reader more
tightly to his paper than this all-consuming impatience, his longing for
daily nourishment, has long been exploited by publishers, who are con-
stantly inaugurating new columns to address the reader's questions, opin-
ions, and protests. Hand in hand, therefore, with the indiscriminate as-
similation of facts goes the equally indiscriminate assimilation of readers,
who are instantly elevated to collaborators. Here, however, a dialectical
moment lies concealed: the decline of writing in this press turns out to be
the formula for its restoration in a different one. For since writing gains
in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinction between
author and public that the press has maintained (although it is tending to
loosen it through routine) is disappearing in a socially desirable way. The
reader is at all times ready to become a writer-that is, a describer or
even a prescriber. As an expert-not perhaps in a discipline, but perhaps
in a post that he holds-he gains access to authorship. Work itself has its
359
360 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
turn to speak. And its representation in words becomes a part of the abil-
ity that is needed for its exercise. Literary competence is no longer
founded on specialized training but is now based on poly technical educa-
tion) and thus becomes public property. It is, in a word, the literarization
of the conditions of living that masters the otherwise insoluble
antinomies. And it is at the scene of the limitless debasement of the
word-the newspaper, in short-that its salvation is being prepared.
Published in Del' (jffentliche Dienst (Ziirich), March 1934. Gesammelte Schriften, 11, 628-
629. Translated by Rodney Livingstone, A portion of this essay was incorporated into "Der
Alltor als Produzent" (April 1934). A previous translation of that portion, done by Edmund
Jephcott (New York, 1978), was consulted.
Notes
L The following passage is a modification of similar ideas expressed in "Diary
from August 7,1931, to the Day of My Death" (1931), in Benjamin, Se-
lected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1999), pp. 501-506. Benjamin also cites from this essay in "The
Author as Producer" (1934), in this volume.
40
Karl Kraus
361
362 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
linguistic, and political facts? Die Fackel need not trouble itself about
public opinion, for the blood-steeped novelties of this "newspaper" de-
mand a passing of judgment. And on nothing more impetuously, Uf-
gentJy, than on the press itself.
A hatred such as that which Kraus has heaped on journalists can never
be founded simply on wha.t they do-however obnoxious this may be;
this hatrecll1111st have its reason in their very being, whether it be anti-
thetical or akin to his own. In fact, it is both. His most recent portrait, in
its very first sentence, characterizes the journalist as "a person who has
little interest either in himself and his own existence, or in the mere exis-
tence of things, but who feels things only in their relationships, above aU
where these meet in events-and only in this moment become united,
substantial, and alive.~' What we have in this sentence is nothing other
than the negative of an image of Kraus. Indeed, who could have shown a
more burning interest in himself and his own existence than the writer
who is never finished with this subject? Who, a more attentive concern
for the mere existence of things, their origin? Whom does that coinci-
dence of the event with the date, the witness, or the camera cast into
deeper despair than him? In the end, he brought together all his energies
in the struggle against the empty phrase, which is the linguistic expres-
sion of the despotism with which, in journalism, topicality sets up its do-
minion over things.
This side of his struggle against the press is illuminated most vividly
by the life's work of his comrade-in-arms, Adolf Loos. Loos found his
providential adversaries in the arts-and-crafts mongers and architects
who, in the ambit of the "Vienna Workshops," were striving to give birth
to a new art jndustry.3 He sent out his rallying cry in numerous essays-
particularly, in its enduring formulation, in the article "Ornamentation
and Crime, which appeared in 1908 in the Frankfurter Zeitung. The
H
later placed even Nietzsche beside Heine as the betrayer of the aphorism
to the impression. HIt is my opinion," he says of the fonner, "that to the
mixture of elements ... in the decomposing European style of the last
half century, he added psychology, and that the new level of language he
created is the level of essayism, as Heine's was that of feuilletonism."
Both forms appear as symptoms of the chronic sickness of which all atti-
tudes and standpoints merely mark the temperature curve: inauthenticity.
It is from the unmasking of the inauthentic that this battle against the
press arose. "Who was it that brought into the world this great excuse: 'I
can do what I am not'?"
The empty phrase. It, however, is an abortion of technology. "The
newspaper industry, like a factory, demands separate areas for working
and selling. At certain times of day-twice, three times in the bigger
newspapers-a particular quantity of work has to have been procured
and prepared for the machine. And not from just any material: every-
thing that has happened in the meantime, anywhere, in any region of
life-politics, economics, art, and so on-must by now have been
reached and journalistically processed." Or, as Kraus so splendidly sums
it up: "It ought to throw light on the way in which technology, while un-
able to coin new platitudes, leaves the spirit of mankind in the state of be-
ing unable to do without the old ones. In this duality of a changed life
dragging on in unchanged forms, the world's i1ls grow and prosper." In
these words, Kraus deftly tied the knot binding technology to the empty
phrase. True, its untying would have to follow a different pattern, jour-
nalism being clearly seen as the expression of the changed function of
language in the world of high capitalism. The empty phrase of the kind
so relentlessly pursued by Kraus is the label that makes a thought mar-
ketable, the way flowery language, as ornament, gives a thought value
for the connoisseur. But for this very reason the liberation of language
has become identical with that of the empty phrase-its transformation
from reproduction to productive instrument. Die Fackel itself contains
models of this~ even if not the theory: its formulas are the kind that tie up,
never the kind that untie. The intertwining of biblical magniloquence
with stiff~neckcd fixation on the indecencies of Viennese life-this is its
way of approaching phenomena. It is not content to call on the world as
witness to the misdemeanors of a cashier; it must summon the dead from
their graves.-Rightly so. For the shabby, obtrusive abundance of these
scandals in Viennese coffeehouses, the press~ and society is only a minor
manifestation of a foreknowledge that then, more swiftly than anyone
could perceive, suddenly arrived at its true and original subject: two
364 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
months after the outbreak of war, Kraus called this subject by its name in
his speech "In These Great Times/' with which all the demons that in-
habited this possessed man passed into the herd of swine who were his
contemporaries.
In these great times, which I knew when they were small, which will again
be small if they still have time, and which, because in the field of organic
growth such transformations are not possible, we prefer to address as fat
times and truly also as hard times; in these times, when precisely what is
happening could not be imagined, and when what must happen can no
longer be imagined, and if it could it would not happen; in these grave
times that have laughed themselves to death at the possibility of growing
serious and, overtaken by their own tragedy, long for distraction and then,
catching themselves in the act, seek wordsj in these loud times, booming
with the fearful symphony of deeds that engender reports, and of reports
that bear the blame for deeds; in these unspeakable times, you can expect
no word of my own from me. None except this, which just preserves si-
lence from misinterpretation. Too deeply am I awed by the unalterability
of language, the subordination of language to misfortune. In the empires
bereft of imagination, where man is dying of spiritual starvation though
feeling no spiritual hunger, where pens are dipped in blood and swords
in ink, that which is not thought must be done, but that which is only
thought is inexpressible. Expect from me no word of my own. Nor should
I be capable of saying anything new; for in the room where someone
writes, the noise is great, and whether it comes from animals, from chil-
dren, or merely from mortars shall not be decided now. He who addresses
deeds violates both word and deed and is twice despicable. This profession
is not extinct. Those who now have nothing to say because it is the turn of
deeds to speak, talk on. Let him who has something to say step forward
and be silent!
Everything Kraus wrote is like that: a silence turned inside out, a si-
lence that catches the storm of events in its black folds and billows, its
livid lining turned outward. Notwithstanding their abundance, each of
the instances of this silence seems to have broken upon it with the sud-
denness of a gust of wind. Immediately, a precise apparatus of control is
brought into play: through a meshing of oral and written forms, the po-
lemical possibilities of every situation are totally exhausted. With what
precautions this is surrounded can be seen from the barbed wire of edito-
rial pronouncelnents that encircles each edition of Die Fackel, as from
KARL KRAUS 365
the razor-sharp definitions and provisos in the programs and lectures ac-
companying his readings from his own work. The trinity of silence,
knowledge, and alertness constitutes the figure of Kraus the polemicist.
His silence is a dam before which the reflecting basin of his knowledge is
constantly deepened. His alertness permits no one to ask it questions,
forever unwilling to conform to principles offered to it. Its first principle
is, rather, to dismantle the situation, to discover the true question the sit-
uation poses, and to present this in place of any other to his opponents. If
in Johann Peter Hebel we find, developed to the utmost, the constructive,
creative side of tact, in Kraus we see its most destructive and critical
face. 4 But for both, tact is moral alertness-Stassi calls it "conviction re-
fined into dialectics"-and the expression of an unknown convention
more important than the acknowledged one. S Kraus lived in a world in
which the most shameful act was still the faux pas; he distinguishes be-
tween degrees of the monstrous, and does so precisely because his crite-
rion is never that of bourgeois respectability, which, once above the
threshold of trivial misdemeanor, becomes so quickly short of breath that
it can form no conception of villainy on a world-historical scale.
Kraus knew this criterion from the first; moreover, there is no other
criterion for true tact. It is a theological criterion. For tact is not-as nar-
row minds imagine it-the gift of allotting to each, on consideration of
all relationships, what is socially befitting. On the contrary, tact is the ca-
pacity to treat social relationships, though not departing from them, as
natural, even paradisal, relationships, and so not only to approach the
king as if he had been born with the crown on his brow, but the lackey
like an Adam in livery. Hebel possessed this noblesse in his priestly bear-
ing; Kraus, in armor. His concept of creation contains the theological in-
heritance of speculations that last possessed contemporary validity for
the whole of Europe in the seventeenth century. At the theological core of
this concept, however, a transformation has taken place that has caused
it, quite without constraint, to coincide with the cosmopolitan credo of
Austrian worldliness, which made creation into a church in which noth-
ing remained to recall the rite except an occasional whiff of incense in the
mists. Stifter gave this creed its most authentic stamp, and his echo is
heard wherever Kraus concerns himself with animals, plants, children.
Stifter writes:
The stirring of the air, the rippling of water, the growing of corn, the toss-
ing of the sea, the verdure of the earth, the shining of the sky, the twinkling
366 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
Tacitly, in these famous sentences, the holy has given place to the modest
yet questionable concept of law. But this nature of Stifter's and his moral
universe are transparent enough to escape any confusion with Kant, and
to be still recognizable in their core as creation. This insolently secular-
ized thunder and lightning, storms, surf, and earthquakes-cosmic man
has won them back for creation by making them its world-historical an-
swer to the criminal existence of men. Only the span between Creation
and the Last Judgment here finds no redemptive fulfillment, let alone a
historical overcoming. For as the landscape of Austria fills unbroken the
captivating expanse of Stifter's prose, 80 for him, Kraus, the terrible years
of his life are not history but nature, a river condemned to meander
through a landscape of helL It is a landscape in which every day fifty
thousand trees are felled for sixty newspapers. Kraus imparted this infor-
mation under the title "The End.» For the fact that mankind is losing the
fight against the creaturely is to him just as certain as the fact that tech-
nology, once deployed against creation, will not stop short of its master,
either. His defeatism is of a supranational-that is, planetary-kind) and
history for him is merely the wilderness dividing his race from creation,
whose last act is world conflagra tion. As a deserter to the camp of animal
creation-so he measures out this wilderness. "And only the animal that
is conquered by humanity is the hero of life"; never was Adalbert Stifter's
patriarchal credo given so gloomy and heraldic a formulation.
It is in the name of the creature that Kraus again and again inclines to-
KARL KRAUS 367
ward the animal and toward "the heart of all hearts, that of the dog," for
him creation's true mirror of virtue, in which fidelitY, purity, gratitude
smile from times lost and remote. How lamentable that people usurp its
place! These are his followers. More numerously and eagerly than about
their master, they throng with unlovely sniffings about the mortally
wounded opponent. Indeed, it is no accident that the dog is the emblem-
atic beast of this author: the dog, the epitome of the follower, who is
nothing except devoted creature. And the more personal and unfounded
this devotion, the better. Kraus is right to put it to the hardest test. But if
anything makes plain what is infinitely questionable in these creatures, it
is that they are recruited solely from those whom Kraus himself first
called intellectually to Hfe, whom he conceived and convinced in one and
the same act. His testimony can determine only those for whom it can
never become generative.
It is entirely logical that the impoverished, reduced human being of
our day, the contemporary, can seek sanctuary in the temple of living
things only in that most withered form: the form of a private individual.
How much renunciation and how much irony lie in the curious struggle
for the "nerves"-the last root fibers of the Viennese to which Kraus
could still find Mother Earth clinging. "Kraus," writes Robert Scheu,
"discovered a great subject that had never before set in motion the pen of
a journalist: the rights of the nerves. He found that they were just as wor-
thy an object of impassioned defense as were property, house and home,
political party, and constitution. He became the advocate of the nerves
and took up the fight against petty, everyday imitations; but the subject
grew under his hands, became the problem of private life. To defend this
against police, press, morality, and concepts, and ultimately against
neighbors in every form, constantly finding new enemies, became his pro-
fession." Here, if anywhere, is manifest the strange interplay between re-
actionary theory and revolutionary practice that we find everywhere in
Kraus. Indeed, to secure private life against morality and concepts in a
society that perpetrates the political radioscopy of sexuality and family,
of economic and physical existence, in a society that is in the process of
building houses with glass walls) and terraces extending far into the liv-
ing rooms that are no longer living rooms-such a watchword would be
the most reactionary of all, were not the private life that Kraus made it
his business to defend precisely that which, unlike the bourgeois form, is
in strict accordance with this social upheaval; in other words, the private
life that is dismantling itself, openly shaping itself, that of the poor, from
368 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
whose ranks came Peter Altenberg, the agitator, and Adolf Loos. In this
fight-and only in this fight-his followers also have their uses, since it is
they who most sublimely ignore the anonymity with which the satirist
has tried to surround his private existence, and nothing holds them in
check except Kraus's decision to step in person before his threshold and
pay homage to the ruins in which he is a "private individual."
As decisively as he makes his own existence a public issue when the
fight demands it, he has always just as ruthlessly opposed the distinction
between personal and objective criticism-a distinction which has been
used to discredit polemics, and which is a chief instrument of corruption
in our literary and political affairs. That Kraus attacks people less for
what they are than for what they do, more for what they say than for
what they write, and least of all for their books, is the precondition of his
polemical authority, which is able to lift the intellectual universe of an au-
thor-all the more surely the more worthless it is, with confidence in a
truly prestabilized, reconciling harmony-whole and intact from a single
fragment of sentence, a single word, a single intonation. But the coinci-
dence of personal and objective elements, not only in his opponents but
above all in himself, is best demonstrated by the fact that he never puts
forward an opinion. For opinion is false subjectivity that can be sepa-
rated from the person and incorporated in the circulation of commodi-
ties. Kraus has never offered an argument that did not engage his whole
person. Thus, he embodies the secret of authority: never to disappoint.
Authority has no other end than this: it dies or it disappoints. It is not in
the least undermined by what others must avoid: its own despotism, in-
justice, inconsistency. On the contrary, it would be disappointing to ob-
serve how it arrived at its pronouncements-by fairness, for example, or
even self-consistency. ~'For a man," Kraus once said, "being right is not
an erotic matter, and he gladly prefers others' being right to his being
wrong." To prove his manhood in this way is denied to Kraus; his exis-
tence demands that at most the self-righteousness of others is opposed to
his wrongness, and how right he then is to cling to this. "Many will be
right one day. But it will be a rightness resulting from my wrongness to-
day." This is the language of true authority. Insight into its operations
can reveal only one thing: that it is binding, mercilessly binding, toward
itself in the same degree as toward others; that it does not tire of trem-
bling before itself, though never before others; that it never does enough
to satisfy itself, to fulfill its responsibility toward itself; and that this sense
of responsibility never allows him to accept arguments derived from his
private constitution or even from the limits of human capacity, but al-
KARL KRAUS 369
ways only from the matter at hand, however unjust it may be from a
vate point of view.
The characteristic of such unlimited authority has for all time been the
union of legislative and executive power. But it was never a more intimate
union than in the theory of language. This is therefore the most decisive
expression of Kraus's authority. Incognito like Haroun al Rashid, he
passes by night among the sentence constructions of the journals, and,
from behind the petrified fa<;ades of phrases, he peers into the interior,
discovering in the orgies of "black magic" the violation, the martyrdom,
of words:
Is the press a messenger? No: it is the event. Is it speech? No: life. The press
not only claims that the true events are its news of events, but it also brings
about a sinister identification that constantly creates the illusion that deeds
are reported before they are carried out, and frequently also the possibility
of a situation (which in any case exists) that when war correspondents are
not allowed to witness events, soldiers become reporters. I therefore wel-
come the charge that all my life I have overestimated the press. It is not a
servant-How could a servant demand and receive so much? It is the
event. Once again the instrument has run away with us. We have placed
the person who is supposed to report outbreaks of fire, and who ought
doubtless to play the most subordinate role in the State, in power over the
world, over fire and over the house, over fact and over our fantasy.
Authority and word against corruption and magic-thus are the catch-
words distributed in this struggle. It is not idle to offer a prognosis. No
one, Kraus least of all, can leave the utopia of an "objective~' newspaper,
the chimera of an "impartial transmission of news," to its own devices.
The newspaper is an instrument of power. It can derive its value only
from the character of the power it serves; not only in what it represents,
but also in what it does, it is the expression of this power. When, how-
ever, high capitalism defiles not only the ends but also the means of jour-
nalism, then a new blossoming of paradisal, cosmic humanity can no
more be expected of a power that defeats it than a second blooming of
the language of Goethe or Claudius. 7 From the one now prevailing, it will
distinguish itself first of all by putting out of circulation ideals that de-
base the former. This is enough to give a measure of how little Kraus
would have to win or lose in such a struggle, of how unerringly Die
Packel would illuminate it. To the ever-repeated sensations with which
the daily press serves its public, he opposes the eternally fresh "news" of
the history of creation: the eternally renewed, uninterrupted lament.
370 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
2. Demon
It is deeply rooted in Kraus's nature, and the stigma of every debate con-
cerning him, that all apologetic arguments miss their mark. The great
work of Leopold Liegler springs an apologetic posture. To certify
Kraus as an "ethical personality" is his first objective. This cannot be
done. The dark background from which Kraus's image detaches itself is
not formed by his contemporaries, but is the primeval world [Vorwelt],
or the world of the demon. The light of the day of Creation falls on
him-thus he emerges from this darkness. But not in all parts; others re-
main that are more deeply immersed in it than one suspects. An eye that
cannot adjust to this darkness will never perceive the outline of this fig-
ure. On it will be wasted all the gestures that Kraus tirelessly makes in
his unconquerable need to be perceived. For, as in the fairy tale, the
demon in Kraus has made vanity the expression of his being. The
demon's solitude, too, is felt by him who gesticulates wildly on the hid-
den hill: "Thank God nobody knows my name is Rumpelstiltskin." JlIst
as this dancing demon is never still, in Kraus eccentric reflection is in con-
tinuous uproar. "The patient of his gifts," Berthold Viertel called him. In
fact, his capacities are maladies; and over and above the real ones, his
vanity makes him a hypochondriac.
If he does not see his reflection in himself, he sees it in the adversary at
his His polemics have been, from the first, the most intimate inter-
mingling of a technique of unmasking that works with the most ad-
vanced means, and a self-expressive art that works with the most archaic.
But in this zone, too, ambiguity, the demon, is manifest: self-expression
and unmasking merge in it as self-unmasking. Kraus has said, "Anti-Sern-
itism is the mentality that offers up and means seriously a tenth of the
jibes that the stock-exchange wit holds ready for his own blood"; he
thereby indicates the nature of the relationship of his own opponents to
himself. There is no reproach to him, no vilification of his person, that
cOl1ld not find its most legitimate formulation in his own writings, in
those passages where self-reflection is raised to self-admiration. He will
pay any to get himself talked about, and is always jl1stified by the
success of these speculations. If style is the power to move 111
KARL KRAUS 371
the props with which the quoter unmasks himself mimetically. Admit-
tedly, what emerges in just this connection is how closely the cruelty of
the satirist is linked to the ambiguous modesty of the interpreter, which
in his public readings is heightened beyond comprehension. "To
creep"-this is the term used, not without cause, for the lowest kind of
flattery; and Kraus creeps into those he impersonates, in order to anni11i-
late them. Has courtesy here become the mimicry of hate, hate the mim-
icry of courtesy? However that may be, both have attained perfection,
absolute pitch. " of which there is so much talk in Kraus in
such opaque allusions, here has its seat. His protests against letters,
printed matter, documents are nothing but the defensive reaction of a
man who is himself implicated. But what implicates him so deeply is
more than deeds and misdeeds; it is the language of his fellow men. His
passion for imitating them is at the same time the expression of and the
struggle against this implication, and also the cause and the result of
that ever-watchful guilty conscience in which alone the demon is in his
element.
The economy of his errors and weaknesses-more a fantastic edifice
than the totality of his gifts-is so delicately and precisely organized that
all outward confirmation only disrupts it. Well it may, if this man is to be
certified as the "pattern of a harmoniously and perfectly formed human
type," if is to appear-in a term as absurd stylistically as semanti-
cally-as a philanthropist, so that anyone listening to his "hardness"
with "the ears of the soul" would find the reason for it in compassion.
No! This incorruptible, piercing, resolute assurance does not spring from
the noble poetic or humane disposition that his followers are so fond of
attributing to him. How utterly banal, and at the same time how funda-
mentally wrong, is their derivation of his hatred from love, when it is ob-
vious how much more elemental are the forces here at work: a humanity
that is only an alternation of malice and sophistry, sophistry and malice,
a nature that is the highest school of aversion to mankind and a pity that
is alive only when interlaced with vengeance. "Oh, had I only been left
the choice / to carve the dog or the butcher, / I should have chosen. n
Nothing is more perverse than to try to fashion him after the image of
what he loves. Rightly, Kraus the "timeless world-disturber" has been
confronted with the "eternal world-improver," on whom benign glances
not infrequently fall.
"When the age laid hands upon itself, he was the hands," Brecht said.
Few insights can stand beside this, and certainly not the comment of his
friend Adolf Loos. "Kraus," he declares, "stands on the threshold of a
KARL KRAUS 373
he one day threw himself into the arms of the Catholic church.
In those biting minuets that Kraus whistled to the chasse-croise of Ju-
stitia and Venus, the leitmotif-that the philistine knows nothing of
love-is articulated with a sharpness and persistence that have a counter-
part only in the corresponding attitude of decadence in the proclamation
y
of art for art's sake. For it was precisely art for art's sake, which for
decadent movement applies to love as well, that linked as
closely as possible to craftsmanship, to technique, and allowed poetry to
shine at its brightest only against the foil of hack writing, as it made love
stand out perversion. "Penury can turn every man into a journal-
ist, but not every woman into a prostitute." In this formulation Kraus be-
trayed the false bottom of his polemic against journalism. It is much less
376 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
the philanthropist, the enlightened friend of man and nature~ who un-
leashed this implacable struggle than the literary expert, artiste~ indeed
the dandy, whose ancestor is Baudelaire. Only Baudelaire hated, as Kraus
did, the satiety of healthy common sense, and the compromise that intel-
lectuals made with it in order to find shelter in journaJism. Journalism is
betrayal of the literary life, of mind, of the demon. Idle chatter is its true
substance, and every feuilleton poses anew the insoluble question of the
relationship between the forces of stupidity and malice, whose expression
is gossip. It is, fundamentally, on the complete agreement of two forms of
existence-life under the aegis of mere mind, and life under the aegis of
mere sexuality-that the solidarity of the man of letters with the whore
is founded, a solidarity to which Baudelaire's existence is once again
the most inviolable testimony. So Kraus can call by their name the laws
of his own craft, intertwined with those of sexuality, as he did in Die
Chinesische Mauer [The Great Wall of China]. Man "has wrestled a
thousand times with the other, who perhaps not live but whose vic-
tory over him is certain. Not because he has superior qualities but be-
cause is the other, the latecomer, who brings woman the joy of variety
and who will triumph as the last in the sequence. But they wipe it from
her brow like a bad dream, and want to be the first." Now, if language-
this we read between the lines-is a woman, how far the author is re-
moved, by an unerring instinct, from those who hasten to be the first
with her; how multifariously he forms his thought, thus inciting her with
intuition rather than slaking her with knowledge; how he lets hatred,
contempt, malice ensnare one another; how he slows his step and seeks
the detour of followership, in order finally to end her joy in variety with
the last thrust that Jack holds in readiness for Lulu! II
life of letters is existence under the of mere mind, as prosti-
tution is existence under the aegis of mere sexuality. The delnon, how-
ever, who leads the whore to the street the man of letters to the
courtroom. This is therefore) for Kraus, the forum that it has always been
for the great journalist-for a Carrel, a Paul-Louis Courier, a Lassalle.
Evasion of the genuine and demonic function of mere mind, to be a dis-
turber of the peace; abstention from attacking the whore from behind-
Kraus sees this double omission as defining the journalist.-Robert Scheu
rightly perceived that for Kraus prostitution was a natural form, not a so-
cial deformation, of female sexuality. Yet it is only the interlacing of sex-
ual with commercial intercourse that constitutes the character of prosti-
tution. It is a natural phenomenon as much in terms of its natural
economic aspect (since it is a manifestation of commodity exchange) as in
KARL KRAUS 377
3. Monster [Unmensch]
Satire is the only legitimate form of regional art. This, however, was not
what people meant by calling Kraus a Viennese satirist. Rather, they were
378 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
attempting to shunt him for as long as possible onto this siding, where his
work could be assimilated into the great store of literary consumer
goods. The presentation of Kraus as a satirist can thus yield the deepest
insight both into what he is and into his most melancholy caricatures.
For this reason, he was at pains from the first to distinguish the genuine
satirist from the scribblers who make a trade of mockery and who, in
their invectives, have little more in mind than giving the public something
to laugh about. In contrast, the great type of the satirist never had firmer
ground under his feet than amid a generation about to mount tanks and
put on gas masks, a mankind that has run out of tears but not of laughter.
In him civilization prepares to survive, if it must, and communicates with
him in the true mystery of satire, which consists in the devouring of the
adversary. The satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received
into civilization. His recollection of his origin is not without filial piety,
so that the proposal to eat people has become an essential constituent of
his inspiration, from Jonathan Swift's pertinent project concerning the
use of the children of the less wealthy classes, to Leon Bloy's suggestion
that landlords of insolvent Jodgers be conceded a right to the sale of the
lodgers' flesh. In such directives, great satirists have taken the measure of
the humanity of their fellow men. "Humanity, culture, and freedom are
precious things that cannot be bought dearly enough with blood, under-
standing, and human dignity" -thus Kraus concludes the dispute be-
tween the cannibal and human rights. One should compare his formula-
tion with Marx's treatment of the "Jewish question," in order to judge
how totally this playful reaction of 1909-the reaction against the classi-
cal ideal of humanity-was likely to become a confession of materialist
humanism at the first opportunity. Admittedly, one would need to under-
stand Die Fackel from the first number on, literally word for word, to
predict that this aesthetically oriented journalism, without sacrificing or
gaining a single motif, was destined to become the political prose of
1930. For this it had to thank its partner, the press, which disposed of hu-
manity in the way to which Kraus alludes in these words: "Human rights
are the fragile toy that grownups like to trample on and so will not give
up." Thus, drawing a boundary between the private and public spheres,
which in 1789 was supposed to inaugurate freedom, became a mockery.
Through the newspaper, says Kierkegaard, "the distinction between pub-
lic and private affairs is abolished in private-public prattle ... ')
To open a dialectical debate between the public and private zones that
commingle demonically in prattle, to lead concrete humanity to victory-
this is operetta's purpose, which Kraus discovered and which in
KARL KRAUS 379
Offenbach he raised to its most expressive level. 12 Just as prattle seals the
enslavement of language through stupidity, so operetta transfigures stu-
pidity through music. To fail to recognize the beauty of feminine stupid-
ity was for Kraus always the blackest philistinism. Before its radiance the
chimeras of progress evaporate. And in Offenbach's operettas the bour-
geois trinity of the true, the beautiful, and the good is brought together,
freshly rehearsed and with musical accompaniment, in its star turn on the
trapeze of idiocy. Nonsense is true, stupidity beautiful, weakness good.
This is Offenbach's secret: how in the deep nonsense of public disci-
pline-whether it be that the upper ten thousand, a dance floor, or a
military state-the deep sense of private licentiousness opens a
eye. And what, in of language, might have been judicial strict-
ness, renunciation, discrimination, becomes cunning and ob-
struction and postponement, in the form of music.-Music as pre-
server of the moral Music as the police of a world of pleasure?
Yes, this is the splendor that falls on the old Paris ballrooms, on the
Grande Chaumiere, on the Closerie des Lilas in Kraus's of La
Vie parisienne. "And the inimitable duplicity of this music, which simul-
taneously puts a plus and a minus sign before everything it says, betray-
ing idyll to parody, mockery to lyricism; the abundance of musical de-
vices ready to perform all duties, uniting pain and pleasure-this gift is
here developed to its purest pitch." L3 Anarchy as the only international
constitution that is moral and worthy of man becomes the true music of
these operettas. The voice of Kraus speaks, rather than sings~ this inner
music. It whistles bitingly about the peaks of dizzying stupidity, reverber-
ates shatteringly from the abyss of the absurd; and in Frescata's lines it
hums, like the wind in the chimney, a requiem to the generation of our
grandfathers.-Offenbach's work is touched by the pangs of death. It
contracts, rids itself of everything superfluous, passes through the dan-
gerous span of this existence and reemerges saved, more real than before.
For wherever this fickle voice is heard, the lightning flashes of advertise-
ments and the thunder of the Metro cleave the Paris of omnibuses and
gas jets. And the work gives him all this in return. For at moments it is
transformed into a curtain, and with the wild gestures of a fairground
showman with which he accompanies the whole performance, Kraus
tears aside this curtain and suddenly reveals the interior of his cabinet of
horrors. There they stand: Schober, Bekessy, and the other skits, no
longer enemies but curiosities, heirlooms from the world of Offenbach or
Nestroy-no, oJder, rarer stiH, lares of the troglodytes, household gods of
stupidity from prehistoric times. H Kraus, when he reads in public, does
380 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
not speak the words of Offenbach or Nestroy: they speak from him. And
now and then a breathtaking, half-blank, half-glittering whoremonger's
glance falls on the crowd before him, inviting them to the unholy mar-
riage with the masks in which they do not recognize themselves, and for
the last time invokes the evil privilege of ambiguity.
It is only now that the satirist's true face, or rather true mask, is re-
vealed. It is the mask of Timon the misanthrope. "Shakespeare had fore-
knowledge of everything"-yes. But above all of Kraus. Shakespeare por-
trays inhuman figures-Timon the most inhuman of them-and says:
Nature would produce such a creature if she wished to create something
befitting the world as your kind have fashioned it, something worthy of
it. Such a creature is Timon; such is Kraus. Neither has, or wants, any-
thing in common with men. "An animal feud is on, and so we renounce
humanity"; from a remote village in the Swiss mountains Kraus throws
down this challenge to mankind, and Timon wants only the sea to weep
at his grave. Like Timon's verse, Kraus's poetry stands opposite the colon
of the drarnatis persona~ of the role. A Fool, a Caliban, a Timon-no
lTIOre thoughtful, no more dignified or better-but, nevertheless, his own
Shakespeare. All the figures thronging about him should be seen as origi-
nating in Shakespeare. Always he is the model, whether Kraus is speak-
ing with Otto Weininger about man or with Peter Altenberg about
women, with Frank Wedekind about the stage or with Adolf Loos about
food, with Else Lasker-Schuler about the Jews or with Theodor Haecker
about the Christians. The power of the demon ends at this realm. His
semihuman or subhuman traits are conquered by a truly inhuman being,
a monster. Kraus hinted at this when he said, "In me a capacity for psy-
chology is united with the greater capacity to ignore the psychological. ')
It is the inhuman quality of the actor that he claims for himself in these
words: the cannibal quality. For in each of his roles the actor assimilates
bodily a human being, and in Shakespeare's baroque tirades-when the
cannibal is unmasked as the better man, the hero as an actor, when
Timon plays the rich man, Hamlet the madman-it is as if the actor's lips
were dripping blood. So Kraus, following Shakespeare's example, wrote
himself parts that let him taste blood. The endurance of his convictions is
persistence in a role, in its stereotypes, its cues. His experiences are, in
their entirety, nothing but this: cues. This is why he insists on them, de~
manding them from existence like an actor who never forgives a partner
for denying him his cue.
Kraus's public readings of Offenbach, his recital of couplets from
Nestroy, are bereft of all musical means. The word never gives way to the
KARL KRAUS 381
"You came from the origin-the origin is the goal" is received by the
"Dying Man" as God's comfort and promise. To this Kraus alludes here,
as does Berthold Viertel when, in the same way as Kraus, he calls the
world a "wrong, deviating, circuitous way back to paradise." "And so,"
he continues in this most important passage of his essay on Kraus, "I at-
tempt to interpret the development of this odd talent: intellectuality as a
deviation ... leading back to immediacy; publicity-a false trail back to
language; satire-a detour to the poem." This '''origin)'-the seal of au-
thenticity on the phenomenon-is the subject of a discovery that has a
curious element of recognition. The theater of this philosophical recogni-
tion scene in Kraus's work is poetry, and its language is rhyme: "A word
that never tells an untruth at its origin)' and that, just as blessedness has
its origin at the end of time, has its at end of the line. Rhyme-two
putti bearing the demon to its grave. It died at its origin because it came
into the world as a hybrid of mind and sexuality. Its sword and shield-
concept and guilt-have fallen from its hands to become emblems be-
neath the feet the angel that killed it. This is a poetic, martial angel
with a foil in his hand, as only Baudelaire knew him: "practicing alone
fantastic swordsmanship,"
Flairant dans tOllS les coins les hasards de la rime)
Trebuchant sur les mots comme sur les paves,
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis 10ngtemps reves.
name, it draws all creatures up to it. In "The Forsaken" the most ardent
interpenetration of language and eros, as Kraus experienced them, ex-
presses itself with an innocent grandeur that recalls the perfect Greek epi-
grams and vase pictures. "The Forsaken" are forsaken by each other.
But-this is their great solace-also with each other. On the threshold be-
tween dying and rebirth, they pause. With head turned back, joy "in un-
heard-of fashion" takes her eternal leave; turned from her, the soul "in
unwonted fashion" silently sets foot in an alien world. Thus forsaken
with each other are joy and soul, but also language and eros, also rhyme
and name.-To "The Forsaken" the fifth volume of Words in Verse is
dedicated. Only the dedication now reaches them, and this is nothing
other than an avowal of Platonic love, which does not satisfy its desire in
what it loves, but possesses and holds it in the name. This self-obsessed
man knows no other self-renunciation than giving thanks. His love is not
possession, but gratitude. Thanking and dedicating-for to thank is to
put feelings under a name. How the beloved grows distant and lustrous,
how her minuteness and her glow withdraw into name: this is the only
experience of love known to Words in Verse. And, therefore, "To live
without women, how easy. / To have lived without women, how hard."
From within the linguistic compass of the name, and only from within
it, can we discern Kraus's basic polemical procedure: citation. To quote a
word is to call it by its name. So Kraus's achievement exhausts itself at its
highest level by making even the newspaper quotable. He transports it to
his own sphere, and the elnpty phrase is suddenly forced to recognize
that even in the deepest dregs of the journals it is not safe from the voice
that swoops on the wings of the word to drag it from its darkness. How
wonderful if this voice approaches not to punish but to save, as it does on
the Shakespearean wings of the lines in which, before the town of Arras,
someone sends word home of how in the early morning, on the last
blasted tree beside the fortifications, a lark began to sing. A single line,
and not even one of his, is enough to enable Kraus to descend, as savior,
into this inferno, and insert a single italicization: "It was a nightingale
and not a lark which sat there on the pomegranate tree and sang."17 In
the quotation that both saves and punishes, language proves the matrix
of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively
from its context, but precisely thereby cans it back to its origin. It ap-
pears, now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously, in the struc-
ture of a new text. As rhyme, it gathers the similar into its aura; as name,
it stands alone and expressionless. In citation the two realms-of origin
and destruction-justify themselves before language. And conversely,
KARL KRAUS 385
The materialist humanism which Marx here opposes to its classical coun-
terpart manifests itself for Kraus in the child, and the developing human
being raises his face against the idols of ideal man-the romantic child of
nature as much as the dutiful citizen. For the sake of such development,
386 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
The fact, however, that the developing man actually takes form not
within the natural sphere but in the sphere of mankind, in the struggle for
liberation, and that he is recognized by the posture which the fight with
exploitation and poverty stamps upon him, that there is no idealistic but
only a materialistic deliverance from myth, and that at the origin of cre-
ation stands not purity but purification-all this did not leave its trace on
Kraus's materialist humanism until very late. Only wben despairing did
he discover in citation the power not to preserve but to purify, to tear
from context, to destroy; the only power in which hope still resides that
something might snrvive this age-because it was wrenched from it.
Here we find confirmation that all the martial energies of this man are
innate civic virtues; only in the melee did they take on their combative as-
pect. But already no one recognizes them any more; no one can grasp
the necessity that compelled this great bourgeois character to become a
comedian, this guardian of Goethean linguistic values a polemicist, or
why this irreproachably honorable man went berserk. This, however,
was bound to happen, since he thought fit to change the world by begin-
ning with his own class, in his own home, in Vienna. And when, admit-
ting to himself the futility of his enterprise, he abruptly broke it off, he
placed the matter back in the hands of nature-this time destructive not
creative nature:
respect astonishing, but incomprehensible only in the fact that it has not
been preserved in Die Faclwl's largest type, and that this most powerful
of postwar bourgeois prose must be sought in the now-vanished issue of
November 1920:
What I mean is-and now for once I shall speak plainly to this dehuman-
ized brood of owners of property and blood, and to all their followers, be-
cause they do not understand German and from my "contradictions" are
incapable of deducing my true intention ...-what I mean is, communism
as a reality is only the obverse of their own life-violating ideology, admit-
tedly by the grace of a purer ideal origin, a deranged remedy with a purer
ideal purpose: the devil take its practice, but God preserve it as a constant
threat over the heads of those who have property and would like to com-
pel all others to preserve it, driving them, with the consolation that
worldly goods are not the highest, to the fronts of hunger and patriotic
honor. God preserve it, so that this rabble who are beside themselves with
brazenness do not grow more brazen still, and so that the society of those
exclusively entitled to enjoyment, who believe they are loving subordinate
humanity enough if they give it syphilis, may at least go to bed with a
nightmare! So that at least they may lose their appetite for preaching mo-
rality to their victims, take less delight in ridiculing them!
Notes
1. Gustav Gluck (1902-1973), perhaps Benjamin's closest friend during the
19305, was director of the foreign section of the Reichskreditgesellschaft
(Imperial Credit Bank) in Berlin until 1938. He was able to arrange the
transfer to Paris of the fees Benjamin received from his occasional contribu-
tions to German newspapers until 1935. In 1938 Gluck emigrated to Argen-
tina; after World War II, he was a board member of the Dresdner Bank.
2. The Austrian satirist and critic Karl Kraus (1874-1936) founded the Vien-
nese journal Die Facket in 1899 and edited it until shortly before his death.
In the journal's early years, its contributors included the architect Adolf
Loos (see note 3 below) and the composer Arnold Schonberg, but, after De-
cember 1911, Kraus wrote the entire contents of the journal himself.
3. The Austrian architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933) was a trenchant critic of the
attempts of the Wiener Werkstattc [Vienna WorkshopsJ to unite the fine and
the decorative arts by turning the house into a richly ornamented "total
work of art." The Wiener Werkstatte produced furniture, jewelry, textiles,
and household objects.
4. Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826) was a German journalist and author who
developed a number of innovative short prose forms during his work as edi-
tor and chief writer at the Badischer Landkale1ldar, an annual publication
KARL KRAUS 389
not unlike the American Old Farmer's Almanac. See Benjamin's two 1926
essays 011 Hebel in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 428-434.
5. Otto Stassi, Lebensform und Dichtu11gsform [Life Form and Poetic Form]
{Munich, 1914).
6. This quotation by the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) comes
from the introduction to his Bunte Steine (1853), a volume of short stories.
Stifter's prose is characterized by an unusually graceful style and a reverence
for natural processes. See Benjamin's essay "Stifter" (1918), in Benjamin, Se-
lected Writings, vol. 1, pp. 111-113.
7. Matthias Claudius (1740-1815), German poet, was perhaps the most nota-
ble poetic voice between Klopstock and Goethe. He served as editor of the
important journal Der Wandsbecker Bote.
8. Johann Nestroy (1801-1862), Austrian dramatist and character actor, used
satire, irony, and parody as weapons against the newly rising bourgeoisie.
His best-known work is Einen Jux will er siGh mach en (He Intends to Have a
Fling; 1842), adapted by Thornton Wilder as The Matchmaker and later
turned into the musical play and film Hello, Dolly! Jacques Offenbach
(1819-1880), German-born musician and composer, produced many suc-
cessful operettas and operas bouffes in Paris, where he managed the Galte-
Lyrique (1872-1876).
9. Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Humankind) is the title of
Kraus's mammoth apocalyptic drama, which sought to expose the bureau-
cratic mediocrity and political criminality that he believed had brought Eu-
rope to the Great War. The play was published in its final form in 1923. Due
to its length (it has 220 scenes and approximately 500 characters), it was
first performed in Vienna only in 1964-and even then in a shortened ver-
sion.
10. "Vienna Genesis" refers to an illuminated manuscript-a copy of the book of
Genesis-in the collection of the Austrian National Library. Its dating (early
Byzantine, perhaps 500-600 A.D.) and place of origin (Constantinople 01'
Syria) are disputed. The linkage of Expressionism and late antiquity had
been a concern of Benjamin's from the time he read the Austrian art histo-
rian Alois Riegl's study Die slJl:itl'omische Kunst-Industrie (The Late Roman
Art Industry; 1901) during the years of the First World War.
11. Benjamin refers here to the "Lulu" cycle, two dramas by the German play-
wright Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), In El'dgeist (Earth Spirit; 1895) and
Die Buchse del' Pandora {Pandora'S Box; 1904), the conflict of a desiccated,
hypocritical bourgeois morality with a personal and, above all, sexual free-
dom is played out in the fate of the amoral femme fatale Lulu. Alban Berg
based his opera Lulu on Wedekind's plays.
12. Kraus translated and edited Offenbach's farcical operetta La vie pal'isienne
(libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy), which premiered at the
390 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
Palais Royal in 1886. See Benjamin's "Karl Kraus Reads Offenbach" (1928)
in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-.1934 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 110-112.
13. Karl Kraus, "Offenbach Renaissance," Die Fackel, 557-558 (April 1927):
47.
14. The Austrian politician Johann Schober (1874-1932) was twice prime minis-
ter of Austria (1921-1922 and 1929-1930). He served for many years as Vi-
enna's chief of police, and was responsible for the bloody suppression of
workers' demonstrations in 1927. Imre Bekessy (1887-1951) founded the
gossipy and sensationalist Vienna daily Die Stunde (The Hour) in 1923. Al-
fred Kerr (Alfred Klempererj 1867-1948) was Berlin's most prominent and
influential theater critic. All were targets of Kraus's polemics in the 1920s.
15. "George school" refers to the circle of conservative intellectuals around the
poet Stefan George (1868-1933), whose high-modernist verse appeared in
such volumes as Das .lahr der Seele (The Year of the Soul; 1897) and Der
siebente Ring (The Seventh Ring; 1907). George's attempt to "purify" Ger-
man language and culture exerted a powerful influence on younger poets.
16. The Austrian comic dramatist Ferdinand Raimund (1790-1836) was-along
with Johann Nestroy-among the preeminent playwrights of Vienna in the
mid-nineteenth century. The Austrian actor Alexander Girardi (1850-1918)
was famous for his performances in Raimund's plays.
17. Kraus cites this line in Die Fackel and attributes it to an anonymous Belgian
soldier. Granat means "pomegranate"; Granate, "grenade" or "shell.'~
18. This is the conclusion of Karl Marx's 1844 review of Bruno Bauer's "On the
Jewish Question."
19. Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, II (Words in Verse, II).
20. Benjamin discusses the German writer Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) in his es-
says "Experience and Poverty" (1933), in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol.
2, pp. 733-734, and "On Scheerbart" (late 1930s or 1940), in Benjamin, Se-
lected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2003), pp. 386-388. The New Angel is Paul I<lee's ink wash
drawing Angelus Novus (1920), which Benjamin owned for a time.
21. Benjamin refers to the German scientist, satirist, and aphorist Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799),
41
Reflections on Radio
The crucial failing of this institution has been to perpetuate the funda-
mental separation between practitioners and the public, a separation that
is at odds with its technological basis. A child can see that it is in the
spirit of radio to put as many people as possible in front of a microphone
on every possible occasion; the public has to be turned into the witnesses
of interviews and conversations in which now this person and now that
one has the opportunity to make himself heard. Whereas in Russia they
are in the process of drawing out the logical implications of the different
apparatuses, with us the mindless notion of the "offering") under whose
aegis the practitioner presents himself to the public, still has the field to
itself. What this absurdity has led to after long years of practice is that
the public has become quite helpless, quite inexpert in its critical reac-
tions, and has seen itself more or less reduced to sabotage (switching off).
There has never been another genuine cultural institution that has failed
to authenticate itself by taking advantage of its own forms or technol-
ogy-using them to create in the public a new expertise. This was as true
of the Greek theater as of the Meistersingers, as true of the French stage
as of orators from the pulpit. But it was left to the present age, with its
unrestrained development of a consumer mentality in the operagoer, the
novel reader, the tourist, and other similar types to convert them into
dull, inarticulate masses-and create a "public" (in the narrower sense of
the word) that has neither yardsticks for its judgments nor a language for
its feelings. This barbarism has reached its zenith in the attitude of the
masses toward radio programs, and now seems on the point of reversing
itself. Only one thing is needed for this: listeners must direct their re-
391
392 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
flections at their own real reactions, in order to sharpen and justify them.
This task would of course be insoluble if their behavior really were-as
radio managers and especially presenters like to imagine-more or less
impossible to calculate, or simply dependent upon the content of the pro-
grams. But the most superficial reflection proves the opposite. No reader
has ever closed a just-opened book with the finality with which the lis-
tener switches off the radio after hearing perhaps a minute and a half of a
talk. The problem is not the remoteness of the subject matter; in many
cases, this might be a reason to keep listening for a while before making
up one's mind. It is the voice, the diction, and the language-in a word,
the formal and technical side of the broadcast-that so frequently make
the most desirable programs unbearable for the listener. Conversely, for
the same reason but very rarely, programs that might seem totally irrele-
vant can hold the listener spellbound. (There are speakers who can hold
your attention while reading weather forecasts.) Accordingly, it is the
technical and formal aspects of radio that will enable the listener to train
himself and to outgrow this barbarism. The matter is really quite obvi-
ous. We need only reflect that the radio listener, unlike every other kind
of audience, welcomes the human voice into his house like a visitor.
Moreover, he will usually judge that voice just as quickly and sharply as
he would a visitor. Yet no one tells it what is expected of it, what the lis-
tener will be grateful for or will find unforgivable, and so on. This can be
explained only with reference to the indolence of the masses and the na1'-
row-mindedness of broadcasters. Not that it would be an easy task to de-
scribe the way the voice relates to the language used-for this is what is
involved. But if radio paid heed only to the arsenal of impossibilities that
seems to grow by the day-if, for example, it merely provided from a set
of negative assumptions a typology of comic errors made by speakers-it
would not only improve the standard of its programs but would win lis-
teners over to its side by appealing to them as experts. And this is the
most important point of all.
Fragment written no later than November 1931; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime.
Gesammelte Schriften, II, 1506-1507. Translated by Rodney Livingstone.
42
Theater and Radio
393
394 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
But not hopeless to debate with them. This is the only thing that can
be expected from the progressive stage. Brecht, the first to have devel-
oped its theory, calls it "epic." This Epic Theater is utterly matter-of-fact,
not least in its attitude toward technology. This is not the place to ex-
pound on the theory of Epic Theater, let alone to show how its discovery
and construction of gestus is nothing but a retranslation of the methods
of montage-so crucial in radio and film-from a technological process
to a human one. It is enough to point out that the principle of Epic The-
ater, like that of montage, is based on interruption. The only difference is
that here interruption has a pedagogic function and not just the character
of a stimulus. It brings the action to a halt, and hence compels the listener
to take up an attitude toward the events on the stage and forces the actor
to adopt a critical view of bis role.
The Epic Theater brings the dramatic Gesamtkunstwerk into confron-
tation with the dramatic laboratory. It returns with a fresh approach to
the grand old opportunity of theater-namely, to the focus on the people
who are present. In the center of its experiments stands the human being
in our crisis. It is the human being who has been eliminated from radio
and film-the human being (to put it a little extremely) as the fifth wheel
on the carriage of its technology. And this reduced, debarred human be-
ing is subjected to various trials and judged. What emerges fro111 this ap-
proach is that events are alterable not at their climactic points, not
through virtue and decision-making, but solely in their normal, routine
processes, through reason and practice. What Epic Theater means is the
attempt to take the smallest possible units of human behavior and use
them to construct what was known as "action" in the Aristotelian theory
of drama.
Thus, Epic Theater challenges the theater of convention. It replaces
culture with training, distraction with group formation. As to this last,
everyone who has followed the development of radio will be aware of the
efforts made recently to bring together into coherent groups listeners
who are similar to one another in terms of their social stratification, in-
terests, and environment generally. In like fashion, Epic Theater attempts
to attract a body of interested people who, independently of criticism and
advertising, wish to see realized on the stage their most pressing con-
cerns, including their political concerns, in a series of "actions" (in the
above-mentioned sense). Remarkably enough, what this has meant in
practice is that older plays-such as Eduard II [Edward II] and
Dreigroschenoper [Threepenny Opera]-have been radically trans-
formed, while more recent ones-such as Der jasager and Det
396 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
Notes
1. Ernst Schoen (1894-1960), German musician, poet, and translator, was the
artistic director of a major radio station in Frankfurt. Schoen provided
Benjamin with opportunities to present his work on the radio during the
19205 and early 19308.
2. Der Lindberghflug is a cantata (with text by Brecht and music by Kurt Weil1)
based on Breches radio play Der Plug der Lindberghs (The Flight of the
Lindberghs; 1930), which was later renamed Der Ozeanflug (The Flight
over the Ocean). Brecht wrote the didactic plays Das Badener Lehrstiicl?
vorn Einverstandnis (The Baden-Baden Didactic Play of Acquiescence;
1929), Dey Jasager (He Who Said Yes; 1930), and Der Neinsager (He Who
Said No; 1930) for performance by amateur, politically engaged troupes.
3. The dramatist Elisabeth Hauptmann (1897-1973) began collaborating with
Brecht in 1.924. She emigrated in 1933, first to France and then to the United
States.
4. Zerstreuung means not only "entertainment" but also "distraction," a sense
to which Benjamin turns later in this essay.
5. Benjamin is referring to Brecht's plays Leben Eduards des Zweiten von En-
gland (Life of Edward the Second of England; 1924) and Die
Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera; 1928).
43
Conversation with Ernst Schoen
397
398 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
This part of Schoen's agenda has already won the support of Bert Brecht,
who will be a partner in these ventures. 7
Schoen does not, by the way, think complacently of anointing the
technical achievements-the sort one hears every month in the radio-as
"cultural treasures." No, he keeps a cool head about such matters and is,
for example, completely aware of the fact that television-which repre-
CONVERSATION WITH ERNST SCHOEN 399
Yes, in theory. But this presupposes perfect transmitters [Sender] and per-
fect receivers, which do not exist in practice. And this determines the task
of radio music: it must take into account specific losses of quality that
are still an unavoidable aspect of all broadcasting today. Moreover (and
here Schoen aligns himself with Scherchen),lO the grounds-call them aes-
thetic-for a newly established radio music do not yet exist. The Baden-
Baden festival confirmed this. The hierarchy of the value of the works
which were played there corresponded perfectly to their relative suitability
for radio. In both respects, the Brecht-Weill-Hindemith Lindberghflug and
Eisler's TemtJo der Zeit cantata clearly came out on top.l1
Published in Die literarische Welt, 5, no. 35 (August 30, 1929). Gesammelte Schriften.• IV~
548-551. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin.
Notes
1. Benjamin is referring here to Jules Laforgue (1860-1887), French Symbolist
poet; Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist, essayist, and critic; Henri
Rousseau (1844-1910), French post-Impressionist painter, known as "Le
Douanier"; Louis Aragon (1897-1982), French poet and novelist; Jean
Cocteau (1889-1963), French Surrealist poct, novelist, dramatist, designer,
and filmmaker; Max Beckmann (1884-1950), German painter, draftsman,
printmaker, sculptor, writer, and champion of "New Objectivity"; and
Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), pre-Surrealist Greek-Italian painter and
founder of the satola meta{isica art movement.
2. Ernst Schoen, "Musikalische Unterhaltung durch Rundfunk," Al1bruch:
MOllatsschrift fur modenze Musik 11, no. 3 (1929): 128-129. This Austrian
J
journal, published in Vienna from 1919 to 1937, was the first devoted exclu-
sively to contemporary music. Schoen's essay appeared in a special issue on
"light music" which also contained texts by Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch,
and Kurt Weill.
3. Ernst Schoen (1894-1960), the program director for Radio Frankfurt, was a
trained musician and compose!; having studied with both Ferruccio Blisoni
and Edgard Varese. He was one of the very few friends Benjamin had re-
tained from his schooldays-and this despite Schoen's affair with Benjamin's
wife, Dora, in the early 19205. Schoen is credited with getting Benjamin in-
volved in radio, to such an extent that Benjamin earned a living from his ra-
dio broadcasts for three years (1929-1932).
Besides a series of letters Benjamin wrote to Schoen prior to 1921-which
are collected in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, ed. Gershom
Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994)-there is an important (and unfortunately still untranslated) episto-
lary exchange about radio politics in April 1930 which is reprinted, along
with a textual fragment entitled "Situation im Rundfunk," in Benjamin,
Gesammelte Schriftel1, II, 1497-1505. See also Ernst Schoen, "Musik im
Rundfunk: Del' Frankfurter Sender," Anbruch, 12 (1930): 255-256.
4. Hans Flesch (1896-1945), the pioneering first program director of Radio
Frankfurt starting in 1924, explored from the outset the possibilities of
radio-specific works, including the remarkable Zauberei auf dem Sender
(Magic in Airwaves), the very first German Horspiel (radio play), in which
Flesch anticipated the possibility of acoustic montage years before it became
a technological reality. He quickly made a name for himself as a tireless in-
novator, which enabled him to get not only Walter Benjamin but also the
young Theodor W. Adorno, BertoIt Brecht, and Flesch's friend and brother-
CONVERSATION WITH ERNST SCHOEN 401
The radio play "What the Germans Read While Their Classical Authors
Wrote," which this journal has excerpted for its readers,l attempts to do
justice to a few basic thoughts about the sort of popularity
[Volkstumlichkeit)2 which radio should be striving for in its literary
profiles. Given how transfonnative the advent of radio was in so many
respects, it is-or should be-nowhere more transformative than with re-
spect to what is understood as "popular" [Volkstumlichl?eit]. According
to an older conception of the term, a popular presentation-however
valuable it may be-is a derivative one. This can be explained easily
enough, since prior to radio there were hardly any modes of publication
that really served the purposes of popular culture or popular education.
The forms of dissemination that did exist-the book, the lecture, the
newspaper-were in no way different from those in which scientists con-
veyed news of their research to their professional circles. As a result,
representation appropriate to the masses [volksmafSige DarstellungJ had
to take place via forms employed by science and was thus deprived of
its own original methods. Such representation found itself limited to
clothing the contents of specific domains of knowledge in more or less
appropriate forms, perhaps also seeking points of contact in experience
or in common sense; but whatever it offered was always second-hand.
Popularization was a subordinate technique, and its public stature con-
firmed this.
Radio-and this is one of its most notable consequences-has pro-
403
404 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
is just as dubious as the latter, there is only one way out: to take on the
scientific questions directly. This is exactly what I am trying to do in my
experiment.] The heroes of the German spirit do not appear there as
themselves, nor did it seem appropriate to present as many acoustic sam-
ples of works as possible. In order to explore the question deeply, the
point of departure was intentionally kept on the surface. It was an at-
tempt to show listeners what was in fact present so randomly and abun-
dantly that it permitted typification: not the literature but the literary
conversation of those days.4 Yet it is this conversation-which, as it oc-
curred in cafes and at trade shows, at auctions and on walks, commented
in an infinite variety of ways upon schools of poetry and newspapers,
censorship and bookstores, youth education and lending libraries, en-
lightenment and obscurantism-that is also most intimately related to
issues of the most advanced literary scholarship, a scholarship that in-
creasingly tries to research the demands made on poetic activity by the
conditions of its time. To bring together once again the talk about book
prizes, newspaper articles, lampoons, and new publications-in itself the
most superficial talk imaginable-is one of the least superficial concerns
of scholarship, since such retrospective recreations make substantial de-
mands on any factual research that is adequate to its sources. In short,
the radio play in question seeks the most intimate contact with the latest
research on the so-called sociology of the audience. It would find its
strongest confirmation in its ability to capture the attention of both the
expert and the layman, even if for different reasons. And thereby would
also give voice to what may be the simplest definition of the concept of a
new popularity [Volkstiimlich keit].
Published in Rufer und Horer: MOl1atshefte fiir den Rundfullk (September 1932).
Gesammelte Schriftell, IV, 671-673. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin.
Notes
are folksy and folkloric on the one hand and popular (i.e., mass-oriented, or
intended for the general public) on the other.
3. The Versuch ("experiment") Benjamin refers to here, using an explicitly
Brechtian genre-designation, is his own radio play "What the Germans Read
While Their Classical Authors Wrote."
4. The "conversation about literature" was a common Romantic form. See,
for example, Friedrich Schlegel's "Gesprach liber die Poesie" (Conversa-
tion about Poesy; 1800), one of his most important formulations of literary
theory.
45
On the Minute
After trying for months, I had received a commission from the head of
broadcasting in D. to entertain listeners for twenty minutes with a report
from my field of specialization: the study of books. I was told that if my
banter fell on sympathetic ears, I could look forward to doing sllch re-
ports on a more regular basis. The program director was nice enough to
point out to me that what was decisive, besides the structure of my obser-
vations, was the manner and style of the lecture. "Beginners," he said,
"make the mistake of thinking they're giving a lecture in front of a larger
or smaller audience which just happens to be invisible. Nothing could be
further from the truth. The radio listener is almost always a solitary indi-
vidual; and even if you were to reach a few thousand of them, you are al-
ways only reaching thousands of solitary individuals. So you need to
have as if you were speaking to a solitary individual-or to many solitary
individuals, if you like, but in no case to a large gathering of people.
That's one thing. Then there is another: you must hold yourself strictly to
the tinle limit. If you don't, we will have to do it for YOll, and we'll do so
by just brutally clltting you off. Experience has taught us that going over
the allotted time, even slightly, tends to multiply the delays over the
course the program. If we don't intervene at that very moment, our en-
tire program unravels.-So don't forget: adopt a relaxed style of speak-
ing and conclude on the minute!"
I followed these suggestions very precisely; after all, a lot was at stake
for me in the recording of my first lecture. I arrived at the agreed-upon
hour at the radio station, with a manuscript that I had read aloud and
timed at home. The announcer received me cordially, and I took it as a
407
408 THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
Du Camp, Maxime, 123; Paris, 107 sciousness, 329; and cult vs. exhibi-
Dumas, Alexandre, 134 tion value, 25; destructive side of,
Durer, Albrecht, Melancolia .. 70 22; development of, 52n30; dialecti-
cal structure of, 340; and distrac-
Ede1; Josef Maria, 268n1 tion, 41; editing of, 35; and educa-
Edison, Thomas, 52n30 tion, 14; and fascism, 34, 44n9; and
Education, 13,201-202,204,213, here-and-now of art, 22; and
216n5,383,393,394,395,404 masses, 34, 38, 205, 318-319, 325;
Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich, 287; and montage, 90,91; and painting,
Battleship Potemkin, 316,323,325, 35,36,531132; and panoramas, 16,
328,330-331 99; and politics, 49n24, 316-317,
Eisler, Hanns, 87-88; Die Massnahme J 321n10, 331; production of, 29-38,
. 88; Tempo del' Zeit, 399 44n9, 318, 319, 336; and reality,
El Greco, 129 35; and reproduction, 28, 44n9;
Elias, Julius, 357 Russian, 34,286,293,323-326,
Eluard, Paul (Eugene Emile Paul 336; and shock-character of mon-
Grindel): Repetitions, 199-200, tage, 317-318; shock effect of, 39,
201,237 41, 53n32; silent vs. sound, 31;
Enfantin, Barthelemy Prosper, 101 sound, 21; and technology, 33, 329,
Engels, Friedrich, 104, 116, 117, 118, 330; and test performances, 30-31;
122, 124, 127, 132; Communist and tradition, 22; training through,
Manifesto, 105, 108; Die Lage der 26; and unconscious, 37-38; view-
Arbeitenden Klassen in England, 131 point in, 34-35. See also Photogra-
Entretiens: L'Art et fa rea lite; VArt et phy
['hat, 300,301, 302 Film actor, 30-32,33, 49n24, 205,
Epic Theater, 395 318
Ernst, Max, 170, 199,200,201, Film apparatus, 30,32,35,37,205,
216n5,237 318. See also Camera
Evans, Walker, 170 Film comedy, 323-324, 329-330
Expressionism, 164n8, 374-375, 385 Film stars, 33, 325
Flaneur, 5, 99, 104-105, 107
Packel) Die (periodical), 344, 361- Flesch, Hans, 348,397
362,363,364,369,371,378,381 Fourier, Charles, 45nll, 98
Facsimile [AbbildJ, 23 Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro), 29
Fascism, 4, 14, 20, 33, 34, 41, 42, French Revolution, 108, 135
44n9, 80, 85,89,300,301,305, Freud, Sigmund, 169, 193,245;
306-307. See also National Social- Traumdeutung 138, 199
J
Masses: and art, 39, 40, 320, 321n10; Napoleon III, 107, 108, 114n48
education for, 61, 201-202; and fas- National Socialism, 158, 160, 162.
cism, 41; and film, 33, 34, 38, 205, See also Fascism
318-319,325; leadership of, Nature, 26, 59, 99, 109, 181-182,
50n25; participation by, 39; and 264,265
photography, 54n36, 87; and prole- Nazarenes, 141, 208,240
tariat, 41; and radio, 346, 391, 392, Neo-Kantianism, 177, 178, 198
394,403-404; and reproduction, Nerval, Gerard de, 132
23-24, 36; and uniqueness, 23, 24; Nestray, Johann, 371, 379, 380
and war, 41-42 Newhall, Beaumont, 268n1
Maublanc, Rene, 92, 93 New Objectivity [Neue Sachlichkeit],
Mehring, Franz, 88, 116, 117, 124- 63,84,86, 87,92, 148n30,164n8
125, 143nl; Lessing-Legende, 119, Newspapers. See Journalism/newspa-
127 pers/press
Meissonier, Jean-Louis-Ernest, 304 Nguyen Trang Hiep, Paris, capitale de
Mendelssohn, Anja, 168, 169, 192, 193 la France, 96
Mendelssohn, Georg, 168, 169 Niepce, Joseph Nicephore, 111n 16,
MesmeJ; Franz Anton, 253n3 274
Michaelis, Karin, 371 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 94n5, 146n19,
Michelet, Jules, 97, 132 165n12,363,383
Michon, Jean Hippolyte, 192 Nouvelle Revue Franfaise (periodical),
Mickey Mouse (cartoon character), 301
38, 51n29, 318, 338 Novalis (Friedrich Leopold, Freiherr
Midsummer Night's Dream, A (film), von Hardenburg), Heinrich von
29 Ofterdingen, 51n26, 198, 238n2
Mies Van der Rohe, Ludwig, 2 Nungesser, Charles, 353
Mobius, Paul Julius, 129
Moholy-Nagy, Ll.szl6, 2, 3, 9, 271- Offenbach, Jacques, 102,371,379,
272,290; "Production-Reproduc- 380,394; La vie parisienne 389n12
J
The translation of "Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhl1nderts" (Paris, the
Capital of the Nineteenth Century) was previously published in Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
The translations of "Zum Planetarium" (To the Planetarium), "Der Autor als
Produzent" (The Author as Producer), "Vereidigter Bticherrevisoe' (Attested
Auditor of Books), and "Diese FHichen sind Zl1 vermieten)) (This Space for Rent)
first appeared in Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), and are reprinted by permission of I-far-
court, Inc.