Cultural Amnesia (10 page)

There is no arguing against all-inclusive obscurity except to say that the whole thing means nothing, which few of us dare
to do. Kraus did.
Now that Benjamin’s writings are at last being published in English in some sort of orderly sequence, there is all too much opportunity to conclude that
Kraus might have had Benjamin’s number. Kraus had his own limitations, but he had an infallible ear for the kind of rhetoric whose only real subject is its own momentum. Benjamin was a
rampant case. Lest we doubt it, we can read on after the sentence already quoted. You will have noted that “the destruction” has “thus” become obligatory. But the
“thus” is not enough. There is also “this”:

This very task of destruction poses again, ultimately, the
question of a pure immediate violence that might be able to call a halt to mythic violence. Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythic violence is confronted by the divine. And the
latter constitutes its antithesis in all respects. . . .

And that’s only a sample. Thus, this very, might, just as—it’s the prose equivalent of
a velvet fog: breathe it in and you’ll choke on cloth. Benjamin was young, but this style of argument was never to be long discarded. In the next volume, or perhaps the one after that, the
critic grown older will be heard on more down-to-earth subjects, but invariably the attendant metaphysical speculation will send his treatment of them spiralling towards the ceiling, like the
burnt paper wrapping of an amaretto cookie rising on its self-generated column of hot air. (The first time I ever saw that trick worked in an Italian restaurant, I thought immediately of a thin
argument gaining altitude.) Apart from his remarks on the reproducible works of art and their lost aura, Benjamin’s other widely known brainwave is about how the broad pavements of Paris
favour café life. The observation is persuasive, if commonplace even for the time it was made, but the prospective reader should be warned that the disquisition it instigated was endless.
Benjamin’s aperçus about his ideal European city grew into essays which themselves went on growing, on their slow way to becoming a book which was left unfinished at his death and
might never have been finished even if he had lived, since its obvious aim was to Get Everything In. Often supposed, by literati of the panscopic persuasion, to be one of the great lost books of
the twentieth century, the completed work might well have turned out to be a teeming marvel. Indeed the fragment
we have, published under the enchanting title of
The Arcades Proj ect
, was greeted by some critics, notably George Steiner, as proof positive that the finished job would have been inexhaustibly miraculous. But for
those of us who have been dismayed by the essays, the vanished prospect of Benjamin’s magic syntopicon is less likely to bind us with a spell. There is no reason to believe, and every
reason to doubt, that the fully realized
omnium gatherum
would have kept a reasonable proportion between its author’s enviable knack for assessing the
significance of what everybody else had already seen and his congenital propensity for inflating the results into a speculative rigmarole that nobody else would ever think or could even follow.
The sceptical question lingers; how could a brain as sharp as his churn out so much mush?

His life story gives us the answer: he was cushioning reality. It needed cushioning. Reality was
anti-Semitism. Born into comfortable surroundings, Benjamin nevertheless concluded at an early age that the Jewish bourgeoisie were kidding themselves about assimilation. The better they did in
every field of the arts, science, the professions and commerce, the more they were resented. The more they fitted in the more they stood out. In other words, they were disliked for themselves.
Before World War I, Theodor Herzl has drawn the central impulse of Zionism from no other assumption. (Victor Klemperer, in
To the Bitter End
, the
1942–1945 volume of his monumental diary, noted that a total rejection of assimilation for Jews was the point on which the arch-Nazi Hitler and the arch-Zionist Herzl were of the same mind:
les extrêmes se touchent
.) The idea was already in the air, but Benjamin, perhaps because he was struck with it so young, gave it a portentous twist.
He chose to despise, not the goyim for their prejudice, but the Jewish bourgeoisie for their gullibility, and, beyond them, the bourgeoisie
in toto
. Wanting
a more enlightened society, he saw its seeds in Marxism. Objectively (as the Marxists went on saying until only recently) he became committed to one of the two implacable forces that would
combine their energies to undermine the Weimar Republic, which might conceivably have withstood the pressure from either the Communists or the Nazis, but was squeezed to death when attacked by
both.

Well accustomed to travelling within Europe and setting up his desk anywhere, usually within sight of the sea, Benjamin
was able to absent himself from Germany after the Nazis got their grip on it. Keeping a
suitable distance should have been an aid to perspective, but he was hobbled in his
capacity for political analysis by his pidgin Marxist conviction—which he shared with his friend Brecht—that the Nazi regime was somehow a logical consequence of bourgeois capitalism,
instead of what it was, a radical force in itself. (In
Die vergebliche Warnung
—
The Unheeded
Warning
—Manès Sperber said that when the Nazis finally came to power it never occurred to him that he was in danger as a Jew, only as a Communist. The Jews were capitalists,
so why would the Nazis attack them?) Sooner or later, according to the Comintern general line, the coming crisis of capitalism would bring the Nazis down. The sooner became later and it never
happened. If Benjamin had waited any longer he would have been caught at home, with the concentration camp as the inevitable consequence. When he finally ran, he was only just in time. If he had
been better organized he might have made it across the border, but it would be a mistake to blame his unworldliness. Plenty of worldly people died from despair as he did, because the Nazis had
taken care to ensure that the world was no longer worth living in. Mentioning Benjamin’s suicide in one of her letters to Karl Jaspers (
Briefwechsel
1926–1969
, p. 77) Hannah Arendt made a point we should consider: “This atmosphere of
sauve qui peut
was hideous, and suicide was the only
noble gesture.” To go out nobly was the only way left to affirm life. It could be said that Arendt, who had got to safety in America, was asking a lot by suggesting that voluntary death was
the only nobility left for those who didn’t make it, but she was undoubtedly right about the hideous pressure exerted when ordinary civil existence was suddenly transformed into a case of
every man for himself. The Devil took the hindmost, and one of them was Benjamin.

There was a subsidiary consequence of Germany’s traditional anti-Semitism (the old, pre-Nazi brand that worked by
exclusion rather than repression), a consequence which Benjamin might have examined if he had lived to write an autobiography. The autobiography would have had to be unsparing on the issue,
because what affected him in a debilitating way was his acquiescence as much as his defiance. Benjamin never got the university post that he might legitimately have expected, but he allowed the
rejection to haunt his work instead of giving it strength. Even as late as the Weimar Republic, the German universities retained their tacit quota system by which Jews found it hard
to get a place on the faculty. Benjamin wanted a place on the faculty more than anything else in life. Other Jews of comparable critical talent, forced into journalism because the
universities had shut them out, did what Benjamin could never bring himself to do. They accepted journalism’s requirements of readability, and found ways of giving everything they had to
the article rather than the treatise. The books they wrote had a general public in mind. In retrospect, the journalists can be seen to have enriched German-speaking culture by saving it from the
stratospheric oxygen-starvation of the deliberately high-flown thesis. Their written and spoken conversations were informal seminars that turned the cafés into universities, even as the
universities were hardening further into hieratic structures where nothing mattered except the prestige of position—a characteristic that made them fatally corruptible by political
pressure. The journalists were well out of it, and the cleverest of them realized it: they took the opportunity to create a new language for civilization, a language that drew strength from the
demotic in order to cherish the eternal.

Benjamin, on the other hand, even when he wrote for a newspaper, had a way of sounding as if he was still angling for a
Ph.D. If he had reached safety he might have been obliged to change his ways, almost certainly for the better. To pine for more of what he had done already, you have to miss the glaring point
that he had already done far too much of it. Take any essay by Benjamin and then place beside it an essay by, say, Alfred Polgar. In a Benjamin essay, there will be very few actual perceptions
gleaming through the cloud of smoke. Some of them will be unique, but they will all be gasping for air. A Polgar essay is made of perceptions and nothing else, and the style is just the most
elegant possible way of holding them together. Benjamin truly and touchingly loved Paris, but what did he ever say about it that is not left looking thin beside the wealth of observation that the
journalist Janet Flanner could put into a single report, or the historian Richard Cobb into a single paragraph of an essay? Joseph Roth, the Jewish exile from Vienna who drank himself to death in
Paris in the last days of its freedom, packed his every piece about the city with enough material to keep Benjamin speculating for a year. Examples could be multiplied, and always to
Benjamin’s detriment: the lowly journalism of others, then and since, leaves his paroxysms of verbiage sounding inarticulate.
None of this is pleasant to say, and is
probably not pleasant to hear. There aren’t so many truly comprehensive freelance scholars that we can afford to mock one of them just because he was a victim of his own style, and Benjamin
was a victim of a lot more than that. Kicking a man when he is down is bad enough, and kicking him when he is unfairly dead looks like blasphemy. Considering the refinement of Benjamin’s
mind, his fate was a crucifixion. But we are talking about his reputation, the prestige he still has, and, for the humanities, the baleful encouragement he gives to the damaging notion that there
is somehow a progressivist, humanitarian licence for talking through a high hat. There is no such licence. The wretched of the earth get no help from witch doctors, and when academic language
gets beyond shouting distance of ordinary speech, voodoo is all it is.

MARC BLOCH

Marc Bloch was born in 1886, fought in World War I, established himself as one of
France’s leading historians between the wars, and took up arms again as a Resistance fighter in World War II. He was caught, tortured and executed in 1944. His last, brief book, written
while he was already in some danger (“The circumstances of my present life, the impossibility of reaching any large library, and the loss of my own books have made me dependent on my
notes and upon memory”), is easily available in English as
The Historian’s Craft
(1953). His more scholarly books, foundation stones in the
Annales
school of history, are for specialists, but his incidental commentary, like his life, is for everyone. There is an excellent account of his
career by the Univeristy of North Carolina’s Carole Fink,
Marc Bloch: A Life in History
(1989), a model of what an academic study can be, and a
testament to the example of an heroic man.