Illuminations, p.4
Illuminations, page 4
Moreover, in his attitude to financial problems Benjamin was by no means an isolated case. If anything, his outlook was typical of an entire generation of German-Jewish intellectuals, although probably no one else fared so badly with it. Its basis was the mentality of the fathers, successful businessmen who did not think too highly of their own achievements and whose dream it was that their sons were destined for higher things. It was the secularized version of the ancient Jewish belief that those who ‘learn’ – the Torah or the Talmud, that is, God’s Law – were the true elite of the people and should not be bothered with so vulgar an occupation as making money or working for it. This is not to say that in this generation there were no father-son conflicts; on the contrary, the literature of the time is full of them, and if Freud had lived and carried on his inquiries in a country and language other than the German-Jewish milieu which supplied his patients, we might never have heard of an Oedipus complex.12 But as a rule these conflicts were resolved by the sons’ laying claim to being geniuses, or, in the case of the numerous Communists from well-to-do homes, to being devoted to the welfare of mankind – in any case, to aspiring to things higher than making money – and the fathers were more than willing to grant that this was a valid excuse for not making a living. Where such claims were not made or recognized, catastrophe was just around the corner. Benjamin was a case in point: his father never recognized his claims, and their relations were extraordinarily bad. Another such case was Kafka, who – possibly because he really was something like a genius – was quite free of the genius mania of his environment, never claimed to be a genius, and ensured his financial independence by taking an ordinary job at the Prague workmen’s compensation office. (His relations with his father were of course equally bad, but for different reasons.) And still, no sooner had Kafka taken this position that he saw in it a ‘running start for suicides,’ as though he were obeying an order that says ‘You have to earn your grave.’13
For Benjamin, at any rate, a monthly stipend remained the only possible form of income, and in order to receive one after his parents’ death he was ready, or thought he was, to do many things: to study Hebrew for three hundred marks a month if the Zionists thought it would do them some good, or to think dialectically, with all the mediating trimmings, for one thousand French francs if there was no other way of doing business with the Marxists. The fact that despite being down and out he later did neither is worthy of admiration, and so is the infinite patience with which Scholem, who had worked very hard to get Benjamin a stipend for the study of Hebrew from the university in Jerusalem, allowed himself to be put off for years. No one, of course, was prepared to subsidize him in the only ‘position’ for which he was born, that of an homme de lettres, a position of whose unique prospects neither the Zionists nor the Marxists were, or could have been, aware.
Today the homme de lettres strikes us as a rather harmless, marginal figure, as though he were actually to be equated with the figure of the Privatgelehrter that has always had a touch of the comic. Benjamin, who felt so close to French that the language became for him a ‘sort of alibi’ (Briefe II, 505) for his existence, probably knew about the homme de lettres’s origins in prerevolutionary France as well as about his extraordinary career in the French Revolution. In contrast to the later writers and literati, the ‘écrivains et littérateurs’ as even Larousse defines the hommes de lettres, these men, though they did live in the world of the written and printed word and were, above all, surrounded by books, were neither obliged nor willing to write and read professionally, in order to earn a living. Unlike the class of the intellectuals, who offer their services either to the state as experts, specialists, and officials, or to society for diversion and instruction, the hommes de lettres always strove to keep aloof from both the state and society. Their material existence was based on income without work, and their intellectual attitude rested upon their resolute refusal to be integrated politically or socially. On the basis of this dual independence they could afford that attitude of superior disdain which gave rise to La Rochefoucauld’s contemptuous insights into human behaviour, the worldly wisdom of Montaigne, the aphoristic trenchancy of Pascal’s thought, the boldness and open-mindedness of Montesquieu’s political reflections. It cannot be my task here to discuss the circumstances which eventually turned the hommes de lettres into revolutionaries in the eighteenth century nor the way in which their successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries split into the class of the ‘cultured’ on the one hand and of the professional revolutionaries on the other. I mention this historical background only because in Benjamin the element of culture combined in such a unique way with the element of the revolutionary and rebellious. It was as though shortly before its disappearance the figure of the homme de lettres was destined to show itself once more in the fullness of its possibilities, although – or, possibly, because – it had lost its material basis in such a catastrophic way, so that the purely intellectual passion which makes this figure so lovable might unfold in all its most telling and impressive possibilities.
There certainly was no dearth of reasons to rebel against his origins, the milieu of German-Jewish society in Imperial Germany, in which Benjamin grew up, nor was there any lack of justification for taking a stand against the Weimar Republic, in which he refused to take up a profession. In A Berlin Childhood around 1900 Benjamin describes the house from which he came as a ‘mausoleum long intended for me’ (Schriften I, 643). Characteristically enough, his father was an art dealer and antiquarian; the family was a wealthy and run-of-the-mill assimilated one; one of his grandparents was Orthodox, the other belonged to a Reform congregation. ‘In my childhood I was a prisoner of the old and the new West. In those days my clan inhabited these two districts with an attitude mingled of stubbornness and self-confidence, turning them into a ghetto which it regarded as its fief’ (Schriften I, 643). The stubbornness was toward their Jewishness; it was only stubbornness that made them cling to it. The self-confidence was inspired by their position in the non-Jewish environment in which they had, after all, achieved quite a bit. Just how much was shown on days when guests were expected. On such occasions the inside of the sideboard, which seemed to be the centre of the house and thus ‘with good reason resembled the temple mountains,’ was opened, and now it was possible ‘to show off treasures such as idols like to be surrounded with.’ Then ‘the house’s hoard of silver’ appeared, and what was displayed ‘was there not tenfold, but twentyfold or thirtyfold. And when I looked at these long, long rows of mocha spoons or knife rests, fruit knives or oyster forks, the enjoyment of this profusion struggled with the fear that those who were being expected might all look alike, just as our cutlery did’ (Schriften I, 632). Even the child knew that something was radically wrong, and not only because there were poor people (‘The poor – for the rich children of my age they existed only as beggars. And it was a great advance in my understanding when for the first time poverty dawned on me in the ignominy of poorly paid work’ [Schriften I, 632]) but because of ‘stubbornness’ within and ‘self-confidence’ without were producing an atmosphere of insecurity and self-consciousness which truly was anything but suitable for the raising of children. This was true not only of Benjamin or Berlin Westfn3 or Germany. With what passion did Kafka try to persuade his sister to put her ten-year-old son in a boarding school, so as to save him from ‘the special mentality which is particularly virulent among wealthy Prague Jews and which cannot be kept away from children … this petty, dirty, sly mentality.’14
What was involved, then, was what had since the 1870s or 1880s been called the Jewish question and existed in that form only in the German-speaking Central Europe of those decades. Today this question has been washed away, as it were, by the catastrophe of European Jewry and is justly forgotten, although one still encounters it occasionally in the language of the older generation of German Zionists whose thinking habits derive from the first decades of this century. Besides, it never was anything but the concern of the Jewish intelligentsia and had no significance for the majority of Central European Jewry. For the intellectuals, however, it was of great importance, for their own Jewishness, which played hardly any role in their spiritual household, determined their social life to an extraordinary degree and therefore presented itself to them as a moral question of the first order. In this moral form the Jewish question marked, in Kafka’s words, ‘the terrible inner condition of these generations.’15 No matter how insignificant this problem may appear to us in the face of what actually happened later, we cannot disregard it here, for neither Benjamin nor Kafka nor Karl Kraus can be understood without it. For simplicity’s sake I shall state the problem exactly as it was stated and endlessly discussed then – namely, in an article entitled ‘German-Jewish Mt Parnassus’ (‘Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass’) which created a great stir when Moritz Goldstein published it in 1912 in the distinguished journal Der Kunstwart.
According to Goldstein, the problem as it appeared to the Jewish intelligentsia had a dual aspect, the non-Jewish environment and assimilated Jewish society, and in his view the problem was insoluble. With respect to the non-Jewish environment, ‘We Jews administer the intellectual property of a people which denies us the right and the ability to do so.’ And further: ‘It is easy to show the absurdity of our adversaries’ arguments and prove that their enmity is unfounded. What would be gained by this? That their hatred is genuine. When all calumnies have been refuted, all distortions rectified, all false judgments about us rejected, antipathy will remain as something irrefutable. Anyone who does not realize this is beyond help.’ It was the failure to realize this that was felt to be unbearable about Jewish society, whose representatives, on the one hand, wished to remain Jews and, on the other, did not want to acknowledge their Jewishness: ‘We shall openly drum the problem that they are shirking into them. We shall force them to own up to their Jewishness or to have themselves baptized.’ But even if this was successful, even if the mendacity of this milieu could be exposed and escaped – what would be gained by it? A ‘leap into modern Hebrew literature’ was impossible for the current generation. Hence: ‘Our relationship to Germany is one of unrequited love. Let us be manly enough at last to tear the beloved out of our hearts … I have stated what we must want to do; I have also stated why we cannot want it. My intention was to point up the problem. It is not my fault that I know of no solution.’ (For himself, Herr Goldstein solved the problem six years later when he became cultural editor of the Vossische Zeitung. And what else could he have done?)
One could dispose of Moritz Goldstein by saying that he simply reproduced what Benjamin in another context called ‘a major part of the vulgar anti-Semitic as well as the Zionist ideology’ (Briefe I, 152–53), if one did not encounter in Kafka, on a far more serious level, a similar formulation of the problem and the same confession of its insolubility. In a letter to Max Brod about German-Jewish writers he said that the Jewish question or ‘the despair over it was their inspiration – an inspiration as respectable as any other but fraught, upon closer examination, with distressing peculiarities. For one thing, what their despair discharged itself in could not be German literature which on the surface it appeared to be,’ because the problem was not really a German one. Thus they lived ‘among three impossibilities …: the impossibility of not writing’ as they could get rid of their inspiration only by writing; ‘the impossibility of writing in German’ – Kafka considered their use of the German language as the ‘overt or covert, or possibly self-tormenting usurpation of an alien property, which has not been acquired but stolen, (relatively) quickly picked up, and which remains someone else’s possession even if not a single linguistic mistake can be pointed out’; and finally, ‘the impossibility of writing differently,’ since no other language was available. ‘One could almost add a fourth impossibility,’ says Kafka in conclusion, ‘the impossibility of writing, for this despair was not something that could be mitigated through writing’ – as is normal for poets, to whom a god has given to say what men suffer and endure. Rather, despair has become here ‘an enemy of life and of writing; writing was here only a moratorium, as it is for someone who writes his last will and testament just before he hangs himself.’16
Nothing could be easier than to demonstrate that Kafka was wrong and that his own work, which speaks the purest German prose of the century, is the best refutation of his views. But such a demonstration, apart from being in bad taste, is all the more superfluous as Kafka himself was so very much aware of it – ‘If I indiscriminately write down a sentence,’ he once noted in his Diaries, ‘it already is perfect’17 – just as he was the only one to know that ‘Mauscheln’ (speaking a Yiddishized German), though despised by all German-speaking people, Jews or non-Jews, did have a legitimate place in the German language, being nothing else but one of the numerous German dialects. And since he rightly thought that ‘within the German language, only the dialects and, besides them, the most personal High German are really alive,’ it naturally was no less legitimate to change from Mauscheln, or from Yiddish, to High German than it was to change from Low German or the Alemannic dialect. If one reads Kafka’s remarks about the Jewish troupe of actors which so fascinated him, it becomes clear that what attracted him were less the specifically Jewish elements than the liveliness of language and gesture.
To be sure, we have some difficulty today in understanding these problems or taking them seriously, especially since it is so tempting to misinterpret and dismiss them as mere reaction to an anti-Semitic milieu and thus as an expression of self-hatred. But nothing could be more misleading when dealing with men of the human stature and intellectual rank of Kafka, Kraus, and Benjamin. What gave their criticism its bitter sharpness was never anti-Semitism as such, but the reaction to it of the Jewish middle class, with which the intellectuals by no means identified. There, too, it was not a matter of the frequently undignified apologetic attitude of official Jewry, with which the intellectuals had hardly any contact, but of the lying denial of the very existence of widespread anti-Semitism, of the isolation from reality staged with all the devices of self-deception by the Jewish bourgeoisie, an isolation which for Kafka, and not only for him, included the often hostile and always haughty separation from the Jewish people, the so-called Ostjuden (Jews from Eastern Europe) who were, though one knew better, blamed by them for anti-Semitism. The decisive factor in all this was the loss of reality, aided and abetted by the wealth of these classes. ‘Among poor people,’ wrote Kafka, ‘the world, the bustle of work, so to speak, irresistibly enters the huts … and does not allow the musty, polluted, child-consuming air of a nicely furnished family room to be generated.’18 They fought against Jewish society because it would not permit them to live in the world as it happened to be, without illusions – thus, for example, to be prepared for the murder of Walther Rathenau (in 1922): to Kafka it was ‘incomprehensible that they should have let him live as long as that.’19 What finally determined the acuteness of the problem was the fact that it did not merely, or even primarily, manifest itself as a break between the generations from which one could have escaped by leaving home and family. To only very few German-Jewish writers did the problem present itself in this way, and these few were surrounded by all those others who are already forgotten but from whom they are clearly distinguishable only today when posterity has settled the question of who is who. (‘Their political function,’ wrote Benjamin, ‘is to establish not parties but cliques, their literary function to produce not schools but fashions, and their economic function to set into the world not producers but agents. Agents or smarties who know how to spend their poverty as if it were riches and who make whoopee out of their yawning vacuity. One could not establish oneself more comfortably in an uncomfortable situation.’20) Kafka, who exemplified this situation in the above-mentioned letter by ‘linguistic impossibilities,’ adding that they could ‘also be called something quite different,’ points to a ‘linguistic middle class’ between, as it were, proletarian dialect and high-class prose; it is ‘nothing but ashes which can be given a semblance of life only by overeager Jewish hands rummaging through them.’ One need hardly add that the overwhelming majority of Jewish intellectuals belonged to this ‘middle class’; according to Kafka, they constituted ‘the hell of German-Jewish letters,’ in which Karl Kraus held sway as ‘the great overseer and taskmaster’ without noticing how much ‘he himself belongs in this hell among those to be chastised.’21 That these things may be seen quite differently from a non-Jewish perspective becomes apparent when one reads in one of Benjamin’s essays what Brecht said about Karl Kraus: ‘When the age died by its own hand, he was that hand’ (Schriften II, 174).
For the Jews of that generation (Kafka and Moritz Goldstein were but ten years older than Benjamin) the available forms of rebellion were Zionism and Communism, and it is noteworthy that their fathers often condemned the Zionist rebellion more bitterly than the Communist. Both were escape routes from illusion into reality, from mendacity and self-deception to an honest existence. But this is only how it appears in retrospect. At the time when Benjamin tried, first, a half-hearted Zionism and then a basically no less half-hearted Communism, the two ideologies faced each other with the greatest hostility: the Communists were defaming Zionists as Jewish Fascists22 and the Zionists were calling the young Jewish Communists ‘red assimilationists.’ In a remarkable and probably unique manner Benjamin kept both routes open for himself for years; he persisted in considering the road to Palestine long after he had become a Marxist, without allowing himself to be swayed in the least by the opinions of his Marxist-oriented friends, particularly the Jews among them. This shows clearly how little the ‘positive’ aspect of either ideology interested him, and that what mattered to him in both instances was the ‘negative’ factor of criticism of existing conditions, a way out of bourgeois illusions and untruthfulness, a position outside the literary as well as the academic establishment. He was quite young when he adopted this radically critical attitude, probably without suspecting to what isolation and loneliness it would eventually lead him. Thus we read, for example, in a letter written in 1918, that Walther Rathenau, claiming to represent Germany in foreign affairs, and Rudolf Borchardt, making a similar claim with respect to German spiritual affairs, had in common the ‘will to lie,’ ‘the objective mendacity’ (Briefe I, 189 ff). Neither wanted to ‘serve’ a cause through his works – in Borchardt’s case, the ‘spiritual and linguistic resources’ of the people; in Rathenau’s, the nation – but both used their works and talents as ‘sovereign means in the service of an absolute will to power.’ In addition, there were the littérateurs who placed their gifts in the service of a career and social status: ‘To be a littérateur is to live under the sign of mere intellect, just as prostitution is to live under the sign of mere sex’ (Schriften II, 179). Just as a prostitute betrays sexual love, a littérateur betrays the mind, and it was this betrayal of the mind which the best among the Jews could not forgive their colleagues in literary life. In the same vein Benjamin wrote five years later – one year after the assassination of Rathenau – to a close German friend: ‘… Jews today ruin even the best German cause which they publicly champion, because their public statement is necessarily venal (in a deeper sense) and cannot adduce proof of its authenticity’ (Briefe I, 310). He went on to say that only the private, almost ‘secret relationships between Germans and Jews’ were legitimate, while ‘everything about German-Jewish relations that works in public today causes harm.’ There was much truth in these words. Written from the perspective of the Jewish question at that time, they supply evidence of the darkness of a period in which one could rightly say, ‘The light of the public darkens everything’ (Heidegger).
