Howard Eiland: Walter Benjamin - A Critical Life

on behalf of Harvard bookstore I'm pleased to welcome you to today's Friday forum with Howard Island who was here to discuss his new book written with Michael Jennings Walter Benjamin a critical life I think that that most people who are interested in Walter Benjamin are aware that he he died as a suicide and at the beginning of World War two in these at the Spanish border so I earnestly hope that I'm not going to ruin anyone's pleasure by reading the last few pages of the final chapter of this biography I'd like to pick the story up in September of 1940 in Marseilles benjamine is waiting there for plans to develop for an escape out of Europe to the United States he has a visa that would enable him to enter the United States which was secured for him by his friends in New York at the Institute of social research Ted or Adorno and Max Horkheimer but he does not have an exit visa from France so he is forced to have recourse to an illegal crossing over the Pyrenees from France into Spain and he is now in Marseilles in September 1940 having left his apartment in France in Paris back in May in a great hurry in order to escape the oncoming German armies and having left a great many of his manuscripts behind some of them hidden in the bibliothèque nationale by his friend and the librarian there assures pitaya the writer bataya so he is in Marseilles and for about five weeks as this plan is hatching and I'd like to begin the reading with a certain lunch date that he had during this this this period in Marseille so by mid September the sojourn as he had called it in a letter the sojourn in Marseille had become quote a terrible test of nerves that's from a letter as well he was weighed down by a powerful depression there are indications however that even this urgent state of affairs could not extinguish his intellectual fires or his playfulness the novelist the German novelist Summa Morgenstern tells of a lunch date with benjamine in Marseilles at this time during which the two writers talked about flow Barre so this is a passage from Morgenstern's account of this lunch date with Benjamin hardly had we studied the menu and ordered something to drink then Walter baño means several times glanced at me insistently through his eyeglasses as though he expected from me some obligatory but now overdue remark finally rather keyed up he asked me haven't you noticed anything we haven't eaten yet I said what am I supposed to notice he handed me the menu and waited I surveyed the list of dishes once again but nothing caught my eye at that point he lost all patience haven't you noticed the name of this restaurant I glanced at the menu and saw that the innkeeper was named our new I communicated this finding to him well he went on doesn't that name mean anything to you I felt I had flunked I was not equal to this this exam don't you remember who our new is Madame our new is the name of Frederick's beloved in l'éducation sentimental flow bears novelty at the sentimental education so it was not until after the soup that he recovered from the disappointment I had caused him and the subject of our lunchtime conversation that day was naturally flow bear in late September Benjamin accompanied by two acquaintances from Marseille German born Henny Garland and her teenage son Joseph who by the way later taught engineering at Brown University Providence took the train from Marseille into the countryside near the Spanish border the prospects for a legal exit from France seemed non-existent and benjamine chose to attempt an illegal crossing into Spain from there he hoped to make his way through Spain to an embarkation point in Portugal and on to the United States his friends in New York actually had arranged for him an apartment on Central Park West in Port vond they joined Lisa fitco a 31 year old political activist who had lived in Vienna Berlin and Prague and whose husband Hans Benjamin knew from the internment camp at vanish Benjamin was interned together with many non French residents in France in the fall of 1939 for about seven seven weeks fitco was hardly a professional guide but she had explored the possibilities for escape with real thoroughness she could find her way along a path across the spurs of the Pyrenees and into the border town of poor Bou Spain with the aid of a description she had obtained from the mayor of Banyuls sua Mayer close to poor vaunt from nearby Serbia there was a more direct route to Porvoo that had served many refugees as their highway out of France but the Vichy guard mobile had learned of this path and were closely guarding it refugees were now forced westward higher into the mountains along the route least err so called because the narrow defile had in 1939 provided the escape route for Enric Lisa a senior military official of the Republic who was in flight from the Spanish fascists Leon forked vaanga Heinrich and Gollum on Franz Werfel and Amala their fall had all escaped by means of this rugged trail fit go ask Benjamin whether in view of his fragile heart he wanted to risk the exertion the real risk he answered would be not to go at this point the story of Walter Benjamin's last days becomes murky on the advice of maher zain manuals fitco led the little group on a reconnaissance on the first part of the path over the mountains Benjamin probably left Banyuls on September 25th fitco noted Benjamin's carefully calculated pace 10 minutes of walking followed by one minutes rest and his refusal to have anyone else carry his heavy black attache case which contained he said a new manuscript that was quote more important than I am speculation has run wild as to the identity of this manuscript some have thought that it might be a completed version of the arcade's project or of the Baudelaire book neither of these is at all likely however given the state of Benjamin's health and his only sporadic ability to work in the last year of his life the manuscript may have been a final text of on the concept of history as last completed work that we know of but he would have attributed this much importance to the version he was carrying only if it differed significantly from the versions he had given into the keeping of hannah arendt gretel Adorno Nora's wife and George bataya this though is only the first of the mysteries of his final days Benjamin must have suffered terribly on the walk through the Pyrenees though he did not complain to Lisa fitco and was even capable of making jokes and drawing on his many years experience of Hill walking helping them decipher the little handwritten map that was their only reference I actually spoke to Lisa fitco in Chicago she was 95 years old several years ago about a year before she died and she was telling me about the the walk over the Pyrenees and she said that the first thing she said was he was incredibly funny so he really was cracking jokes when feet go the girl ons and Benjamin reached the small clearing that was their goal for the for the day Benjamin announced that he would sleep alone in the clearing he was at the end of his powers and unwilling to attempt any segment of the journey more than once his companions having acquainted themselves with the first third of the trail returned to Bond Ewell's to sleep in an inn and rejoined him the next morning for the final most difficult portion of the climb and the descent into poor boo fit girl remembers the contradiction between Benjamin's crystal clear mind his unbending inner strength as she put it and his other worldliness only on one of the steepest sections did he falter and fit go and Joseph Gerland essentially dragged him up through a vineyard even under conditions such as these venya means ornate courtesy did not abandon him when they had paused to eat and drink he asked fit go to pass a tomato with your kind permission may I on the afternoon of September 26 they when they were within sight of poor boo fit go left the little party which had grown slightly larger as they encountered other refugees including Corina Biermann and three companions biermann's first sight of Benjamin suggested that on this quote extremely hot September day he was on the point of cardiac arrest she says we ran in all directions in search of some water to help the sick man impressed by his bearing and manifest intellectual 'ti she took him to be a professor poor boo had remained a fishing a quiet fishing village well into the 1920s but its strategic position on the rail line between Spain and France led to heavy bombing during the Spanish Civil War Mannie mean--and the girl ons reported together with beer man's party to the small Spanish customs office in order to obtain the stamp on their paper is necessary for transit into Spain for reasons that will presumably never be discovered the Spanish government had recently closed the border to illegal refugees from France Benjamin and his companions were told that they would be returned to French soil where they would face almost certain internment and transfer to a concentration camp in the Gestapo the entire group was escorted to a small hotel where they were kept under loose guard near Mon remembers hearing quote a loud rattling from one of the neighboring rooms I'm going to investigate she found benjamine in a quote desolate state of mind and in a completely exhausted physical condition he told me she writes that by no means was he willing to return to the border or to move out of this hotel when I remarked that there was no alternative other than to leave he declared that there was one for him he hinted that he had some very effective poisonous pills with him he was lying half-naked in his bed and had his very beautiful big golden grandfather watch with open cover on a little board near him observing the time constantly he was visited by one of the two local doctors bled and given injections in the course of the afternoon and evening at some point during the night of September 26 he composed a note for his companion in flight Henny Garland and for Adorno the text of which was reconstructed from memory by Henny Garland many years later who had felt it necessary to destroy the original and this is the note that the note that she remembers his last piece of writing in a situation presenting no way out I have no other choice but to make an end and make an end of it it is in a small village and the Pyrenees where no one knows me that my life will come to a close I ask you to transmit my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to him the situation in which I find myself there was not enough time remaining from to write all the letters I would like to write sometime later that night he took a massive dose of morphine Arthur Kessler later remembered him leaving Marseille with enough morphine to kill a horse his castle put it at this point the record of Walter Benjamin's last hours and the fate of his body becomes virtually impervious to historical inquiry any girland later later recalled that she received an urgent message from benjamine early in the morning of September 27th she found him in his room where he asked her to depict his condition as the result of illness and gave her the note he then lost consciousness Guerlain summoned a doctor who pronounced him beyond help according to Garland Benjamin died sometime on September 27th Biermann recounts that news of venu means death caused a great uproar in the small town several charged calls were made perhaps to the American consulate in Barcelona since Benjamin was carrying an entry visa for the United States as biermann's party sat down for a meal in the hotel on September 27th a priest a priest led a group of about 20 monks carrying candles and chanting a Mass through the dining room she writes we were told that they had come from a neighboring monastery to say a requiem at the deathbed of Professor Benjamin and to bury him the municipal death certificate confirms some aspects of Garland's recollections but not others and it is contradicted at key points by the church registered identifying the deceased as dr. Benjamin Walter it attributes his death to a cerebral hemorrhage the spanish doctor who examined benjamin may have acceded to his final wish hoping to conceal the suicide or he may have been bribed by the other refugees who would have wanted to avoid the kind of ruckus that might lead to their return to france but it gives the date of death as September 26th the next day the border was reopened before leaving poor boo any girl and followed Benjamin's last wishes and destroyed a number of letters and perhaps inadvertently the manuscript he had carried over the Pyrenees she also left enough money to rent a crypt for him in the communal cemetery for five years the municipal death certificate records the burial on September 27th the ecclesiastical record however places the burial in September 26-28 perhaps because the death certificate transposed his name's Walter Benjamin was buried in the Catholic section of the cemetery and not in the area reserved for those of other faiths to say nothing of suicides the municipal and ecclesiastical records again yield contradictory information on the exact number of the rented crypt although a small memorial has been affixed to one of the possible resting places a list of Benjamin's belongings though not the belongings themselves was discovered many years later in the municipal records likewise under the name Benjamin Walter it mentions a leather attache case but no manuscript a man's watch a pipe six photographs an x-ray he had a heart condition a pair of glasses a few letters and newspapers along with other papers and a bit of money at the conclusion of the five-year lease a new body was placed in the crypt and cemetery at poor boo Benjamin's remains were in all probability transferred to a mass grave a memorial by the Israeli archive artist Donny caravan now looks out from the cemetery toward the Little Harbour of poor boo and beyond that to the Mediterranean so that's how the last chapter ends that's the story of his last couple of days so I'm happy now to take questions from you if you have any we'd be happy to talk more about then you mean in other respects whose life this is the it's asking about the venue means relation to his colleagues at the Institute of Social Research Max Horkheimer and Adorno it's an extraordinarily complicated situation one of the interesting twists to this relationship is that Max Horkheimer who was the director of the Institute of Social Research in New York had earlier in 1924 when he was a graduate student at the University of Frankfurt had served as a reader of Walter Benjamin's second dissertation which was submitted to the faculty and aesthetics at Frankfurt in 1924 this is the as you may know in Germany in order to become a teacher in a university you have to write two dissertations his first dissertation was on the concept of criticism in German Romanticism it's 1919 treatment of the ideas of free Jewish legal nivalis Schelling and so on the second dissertation was later published in 1929 as the origin of the German powers feel the towers feel means the play of morning or the morning play a group of at that time very obscure and still actually very obscure German plays from the 17th and 16th centuries distinguished from the genre of tragedy that was his second dissertation he wrote for that dissertation an extraordinarily difficult prologue and when he submitted this dissertation at Frankfurt whether he intended this or not nobody knows but when he submitted it the man in esthetics read the prologue and immediately passed it on to another department because he could make nothing of the prologue he could not understand it it was passed on to another department and it was in that department that Horkheimer was asked together with another graduate students who to be a reader for the dissertation the professor in charge whose name was Hans Cornelius found the dissertation once again completely unreadable and incoherent especially the prologue and so his two graduate students naturally went along with with that opinion Horkheimer as a young man wrote a report on the dissertation saying this was this was not acceptable no one can understand it this indicates that the man would not be an effective teacher since he he doesn't know how to communicate in accessible language and so on and so the dissertation was was not accepted they actually wrote to Veniamin asking him to withdraw the dissertation so that he would not have a formal rejection from the university which he agreed to later regretted the decision tremendously and wish that he had forced them to actually go through with the formal rejection at any rate Horkheimer was part of this rejection and this is what led to been you means becoming a freelance journalist you know he he gave up his in his ambition to be to be a teacher in the university and and for about seven years was a very successful journalist in Baia Mare Germany until of course the Ascension of the National Socialists at which point he was virtually unable to get his work published in Germany anymore he published some few pieces from the next two years under pseudonym but things became very difficult for him a situation aggravated by his divorce from his wife Dora which he initiated out of a desire to marry his Russian girlfriend who herself had a partner in back in Russia and had no intention of marrying men and all a strange self-destructive kind of act and he was divorced from his wife and the his case was so flimsy that the judge actually awarded his wife his entire inheritance venya means entire inheritance so he was he was in virtual poverty after this divorce and with the with the Hitler's taking office in 1933 he was in really serious financial straits so this decision to reject his dissertation was a very very crucial one Max Horkheimer never told benjamine about this then you mean during his lifetime never knew that Horkheimer had been part of this decision at Frankfurt and if you look at the letters between Horkheimer and Benjamin in the 1930s there is a strange kind of tension I think running through the letters course I how can you not you know keep this in mind when you read the letters and III I think it's there there's a strange kind of formality Horkheimer certainly does a lot for Benjamin in 1940 he made efforts to get Benjamin a position at the University of Havana and various other things and did as I mentioned secure for him the the visa the entry visa into the United States but I feel myself that there was there was a there was a kind of coldness and and tension as I said in the relationship with Horkheimer the relationship with Adorno though was very different Adorno and his wife Gretel were very very close to two Walter Benjamin Ben you mean actually knew Gretel Adorno before he met Theodore and my co-author Mike Jennings thinks that they had a kind of romantic fling going I actually I don't see this myself we disagree about this in the letters I think that it was it's a very kind of fond friendship but I don't really see much indication of anything more than that but Mike thinks that there was and that this may have entered into the relationship with Teodoro dono and caused some tension there was tension certainly Adorno when he got his dissertation was deeply influenced by Walter Benjamin and in his first course as a proviso sent a kind of unpaid assistant professor or lecturer in university his first course actually included an extended treatment of Benjamin's tower spiel book and his first writings on literary criticism Adorno's are deeply indebted to Benjamin indeed his I would say most of his work is shows the influence of Walter Benjamin in a very very strong and decisive way so for for many years Adorno could be seen as Benjamin's foremost disciple which is the way then you mean himself once described adore now but then Adorno and Gretel moved to New York in 1934 I believe it was Dorner became the assistant director of the Institute of Social Research under Max Horkheimer and the the Institute was by no means main source of income in the 1930s it was his only steady source of income and as I've mentioned he was at times on the verge of real poverty he was forced oftentimes to live with friends he lived with Berthold Brecht for three summers in breakfast house up in Denmark in a little island in Denmark he he got back on good terms with his wife Dora two years after the divorce Dora saw him at the burial of his mother they had lived for for several years together with their son Stephan in Benjamin's parents villa in Berlin and Dora had supported Benjamin for many many years as she was an English translator her father was a professor of English a Shakespearean well-known Shakespearean in University of Vienna and she grew up with a very good knowledge of English and often often traveled to England so she supported Benjamin through translations into English and various other she ran magazine for women and she supported benjamine and their son for many years Benjamin made very little effort to to help help bus Stefan although he he loved Stefan and saw him but he did not do much to contribute to his financial support so Sidora was outraged by the divorce but two years afterward when Benjamin's mother was being buried dora saw him at the burial and felt sorry for him because he looked so bad looked a wreck so she got back in touch with him she invited him for lunch and invited a friend that a rider friend they were both close to and the relationship resumed not not intimately but she she began taking care of him again she had the greatest respect for him for his mind and she often said in letters that as long as someone like Walter Benjamin is alive in the world it can't be all that bad so Ben you mean she herself left Germany in 1934 having sold the villa which she inherited after the parents died because the judge awarded it to her at the divorce proceedings and she moved to San Remo Italy and began running a little Pensione there it's a very good businesswoman and then you mean would often go down to the Pensione in San Remo this beautiful resort town in Italy and would stay there for months at a time so he that that's the kind of life he lived in the 30s as an exile he also spent two summers in the Spanish island of Ibiza where he would live for virtually nothing in a room that was half constructed would go out in the mornings into the woods where he had a lawn chair hidden away in the bushes would pull out his lawn chair in the middle of the woods with his papers in his books and would work there during the day during the summer of 1933 and 1934 that's how he worked in Ibiza he produced some of his finest works there too so anyway this is a long roundabout attempt to answer your question the relationship with the door no was was very complicated but Adorno and Gretel Gretel his Adorno's wife who was a businesswoman and who ran a glove Factory in Frankfurt did everything they could to help Benjamin they secured money from Fran they they Gretel gave of her own of you know financial resources very generously they were extraordinarily helpful in kind of any mean been over backwards in fact but there are there's also the situation in 1938 and 39 where Benjamin was working on his book on Baudelaire and adorned are rejected the first essay that Benjamin wrote later called the Paris of the Second Empire under Baudelaire and it was a crushing devastating experience for Benjamin to have this essay rejected so once Adorno had become assistant director of the Institute he was no longer you know Benjamin's disciple and sort of younger you know student he was now Benjamin's boss and Ben you mean had to kowtow to him and he he lorded it over Benjamin in certain ways and at that as I say the culminating point was when he rejected this this this essay asking Ben you mean to write another one that he felt would be more theoretical and Benjamin did then you mean came up with on some motifs and Baudelaire one of his greatest essays I think so Donal got what he wanted he knew how to get what he wanted forbidden me but he caused a lot of a lot of you know of a suffering at the time so it's a it's a it's there's a whole book there you know it's a really complicated situation yes okay the question has to do with the speculation about Ben you mean suicide or not actually I was reading the last few pages of the final chapter so you yes there has been a lot of speculative speculation about the the final days and doubts have been raised in fact even suggestion has even been made that he was knocked off by by the Russian government I I don't I'm not persuaded by this we Mike Jennings my co-author and I were in contact with one of the people not only Lisa fit girl whom I as I mentioned I spoke to on the phone but Joseph Garland who was Henny Girl ons 16 year old son at the time of the crossing he became as I mentioned before a professor of engineering at Brown and I we spoke to him he he told us that he remembers standing outside venya means hotel room when his mother went down that morning to go into him because benjamine sent for her to give her the note to Adorno if you remember I read about this so joseph gerland remembers standing outside with the door closed but he could hear he says venya means labored breathing he says it was really really loud and really hard to listen to so that is a pretty convincing detail that this actually is true that he took the morphine that night he managed to keep conscious until the morning sent for Henny girl and gave her the note and then lost consciousness you know he managed to stay stay there that long and then he never recovered consciousness after that so I I think that that plus Lisa fit goes witness I think is sufficient evidence and in fact good evidence that this really did happen this way and the other sort of speculations have to do with various kinds of anti-soviet feeling and so on so I'm not a unless persuaded by that I'm much we can't know for sure obviously it's all sort of second very very difficult questions who have repeat and paraphrase basically asking about whether Benjamin has a kind of self-destructive streak you know he has a famous essay called the destructive character written in the early 30s in which there is an indication of this he stayed in in Paris much too late much too long Dora his wife actually begged him in January of 1940 to come with her and their son Stephan to London she had a she had sold her Pensione and had a new apartment in London she had a room all ready for him she begged him to come to London in January of 1944 Hitler a month before Hitler's ascension to power and he refused he was working in the bibliothèque nationale he was working on the arcades project there was he thought no other place in the world where he had the resources there for his book that he had in the bibliothèque nationale and he was unwilling to abandon his work on the arcades project so he did not take her very generous offer Sholem had early in the 20s invited him to Palestine and benjamine had repeatedly refused and well he for a lot of different reasons that's also extremely complicated relationship the relation to Sholem Sholem had demanded that if Benjamin come to Palestine that he in effect joined the the Zionist movement and commit himself to the the to Zionism and to the devotion to the land in Israel Benjamin was not willing to do that he had serious reservations from 1912 when he was a student on about Zionism and was not willing to to commit to Zionism he he actually deceived Sholem and the president of Jerusalem University at one point saying that he was interested in going to Jerusalem and managed to get from Judah Magnus the president of Jerusalem University at very generous subvention that would enable him to learn Hebrew and then you mean took the several thousand marks immediately went off to the gambling casinos in Monte Carlo apparently lost a whole bunch of it and that's whenever that's whenever he did that's what he did when he had money he would go and gamble it he took Hebrew lessons for about three weeks he waited nine months to arrange the lessons he didn't thank Magnus until nine months later after he arranged the lessons then after three weeks he abandoned the lessons although he took advantage of the lessons to buy a whole bunch of books on on Hebrew and Hebrew language because he was he was fond of book buying later in the 30s Sholem actually closed the doors to - any any immigration to Palestine he made it clear that there were there was no room for intellectuals like Walter Benjamin so actually when Benjamin became truly desperate in the late thirties Palestine was closed to him and Sholem in his comfortable apartment in Jerusalem sort of was saying you know buck up start stop all this worrying you know so as for going to the Soviet Union that too was not something that appealed to him he was not interested in joining the Communist Party for a lot of reasons mainly because he wanted to travel because he was addicted to traveling he loved traveling and he knew that if he were to become a communist member of the Communist Party his traveling would be severely limited there were other reasons as well he simply for this is similar to the reasons why he wouldn't become scientists he was not a he was not interested in joining a party and becoming a you know part of some line so the the the the the idea of moving to Russia was not really something real to him he actually did not have that much available to him the only real sort of escape route was the route to London that door offered him and that he turned down because he wanted to continue work in the bibliothèque nationale under the arcades project and he stayed you know he stayed until late May in 1940 after the German armies had invaded France in the spring of 1940 and then he had to abandon his apartment in a complete rush leaving behind many many manuscripts he had a heart condition and so on I even as an adult Benjamin could not make himself a cup of coffee he was not a very practical person so but I do think he wanted to he did want to escape and he did want to come to the United States so that final door was closed to him as well sorry okay Colon's you know shaolin's approached a Jewish - the history of Jewish mysticism was highly rational he was a very rational scholar and yes in his early work was in the philosophy of mathematics it's it's a magnificent you know study Sholem study is magnificent and influence benjamine in very deep ways especially in venu means understanding of language from an early from early on from 1915 on when they became friends when Shaolin was five years younger Sholem z' influence on Benjamin is very very important but Shaolin was a rationalist benjamine was much more like a real mystic and and Shaolin himself recognized Shaolin once when he was a student compared benjamine to Lao Tzu and and said that that benjamine reminds me of the Jewish prophets he has the kind of spiritual bearing that one sees in Isaiah and Jeremiah this is a man who reads the Hebrew you know intimately so there is a very strong kind of mystical tendency in benjamina I think at the same time there was an extraordinary commitment to enlightenment and to reason and to expressing things as lucidly as possible so it's it's this conflict or tension or dialectic between the rational or the enlightened and the mystical that is one of the things that makes him fascinating as a writer he wasn't he wasn't yeah this there's also great urbanity in Walter Benjamin his radio scripts for children and for adults which he produced and himself broadcast in the in the late 20s and early 30s and to German radio networks the radio scripts are wonderfully entertaining and urbane weedy pieces of work from a man who is thoroughly at home in the world so it there he has many hats he has many sides to him I think that's one of the reasons he appeals to so many different kinds of people

Channel: GBH Forum Network

Views: 14,525

Keywords: Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin (Author), MIT, Harvard Bookstore, Germany, Philosopher, Philosophy, The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction (Written Work), Baudelaire, Trauerspiel

Id: 56IqpusrTso

Length: 41min 34sec (2494 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2014