Translated by Esther LeslieEdited by Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla
New York: Verso, 2007
@27.95/Hardcover
German theorist/philosopher Walter Benjamin was, among other things, an advocate of collecting. In his essay "Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting," Benjamin contemplates the material and phenomenological feelings of his most prized possessions. As an astute scholar, voracious reader, and general lover of objects, books were deep extensions of the self: his personal library could almost be regarded as another appendage. But his willingness to probe the psychical faces of collecting was no idle exercise. Instead, his writing was obviously emblematic of this urge. His masterly Arcades Project, certainly one of the great unfinished works of the 20th century, exists only in a sprawling, unwritten form. What remains intact of the manuscript—indeed, what has now been published the world over and praised by historians and academics in a variety of nooks of the humanities—consists of a few essays, a few short fragments, and a gigantic collection of notes, epigrams, notated leads, found scraps, and connecting thoughts. But lest this massive attempt at decoding 19th century bourgeois French culture—and by extension, capitalism, modernity, industrialization, architecture, etc—be regarded as the Tower of Babel of scholarly projects, a hubristic going-too-far that was doomed from the start, consider that Benjamin worked on it right until the end of his life, stashing parts of the manuscript with friends as he fled Paris and the Nazi occupation of France. He died on the border of France/Spain, probably from suicide. Had the project been completed, it would have certainly been important.
Walter Benjamin's Archive is a visual and verbal collection of personal effects connected to Benjamin. In a way, they can be considered a structural attempt at mapping a biographical history of Benjamin through means similar to his Arcades Project. The editors have published a representative array of notes, letters, postcards, journals, and travelogues. The book is meant to be as much a catalog raisonné as a biographical concordance. Documents are presented as images—frayed pieces of paper with Benjamin's famously small handwriting—and are translated as text, usually on the very next page. Luckily, Verso has printed the book on heavy-stock paper, meaning that the book can be easily thumbed-through, accommodating English-speaking readers who are as interested in what Benjamin's effects look like as in the substance of his texts.
The book is organized into 13 chapters, each focusing on a theme or previously isolated part of the collection. The longest and most text-heavy is "Opinions et Pensées" (Opinions and Thoughts), Benjamin's sometimes hilarious journal of his son Stefan's social and communicative development. Between 1921 and 1932, Benjamin wrote down lists of words, inventive turns of phrase, repeated statements, and surreal situations related to his son. The results are by turns semi-indicative of Benjamin's approach to the world—the accumulation of evidences can later be used to understand anything, even his own son—and a touching fragment of his bemused parental devotion. In some instances, it is a matter of the child creating parallels between things, for lack of a better way of comparing. In 1922, Stefan refers to to condensed milk as "white jam" (125). Also in 1922, Benjamin notes that "Outside on a walk one day he notices a particularly small man and says: Mum, do you suppose that's a baby-man?" (130). Or, in 1926: "Mummy, the cat is laughing. It is really laughing. But I don't know why it is laughing. It is laughing even when I don't say anything funny. But perhaps cat jokes are different" (143).
Though I was already quite familiar with Benjamin's writing/writing habits before reading through this Archive, I was always as interested in Benjamin's interpretations of visual cultures as his studies of the verbal. Thankfully, several chapters are heavy on more purely visual material. "Physiognomy of the Thingworld" provides photos of many Russian toys, which fascinated Benjamin as proto-industrial likenesses made by pre-Soviet peasants. The chapter charts his intellectual approach, showing the images, reproducing his original captions and notes, and ending on the article that he later wrote about them for South West German Radio Gazette. In "Travel Scenes," a small portion of Benjamin's large picture postcard collection—most of it lost, dispersed, or destroyed—is reproduced. Mainly from a 1929 trip to Tuscany, these images are the type of raw material that served Benjamin in his famous "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" essay (older translations called it "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"). Picture postcards are at once mass culture, an aide mémoire for travelers without a camera, and wish-fulfillment for people stuck in less glamorous locales. For Benjamin, modernity means new modes of thought. The constellations of images possible due to photography and its specific media (the snapshot, the postcard, the newspaper photomontage, the cinematic filmstrip) yield technology's creative fever dream.
As is probably clear right now, this book is meant for people who have read significant chunks of Benjamin's writing. If you've never heard of Benjamin at all, it might be best to avoid the Archive altogether. Without the proper context, the book will be of little use, and might at times seem incomprehensible. In fact, if the editors falter in their presentation at all, it is over their omission of key biographical milestones that would otherwise make the book a more easily approachable companion to this challenging man's life and work. But, as it stands, Walter Benjamin's Archive provides intimate detail into the cerebral, meticulous world of one of the 20th century's giants. Though incomplete because of World War II and Benjamin's uncertain financial straits during his lifetime—his work was always freelance, piecemeal, hand-to-mouth, seldom appreciated—what is left of the Benjamin Archive is an essential resource for those not discouraged by its arcane, wholly personal content.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. "Unpacking my Library." Selected Writings v.2, 1927-1934. Trans. Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Roy Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Camrbidge, MA: Harvard UP/Belknap, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability, and Other Writings on Media. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP/Belknap, 2008.
