Walter Benjamin, friend and early critical champion of Bertolt Brecht and German translator of Marcel Proust, who has been called ‘the most original, most delicately perceptive yet incisive of German, one would surely say of European, literary and culture critics’ (Times Literary Supplement, 22.8.1968), was born 85 years ago in Berlin and died by his own hand in 1940 while attempting to escape from Nazi-occupied France.

The welcome recent availability of two more of his works in paperback editions – Understanding Brecht and Charles Baudelaire (both New Left Books paperback, 1977) – in addition to the already existing Illuminations (Fontana, 1973) will introduce him to a wider readership than hitherto possible. This is important because Benjamin is a stimulating and unorthodox critic whose very style stirs and sharpens the mind, preparing it for his dialectical explorations and insights. ‘Art’, he once wrote in a typical aside, ‘means brushing reality’s coat up the wrong way’; and he remained true to the spirit of this remark in his own writing.

Many of those who have already come across Benjamin’s work were probably introduced to his name and his ideas by John Berger’s television programmes Ways of seeing, subsequently published in book form (Penguin/BBC, 1972), or by Berger’s essay on him collected in Berger’s Selected essays (Penguin, 1972),
though others will already have read him in translation in New Left Review as early as 1968. However, he is still a little known and much misunderstood figure who is all too often simply bracketed as a Marxist critic with Bertolt Brecht, for the two to be set against Georg Lukács as champions of the avant-garde and modernism as against the latter’s traditionalism.

In fact Benjamin is difficult to categorize and it is wrong to think of him as a Marxist critic in the sense, say, of a Lukács or a Caudwell, whose Marxism unequivocally permeated their whole thinking and came to determine their whole activity. Benjamin came to Marxism later in his own development and it immediately became and remained for him an attractive and convincing intellectual method rendered ever more valid and compelling as the fascist danger grew in his native country. But his Marxism always overlaid a mystical element in his approach which had its origins partly in the highly abstruse theories current in the intensely antibourgeois, anti-Wilhelmine, but equally anti-rationalist atmosphere of the student movement of his youth, of which he was one of the leaders in Berlin. This mystical streak in Benjamin was never totally displaced by his Marxism and, at best, the two elements fruitfully enriched each other. Thus, as John Berger’s essay suggests, Benjamin always writes about a literary work as if it could or should be a magic or a skeleton key to a visionary revolutionary consciousness – a quality of Benjamin’s writing that shows the influence on him of the great Utopian Marxist Ernst Bloch, who died aged 91 earlier this year and whose highly influential book, Spirit of utopia (not yet translated into English), appeared in Germany in the early 1920s.

The best introduction to Benjamin is Stanley Mitchell’s short preface to Understanding Brecht which, while being extremely sympathetic to Benjamin’s more mystical side, contains a sober Marxist criticism and analysis of one of Benjamin’s most famous and most quoted essays, ‘The author as producer’, originally given as a speech to an antifascist literary meeting in Paris in 1934. This essay contains, among much compact but not abstruse thought, a brilliant and theoretically grounded appreciation of Soviet avant-garde writing as a model for ‘committed’ literature, as well as a devastating attack on other apparently left-wing writers who turn ‘the struggle against misery into an object of consumption’. However, the essay ends by over-emphasizing the revolutionizing of the means, the formal techniques, of literary production, at the expense of the social relations which are at its base, and which involve its content, and Stanley Mitchell suggests how and why Benjamin took up this position. A little later, Brecht published an essay on literary technique in an émigré German journal in Moscow which contains a pertinent critique of this overstress on form, a tendency which is also prevalent among the avant-garde today. ‘The extremely healthy campaign against Formalism’, wrote Brecht, ‘has made possible the productive development of artistic forms by showing that the development of social content is an absolutely essential precondition for it. Unless it adapts itself to this development of content and takes orders from it, any formal innovation will remain wholly unfruitful’ (‘On rhymeless verse’, in Brecht’s Poems 1913–56, Methuen, 1976).

The Understanding Brecht volume is otherwise most useful for printing the two different versions of Benjamin’s major essay on Brecht ‘What is Epic Theatre?’, which require and repay close study, and for the unique ‘Conversations with Brecht’, which give an idea of Brecht’s views on the Soviet Union, on Kafka, and on Lukács, and incomparably convey the force and attack of his anti-fascism, while showing him also in lighter vein, describing himself as a ‘moderate manic’ and giving out the dictum, ‘Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones’.

From the late 1920s, Benjamin came to consider his study of Paris as the cultural capital of nineteenth-century Europe his most important work. Fascism, which had already driven him out of Germany, also prevented him from completing this great project. However, a fragment of it, which took on an importance for him of its own, was his study of Charles Baudelaire, the prototype and the archetype of the bourgeois artist – in this case, poet – in rebellion against his social and cultural environment. Baudelaire’s rebellion had profound autobiographic origins, but he was an exact contemporary of Karl Marx, and he too was in revolt against the exploitation and alienation of the new commodity capitalism – characterized by Marx as ‘the bankers’ rule’ – in the period of the ‘bourgeois’ monarchy of Louis Philippe which led to the explosion of the 1848 Revolution.

The English edition of Benjamin’s book on Baudelaire is subtitled A lyric poet in the era of high capitalism and contains the essay ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’. Benjamin’s aim, he explained in a recently published letter, was to show the place Baudelaire had occupied in that epoch ‘as clearly as the position of a half-buried stone is shown in the ground by the mark it leaves if it is carefully extracted’. Benjamin does just this, through Baudelaire’s own writing, and that of his contemporaries – journalists, revolutionaries, and the first bohemians – and also using Marx and sharing his sources. The result is a rich juxtaposition of literary analysis and detection, quotation, and fact-gathering – a criss-cross of economic, social and cultural interconnections which vividly evokes the heyday of commercial capitalism and the cultural movements and phenomena which were the response to it. This volume also contains one of the most important of Benjamin’s short pieces – the little section entitled ‘Taste’ in which he considered the role of taste and fashion under commodity capitalism and their relation with the movement of ‘art for art’s sake’:

‘Taste’, writes Benjamin, ‘develops with the definite preponderance of commodity production over any other kind of production … Its [taste’s] value to the manufacturer is a fresh stimulus to consumption … it is precisely this development which literature reflects in ‘art for art’s sake’. This doctrine and its corresponding practice for the first time gives taste its dominant position in poetry. In ‘art for art’s sake’ the poet for the first time faces language the way a buyer faces the commodity on the open market … They [the poets of ‘art for art’s sake’] have nothing to formulate with such urgency that it could determine the coining of their words. The poet’s taste guides him in his choice of words.’

It is instructive to put this Marxist literary historian and critic’s analysis of the origins of modern Formalism and the avant-garde alongside the experience of one of its greatest poets. When T.S. Eliot was asked about the relation of form to subject in his work, and whether he ever chose the form before knowing what he was going to write in it, he replied: ‘Yes, in a way … We studied Gautier’s poems and then we thought, “Have I anything to say in which this form will be useful?” And we experimented. The form gave the impetus to the content’ (in Writers at Work, [Penguin, 1972]). Theophile Gautier was one of the greatest poets of the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement.

One of Benjamin’s most famous essays is ‘The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction’ (in Illuminations), which contains all the insights and suggestive social and cultural interlockings of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding media, though Benjamin is both more historically and politically conscious (fascism was already using all the resources of artistic and ideological mass production when he wrote his essay in the mid-1930s). It is this piece that John Berger acknowledges in Ways of seeing, though he takes Benjamin’s argument much further than Benjamin – in fact much too far – when he tries to show that the technique of oil painting and artistic realism was an expression of the age of commodity production and investment in artworks, whereas what Benjamin does argue in this essay is that the ritual value of a religious work of art in a religious age is replaced by a stress on a work’s authenticity in a secular age. This essay – like almost everything else Benjamin wrote – is an exhilarating mixture of bold cultural sweep and detailed scrupulous perception.

Benjamin’s life was in many ways a sad one. His attempts to become a university teacher were frustrated, and he earned his living as a freelance critic and translator. One of his closest friends, the Zionist scholar Gershom Scholem, emigrated to Palestine and ceaselessly attempted to convert Benjamin to Zionism and to persuade him to follow him to Jerusalem. Benjamin had meanwhile been introduced to Marxism and to Soviet writing and the Soviet cinema – about which he wrote with great enthusiasm – originally by the Soviet Latvian children’s theatre producer Asja Lacis, through whom in the mid-1920s he also met Brecht. At that time he was very close to joining the Communist Party (his brother Georg had already done so) – ‘a step’, he wrote to Scholem with revealing ambiguity, he would ‘sooner or later definitely take’. He never did. Nor, despite all Scholem’s exhortations and warnings against his growing relationship with Brecht, did he ever sever that link. Rather, with the growth of fascism, his political commitment and his relation with Brecht became more and more central, and the brief existing correspondence between them shows Benjamin’s total readiness to work with Brecht and his Communist associates in the anti-fascist struggle.

The Cambridge critic George Steiner, who has done much to make Benjamin’s name known here, has sought to play down the extent of Benjamin’s political commitment and tends, following Scholem, to over-emphasize the Jewish mystical element in Benjamin’s writing. There is an obverse tendency among Marxists of the New Left here and in West Germany to see him straightforwardly as a Marxist critic standing with Brecht against Lukács, who has even been misleadingly referred to in New Left circles as ‘an eminent opponent of Benjamin’s aesthetic’.[1]

It is understandable that Benjamin is bracketed with Brecht in this way: both were champions of modernism against Lukács’s more conservative aesthetic stance. But Benjamin, who had been profoundly influenced by Lukács’s History and class consciousness, and whom Lukács certainly admired – in fact specifically the German tragic drama book – never entered the debate on Marxist literary theory between Brecht and Lukács but remained an isolated and idiosyncratic figure with some of whose work Brecht himself lost sympathy, dismissing it for its ‘mysticism’.

Benjamin’s complete writings are only now in the process of being published in West Germany, laboriously compiled from rich archives of his manuscripts in the GDR, Frankfurt, and Jerusalem. It is to be hoped that more of his accessible work will eventually be translated into English. Then we shall all be able to read and assess him more fully, in the way we most certainly need and he most certainly deserves.

Note:
1. On the jacket of Benjamin’s The origins of German tragedy (NLB, 1977), an extremely specialized work which Benjamin himself referred to as ‘recondite’, whose translation is therefore of doubtful value.

[ Comment, 12.11.1977 ]