why i believe in benjamin - part 1

It is no small secret that I am obsessed with Walter Benjamin. Over the next few entries, perhaps we will figure out why.

There is a fantastic essay on Walter Benjamin’s character and life. The essay is called “Revisiting the Storyteller” and was written by Jack Zipes, a man who studies radical theories and tropes in fairy tales. Fittingly, Benjamin’s life reads like a fairy tale – a Hans Christian Andersen tale full of light and sound and grief. I suggest you read the essay; what I am about to write does little justice to Zipes or to Benjamin.

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin. Walter led a charmed life – born to a wealthy family in Berlin, Walter had the freedom to fragment, study, and reconfigure life. Puzzles, you see, enraptured the boy – indeed, he remained a boy at heart – and held him captive like a butterfly stilled in a net.

Here, I suppose, the fairy tale begins to writhe, to turn in upon itself and splinter at its sides. Changes swept across Germany, changes that stripped Walter of his nation and identity. Jewish Walter was forced to flee Berlin, forced to leave his childhood trappings in a land that swallowed and stained his memories with a sallow shade of pain.

Exiled, Walter wrote feverishly, obsessively, attempting to understand what had happened to his home and, more importantly, how to redeem it. How did the hate start and why were people willing to listen? He supposed a breakdown in our abilities to tell and understand stories, a failure in one’s ability to communicate. In an age of technological innovation and mechanical reproduction, works of art lost their aura – power – at once rupturing the art-viewer relationship and bringing the viewer and artwork closer together. Movies stirred emotions frozen in the depths of the postmodern soul; film held both a dangerous and redemptive quality. Walter sought a way out of our shackles, a means of escaping the modern conundrum. Whether through self-expression through material objects – a re-possession of the commodity – or through the temporal cracks and crevices educed by boredom, Walter sought keys to reclaiming human life and, perhaps, reclaiming a land and memory that once belonged to him.

[Walter found solace in memories, in the blaze of youth, in children’s books]

I wish I could say that Walter lived happily ever after, that in his obsession he found the keys to healing a fragmented society. Instead, his major work stands unfinished – the fragments he wrote and collected have been bound together in a 1,000 page tome that still cries to be complete. Unable to escape the gestapo, Walter flooded his body with morphine; the Angel of Death offered the only mercy within his reach.