Benjamin, ‘the great reading room of a library divided by the Seine.’ It was a library that Walter plundered without scruples, copying sentences, illustrations, notes and references with boundless energy into his notebooks. The material he accumulated became more and more cumbersome while the project began to seem perhaps interminable. Benjamin worked on Passagen-Werk almost ceaselessly during those years of exile, stopping only to work on some essay commissioned by the Horkheimer Institute – for Adorno, who was supplying the small grant he was living on. But it was his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age’ that seemed most promising. For years his allusive, esoteric projects had kept him out of fashionable conversation, but this essay led him to believe he might be influential in the debate over the future of Marxist aesthetics. Benjamin would be at the middle of a global discussion and wouldn’t feel so alone anymore. How wrong he was. That essay may be his most famous work today, but it had a catastrophic reception at the time – even from his staunch supporters: Scholem was non-committal, Adorno critical, Brecht was even offended and the audience – mostly Communist Party members – at the two evening panels organised by the association of exiled German writers where Benjamin and Hans Sahl discussed the essay listened as if in a silent bubble, almost a boycott. This was late June 1936.
‘That’s it. It’s all over,’ he said to Hans Sahl as they walked home together at the end of the evening. The moon was hidden behind a pitch-black cloud. Blustery wind rattled the lamps over the deserted streets. It was a peculiar wind for a humid June night – a grim wind, fat with rancour and rain. Leaving the station on the metro, the lights of the station were quickly swallowed by the dark tunnel.
‘What’s over?’ asked Sahl.
‘It’s over for them. You saw their faces? The comrades? And their leader, Müzenberg . . . they’re jackasses and I don’t mean just aesthetically speaking.’
In Weimar Germany Sahl had been an important theatre and film critic, among the first to believe in film as an art form. Benjamin’s essay brought new perspective to bear on his hunch and yet no one seemed to appreciate it.
‘You’ll see, Walter,’ he said as they stood on the steps of the station leading up to the road. ‘They’ll give it its due in the end.You’re too far ahead of your time.’
It was late by the time they reached the rue de Vaugirard, Benjamin’s pace was slow and uncertain and his head was bowed. He’d stop periodically but continue talking, shaking his head and never looking up at Sahl, who was having some difficulty following but couldn’t figure out how to interrupt.
‘I made a mistake, I made a mistake . . .’ he kept repeating in the grimy darkness of the night. He was worn out and panting. This was a man used to being in control of his feelings. He never liked to reveal too much and worried about saying the wrong thing. But that evening he seemed short of illusions. And was slowly pulling the white flag of surrender from his pocket.
Suddenly he burst out, ‘Enough of this,’ and embarrassed drops of rain began to fall. Sahl opened his umbrella and stood closer, trying to keep Benjamin from getting wet.
‘Maybe we should leave,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve already seen a couple of uniforms around. Are your papers in order?’
‘What does it matter?’
It was god only knows what time of night and they’d been standing there for a long time under the soundless rain shower. And then two policemen out on their rounds appeared from around the corner.
‘Bonsoir,’ said one, lifting his fingers to his cap. ‘You’ve been standing here for quite a while now.Who are you and what are you doing?’
Sahl didn’t have time to answer because Benjamin jumped in, ‘We are two German Jews standing under an umbrella talking,’ he said very seriously. Then he twirled his fingers in the air and made off alone through the rain that had begun to seem unending.
After that ill-fated evening in 1936, Benjamin made no further efforts to broaden his circle. Even though he missed intellectual companionship and his loneliness bothered him, he resigned himself to it. He began to concentrate on himself and his few friends whom he didn’t spare the smallest detail – not even his constant state of anxiety over his finances – in his letters and in rare encounters. Money became his central concern, his obsession.
After his German remittances were suspended, his only source of income was the money coming in from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research. But that money never seemed enough. There isn’t a single letter from that extensive period that doesn’t hint at his hardships and deprivations, the difficulty of daily survival, the humiliation he suffered without any promise of remedy. In October 1935, for example, Benjamin wrote to Max Horkheimer, ‘Any help you give me will produce immediate relief. I have reduced my living expenses enormously compared to what they were in April when I returned to Paris, consequently I am now living as a boarder with some émigrés. Beyond that, I have succeeded in obtaining permission to take my midday meal at a restaurant that has a special arrangement for French intellectuals. In the first place, however, this permission is temporary and, in the second place, I can make use of it only on those days I am not in the library, for the restaurant is very far from there. I will only mention in passing that I ought to renew my carte d’identité but do not have the one hundred francs this requires. Since it involves a fee of fifty francs, I have also not yet been able to join the Presse Étrangère, which I was urged to do for administrative reasons.’ To Scholem he wrote, ‘I don’t know how long my powers of resistance will last in view of all the circumstances, since I am provided with only the bare necessities for at most two weeks a month. The most trifling purchase depends on a miracle taking place.’
Was he exaggerating? Possibly. Even Scholem, his very best friend, would admit years later that he’d had doubts and harboured suspicions. The truth might have been that when it came to money and other practical things – what it takes to put food on the table – Benjamin was like a man lost in the desert, a time-traveller who stumbled into the present.
‘You should have been born in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, like one of your flâneurs,’ Hannah Arendt told him once. It must have been at the Café de la Paix after she’d returned from one of her trips to Palestine. During that period Hannah was director of the Paris office of the Alijah Youth, which organised the emigration of children to Palestine. ‘Really you’re an homme de lettres and you don’t belong to any time,’ she sighed as she finished off her tea and tossed her mane of black hair over her shoulder. ‘You should have lived in a time when you could have been paid to write what you write without ever thinking about obligations.Wouldn’t you like a stipend that had no obligations attached?’
She seemed to grow meaner as she spoke, meaner and more tired. It was as if she was going to tell him everything she thought this time, without weighing her words.
‘No, not at all . . .’ Walter spluttered.
‘Of course you remember that we no longer live in the age of Pascal and Montaigne. Things didn’t go in your favour at the university, and then they went badly with Scholem and the Zionists, and badly with your Marxist friend.Will you ever open your eyes?’
She was off and running now. It was a bad sign when she knit her brows like that.
‘It’s useless to keep trying,’ she added sternly. ‘You will never find anyone who is willing to give you money so that you can live happily ever after as an homme de lettres, a revolutionary aristocrat. I am sorry to be the one to tell you, Walter, but there’s not much room left in the world for men like you.’
He could only remember a very few occasions in which anyone had dared to speak so harshly with him. Benjamin looked at her, trying to fight against the onslaught of emotions that seemed to be pressing on him from all sides. The people sitting around them in the café seemed a muffled crowd in the distance, only concerned with what was going on at their table. He thought he should say something, but every sentence that came to mind deteriorated before he could open his mouth.
‘One becomes ever more what one is,’ he finally mumbled.
Hannah