The Stamp Collector

 “One Way Street,” Essays by Walter Benjamin, 1916 to 1937

If you’ve had any acquaintance with cultural Marxists, the name Walter Benjamin always pops up.  After reading and skimming this book I’m not sure why.  The essays and ‘thoughts’ collected in this compendium (he only wrote one book-length work) took place during times of immense historical events – World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, two German revolutions, the rise of the Nazis and Mussolini and the beginnings of World War II.  Yet little of this penetrates these highly intellectual, Surrealist, poetic and ostensibly communist writings.  It is more a discussion of smaller things.

This volume is introduced by the painful intellectualisms of Susan Sontag, which is a warning.  Benjamin first lived in Germany, was a friend of Adorno, wrote literary analyses of Nietzsche, Proust and Goethe, collected stamps, wrote poetically, remembered dreams, favored hashish and Surrealism and committed suicide in 1940 on the Spanish border while trying to escape fascism.  He only started to read Marx two years before his death, so his leftist reputation seems strained.  He is really a dissident intellectual, which should not have been difficult during these momentous years.

TRAVELOGUES

One of the best, grounded essays is on the chaotic communalism of Naples, Italy – which could serve as a neo-realist workup for a Fellini film.  He also writes an essay on Marseilles and hash, so he’s no academic prude.  He spends time on his home city Berlin, a labyrinth which he first explored as a young child.  His wanderings were made more difficult by his inability to read maps and a poor sense of direction – even ‘left’ and ‘right’ were a mystery. (!)  He frequents the debating rooms, brothels, assembly halls and stores of Berlin with his mother, his nanny and later with other guides. Perhaps if you are a Berliner you might find this interesting.

Of special interest is his trip to Moscow in 1927.  There he views the culture of multiple street peddlers and beggars, Mongols, old women and homeless children.  And also of children’s daycare, which we would call neighborhood centers.  Here a woman tries to feed children, organizes games and attends to their personal problems.  In museums Benjamin notes how the Moscow proletariat is not intimidated from enjoying and appropriating culture, including bourgeois culture.  This is unlike our own museums, which statistically see few workers.  He does mention archaic bourgeois theater being performed for no reason except it was part of the European canon.  He laments the disappearance of the Constuctivist art of the earlier revolutionary period, replaced by bland postering. 

Moscow in Summer in the 1920s

Benjamin thinks with his eyes in Moscow.  He observes the crowded apartments, at 13 sq. meters per person; the ever-changing adaptations of every aspect of the city; of generals who become art directors; of endless meetings in corners; of the forsaken and fungible understanding of time; of mute churches; of multiple pubs and theaters.   He travels on crowded street-cars and in open horse sleighs in what he calls a “gigantic village.” Christmas is celebrated in ornate detail, yet jazz and dancing are prohibited as ‘bourgeois’ – though secretly practiced.  As to commerce:  “The Soviet State has severed money from power.  It reserves power to the Party, and leaves money to the NEP man.”  But Benjamin notes that there are castes in Moscow, based on relations to the Party.   He states: “The mourning for Lenin is, for Bolsheviks, also a mourning for heroic Communism.”  And this is not all his observations of the city’s life.

SURREALISM & SUCH

The origins of French surrealism in 1919 lie in an earlier revolt against Catholicism by French poets like Rimbaud and Lautreamont. He examines Andre Breton’s first surrealist book, Nadja, which helped initiate the movement.  Surrealism reflected the crisis of bourgeois ‘art for arts sake,’ its exclusive focus on 'beauty' and the legacy of a capitalist and brutal WW1. As a ‘revolutionary intelligentsia’ it promoted a “radical concept of freedom,” an “an intoxication for the revolution” and moved towards communism.  Benjamin here examines surrealism in detail, and if that is of interest, this essay will help.

The book includes a short history of photography and essays on the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus and the German Marxist historian Edward Fuchs. As you can see, Benjamin found interest in a wide variety of small and more obscure cultural issues, similar to later so-called ‘Western Marxists' and the conservative Frankfurt School.  In that perhaps he is a forerunner or fellow traveler of theirs.  At any rate, one book by Benjamin is enough for me. To my mind somewhat random intellectualism is not very helpful for this author and certainly for many readers.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Marxist Theory of Art,” “Marxist Criticism of the Bible,” “Ways of Seeing” (Berger); “The Conspiracy,” “A Walk Through Paris,” “Violence” (Zizek); "Gorky Park."

And I got it at May Day Books discount section!

Red Frog

December 3, 2022