Collections unlock themselves once a single piece is brought to voice. In the beginning was the exemplary object, which often opens up the way to thought as if by itself. Groups of documents arose. Sibling relationships became visible. The consideration of material and its context in the work delivered insights into an extraordinary bequest and its originator—it generated a portrait of the author from his archive.
Benjamin’s mode of working is marked by the techniques of archiving, collecting, and constructing. Excerpts, transpositions, cuttings-out, montaging, sticking, cataloguing and sorting appear to him to be true activities of an author. His inspiration is inflamed by the richness of materials. Images, documents, and perceptions reveal their secrets to the look that is thorough enough. Benjamin was interested in the incidental. He loved to think in marginal areas, in order to push out from there to the center; he liked to use the phrase “most central.” His capacity for immersion and his preparedness to make connections allowed him to discover essential things in details. Fragments recombined into new things; this researcher converted them into something distinctive.
Benjamin believed that the basis of collecting does not lie in “exactness,” in “silk reeling” or “the complete inventorizing of all data” (GS III, p. 216). Peculiar to the collector is “a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is their usefulness—but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage of their fate” (SW 2:2, p. 487). Benjamin designates the true passion of the collector as “anarchistic, destructive.” He affiliates fidelity to the thing with “the wilfully subversive protest against the typical, classifiable.” Possession of a thing generates completely irrational accents. For the collector his item, its origin and past all close ranks as “a magic encyclopedia, a world ordering, whose outline is the fate of the object” (GS III, pp. 216f).
The suspicion that what is being dealt with here is historically outbid can be countered by a reference to the note Excavation and Memory, a key text on the question of memory. It informs us that to approach a submerged past involves digging. It is advisable to plan one’s procedures, but also indispensable to probe cautiously, tentatively, into the dark loam. “And the man who merely makes an inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his richest prize” (SW 2:2, p. 576). The concept of “topicality” was no empty phrase for Benjamin.
One of the few who was able to judge that for himself was Jean Selz. Selz got to know Benjamin in 1932 on the Pitiusas, the small sister islands of the Balearics, and he encountered him on Benjamin’s home ground: translation, as they rendered parts of Berlin Childhood in French. Selz learnt a lot about Benjamin’s modes of thinking and working. He experienced how Benjamin traced the graphic form of words. He witnessed how he held his pen. And he discovered the various functions of the notebooks. In retrospect Selz described his extraordinary interlocutor in the following way: “Walter Benjamin was one of the most intelligent men I have ever met in my life. He was perhaps the only one who gave me with so much force the impression that there is a depth of thought where, propelled by rigorous logical reasoning, precise historic and scientific facts inhabit a plane in which they coexist with their poetic counterparts, a plane where poetry is no longer simply a form of literary thought, but reveals itself as an expression of the truth that illuminates the most intimate correspondences between man and the world” (Jean Selz, “Benjamin in Ibiza,” p. 366).
“Thirteen—it was a cruel pleasure to stop at this number”: Benjamin quotes Marcel Proust, from his cycle In Search of Lost Time, two volumes of which he translated together with Franz Hessel. Benjamin had a particular affinity for the number thirteen. He described the thirteen towers of San Gimignano. And he composed five texts that are structured as thirteen theses. Four of these are in One-Way Street: The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses, Thirteen Theses against Snobs, The Technique of the Critic in Thirteen Theses, Number 13 and The Path to Success in Thirteen Theses.2 These are poetological reflections, contributions to the self-understanding of writing, judging, and publishing, his main activities. Thirteen features as a magical number, standing for conspiracy and danger, bringing bad luck or good fortune. That last thing was bestowed upon Benjamin’s archives. They were saved and it is to be hoped that they will not be forgotten.
Erdmut Wizisla
1Charles Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” in Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art, London: Phaidon, 1955.
2This final one is in SW 2:1, pp. 144-7.
Thus the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.
SW 2:2, p. 487
The scruples, sometimes disturbing even to me, with which I view the plan of some sort of “Collected Works” correspond to the archival precision with which I preserve and catalog everything of mine that has appeared in print. Furthermore, disregarding the economic side of being a writer, I can say that for me the few journals and small newspapers in which my work appears represent for me the anarchic structure of a private publishing house. The main objective of my promotional strategy, therefore, is to get everything I write—except for some diary entries—into print at all costs and I can say that I have been successful in this—knock on wood!—for about four or five years.
Correspondence, p. 385
I, however, had something else in mind: not to retain the new but to renew the old. And to renew the old—in such a way that I myself, the newcomer, would make what was old my own—was the task of the collection that filled my drawer.
SW 3, p. 403
The “struggle against dispersion,” which is the “most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects” (AP, p. 211), finds no more pregnant expression than in the archive. Given the insecurities that beleaguered his life, Walter Benjamin led this struggle with particular perseverance and finesse. His own contribution as a collector to the preservation and transmission of his works is not without irony. “I will continue to ensure the completion of your collection of little grasses and stems from my field,” Benjamin wrote to his friend Alfred Cohn in 1928, in a statement that predates his departure