(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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BERND WITTE
Feerie” (GB 3:322; a dialectical faerie) in the style of Einbahnstraße, the
work was “dem Prozeß einer vollkommenen Umwälzung unter worfen,”
“den eine aus der weit zurückliegenden Zeit meines unmittelbar metaphysischen,
ja theologischen Denkens stammende Gedanken- und Bildermasse
durch machen mußte, um mit ihrer ganzen Kraft meine gegenwärtige
Verfassung zu nähren” (GB 5:88–89; subjected to the process of a complete
transformation, which a mass of ideas and images stemming from
the remote period of my immediate metaphysical and theological stance
had to go through, in order to empower my present disposition with its
full authority.) In the Bibliothèque Nationale Benjamin immersed himself
in what seemed to be an unlimited assortment of literature on Paris.
When he had to interrupt his research because of the Nazi invasion of
Paris in 1940, the list of primary sources he had consulted and excerpted
included nearly 850 titles. According to his exposé entitled “Paris, die
Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts” (“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth
Century”), which he sketched in May 1935, the quotes gathered were to
have served as the basis for six extensive investigations, of which Benjamin
only began to work on the fifth, “Baudelaire oder die Straßen von Paris”
(“Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris”). The middle section of this text was
completed in September 1938 and sent to New York for publication. It
is certainly not by chance that the literary part of his project reached the
level of completion that it did. Concentrating on the experience Charles
Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century author, had had with his city, Benjamin
pays tribute to the atomization of collective memory into private
memories. By adopting a technique that he had previously developed for
his analysis of Marcel Proust’s mémoire involontaire (spontaneous memory)
he applies his materialistic approach to Baudelaire’s private memory.
His metaphorical comparison of shock as an individual sensory form and
shock as part of the process of social production is a forceful attempt to
construct individual experience as collective knowledge and thus make it
transmissible for later generations.
In “Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire” (“The Paris of the
Second Empire in Baudelaire”) Benjamin develops the antithesis to his
false idyll of craftsmen, the advantages of which could only be found in
a traditional society strictly bound by cultural rituals. The middle section
of his Baudelaire book, “Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des
Hochkapitalismus” (Charles Baudelaire: A Poet in the Age of High Capitalism)
planned as a miniature of the Passagen-Werk, but never completed,
relies on historical materialism to show “wie [Baudelaire] ins neunzehnte
Jahrhundert eingebettet liegt” (“how Baudelaire lies embedded in the
nineteenth century,” J51a,5). At the same time, Baudelaire’s work is
brought into contemporary perspective, that is, into a historical constellation
reflecting the plight of European civilization, which was threatened
by National Socialism in Germany, and the totalitarian socialism cultivated