(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

LITERATURE AS THE MEDIUM OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY
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what has already been written, are they in a position to make use of texts
as a medium of cognition for their own lives. It is self-explanatory that
these requirements can be fulfilled neither by “physiologies” nor by detective
stories. That Benjamin was able to glean them from Hugo’s texts,
inspired as they were by spiritual activities and séances, might explain the
enigmatic quality of his deliberations.
Distinctive and much more precise are Benjamin’s assumptions concerning
Baudelaire. They introduce a category that seems to be able to
destroy the phantasmagoria of the world of commodities: the shock. Benjamin’s
seminal interpretation of Baudelaire’s sonnet “A une passante”
(To a Passerby) figures as the center of his chapter “Der Flaneur” (“The
Flâneur”) and it is here that the cultural critic pinpoints the experience
of the city dweller within the innermost experience of the individual.
“In tiefer Trauer und hoheitsvollem Schmerz” (“In deep mourning and
majestic pain”) the woman passing by emerges from the crowd and is
both thrust into the focus of the discerning subject and at the same time
removed from it. For Benjamin she becomes an allegorical figure “der
von der Großstadt stigmatisiert[en] Liebe” (GS I.2:548; “of love being
stigmatized by the big city,” SW 4:25). She confers a traumatic experience
onto the poet, tearing the phantasmagorical veil asunder and revealing
the true character of the masses pulsing through the city streets. Benjamin
conjectures that her being has been determined by the “frosty breath
of commodity economics,” something that he had first experienced in
the marches of the Fascist masses and the formation of the throngs in
Stalin’s Soviet Union. At the same time he discerns her particular form of
being in the very impossibility of love in modern societies, as revealed in
Baudelaire’s poem. In essence, literary texts are shown to be the medium
of cultural memory, the true significance of which can only be derived
from the reality of recent social experience.
VI
In the third chapter of his Baudelaire book, entitled “Die Moderne”
(“Modernity”), Benjamin assembles the motives that offset the fury of
production in the socioeconomic sector of modernity. According to his
analysis modern society is marked by an “Überforderung des Produzierenden”
(GS I.2:574; “overtaxing of the productive person,” SW 4:42).
Since everything has been transformed into a commodity and become
purchasable, the impetus to generate objects by exerting personal labor
evaporates. “Die Widerstände, die die Moderne dem natürlichen produktiven
Elan des Menschen entgegensetzt, stehen im Missverhältnis zu
seinen Kräften. Es ist verständlich, wenn er erlahmt und in den Tod
flüchtet” (GS I.2:578; “The resistance that modernity offers to the natural
productive élan of an individual is out of all proportion to his strength.