(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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BERND WITTE
to Marx the defeat of the insurgents by a coalition that included the bourgeois
reactionary forces, the church, the farmers, and even paupers was
followed by singularly violent reprisal: “More than 3000 insurgents were
butchered after the victory, and 15,000 were deported without trial. With
this defeat the proletariat recedes into the background of the revolutionary
stage.” 11 What Marx reports with almost statistical sobriety becomes
part of a history of salvation in Benjamin’s allegory. For him the proletariat
appears as the messianic savior of humankind, who takes the stage of history
and whose suffering and death presage a future redemption, should
the masses be intelligent enough to join up with the “reverie” of the poet.
That Benjamin can couch his hopes in an allegorical image is telling proof
that “die großen Tendenzen der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung . . . noch
die gleichen sind” (GS I.2:593; “the great tendencies of social development
are still the same,” SW 4:55) as when Baudelaire was living and writing in
Paris. Or should Benjamin’s final image be subject to a similar assumption
raised about Meryon’s etchings of the city: “Das, wovon man weiß, daß
man es bald nicht mehr vor sich haben wird, das wird Bild” (GS I.2:590;
“When one knows that something will soon be removed from one’s gaze,
that thing becomes an image,” SW 4:53)?
That prompts two central questions: What is the close relationship
between the political and social history and the history of literature and
the media that Benjamin purports to have established? What would be
the result of contemplating jointly on these two historical spheres? Both
of these questions have been conceived from Benjamin’s perspective by
taking the conditions for their material production into account. Hence
it is not a simple matter of mirroring or reflecting material circumstances,
as can easily be posited for Georg Lukács’s naive Marxism. Rather, Benjamin’s
arguments are based on the awareness that the media themselves
have their own innate history. Not their content but their technical development
is highly significant for tracing the historical past. In modernity,
both political history and the traditional media of collective memory,
literature, are the outcome of a historical catastrophe, which Benjamin
locates in a long sequence of failed revolutions extending from 1789 to
1918. This sequence, one may posit, has led to the global triumph of the
principle of the liberal market economy, which pervades all expressions of
human existence today. The distortions and aberrations of political history
disclose the meaninglessness of literature and, inversely, the loss of
authenticity and functionality plaguing today’s media can be read as characteristic
of the deterioration in the social and political spheres.
VII
When Benjamin recommenced his work on his Baudelaire project in the
winter of 1939/40, after having been interrupted by the strong criticisms