(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

ON BENJAMIN, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND NEVER USING THE WORD “I” 135
“Berliner Chronik”: “Like a Man Digging”
While I have been using the term autobiography for Benjamin’s recollections
of his childhood, he explicitly states in “Berliner Chronik” that the
text resists this designation — at least as conventionally understood:
Erinnerungen, selbst wenn sie ins Breite gehen, stellen nicht immer
eine Autobiographie dar. Und dieses hier ist ganz gewiß keine, auch
nicht für die berliner Jahre, von denen hier ja einzig die Rede ist.
Denn die Autobiographie hat es mit der Zeit, dem Ablauf und mit
dem zu tun, was den stetigen Fluß des Lebens ausmacht. Hier aber
ist von einem Raum, von Augenblicken und vom Unstetigen die
Rede. Denn wenn auch Monate und Jahre hier auftauchen, so ist es
in der Gestalt, die sie im Augenblick des Eingedenkens haben. Diese
seltsame Gestalt — man mag sie flüchtig oder ewig nennen — in
keinem Falle ist der Stoff, aus welchem sie gemacht wird, der des
Lebens. (GS VI:488)
[Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an
autobiography. And these quite certainly do not, even for the Berlin
years that I am exclusively concerned with here. For autobiography
has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous
flow of life. Here, I am talking of space, of moments and
discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in
the form they have at the moment of commemoration. This strange
form — it may be called fleeting or eternal — is in neither case the
stuff that life is made of. (SW 2:612)]
Here, as in numerous self-conscious comments on the text’s own status,
what appears to be something of a disclaimer is, in fact, the work’s very
project. To talk of one’s life in terms of “space, of moments and discontinuities”
does indeed yield a “strange form,” yet one that bears the imprint
of the very strangeness of the self in modernity that Benjamin outlines
here and elsewhere. In portraying his childhood he frequently separates
himself from those exuding an air of self-satisfaction or self-assurance; the
closest he comes to leading a “self-contained” existence is with a small
group of friends with whom he was active in the youth movement, itself
not free of divisions, who sought educational and social reform. The same
applies to Benjamin’s relationship to Berlin. Even though he is introducing
his readers to his own home town, he emphasizes the importance of
his guides in the form of nursemaids, his mother, friends, even his later
experience of another city, Paris, which taught him “Vorbehalt” (GS
VI:467; “caution,” SW 2:597).
These hesitancies and displacements all appear to be signs of what
Benjamin refers to as “die Vorkehrung des Subjekts, das von seinem ‘ich’
vertreten, nicht verkauft zu werden fordern darf” (GS VI:476; “the