(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

ON BENJAMIN, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND NEVER USING THE WORD “I” 147
notes that “die Ferne, wenn es schneit, nicht mehr ins Weite sondern ins
Innere führt” (GS VII.1:396; “distance, when it snows, leads no longer
out into the world, but within,” SW 3:356), and indeed, the storm has
come to him, mixing with the text. The whirling flakes permeating and
permeated by the distant cities of Benjamin’s books not only appear here
as the snow dusting the shoulders of the reading child of Einbahnstraße;
they also become that of both versions of the epigraph, its transposition
of terms made permeable, as both “children’s sugar” and “winter sugar”
on days that are both “winter days” and “childhood days.”
Yet a storm is also raging somewhere else in this vignette, not yet from
paradise as in Benjamin’s later “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“On
the Concept of History”), but in other books, held in a cabinet, forbidden,
which he only encountered once, in a dream, and which he could never
find again. They do not stand but lie flat, like frames; yet they are anything
but static, filled by a raging storm, as “ein wechselnder und trüber Text
sich wölkte, der von Farben schwanger war” (GS VII.1:397; “a brooding,
changeable text — a text pregnant with colors — formed a cloud,” SW
3:356). The image of this kinetic, colorful, tempestuous birth is illuminated
by a death, as these hues, though brilliant and fleeting, were also shaded
by “einem Violett, das aus dem Innern eines Schlachttiers zu stammen
schienen” (GS VII.1:397; “a violet that seemed to come from the entrails
of a slaughtered animal,” SW 3:356). The child’s attempt at an allegorical
reading of the snowstorm appears again here in the struggle to decipher
titles that flash up from these frames, each both stranger and more familiar
than the last (GS VII.1:397; SW 3:356–57). As irretrievable as Benjamin’s
lost diagram of his life, the books disappear along with their dream image
when he wakes, before they can be fully understood, grasped. The dream is
both the form and the content of these books, which must disappear with
the end of sleep, as irretrievable as the past itself.
The stormy movement of the images springing from flat books
would have us think of film, a nascent medium arising from the death,
if not ritual slaughter, of photography. This medium in decline takes
shape in another figure Benjamin sees in his dreams, one that looks
back at him: “das bucklichte Männlein” (“the little hunchback”),
Benjamin’s “grau[er] Vogt” (“gray assessor”), who was pushed off
the stage long ago, even though his aunt, “dazzled” by the Silberblick
of photography’s magnesium flash, might refuse to follow, anchoring
herself in the bay window of her ever-more fortified apartment,
struck silent while also singing her demise like a canary (GS VII.1:430;
SW 3:385). The violet light illuminating these scenes, setting them in
motion, is familiar. A similar luminescence faintly glows in “Berliner
Chronik,” where it is the only light illuminating a café amphitheater
Benjamin dubbed “die Anatomie” (“The Anatomy School”), a space
resembling a theater after its time and a cinema before its own, “ein