(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

ON BENJAMIN, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND NEVER USING THE WORD “I” 149
Conclusion: Collecting and Unpacking the Self
If as a child Benjamin would become entangled and pulled into his books,
as an adult he would in fact hunt them like butterflies, netting some of his
most cherished quarry while himself a transient, discovering cities while
in pursuit of books. In his 1931 essay “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus”
(“Unpacking my Library”), he comments on two figures, the child and
the collector, who offer a pair of the most illuminating, and touching,
images of acquisition that also mark a loss. If we were to follow Adorno’s
observation that Benjamin was “hardly a person at all but rather an
arena for the movement of the content that forced its way to expression
through him,” this essay might best bear the Benjaminian stamp of the
autobiographical. 21 Strangely, it is also one of the few texts in which Benjamin
speaks to us so directly, not only violating his “little rule” by saying
“I,” but also addressing us as “you.” The intimacy established with the
reader, alone with Benjamin as he unpacks his final boxes late at night,
is akin to that of the relationship he seeks to illuminate, the ties between
a collector and his possessions. He does so by giving insight into something
“Unverhüllteres, Handgreiflicheres” (GS IV.1:388; “something less
obscure, something more palpable,” SW 2:486) than the usefulness or
history of his books, instead illuminating the act of collecting itself rather
than providing an inventory of a collection.
The “man digging” of “Berliner Chronik” is here a “man collecting,”
now recollecting, as his books become a stage for images in memory of
their former resting places (GS IV.1:388; SW 2:487). For all of its apparent
melancholy, however, Benjamin tells us the scene is not marked by
the elegiac but by anticipation; the collector, like the child, allows for
the “Wiedergeburt” (“rebirth”) of his possessions, the “Erneuerung des
Daseins” (“renewal of existence”) through an activation of the collector’s
“taktischem Instinkt” (“tactile instinct”): “Man hat nur einen Sammler
zu beobachten, wie er die Gegenstände seiner Vitrine handhabt. Kaum
hält er sie in Händen, so scheint er inspiriert durch sie hindurch, in ihre
Ferne zu schauen” (GS IV.1:389–90; “One has only to watch a collector
handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands,
he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past, as though
inspired,” SW 2:487, 489). Though authenticity is always subject to scrutiny
in Benjamin’s work, his insistence that such renewal is only possible
in the hands of the genuine collector, the collector as he ought to be, is
striking, yet not contradictory (GS IV.1:396; SW 2:492). A “man digging”
continually turns and scatters the soil, just as the “man collecting”
recognizes that it is the incompletion of the collection that gives collecting
meaning. The true collector would seem to be one whose collection
consists not of objects but of irretrievable moments of collecting. “Das
Phänomen der Sammlung verliert, indem es sein Subjekt verliert, seinen