(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

7: The Passagen-Werk Revisited:
The Dialectics of Fragmentation and
Reconfiguration in Urban Modernity
Karl Ivan Solibakke
I
S
INCE ITS PUBLICATION IN 1982 Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (The
Arcades Project) has become an essential compendium of nineteenthcentury
modernism in European intellectual history and an exhaustive
though fragmentary inquiry into the emergence of bourgeois urban culture
between the Revolution of 1830 and the Paris Commune in 1871.
Compiled in the years between 1927 and the Nazi invasion of France in
1940, the material the German-Jewish cultural critic drew together laid
the groundwork for what was to have been a definitive monograph on
Paris during the central decades of the nineteenth century. Transforming
geographic space into a matrix of text, Benjamin explores the reconfiguration
of early contemporary cityscapes and maps out an allegorical
blueprint for bourgeois cultural memory. True to the encyclopedic spirit
of his analysis, the doctrine of historical materialism he championed,
and his passion for accruing written artifacts like shards at an archaeological
dig, Benjamin noted: “Geschichte schreiben heißt, Jahreszahlen
ihre Physiognomie zu geben. (“to write history means giving dates their
physiognomy,” N11,2) or, more simply, writing history is citing history.
“Ihre Theorie,” Benjamin observes, “hängt aufs engste mit der Montage
zusammen” (“its theory is intimately related to that of montage,”
N1,10). Interweaving excerpts from 850 secondary sources with original
commentaries, observations, and glosses, the author substantiates how
changes to urban existence were mirrored in the surfaces, façades, and
contours of a rapidly evolving metropolis. In particular, new technologies
impacted communal sites, and these came to embody collective memory
and public visions in Paris, “the capital of the nineteenth century.” “Es ist
das Eigentümliche der technischen Gestaltungsformen (im Gegensatz zu
den Kunstformen),” he asserts, “daß ihr Fortschritt und ihr Gelingen der
Durchsichtigkeit ihres gesellschaftlichen Inhalts proportional sind” (“It
is the peculiarity of technological forms of production — as opposed to