(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE PASSAGEN-WERK REVISITED
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he finds prefigured in the writings of Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–
81), the French revolutionary mystic (GS V1:75–77; AP, 25–26). While
Benjamin’s historical materialism aims to distance itself from teleological
notions in the individual sphere, his collective ambitions are not entirely
divorced from the meaning that time and the temporal have for human
happiness. The nineteenth century materializes as a grand hallucination,
the outcome of a dream vision, and Benjamin argues that the era should
be perceived as a “dreamtime,” albeit one in which the individual consciousness
anchors itself in reflection at the same time that the collective
consciousness “in immer tieferem Schlafe versinkt” (“sinks into ever
deeper sleep,” K1,4). The delusions of the Parisian bourgeoisie, its inclination
to sink into a dreamlike stupor during the formative years of the
capitalist social order, had catastrophic consequences for the twentieth
century, made manifest by two world wars within the space of a generation
as well as the ecological ravages wrought by rampant industrialization
and the squandering of finite natural resources. Yet, as the purveyor
of translucent images rooted in the fading texture of an urban era on the
brink of extinction, Benjamin did endorse one antidote for the decay that
collective reverie sowed. His “kopernikanische Wendung in der geschichtlichen
Anschauung” (“Copernican revolution in historical perception”)
boldly predicts that an “Einfall des erwachten Bewußtseins” (“flash of
awakened consciousness,” K1,2) would herald a turnaround both perceptive
and vigorous enough to come to terms with the nineteenth century’s
culpability for the tragedy of the first half of the twentieth century.
“Politik erhält den Primat über die Geschichte” (“politics attains primacy
over history,” K1,2) as collective forces awaken from their trancelike stupor
and undergo a Copernican “Wendung des Eingedenkens” (“turn of
remembrance,” K1,3), making Benjamin’s brand of historical philosophy
an agenda for redeeming the remnants of the past, immediately prior to
their erasure from the slate of cultural memory.
The principles of memory that Benjamin spent most of his life developing
are assessed in the last text that he was able to complete before his
suicide, the theses he expounded in “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.”
In this work he not only sums up the methodology behind his historical
materialism and fortifies the theoretical groundwork for what he identifies
as “weak messianic” forces to offset the havoc wrought by centuries
of cultural manipulation but also stresses that political and historical
catastrophes are closely linked to the question of whether the tragedies
leading to a permanent “state of emergency” in the sociocultural domain
are not representative of human fate in general and of delusions about
what might be the best of all possible worlds. His pessimistic observations
disclose the nature of urban space as a theater for human forgetfulness
and cultural exploitation. And yet, as catastrophic as the century
had appeared to Benjamin at the time of his suicide in 1940, it would