(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE PASSAGEN-WERK REVISITED
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(GB 5:237). The peculiarity of this situation is even more noteworthy
if one considers that Benjamin was distantly related to Heine; both his
father and mother were descended from the same lineage as the great
nineteenth-century poet. While he was apparently aware of his illustrious
heritage, Benjamin provides little evidence of having based his cultural
commentary on Heine’s, only briefly citing Charles Benoist’s observation
that Lutezia vividly depicts the powerful influence of Communism on the
workers in the Parisian suburbs (V5a,1).
Originally penned as editorials for the Allgemeine Zeitung in Augsburg,
Heine’s Parisian commentaries are precise and complex readings
of the changes impacting metropolitan culture during the reign of Louis
Philippe between 1830 and 1848. Particularly germane for Benjamin’s
dialectical and materialistic method is Heine’s reconfiguration of contemporary
semiotic systems, which undergo a marked process of atomization
in the twenty years between Französische Zustände in 1834 and
Lutezia in 1854. Whereas the earlier work is comprised of nine chapters,
in which Parisian topographies are recognizable, the later work condenses
the cityscape and its cultural manifestations to a system of textual fragments.
Its fifty articles unfold seemingly irreconcilable zones of discourse
that transcend traditional styles of cultural commentary and serve to chart
urban dissolution. In anticipation of the visual turn in the twentieth century,
Heine also transforms geopolitical realities into ciphers commensurate
with new and unfamiliar readings of metropolitan experience. Elusive,
perplexing, and uncanny, urban fragmentation casts an eye from the city
center to its margins and peripheries, at the same time that seemingly
irrelevant fringe elements — Heine’s masses and Benjamin’s ragpickers
illustrate this rupture — supplant sociocultural norms. As a result, Heine
transforms the growing abstraction of metropolitan experience into a virtual
network of philosophical, political, and sociocultural imagery consistent
with allegories of cultural erosion. He specifically invokes a broad
range of collective expressions and blends music, the visual arts, theater,
dance, and architecture with politics or folkloristic elements, so that the
multifaceted textures of his Paris prefigure the semiotic micrology and
complex iconology found in Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk. Unquestionably,
the dominance of time over space in Heine’s urban commentary can be
seen as paving the way for three concepts that have become cornerstones
of Benjamin’s cultural theory: the notions of the phantasmagorical as a
historical cipher, of the “time of the now” (Jetztzeit) as the amalgamation
of the past into the immediate present, and of the dialectical image as the
true insignia of modernity.
Any appreciation of Heine’s and Benjamin’s aptitude as topographical
theorists also has to have high esteem for their skill at codifying modern
signatures of cultural memory. This talent may have been predicated by
the increased flow of semiotics over European borders, as more and more