(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

INTRODUCTION: BENJAMIN’S ACTUALITY
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with him. He fled to Lourdes and Marseille and, with Adorno’s help,
obtained an entry permit to the United States, but he was unable to
get an exit visa from France. This meant that he and his travel companions
would likely end up in an internment camp. After secretly crossing
the border into the small Spanish town of Port Bou, Benjamin was told
that he was to be returned to France, where he would most certainly fall
into the hands of the Nazis. Ill with heart disease and emotionally devastated,
he took his own life through an overdose of morpheme during
the night of September 26. His grave at the small Port Bou cemetery
remains unidentified, but a monument by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan
was installed in 1994 to commemorate Benjamin’s death.
II
As even this very selective survey of biographical data suggests, Benjamin’s
life was, by choice and circumstance, predicated on the perennial experience
of dislocations, exile, and ruination. His fate is typical of that of countless
victims of Fascism and the Holocaust, but beyond the immediate threat
to his physical existence that was common to so many, his life also reflects
the predicament of the modern European intellectual generally, who is no
longer at home in a particular nation-state or tradition but must time and
again renegotiate his self-identity in the hybrid space of cosmopolitanism,
migration, and transcultural affiliations. Benjamin’s preoccupation with
allegory, montage, translation, critique, citation, and the dialectical image
can be regarded as the formal equivalent of this experiential space, even
though it would be reductive to take these genres and concepts simply as
direct expressions of their author’s personal biography.
Benjamin views the fallen state and ruination of European modernity
in allegorical images that hark back to the era of the Baroque and
that he saw recurring in the commodity culture of high industrial capitalism.
In contrast to the symbol in idealist aesthetics, where the sensuously
beautiful particular incarnates the universal idea, the fragmentary
meaning of Baroque allegory is the product of a willfully subjective
and artfully arbitrary projection by the mournful intellectual’s melancholic
gaze. In Benjamin’s analysis of the mythical ever-same behind
illusory innovations, this allegorical structure uncannily corresponds to
the modern commodity, whose price does not represent true value but
changes according to the fashionable mechanism of manipulative market
forces. As he writes in the Passagen-Werk: “Die Moden der Bedeutungen
wechselten fast so schnell wie der Preis für die Waren wechselt” (“The
fashions of meaning fluctuated almost as rapidly as the price of commodities,”
J80,2/ J80a,1, translation modified). Believing that historical
progress had merely brought about technological advances without
furthering true human liberation, Benjamin had little faith in political