(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

220
WILLI BOLLE
II. The View of the Colonial Empire from the
Metropolis — and the Reverse View
In his unpublished résumé of fragment J54a,7, quoted above, Benjamin
focuses on the relation between the metropolis (“the capital”) and its colonies.
Here is the complete text:
Baudelaire erfaßte, indem er der schwindsüchtigen Negerin in der
Hauptstadt entgegenging einen sehr viel wahreren Aspekt des kolonialen
Imperiums von Frankreich als Dumas, der im Auftrage von
Salvandy ein Schiff nach Tunis bestieg.
[When he went to meet the consumptive Negress who lived in the
city [in the capital], Baudelaire saw a much truer aspect of the French
colonial empire than did Dumas when he took a boat to Tunis on
commission from [the minister of Colonization] Salvandy.]
Benjamin compares the ways in which two French writers of the
Second Empire, Charles Baudelaire and Alexandre Dumas, viewed this
relation. While the best-seller author Dumas planned to write a book
which “donnerait bien à 50 ou 60.000 [français] le goût de colonizer”
(“would give some fifty or sixty thousand [Frenchmen] a taste for colonialism,”
d4,1), intending to make a profitable deal with the French
government, Baudelaire maintained his independence from colonial politics.
Moreover, having in his youth spent several months in the French
colony La Réunion in the Indian Ocean, he recognized the physiognomy
of the colonies in the capital itself, concretely inscribed in the
figure of the poverty-stricken black woman affected by tuberculosis. It
is worth noting that Benjamin’s use of the word “negress” indicates an
unreflective use of typical colonial language, considered offensive from a
postcolonial point of view.
Starting from this programmatic text J54a,7, let us now assemble a
whole constellation of fragments from the Passagen-Werk, in order to get
a more complete idea of Benjamin’s vision of the relations between the
European metropolis and its colonies. As already pointed out, I am trying
to show these relations from the perspective of entangled history. Despite
the fact that Benjamin, unlike Baudelaire, never traveled beyond Europe,
he may be considered a precursor of the advocates of “histoire croisée.”
The distance and irony in his comments on several quotations from colonial
authors constitute critiques of Eurocentrism; as an alternative he also
tries to obtain a reverse view of the metropolis from the colonial periphery.
With the following constellation of fragments I intend to document
this interchange of points of view in its historic dimension.
The topic of the view of the colonial empire from the metropolis
may be found emblematically represented by Grandville (the caricaturist