Preface

      But when shall we actually write books like catalogues?

      One-Way Street (SW1, p. 457)

      His last archive remains a secret: the briefcase that Walter Benjamin carried over the Pyrenees in September 1940 is lost. Only one document that was transported in it survives—an authenticated letter from May 8, 1940, in which Max Horkheimer confirms Benjamin’s membership of the Institute for Social Research in New York and confirms that his researches have proven to be extremely helpful for the Institute. Lisa Fittko, who helped him and other refugees in their escape, attested that Benjamin wanted the briefcase to be saved above everything else; for supposedly his latest manuscript was inside, and it was the most important thing of all, more important even than his own life. It may possibly have contained the theses On The Concept of History. Any more detailed information is lacking. What is certain, however, is that the briefcase held some sort of texts by Benjamin. Papers with unknown contents are mentioned in a police report listing the belongings on his person at the time of his death—his last possessions consisted of a watch, a pipe, six photographs, glasses, letters, magazines, and money, which was used to pay off the hotel bill and the costs of the funeral.

      If Benjamin had not taken precautions his legacy would have suffered the same fate as the briefcase. It is impossible to imagine the effect that might have had on the reception of his work. The fact that his archive is so bristling with contents today—a fact that is barely comprehensible when viewed against the backdrop of his personal fate—is due to the strategic calculation with which he deposited his manuscripts, notebooks, and printed papers in the custody of friends and acquaintances in various countries. His archives landed in the hands of others, so that their documents might be delivered to posterity. Those who received his work accepted the obligatory nature of their role and faithfully conserved the papers. With the ethos of an archivist Benjamin secured the continued life of his thought, a thought that sought to grasp the present through reading testimonials from the past.

      Benjamin’s concept of the archive, however, differs from that of the institutionalized archives, whose self-understanding is derived from the origin of the word “archive.” “Archive” stems from the Greek and Latin words for “town hall, ruling office,” which, in turn, are derived from “beginning, origin, rule.” Order, efficiency, completeness, and objectivity are the principles of archival work. In contrast to this, Benjamin’s archives reveal the passions of the collector. The remains heaped up in them are reserve funds or something like iron reserves, crucial to life, and which for that reason must be conserved. These are points at which topicality flashes up, places that preserve the idiosyncratic registrations of an author, subjective, full of gaps, unofficial.

Thirteen of Benjamin’s archives are presented in what follows. Not all of their contents can be enclosed within briefcases, folders, card indexes or other containers. Something else is transferred alongside their objective significance: Benjamin’s archives consist of images, texts, signs, things that one can see and touch, but they are also a reservoir of experiences, ideas, and hopes, all of which have been inventoried and analyzed by their stock taker. His project on the Paris Arcades, a collection of quotations and commentary, was intended to scout the “prehistory of the 19^th century” from elements of the everyday world, art, and dreams. It registers types (the flâneur, the dandy, the rag picker, the whore), building forms and places (arcades, boulevards, panoramas, catacombs), materials (iron, glass), the effect of fashion, advertising and the workings of the commodity. For all this Benjamin created “a place in the archives of our memory” (Baudelaire¹). This entire work of this author can be conceived as an archive of thought, of perceptions, of history and of the arts.

      What can be found in these archives? The opening chapter “Tree of Conscientiousness”—a quotation from Benjamin, as are all of the chapter headings in this book—traces Benjamin’s activity as an archivist of his own writings. Lists, catalogues, and card indexes, at once meticulous and inventive compilations, have all found their way into the archive. At the chapter’s center stands a registry, in which Benjamin rubricated his correspondence and manuscripts according to his own predilections. “Scrappy Paperwork” deals with the word “scrap” (verzetteln); and its twofold meaning—as “failure, fragmentary, unachieved,” on the one hand, and as a particular method of making information manageable, on the other. Benjamin’s legacy consists of hundreds of little scraps; and as such might be associated with Zettel’s Dream by Arno Schmidt and the little boxes of memoranda in Jean Paul’s Quintus Fixlein—in a review in 1934 Benjamin claimed that Jean Paul’s boxes of memoranda were the archive of art of the Biedermeier period. Small- format manuscripts encouraged Benjamin’s inclination to write in a miniscule hand, a trait reminiscent of Robert Walser; the chapter “From Small to Smallest Details” outlines this characteristic aspect of Benjamin’s writing. The Russian toys that Benjamin acquired in Moscow, and described in an illustrated article, are presented under the heading “Physiognomy of the Thing World.” These photographs are witnesses to a disappearance, they bring into view remnants of peasant handiwork. “Opinions et Penseés” describes the words and turns of phrase that derive from Stefan Benjamin—an “archive of non-sensuous similarities,” constructed and interpreted by the father who tracked the linguistic and intellectual development of his son. Benjamin once described his notebooks as the “daintiest quarters”: this line becomes a chapter heading. His notebooks were important tools of his work, for they stored and structured his material and thoughts; every single square centimeter of them seems to have been used. Only a portion of Benjamin’s postcard collection has been preserved—this consists of “Travel Scenes” from Tuscany and the Balearics, in relation to which the jottings of an enthusiastic traveler might be read differently. The chapter “A Bow Being Bent” investigates Benjamin’s capacity for structuring his research materials and it demonstrates his organization of knowledge in rigorous and eccentric designs—which provide the connecting links between initial ideas and first drafts. Graphic forms are considered here as “Constellations”; spatial, bi-polar, or elliptical orderings, in which concepts or figures of thought exist in charged relationships with each other. Benjamin’s sympathy for the figure of the rubbish collector permits a view of the great unfinished Arcades Project as “Rag Picking,” a practice committed to salvaging everything that is disregarded by history. Taken from Benjamin’s bequest, Germaine Krull’s photographs of arcades and Sasha Stone’s interior studies are presented under the title “Past Turned Space”—public and private bourgeois lives, two sides of the same coin. The chapter “Hard Nuts to Crack” is devoted to Benjamin’s delight at word games and brainteasers, which he developed into a small collection of puzzles—he managed to publish some of them, but some were simply exchanged with those of like minds. A puzzle forms the object of the thirteenth chapter: eight reproductions of the Sibyls from the cathedral at Siena. What meaning these held for Benjamin remains obscure; one of the mottos in The Arcades Project, taken from the Aeneid, gives a pointer—into the underworld.

      These would not be Benjamin’s archives if the materials did not communicate with one another. Each of these collections is distinctive and yet none of them lies in a closed drawer. Fine threads lead from one to another. The drafts are tangent to the graphic outlines. Puzzles work with the tones of language, with distortions and shifts of meaning—just as do Benjamin’s notes on his son Stefan. The toys of the child’s world are miniaturized just like his tiny script. The reproductions of the Sibyls are picture postcards as are the views of Italy and Spain. The overarching concept is the archive, to which belong all the scraps, notebooks, the notes for The Arcades Project, as well as the photographs and the drafts. Everything is held together by the genius of the collector, who regarded “being at home in marginal areas” (GS III, p. 369) as a characteristic