On this planet a great number of civilizations have perished in blood and horror. Naturally, one must wish for the planet that one day it will experience a civilization that has abandoned blood and horror; in fact, I am … inclined to assume that our planet is waiting for this. But it is terribly doubtful whether we can bring such a present to its hundred- or four-hundred-millionth birthday party. And if we don’t, the planet will finally punish us, its unthoughtful well-wishers, by presenting us with the Last Judgment’fn4 (Briefe II, 698).

Well, in this respect the last thirty years have hardly brought much that could be called new.

III. THE PEARL DIVER

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made,

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

– The Tempest, I, 2

Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind,’ the mindless peace of complacency. ‘Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions’ (Schriften I, 571). This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of despair – not the despair of a past that refuses ‘to throw its light on the future’ and lets the human mind ‘wander in darkness’ as in Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it; hence their power is ‘not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy’ (Schriften II, 192). Still, the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power originally were inspired by an entirely different intention, the intention to preserve; and only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professional ‘preservers’ all around them did they finally discover that the destructive power of quotations was ‘the only one which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive – for no other reason than that it was torn out of it.’ In this form of ‘thought fragments,’ quotations have the double task of interrupting the flow of the presentation with ‘transcendent force’ (Schriften I, 142–43) and at the same time of concentrating within themselves that which is presented. As to their weight in Benjamin’s writings, quotations are comparable only to the very dissimilar Biblical citations which so often replace the immanent consistency of argumentation in medieval treatises.

I have already mentioned that collecting was Benjamin’s central passion. It started early with what he himself called his ‘bibliomania’ but soon extended into something far more characteristic, not so much of the person as of his work: the collecting of quotations. (Not that he ever stopped collecting books. Shortly before the fall of France he seriously considered exchanging his edition of the Collected Works of Kafka, which had recently appeared in five volumes, for a few first editions of Kafka’s early writings – an undertaking which naturally was bound to remain incomprehensible to any nonbibliophile.) The ‘inner need to own a library’ (Briefe I, 193) asserted itself around 1916, at the time when Benjamin turned in his studies to Romanticism as the ‘last movement that once more saved tradition’ (Briefe I, 138). That a certain destructive force was active even in this passion for the past, so characteristic of heirs and late-comers, Benjamin did not discover until much later, when he had already lost his faith in tradition and in the indestructibility of the world. (This will be discussed presently.) In those days, encouraged by Scholem, he still believed that his own estrangement from tradition was probably due to his Jewishness and that there might be a way back for him as there was for his friend, who was preparing to emigrate to Jerusalem. (As early as 1920, when he was not yet seriously beset by financial worries, he thought of learning Hebrew.) He never went as far on this road as did Kafka, who after all his efforts stated bluntly that he had no use for anything Jewish except the Hasidic tales which Buber had just prepared for modern usage – ‘into everything else I just drift, and another current of air carries me away again.’26 Was he, then, despite all doubts, to go back to the German or European past and help with the tradition of its literature?

Presumably this is the form in which the problem presented itself to him in the early twenties, before he turned to Marxism. That is when he chose the German Baroque Age as a subject for his Habilitation thesis, a choice that is very characteristic of the ambiguity of this entire, still unresolved cluster of problems. For in the German literary and poetic tradition the Baroque has, with the exception of the great church chorales of the time, never really been alive. Goethe rightly said that when he was eighteen years old, German literature was no older. And Benjamin’s choice, baroque in a double sense, has an exact counterpart in Scholem’s strange decision to approach Judaism via the cabbala, that is, that part of Hebrew literature which is untransmitted and untransmissible in terms of Jewish tradition, in which it has always had the odour of something downright disreputable. Nothing showed more clearly – so one is inclined to say today – that there was no such thing as a ‘return’ either to the German or the European or the Jewish tradition than the choice of these fields of study. It was an implicit admission that the past spoke directly only through things that had not been handed down, whose seeming closeness to the present was thus due precisely to their exotic character, which ruled out all claims to a binding authority. Obligative truths were replaced by what was in some sense significant or interesting, and this of course meant – as no one knew better than Benjamin – that the ‘consistence of truth … has been lost’ (Briefe II, 763). Outstanding among the properties that formed this ‘consistence of truth’ was, at least for Benjamin, whose early philosophical interest was theologically inspired, that truth concerned a secret and that the revelation of this secret had authority. Truth, so Benjamin said shortly before he became fully aware of the irreparable break in tradition and the loss of authority, is not ‘an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does it justice’ (Schriften I, 146). Once this truth had come into the human world at the appropriate moment in history – be it as the Greek a-letheia, visually perceptible to the eyes of the mind and comprehended by us as ‘un-concealment’ (‘Unverborgenheit’ – Heidegger), or as the acoustically perceptible word of God as we know it from the European religions of revelation – it was this ‘consistence’ peculiar to it which made it tangible, as it were, so that it could be handed down by tradition. Tradition transforms truth into wisdom, and wisdom is the consistence of transmissible truth. In other words, even if truth should appear in our world, it could not lead to wisdom, because it would no longer have the characteristics which it could acquire only through universal recognition of its validity. Benjamin discusses these matters in connection with Kafka and says that of course ‘Kafka was far from being the first to face this situation.