Ibid., p. 378.

20. In ‘Der Autor als Produzent,’ a lecture given in Paris in 1934, in which Benjamin quotes an earlier essay on the intellectual Left. See Versuche über Brecht, p. 109.

21. Quoted in Max Brod, Franz Kafkas Glauben and Lehre, Winterthur, 1948.

22. Brecht, for instance, told Benjamin that his essay on Kafka gave aid and comfort to Jewish Fascism. See Versuche, p. 123.

23. Franz Kafka, Briefe, p. 183.

24. In the above-mentioned article Pierre Missac deals with the same passage and writes: ‘Sans sous-estimer la valeur d’une telle réussite [d’être le successeur de Hamann et de Humboldt], on peut penser que Benjamin recherchait aussi dans le Marxisme un moyen d’y échapper.’ (Without underestimating the value of such a success [being the successor of Hamann and Humboldt], it is possible to think that Benjamin also sought in Marxism a means of escaping it.)

25. One is immediately reminded of Brecht’s poem ‘On the Poor B.B.’ –

Fröhlich machet das Haus den Esser: er leert es.

Von diesen Städten wird bleiben: der durch sie hindurchging, der Wind!

Fröhlich machet das Haus den Esser: er leert es.

Wir wissen, dass wir Vorläufige sind

Und nach uns wird kommen: nichts Nennenswertes.

(‘Of these cities will remain that which blew through them, the wind./The house makes the feaster merry. He cleans it out./We know we’re only temporary and after us will follow/Nothing worth talking about.’ The Manual of Piety, New York, 1966.)

Worth noting, too, is a remarkable aphorism of Kafka in the ‘Notes from the Year 1920’ under the title ‘He’: ‘Everything he does appears to him extraordinarily new but also, because of the impossible abundance of the new, extraordinarily amateurish, indeed hardly tolerable, incapable of becoming historical, tearing asunder the chain of generations, breaking off for the first time the music of the world which until now could at least be divined in all its depth. Sometimes in his conceit he is more worried about the world than about himself.’

The predecessor of this mood is, again, Baudelaire. ‘Le monde va finir. La seule raison pour laquelle il pouvait durer, c’est qu’elle existe. Que cette raison est faible, comparée à toutes celles qui annoncent le contraire, particulièrement à celle-ci: qu’est-ce que le mond a désormais à faire sous le ciel? … Quant à moi qui sens quelquefois en moi le ridicule d’un prophète, je sais que je n’y trouverai jamais la charité d’un médecin. Perdu dans ce vilain monde, coudoyé par les foules, je suis comme un homme lassé dont l’oeil ne voit en arrière, dans les années profondes, que désabusement et amertume, et devant lui qu’un orage où rien de neuf n’est contenu, ni enseignement ni douleur.’ From Journaux intimes, Pléiade edition, pp. 1195–97.

26. Cf. Kafka, Briefe, p. 173.

27. A selection appeared under the title Paradoxes and Parables in a bilingual edition (Schocken Books, New York, 1961).

28. Benjamin, ‘Lob der Puppe,’ Literarische Welt, January 10, 1930.

29. See Martin Heidegger, Kants These über das Sein, Frankfurt, 1962, p. 8.

30. For the aphorism by Mallarmé, see ‘Variations sur un sujet’ under the subtitle ‘Crise des vers,’ Pléiade edition, pp. 363–64.

fn1 When I go down to the cellar
There to draw some wine,
A little hunchback who’s in there
Grabs that jug of mine.

When I go into my kitchen,
There my soup to make,
A little hunchback who’s in there
My little pot did break.

fn2 O dear child, I beg of you,
Pray for the little hunchback too.

fn3 A fashionable residential area of Berlin.

fn4 Weltgericht (Last Judgment) plays on the dual meaning of Gericht (judgment; dish). (Translator’s note.)

Unpacking My Library

A TALK ABOUT BOOK COLLECTING

I am unpacking my library.