If the gentlemen involved declared later that they did not understand a single word of the study, The Origin of German Tragedy, which Benjamin had submitted, they can certainly be believed. How were they to understand a writer whose greatest pride it was that ‘the writing consists largely of quotations – the craziest mosaic technique imaginable’ – and who placed the greatest emphasis on the six mottoes that preceded the study: ‘No one … could gather any rarer or more precious ones’? (Briefe I, 366). It was as if a real master had fashioned some unique object, only to offer it for sale at the nearest bargain centre. Truly, neither anti-Semitism nor ill will toward an outsider – Benjamin had taken his degree in Switzerland during the war and was no one’s disciple – nor the customary academic suspicion of anything that is not guaranteed to be mediocre need have been involved.

However – and this is where bungling and bad luck come in – in the Germany of that time there was another way, and it was precisely his Goethe essay that spoiled Benjamin’s only chance for a university career. As often with Benjamin’s writings, this study was inspired by polemics, and the attack concerned Friedrich Gundolf’s book on Goethe. Benjamin’s critique was definitive, and yet Benjamin could have expected more understanding from Gundolf and other members of the circle around Stefan George, a group with whose intellectual world he had been quite familiar in his youth, than from the ‘establishment’; and he probably need not have been a member of the circle to earn his academic accreditation under one of these men who at that time were just beginning to get a fairly comfortable foothold in the academic world. But the one thing he should not have done was to mount an attack on the most prominent and most capable academic member of the circle so vehement that everyone was bound to know, as he explained retrospectively later, that he had ‘just as little to do with academe … as with the monuments which men like Gundolf or Ernst Bertram have erected.’ (Briefe II, 523). Yes, that is how it was. And it was Benjamin’s bungling or his misfortune to have announced this to the world before he was admitted to the university.

Yet one certainly cannot say that he consciously disregarded due caution. On the contrary, he was aware that ‘Mr Bungle sends his regards’ and took more precautions than anyone else I have known. But his system of provisions against possible dangers, including the ‘Chinese courtesy’ mentioned by Scholem,2 invariably, in a strange and mysterious way, disregarded the real danger. For just as he fled from the safe Paris to the dangerous Meaux at the beginning of the war – to the front, as it were – his essay on Goethe inspired in him the wholly unnecessary worry that Hofmannsthal might take amiss a very cautious critical remark about Rudolf Borchardt, one of the chief contributors to his periodical. Yet he expected only good things from having found for this ‘attack upon the ideology of George’s school … this one place where they will find it hard to ignore the invective’ (Briefe I, 341). They did not find it hard at all. For no one was more isolated than Benjamin, so utterly alone. Even the authority of Hofmannsthal – ‘the new patron,’ as Benjamin called him in the first burst of happiness (Briefe I, 327) – could not alter this situation. His voice hardly mattered compared with the very real power of the George school, an influential group in which, as with all such entities, only ideological allegiance counted, since only ideology, not rank and quality, can hold a group together. Despite their pose of being above politics, George’s disciples were fully as conversant with the basic principles of literary manoeuvres as the professors were with the fundamentals of academic politics or the hacks and journalists with the ABC of ‘one good turn deserves another.’

Benjamin, however, did not know the score. He never knew how to handle such things, was never able to move among such people, not even when ‘the adversities of outer life which sometimes come from all sides, like wolves’ (Briefe I, 298), had already afforded him some insight into the ways of the world. Whenever he tried to adjust and be co-operative so as to get some firm ground under his feet somehow, things were sure to go wrong.

A major study on Goethe from the viewpoint of Marxism – in the middle twenties he came very close to joining the Communist Party – never appeared in print, either in the Great Russian Encyclopedia, for which it was intended, or in present-day Germany. Klaus Mann, who had commissioned a review of Brecht’s Threepenny Novel for his periodical Die Sammlung, returned the manuscript because Benjamin had asked 250 French francs – then about 10 dollars – for it and he wanted to pay only 150. His commentary on Brecht’s poetry did not appear in his lifetime. And the most serious difficulties finally developed with the Institute for Social Research, which, originally (and now again) part of the University of Frankfurt, had emigrated to America and on which Benjamin depended financially. Its guiding spirits, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, were ‘dialectical materialists’ and in their opinion Benjamin’s thinking was ‘undialectic,’ moved in ‘materialistic categories, which by no means coincide with Marxist ones,’ was ‘lacking in mediation’ insofar as, in an essay on Baudelaire, he had related ‘certain conspicuous elements within the superstructure … directly, perhaps even causally, to corresponding elements in the substructure.’ The result was that Benjamin’s original essay, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in the Works of Baudelaire,’ was not printed, either then in the magazine of the Institute or in the posthumous two-volume edition of his writings. (Parts of it have now been published – ‘Der Flâneur’ in Die Neue Rundschau, December 1967, and ‘Die Moderne’ in Das Argument, March 1968.)

Benjamin probably was the most peculiar Marxist ever produced by this movement, which God knows has had its full share of oddities. The theoretical aspect that was bound to fascinate him was the doctrine of the superstructure, which was only briefly sketched by Marx but then assumed a disproportionate role in the movement as it was joined by a disproportionately large number of intellectuals, hence by people who were interested only in the superstructure. Benjamin used this doctrine only as a heuristic-methodological stimulus and was hardly interested in its historical or philosophical background. What fascinated him about the matter was that the spirit and its material manifestation were so intimately connected that it seemed permissible to discover everywhere Baudelaire’s correspondances, which clarified and illuminated one another if they were properly correlated, so that finally they would no longer require any interpretative or explanatory commentary. He was concerned with the correlation between a street scene, a speculation on the stock exchange, a poem, a thought, with the hidden line which holds them together and enables the historian or philologist to recognize that they must all be placed in the same period.