So it was with Proust, with Kafka, with Karl Kraus, and with Benjamin. His gestures and the way he held his head when listening and talking; the way he moved; his manners, but especially his style of speaking, down to his choice of words and the shape of his syntax; finally, his downright idiosyncratic tastes – all this seemed so old-fashioned, as though he had drifted out of the nineteenth century into the twentieth the way one is driven onto the coast of a strange land. Did he ever feel at home in twentieth-century Germany? One has reason to doubt it. In 1913, when he first visited France as a very young man, the streets of Paris were ‘almost more homelike’ (Briefe I, 56) to him after a few days than the familiar streets of Berlin. He may have felt even then, and he certainly felt twenty years later, how much the trip from Berlin to Paris was tantamount to a trip in time – not from one country to another, but from the twentieth century back to the nineteenth. There was the nation par excellence whose culture had determined the Europe of the nineteenth century and for which Haussmann had rebuilt Paris, ‘the capital of the nineteenth century,’ as Benjamin was to call it. This Paris was not yet cosmopolitan, to be sure, but it was profoundly European, and thus it has, with unparalleled naturalness, offered itself to all homeless people as a second home ever since the middle of the last century. Neither the pronounced xenophobia of its inhabitants nor the sophisticated harassment by the local police has ever been able to change this. Long before his emigration Benjamin knew how ‘very exceptional [it was] to make the kind of contact with a Frenchman that would enable one to prolong a conversation with him beyond the first quarter of an hour’ (Briefe I, 445). Later, when he was domiciled in Paris as a refugee, his innate nobility prevented him from developing his slight acquaintances – chief among them was Gide – into connections and from making new contacts. (Werner Kraft – so we learned recently – took him to see Charles du Bos, who was, by virtue of his ‘enthusiasm for German literature,’ a kind of key figure for German emigrants. Werner Kraft had the better connections – what irony!8) In his strikingly judicious review of Benjamin’s works and letters as well as of the secondary literature, Pierre Missac has pointed out how greatly Benjamin must have suffered because he did not get the ‘reception’ in France that was due him.9 This is correct, of course, but it surely did not come as a surprise.

No matter how irritating and offensive all this may have been, the city itself compensated for everything. Its boulevards, Benjamin discovered as early as 1913, are formed by houses which ‘do not seem made to be lived in, but are like stone sets for people to walk between’ (Briefe I, 56). This city, around which one still can travel in a circle past the old gates, has remained what the cities of the Middle Ages, severely walled off and protected against the outside, once were: an interior, but without the narrowness of medieval streets, a generously built and planned open-air intérieur with the arch of the sky like a majestic ceiling above it. ‘The finest thing here about all art and all activity is the fact that they leave the few remainders of the original and the natural their splendour’ (Briefe I, 421). Indeed, they help them to acquire new lustre. It is the uniform façades, lining the streets like inside walls, that make one feel more physically sheltered in this city than in any other. The arcades which connect the great boulevards and offer protection from inclement weather exerted such an enormous fascination over Benjamin that he referred to his projected major work on the nineteenth century and its capital simply as ‘The Arcades’ (Passagenarbeit); and these passageways are indeed like a symbol of Paris, because they clearly are inside and outside at the same time and thus represent its true nature in quintessential form. In Paris a stranger feels at home because he can inhabit the city the way he lives in his own four walls. And just as one inhabits an apartment, and makes it comfortable, by living in it instead of just using it for sleeping, eating, and working, so one inhabits a city by strolling through it without aim or purpose, with one’s stay secured by the countless cafés which line the streets and past which the life of the city, the flow of pedestrians, moves along. To this day Paris is the only one among the large cities which can be comfortably covered on foot, and more than any other city it is dependent for its liveliness on people who pass by in the streets, so that the modern automobile traffic endangers its very existence not only for technical reasons. The wasteland of an American suburb, or the residential districts of many towns, where all of street life takes place on the roadway and where one can walk on the sidewalks, by now reduced to footpaths, for miles on end without encountering a human being, is the very opposite of Paris. What all other cities seem to permit only reluctantly to the dregs of society – strolling, idling, flânerie – Paris streets actually invite everyone to do. Thus, ever since the Second Empire the city has been the paradise of all those who need to chase after no livelihood, pursue no career, reach no goal – the paradise, then, of bohemians, and not only of artists and writers but of all those who have gathered about them because they could not be integrated either politically – being homeless or stateless – or socially.

Without considering this background of the city which became a decisive experience for the young Benjamin one can hardly understand why the flâneur became the key figure in his writings. The extent to which this strolling determined the pace of his thinking was perhaps most clearly revealed in the peculiarities of his gait, which Max Rychner described as ‘at once advancing and tarrying, a strange mixture of both.’10 It was the walk of a flâneur, and it was so striking because, like the dandy and the snob, the flâneur had his home in the nineteenth century, an age of security in which children of upper-middle-class families were assured of an income without having to work, so that they had no reason to hurry. And just as the city taught Benjamin flânerie, the nineteenth century’s secret style of walking and thinking, it naturally aroused in him a feeling for French literature as well, and this almost irrevocably estranged him from normal German intellectual life. ‘In Germany I feel quite isolated in my efforts and interests among those of my generation, while in France there are certain forces – the writers Giraudoux and, expecially, Aragon; the surrealist movement – in which I see at work what occupies me too’ – so he wrote to Hofmannsthal in 1927 (Briefe I, 446), when, having returned from a trip to Moscow and convinced that literary projects sailing under the Communist flag were unfeasible, he was setting out to consolidate his ‘Paris position’ (Briefe I, 444–45). (Eight years earlier he had mentioned the ‘incredible feeling of kinship’ which Péguy had inspired in him: ‘No written work has ever touched me so closely and given me such a sense of communion’ [Briefe I, 217].)Well, he did not succeed in consolidating anything, and success would hardly have been possible. Only in postwar Paris have foreigners – and presumably that is what everyone not born in France is called in Paris to this day – been able to occupy ‘positions.’ On the other hand, Benjamin was forced into a position which actually did not exist anywhere, which, in fact, could not be identified and diagnosed as such until afterwards. It was the position on the ‘top of the mast’ from which the tempestuous times could be surveyed better than from a safe harbour, even though the distress signals of the ‘shipwreck’ of this one man who had not learned to swim either with or against the tide, were hardly noticed – either by those who had never exposed themselves to these seas or by those who were capable of moving even in this element.

Viewed from the outside, it was the position of the free-lance writer who lives by his pen; however, as only Max Rychner seems to have observed, he did so in a ‘peculiar way,’ for ‘his publications were anything but frequent’ and ‘it was never quite clear … to what extent he was able to draw upon other resources.’11 Rychner’s suspicions were justified in every respect.