Not only were ‘other resources’ at his disposal prior to his emigration, but behind the façade of free-lance writing he led the considerably freer, albeit constantly endangered, life of an homme de lettres whose home was a library that had been gathered with extreme care but was by no means intended as a working tool; it consisted of treasures whose value, as Benjamin often repeated, was proved by the fact that he had not read them – a library, then, which was guaranteed not to be useful or at the service of any profession. Such an existence was something unknown in Germany, and almost equally unknown was the occupation which Benjamin, only because he had to make a living, derived from it: not the occupation of a literary historian and scholar with the requisite number of fat tomes to his credit, but that of a critic and essayist who regarded even the essay form as too vulgarly extensive and would have preferred the aphorism if he had not been paid by the line. He was certainly not unaware of the fact that his professional ambitions were directed at something that simply did not exist in Germany, where, despite Lichtenberg, Lessing, Schlegel, Heine, and Nietzsche, aphorisms have never been appreciated and people have usually thought of criticism as something disreputably subversive which might be enjoyed – if at all – only in the cultural section of a newspaper. It was no accident that Benjamin chose the French language for expressing this ambition: ‘Le but que je m’avais proposé … c’est d’être considéré comme le premier critique de la littérature allemande. La difficulté c’est que, depuis plus de cinquante ans, la critique littéraire en Allemagne n’est plus considérée comme un genre sérieux. Se faire une situation dans la critique, cela … veut dire: la recréer comme genre’ (‘The goal I set for myself … is to be regarded as the foremost critic of German literature. The trouble is that for more than fifty years literary criticism in Germany has not been considered a serious genre. To create a place in criticism for oneself means to re-create it as a genre’) (Briefe II, 505).

There is no doubt that Benjamin owed this choice of a profession to early French influences, to the proximity of the great neighbour on the other side of the Rhine which inspired in him so intimate a sense of affinity. But it is much more symptomatic that even this selection of a profession was actually motivated by hard times and financial woes. If one wants to express the ‘profession’ he had prepared himself for spontaneously, although perhaps not deliberately, in social categories, one has to go back to Wilhelminian Germany in which he grew up and where his first plans for the future took shape. Then one could say that Benjamin did not prepare for anything but the ‘profession’ of a private collector and totally independent scholar, what was then called Privatgelehrter. Under the circumstances of the time his studies, which he had begun before the First World War, could have ended only with a university career, but unbaptized Jews were still barred from such a career, as they were from any career in the civil service. Such Jews were permitted a Habilitation and at most could attain the rank of an unpaid Extraordinarius; it was a career which presupposed rather than provided an assured income. The doctorate which Benjamin decided to take only ‘out of consideration for my family’ (Briefe I, 216) and his subsequent attempt at Habilitation were intended as the basis for his family’s readiness to place such an income at his disposal.

This situation changed abruptly after the war; the inflation had impoverished, even dispossessed, large numbers of the bourgeoisie, and in the Weimar Republic a university career was open even to unbaptized Jews. The unhappy story of the Habilitation shows clearly how little Benjamin took these altered circumstances into account and how greatly he continued to be dominated by prewar ideas in all financial matters. For from the outset the Habilitation had only been intended to call his father ‘to order’ by supplying ‘evidence of public recognition’ (Briefe I, 293) and to make his grant his son, who was in his thirties at that time, an income that was adequate and, one should add, commensurate with his social standing. At no time, not even when he had already come close to the Communists, did he doubt that despite his chronic conflicts with his parents he was entitled to such a subvention and that their demand that he ‘work for a living’ was ‘unspeakable’ (Briefe I, 292). When his father said later that he could not or would not increase the monthly stipend he was paying anyway, even if his son achieved the Habilitation, this naturally removed the basis of Benjamin’s entire undertaking. Until his parents’ death in 1930, Benjamin was able to solve the problem of his livelihood by moving back into the parental home, living there first with his family (he had a wife and a son), and after his separation – which came soon enough – by himself. (He was not divorced until 1930.) It is evident that this arrangement caused him a great deal of suffering, but it is just as evident that in all probability he never seriously considered another solution. It is also striking that despite his permanent financial trouble he managed throughout these years constantly to enlarge his library. His one attempt to deny himself this expensive passion – he visited the great auction houses the way others frequent gambling casinos – and his resolution even to sell something ‘in an emergency’ ended with his feeling obliged to ‘deaden the pain of this readiness’ (Briefe I, 340) by making fresh purchases; and his one demonstrable attempt to free himself from financial dependence on his family ended with the proposal that his father immediately give him ‘funds enabling me to buy an interest in a secondhand bookstore’ (Briefe I, 292). This is the only gainful employment that Benjamin ever considered. Nothing came of it, of course.

In view of the realities of the Germany of the twenties and of Benjamin’s awareness that he would never be able to make a living with his pen – ‘there are places in which I can earn a minimum and places in which I can live on a minimum, but there is no place where I can do both’ (Briefe II, 563) – his whole attitude may strike one as unpardonably irresponsible. Yet it was anything but a case of irresponsibility. It is reasonable to assume that it is just as hard for rich people grown poor to believe in their poverty as it is for poor people turned rich to believe in their wealth; the former seem carried away by a recklessness of which they are totally unaware, the latter seem possessed by a stinginess which actually is nothing but the old ingrained fear of what the next day may bring.

Moreover, in his attitude to financial problems Benjamin was by no means an isolated case. If anything, his outlook was typical of an entire generation of German-Jewish intellectuals, although probably no one else fared so badly with it. Its basis was the mentality of the fathers, successful businessmen who did not think too highly of their own achievements and whose dream it was that their sons were destined for higher things. It was the secularized version of the ancient Jewish belief that those who ‘learn’ – the Torah or the Talmud, that is, God’s Law – were the true elite of the people and should not be bothered with so vulgar an occupation as making money or working for it. This is not to say that in this generation there were no father-son conflicts; on the contrary, the literature of the time is full of them, and if Freud had lived and carried on his inquiries in a country and language other than the German-Jewish milieu which supplied his patients, we might never have heard of an Oedipus complex.12 But as a rule these conflicts were resolved by the sons’ laying claim to being geniuses, or, in the case of the numerous Communists from well-to-do homes, to being devoted to the welfare of mankind – in any case, to aspiring to things higher than making money – and the fathers were more than willing to grant that this was a valid excuse for not making a living.