Where such claims were not made or recognized, catastrophe was just around the corner. Benjamin was a case in point: his father never recognized his claims, and their relations were extraordinarily bad. Another such case was Kafka, who – possibly because he really was something like a genius – was quite free of the genius mania of his environment, never claimed to be a genius, and ensured his financial independence by taking an ordinary job at the Prague workmen’s compensation office. (His relations with his father were of course equally bad, but for different reasons.) And still, no sooner had Kafka taken this position that he saw in it a ‘running start for suicides,’ as though he were obeying an order that says ‘You have to earn your grave.’13

For Benjamin, at any rate, a monthly stipend remained the only possible form of income, and in order to receive one after his parents’ death he was ready, or thought he was, to do many things: to study Hebrew for three hundred marks a month if the Zionists thought it would do them some good, or to think dialectically, with all the mediating trimmings, for one thousand French francs if there was no other way of doing business with the Marxists. The fact that despite being down and out he later did neither is worthy of admiration, and so is the infinite patience with which Scholem, who had worked very hard to get Benjamin a stipend for the study of Hebrew from the university in Jerusalem, allowed himself to be put off for years. No one, of course, was prepared to subsidize him in the only ‘position’ for which he was born, that of an homme de lettres, a position of whose unique prospects neither the Zionists nor the Marxists were, or could have been, aware.

Today the homme de lettres strikes us as a rather harmless, marginal figure, as though he were actually to be equated with the figure of the Privatgelehrter that has always had a touch of the comic. Benjamin, who felt so close to French that the language became for him a ‘sort of alibi’ (Briefe II, 505) for his existence, probably knew about the homme de lettres’s origins in prerevolutionary France as well as about his extraordinary career in the French Revolution. In contrast to the later writers and literati, the ‘écrivains et littérateurs’ as even Larousse defines the hommes de lettres, these men, though they did live in the world of the written and printed word and were, above all, surrounded by books, were neither obliged nor willing to write and read professionally, in order to earn a living. Unlike the class of the intellectuals, who offer their services either to the state as experts, specialists, and officials, or to society for diversion and instruction, the hommes de lettres always strove to keep aloof from both the state and society. Their material existence was based on income without work, and their intellectual attitude rested upon their resolute refusal to be integrated politically or socially. On the basis of this dual independence they could afford that attitude of superior disdain which gave rise to La Rochefoucauld’s contemptuous insights into human behaviour, the worldly wisdom of Montaigne, the aphoristic trenchancy of Pascal’s thought, the boldness and open-mindedness of Montesquieu’s political reflections. It cannot be my task here to discuss the circumstances which eventually turned the hommes de lettres into revolutionaries in the eighteenth century nor the way in which their successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries split into the class of the ‘cultured’ on the one hand and of the professional revolutionaries on the other. I mention this historical background only because in Benjamin the element of culture combined in such a unique way with the element of the revolutionary and rebellious. It was as though shortly before its disappearance the figure of the homme de lettres was destined to show itself once more in the fullness of its possibilities, although – or, possibly, because – it had lost its material basis in such a catastrophic way, so that the purely intellectual passion which makes this figure so lovable might unfold in all its most telling and impressive possibilities.

There certainly was no dearth of reasons to rebel against his origins, the milieu of German-Jewish society in Imperial Germany, in which Benjamin grew up, nor was there any lack of justification for taking a stand against the Weimar Republic, in which he refused to take up a profession. In A Berlin Childhood around 1900 Benjamin describes the house from which he came as a ‘mausoleum long intended for me’ (Schriften I, 643). Characteristically enough, his father was an art dealer and antiquarian; the family was a wealthy and run-of-the-mill assimilated one; one of his grandparents was Orthodox, the other belonged to a Reform congregation. ‘In my childhood I was a prisoner of the old and the new West. In those days my clan inhabited these two districts with an attitude mingled of stubbornness and self-confidence, turning them into a ghetto which it regarded as its fief’ (Schriften I, 643). The stubbornness was toward their Jewishness; it was only stubbornness that made them cling to it. The self-confidence was inspired by their position in the non-Jewish environment in which they had, after all, achieved quite a bit. Just how much was shown on days when guests were expected. On such occasions the inside of the sideboard, which seemed to be the centre of the house and thus ‘with good reason resembled the temple mountains,’ was opened, and now it was possible ‘to show off treasures such as idols like to be surrounded with.’ Then ‘the house’s hoard of silver’ appeared, and what was displayed ‘was there not tenfold, but twentyfold or thirtyfold. And when I looked at these long, long rows of mocha spoons or knife rests, fruit knives or oyster forks, the enjoyment of this profusion struggled with the fear that those who were being expected might all look alike, just as our cutlery did’ (Schriften I, 632). Even the child knew that something was radically wrong, and not only because there were poor people (‘The poor – for the rich children of my age they existed only as beggars. And it was a great advance in my understanding when for the first time poverty dawned on me in the ignominy of poorly paid work’ [Schriften I, 632]) but because of ‘stubbornness’ within and ‘self-confidence’ without were producing an atmosphere of insecurity and self-consciousness which truly was anything but suitable for the raising of children. This was true not only of Benjamin or Berlin Westfn3 or Germany. With what passion did Kafka try to persuade his sister to put her ten-year-old son in a boarding school, so as to save him from ‘the special mentality which is particularly virulent among wealthy Prague Jews and which cannot be kept away from children … this petty, dirty, sly mentality.’14

What was involved, then, was what had since the 1870s or 1880s been called the Jewish question and existed in that form only in the German-speaking Central Europe of those decades. Today this question has been washed away, as it were, by the catastrophe of European Jewry and is justly forgotten, although one still encounters it occasionally in the language of the older generation of German Zionists whose thinking habits derive from the first decades of this century. Besides, it never was anything but the concern of the Jewish intelligentsia and had no significance for the majority of Central European Jewry. For the intellectuals, however, it was of great importance, for their own Jewishness, which played hardly any role in their spiritual household, determined their social life to an extraordinary degree and therefore presented itself to them as a moral question of the first order.