The Storyteller
The Storyteller
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920
The Storyteller
Tales Out of Loneliness
Walter Benjamin
With Illustrations
by Paul Klee
Translated and Edited by
Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie
and Sebastian Truskolaski
First published by Verso 2016
Introduction and Translation © Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie
and Sebastian Truskolaski 2016
Translation of ‘Nordic Sea’ © Antonia Grousdanidou 2016
In Chapter 16, Albert Welti, Mondnacht, taken from
Albert Welti, Gemälde und Radierungen, Furche Verlag, Berlin, 1917.
In Chapter 34, ‘Wandkalender’ © Akademie der Künste, Berlin,
Walter Benjamin Archiv.
The images by Paul Klee are in the public domain.
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-304-4 (PB)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-307-5 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-306-8 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940, author. | Dolbear, Sam, translator, editor. | Leslie, Esther, 1964– translator, editor. | Truskolaski, Sebastian, translator, editor.
Title: The storyteller : tales out of loneliness / Walter Benjamin ; translated and with an introduction by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski.
Description: First [edition]. | Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016013569 | ISBN 9781784783044 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940 – Translations into English. | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author).
Classification: LCC PT2603.E455 A2 2016 | DDC 833/.912 – dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016013569
Typeset in Caslon Pro by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the US by Maple Press
Contents
Introduction: Walter Benjamin and the Magnetic Play of Words
by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski
PART ONE: DREAMWORLDS
Fantasy
1.Schiller and Goethe: A Layman’s Vision
2.In a Big Old City: Novella Fragment
3.The Hypochondriac in the Landscape
4.The Morning of the Empress
5.The Pan of the Evening
6.The Second Self: A New Year’s Story for Contemplation
Dreams
7.Dreams from Ignaz Jezower’s Das Buch der Träume
8.Too Close
9.Ibizan Dream
10.Self-Portraits of a Dreamer
The Grandson
The Seer
The Lover
The Knower
The Tight-Lipped One
The Chronicler
11.Dream I
12.Dream II
13.Once Again
14.Letter to Toet Blaupot ten Cate
15.A Christmas Song
16.The Moon
Welti’s Moonlit Night
The Water Glass
The Moon
In the Dark
The Dream
17.Diary Notes
18.Review: Albert Béguin, The Romantic Soul and the Dream
PART TWO: TRAVEL
City and Transit
19.Still Story
20.The Aviator
21.The Death of the Father: Novella
22.The Siren
23.Sketched into Mobile Dust: Novella
24.Palais D…y
25.Review: Franz Hessel, Secret Berlin
26.Review: Detective Novels, on Tour
Landscape and Seascape
27.Nordic Sea
Town
Flowers
Furniture
Light
Gulls
Statues
28.Tales Out of Loneliness
The Wall
The Pipe
The Light
29.The Voyage of The Mascot
30.The Cactus Hedge
31.Reviews: Landscape and Travel
PART THREE: PLAY AND PEDAGOGY
32.Review: Collection of Frankfurt Children’s Rhymes
33.Fantasy Sentences
34.Wall Calendar from Die literarische Welt for 1927
35.Riddles
The Stranger’s Reply
Succinct
36.Radio Games
37.Short Stories
Why the Elephant Is Called ‘Elephant’
How the Boat Was Invented and Why It Is Called ‘Boat’
Funny Story from When There Were Not Yet Any People
38.Four Tales
The Warning
The Signature
The Wish
Thanks
39.On the Minute
40.The Lucky Hand: A Conversation about Gambling
41.Colonial Pedagogy: Review of Alois Jalkotzy, The Fairy Tale and the Present
42.Verdant Elements: Review of Tom Seidemann-Freud, Play Primer 2 and 3: Something More on the Play Primer
Notes
Translators’ Note
About the Illustrations: Paul Klee
Throughout his life, Walter Benjamin experimented with a variety of literary forms. Novellas and short stories, fables and parables as well as jokes, riddles and rhymes all sit alongside his well-known critical writings. He also long harboured plans to write crime fiction. There exists an extensive outline for a novel, to be titled La Chasse aux mensonge, detailing ten possible chapters, including such details as an accident in a lift shaft, an umbrella as clue, action in a cardboard-making factory, a man who hides his banknotes inside his books and loses them.1 The sheer variety of Benjamin’s literary texts reflects the often precarious existence that he forged as a freelance author, moving around the continent sporadically taking on assignments for newspapers and journals. The short forms collected in the present volume stand in their own right as works of experimental writing, but they also act as the sounding board for ideas that feed back into Benjamin’s critical work. The Tsarist clerk Shuvalkin and the Hasidic beggar in ‘Four Stories’ (c. 1933–4), for example, resurface in his essay on Franz Kafka (1934).2 Likewise, the Imperial panorama from ‘The Second Self’ (c. 1930–3) recalls the ‘Tour of German Inflation’ described in One Way Street (1928) as well as the essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1934–5) and the autobiographical vignettes laid out in Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932–8).3
Charting these continuities is more than a mere exercise in philology. Rather, the purpose of bringing together these texts is to demonstrate how Benjamin formally stages, enacts and performs certain concerns that he develops elsewhere in a more academic register. Consistent across the work is an exploration of such themes as dream and fantasy, travel and estrangement, play and pedagogy. Before commenting directly on the specifics of this topology, however, a discussion of Benjamin’s reflections on storytelling is warranted.
Benjamin treated the theme of storytelling in an array of texts, not least among them ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), an essay on the Russian novelist Nikolai Leskov from which the title of the present volume is drawn.4 In another, a short text titled ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), Benjamin lays out the central claim he would later develop in the Leskov essay. Before the onset of the First World War, we are told, experience was passed down through the generations in the form of folklore and fairy tales.5 To illustrate this claim, Benjamin relates a fable about a father who taught his sons the merits of hard work by fooling them into thinking that there was buried treasure in the vineyard by the house. The turning of soil in the vain search for gold results in the discovery of a real treasure: a wonderful crop of fruit. With the war came the severing of ‘the red thread of experience’ which had connected previous generations, as Benjamin puts it in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’. The ‘fragile human body’ that emerged from the trenches was mute, unable to narrate the ‘forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions’6 that had engulfed it. Communicability was unsettled. It was as if the good and bountiful soil of the fable had become the sticky and destructive mud of the trenches, which would bear no fruit but only moulder as a graveyard. ‘Where do you hear words from the dying that last and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring?’ Benjamin asks.7
By contrast, the journalistic jargon of the newspaper is the highest expression of experiential poverty – a lesson that Benjamin learned from Karl Kraus.8 As Benjamin comments, ‘every morning brings us the news of the globe and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories.’9 But it is precisely for this very reason that seemingly redundant narrative forms become highly charged. Benjamin’s association of experience with folklore and fairy tales cannot be seen as expressing a nostalgic yearning to revive a ruined tradition. Rather, the obsolescence of these forms becomes the condition of their critical function – a point that Benjamin explores in the review ‘Colonial Pedagogy’ with reference to the attempted modernisation of fairy tales. Kafka’s parables elude interpretation because the key to understanding them has been lost, yet the function of this anachronistic opacity is the unfolding of a language of gestures and names: a facet of what has been described as Kafka’s ‘inverse messianism’.10 By the same token, it would appear that the moment for reading Baudelaire’s lyric poetry had passed at the time of its publication, yet it is precisely the untimeliness of its presentation that imbues Baudelaire’s rendition of modern life with the urgency that Benjamin admired. What Benjamin attempts to re-imagine in his engagement with these authors is the communicability of experience in spite of itself. In this regard, it is notable that a common trait of Benjamin’s own fiction is the layering of voices in imitation of an ostensibly antiquated oral tradition: a sea captain tells a passenger a yarn, a friend tells another friend a curious thing that he experienced, a man tells the tale of an acquaintance to another man, who in turn relates the story to us. These stories create layered worlds of citations, enigmas and perspectives. With this, Benjamin extends a long tradition of recording and retelling stories which stretches from Hebel to Hoffmann and beyond.
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