Here experience finds new ground.

Might it be said, then, that Benjamin is attempting to reactivate the orality of storytelling under new conditions? If so, then what kinds of stories do the trenches demand? What writing speaks to the moment? What follows divides Benjamin’s literary output into three sections: dreamworlds, travel, and play and pedagogy. Included are a number of reviews which address the themes in each section, focussing the material through a form that Benjamin pushes in extraordinary directions, to the point where it might undo itself.

The first section of the volume clusters around dreamworlds. Presented here are Benjamin’s own transcribed dreams alongside some of his earliest writings. These early works of fantasy offer visions of a ‘world without pain’11 much as his night dreams mirror and exaggerate the pains of this world. The section on travel is divided into stories of transit through landscapes and seascapes, towns and cities. We see the lonely traveller and also the wanderer who gleans experiences from strange encounters in order to convey them back to an audience, just as in ‘The Storyteller’ the journeyman turned master conveys wisdom in the workshop.12 Focussed here, too, are the erotic tensions of modern city life, a theme Benjamin explored since his earliest writings. The third section presents play and pedagogy as two intertwined aspects in Benjamin’s thinking. Several pieces explore the play of words, as if – to invoke a phrase from Benjamin’s review of Franz Hessel’s Secret Berlin – ‘words become magnets, which irresistibly attract other words’. To learn from and encourage children’s delight at wordplay is axiomatic in Benjamin’s thinking. In this section is a story titled ‘The Lucky Hand’, which features play in the guise of gambling. Is this a modern morality tale? Perhaps Benjamin wishes to convey lessons about instinct and intuition, about the sort of mimetic knowledge possessed by the body? Likewise, ‘On the Minute’ plays on the idea of learning how to interact with new technologies, specifically radio, another medium in which Benjamin honed his ability to engage audiences through oral presentation. The following pages briefly introduce each of these themes.

Dreamworlds

Benjamin’s fragments of fantastical fiction number among his earliest writings: Schiller and Goethe, In a Big Old City, The Pan of the Evening, The Hypochondriac in the Landscape and The Morning of the Empress are all thought to have been written between 1906 and 1912.13 At this point it was perhaps to literary writings that Benjamin principally aspired. In a 1913 letter to his friend Herbert Belmore, Benjamin explicitly describes The Death of the Father as a ‘novella’.14 A second ‘novella’ also written in the same year – reportedly on the theme of prostitution – appears to have been lost. Benjamin does not, however, use this term to describe any of his work again until 1929, in reference to ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’.15

Long dismissed as mere ‘juvenilia’,16 these texts have received little scholarly attention to date. In tandem with his work for Weimar radio, which has been similarly marginalised for many years, Benjamin revived his efforts to write fiction over the course of the 1930s. During this period he produced numerous short stories for newspapers and magazines, often out of ‘tangible motives’, as he admitted to Gershom Scholem.17 (Several of the pieces collected here under the heading ‘Travel’, including ‘Tales Out of Loneliness’, stem from this period.18) Whatever may have caused the widespread disregard for Benjamin’s early stories – they first appeared as an addendum to his Gesammelte Schriften in 1991 after having been omitted from a previous volume dedicated to his ‘Kleine Prosa’ – these pieces are of considerable interest for at least two reasons. For one thing, they distinctively employ certain narrative techniques that seldom appear elsewhere in Benjamin’s work, for example, the uncharacteristic use of the second- and third-person form. More importantly, however, Benjamin’s early stories anticipate a number of the theoretical concerns that he developed in subsequent years. Childhood and fantasy, in particular, come to the fore in his fairy tale–like prose.

If we acknowledge this confluence, then a number of Benjamin’s works on fantasy come to bear directly on his stories. In ‘A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books’ (1926), for instance, Benjamin notes, ‘Pure colour is the medium of fantasy, a home in the clouds for the playful child’.19 This gnomic formulation is a condensed statement of ideas that first emerged around 1915–16: an emphatic notion of ‘fantasy’ (as opposed to the purportedly limited Kantian ‘imagination’) that is yoked to ‘pure colour’; a ‘deforming’ kind of perception associated with the formlessness of clouds, rainbows and the like; and a sense that ‘all deformation of the world will imagine a world without pain’.20 Goethe and Runge, Hoffmann and Scheerbart are never far away. Significantly, Benjamin associates these characteristics with childhood. As Eli Friedlander observes, ‘The purely receptive, uncreative actuality of a paradisiacal order, of painless change and dissolution, of discrimination before judgement and concept, free from yearning and desire … is the prerogative of children.’21 This sentiment is forcefully expressed in ‘The Morning of the Empress’, when Benjamin notes that it is ‘the children’ who seemed to understand the secret question of the sovereign, ‘but she understood the language of the children, as little as that of thunder’.

One need not map out the far-reaching implications of this thought to observe that the suggestive force of Benjamin’s considerations reflects back onto his stories.22 They animate his portrayal of the ‘small, eight-year-old girl’ from ‘In a Big Old City’, whom he describes as ‘gazing wide-eyed at the strange, colourful flowers … embroidered onto’ her guardian’s clothes. They determine his decisive use of colour in ‘The Pan of the Evening’, where dusk is said to weave ‘a shining, pale ribbon of magic over the snowy mountains and low wooded hilltops’. They govern the recurrent theme of uncanny wanderings through dream-like vistas when, in ‘Schiller and Goethe’, Benjamin writes that ‘shades of green and white – many colours – glowed delicately within’ a ‘black mountain’ upon which E.T.A Hoffmann is said to have ‘shone from an undulating Baroque boulder’. This is to say nothing of the frequent meteorological metaphors. In ‘The Hypochondriac in the Landscape’, for example, ‘storms and tempests’ open Benjamin’s account of a quasi-masochistic, fully automated sanatorium.

Presented also in this section is a dream diary. It does not represent, however, a dedicated and sustained attempt on Benjamin’s part to record his dreams with as much fidelity as possible. The dream-notes left in the archive – collected together in Burkhardt Lindner’s 2008 book, Träume,23 from which these translations largely derive – are mainly dated from around the late 1920s into the 1930s. There is evidence to suggest that unlike Adorno, who wrote down his dreams upon waking with the intention of publishing them as a dream diary without commentary, making changes only in exceptional cases,24 Benjamin elaborates upon content and omits detail ex post facto. The manuscripts are riddled with corrections and amendments, altered further for publication in newspapers and journals.

Elaboration and censorship of dreams is not surprising when one considers how many of Benjamin’s friends, lovers, adversaries and acquaintances traverse his dreams.