However, dreams still work against the conditions of the day – possibly to overwhelm them.

Travel

Walter Benjamin professed a love of travel from early on. He claimed that it was stimulated by postcards from his grandmother, who undertook trepidatious adventures across land and sea. His imagination kindled by her postcards, he soon undertook dream-journeys to ‘Tabarz, Brindisi, Madonna di Campiglio’, sailing the world’s oceans.33 As he grew into an adult, he began to travel widely across Europe – to the far northern reaches of Scandinavia, to Moscow and Riga in the East, to Paris in the West – and he was drawn to the South, to Marseilles, Naples, Capri and Ibiza. The Mediterranean South figures on various occasions in his fictional writing. In this regard, he follows in the footsteps of the German Romantics, for whom Italy in particular was a source of fascination. In their accounts of travel to Italy, German writers often established a dichotomy between the realities of day-to-day life in their homeland and an idyllic South, an imagined elsewhere, which promised an escape from the cold conduct of German society. In the German psyche, North and South represent two irreconcilable poles.

Benjamin began to dislodge himself from Germany in 1917, seeking other homes – Bern, Capri, Moscow, Ibiza, Paris, Denmark. He went back to Germany during the late 1920s and early 1930s, working for the radio, for newspapers and writing reviews. But he sensed the changing times. With his precarious mode of employment as a freelance writer, he was always searching for the cheapest place to eat, sleep, read and write. He reports in his diary in 1931 that, having spent all of his money, he seriously considered living in a cave on an island in the Mediterranean.34 He observed that he would endure any deprivation not to have to return to Berlin. Benjamin was blown by historical forces from the cushioned bourgeois home of his childhood to the comfortless cave of the dispossessed.

The city’s spaces, especially those that are perceived only in passing, unexpectedly, and made available to a particular gaze, provide material for stories. It is here that lives and locations intertwine, and someone with an ear to the ground might pick up on a thousand tragedies, misdemeanours, lost or fulfilled loves. The city absorbs history, reflecting and deflecting the markers of power. After wandering in Paris, one of the settings for these stories, Benjamin reports in his Arcades Project:

There is the Place du Maroc in Belleville; that desolate heap of stones with its rows of tenements became for me, when I happened upon it one Sunday afternoon, not only a Moroccan desert but also, and at the same time, a monument of colonial imperialism; topographic vision intertwined with allegorical meaning in this square, yet not for an instant did it lose its place in the heart of Belleville.35

Belleville is perceived through a bifurcation of views: a topographical one, which sees the shapes of the land, its hills and depressions, or in this case its sand, which is evoked in the miserable stones and poor ugly housing; a historical one, which sees colonial imperialism, the snatching of Morocco by the French, Morocco’s desolation and all that is implied in terms of political history and morality. Benjamin goes on:

But to awaken such a view is something ordinarily reserved for intoxicants. And in such cases, in fact, street names are like intoxicating substances that make our perceptions more stratified and richer in space. One could call the energy by which they transport us into such a state their vertu évocatrice, their evocative power – but that is saying too little; for what is decisive here is not the association but the interpenetration of images.36

The street name is charged, a poetry available to all, a stratification and amplification of sense and senses that will cascade for those who are open to it, a cataract of connections, leading into and out of political, historical understanding and emotional truth. (The play on street names in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’ comes into focus here.) Benjamin draws out of the things he witnesses an interpenetration of images which is a concentration of the energies of the world in their most potent state, amplified because of the constriction of the space that holds them. The short story likewise focuses energies into a few pages, acts as a concentration of actual and possible realities. As in the diary form, these stories record something of a tangible, recognisable world, but also bring out the ways in which our encounters and our exposures are overwhelming, mysterious, at times magical and otherworldly.

To travel is to leave behind the familiar. It should be noted that the familiar has its secret side too, as Benjamin established in his review of Franz Hessel’s novel Secret Berlin, which defamiliarises Berlin by casting it as ‘the stage for an Alexandrine musical comedy’. Travel enables new rules and ways of life. In ‘Voyage of The Mascot’, the ship is a floating ‘Magic City’ where revelry is the norm and the captain holds no authority. But over time the revolutionary spirit of the ship morphs into a monumental bureaucracy that clogs up action. In ‘Detective Stories on Tour’, a review essay, Benjamin details how the train carriage becomes a mythic space where various demons hold sway. The lonely traveller is exposed to a world in books that is not the usual one, and the rhythms of reading are realigned with the rhythms of the locomotive. Stations are thresholds to other worlds, as are harbours. Travel brings the threshold into view, as for instance in ‘Nordic Sea’ when Benjamin observes women who stand in the doorways of buildings to negotiate the ‘strict boundaries of the house’. Thresholds between the world of rationality and hallucinatory realms are crossed in these stories, as for example in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’ when the traveller gains access to ‘another realm – elevated, disenchanted and clarified at once’, through an encounter with a graffitied early Gothic capital bearing the name of a demonic woman.