The erotic yearnings kindled especially in the space of the city span Benjamin’s writings. An early tale, ‘Still Story’, describes the journey home of a young female student pursued by the narrator, who stalks her to her door. The city itself becomes a threshold.

A number of these stories were written and set in Ibiza. Benjamin appears fascinated by the differences between peasant life and the lives of the metropolitan figures who find themselves there, usually as exiles from some previous existence. Such a person might misunderstand or misread the signs on the island, as does the narrator of ‘The Wall’, who is sent on a wild goose chase in pursuit of a place that does not exist, or rather he finds it back where he started, a place of misunderstanding. Travel leads somewhere and misleads, though in being misled, one also witnesses much that is not otherwise revealed.

Play and Pedagogy

When travelling from Ibiza to Paris in September 1933, Benjamin devised a number of riddles. This was a longstanding pursuit for him, his wife Dora and his brother Georg, who would exchange riddles on birthdays and at Christmas. Just as he collated the words and sayings of his son, Stefan, as he was growing up, so too did he glean insights from the way that children deploy language when confronted with a handful of words.37 One example is ‘Fantasy Sentences’, constructed during Benjamin’s stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926–7, which is probably based on the formulations of Asja Lacis’s daughter, Daga. A similar experiment was disseminated to a wider audience in 1931, when Benjamin delivered a radio programme entitled ‘Radio Games: Poets with Keywords’. Adapted from a Baroque parlour game, the programme presented listeners with a series of seemingly unrelated words with which they were to construct sentences. Though this programme has been lost to history, the listeners’ contributions remain, having been published in the radio station’s newspaper, the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitschrift.38 The process of translation or transposition best reveals the mechanism at work here. The game is, in Benjamin’s words, poetry by keyword. With each formulation, a horde of analogies open up. New constellations of meaning crystallise as every word – each with a multiplicity of meanings – enters into new relations with another. Here we find a pedagogy rooted in fantasy and the deformation of existing meanings, an interest that dates back to Benjamin’s involvement with the prewar youth movement.

This conception of pedagogy cannot be disconnected from play. Play is at the centre of Benjamin’s thinking. It appears in different guises. It is there as something peculiar to children. It is also something that the gods do with humankind, as indicated in this piece of marginalia that Benjamin wrote on a review in 1930: ‘Collectors may be loony – though this in the sense of the French lunatique – according to the moods of the moon. They are playthings too, perhaps – but of a goddess – namely τύχη (Tyche, Goddess of Luck).’39 Play is there in the concept of Spielraum, which Benjamin develops in his writings on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility: ‘Technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action [Spielraum], immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space. But already he registers his demands on it.’40 Spielraum – room for play or manoeuvre, a space in which some exploration may take place. In this instance, play is a result of technological change and exists in tandem with it, a reorganisation of the self in the world. This room for play is an imagined space, a potential for habitation and habituation contained in the technical form of film or radio. But play was also more universal for Benjamin. Play is what each child longs to do. Wherever the child exists, the likelihood is that a space of play will develop. The Spielraum conjures forth and expands imagination. It develops the capacity for motile thought, and it is manifest in the facility of children to let language slip. Spielraum develops through mishearings and misunderstandings.