Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
Author(s): Ben Brewster
Source: Perspecta, Vol. 12 (1969), pp. 161-162
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566964
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Walter Benjamin
and the Arcades Project
Ben Brewster is a research student in
Sociology at the School of Oriental and
African Studies in London. He is on the
editorial board of the New Left Review to
which he is a regular contributor. This
introduction to Walter Benjamin first
appeared in the New Left Review No. 48,
March-April 1968.
Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) came from a
Jewish bourgeois family. Born in Berlin, he
spent his childhood there, studied philosophy
in Freiburg, Munich and Bern, and after the
First World War worked as a literary critic
and essayist in Berlin and Frankfurt. When
the Nazis came to power in 1933, Benjamin
fled to Paris, where, apart from holidays in
Spain and Italy, he lived until 1940. He was
caught by Spanish police attempting to flee
across the Pyrenees after the fall of France,
and took his own life on September 26th,
1940.
While studying in Munich in 1915 he first met
Gerhard Scholem, who was to become a life-
long friend and aroused in Benjamin an
interest in Jewish mysticism that contributed
to his later work. Scholem emigrated to
Palestine during the '20's, and Benjamin
planned to follow him, but financial difficulties
and intellectual commitments always
prevented him. Between 1923 and 1925 he
was attached to the University of Frankfurt,
where he wrote his book on German baroque
tragedy, The Origins of German Tragedy.
Other works in the early '20's included his
graduation thesis at Bern in 1919: The
Concept of Art Criticism in German
Romanticism and a long essay on Goethe's
Elective Affinities. Another friend of the war
years, Ernst Bloch, introduced Benjamin to
Marxism, and this influence was deepened by
meeting the Russian film director Asya Lacis
on Capri in the summer of 1924. He followed
up discussions with her about the Soviet
Union by reading the Marxist classics and
Lu kcs' History and Class-consciousness. In
the winter of 1926 to 1927 Benjamin made a
trip to Moscow. These Marxist beginnings
were carried forward by his meeting Brecht in
the late '20's, and he became one of the
latter's first critical champions. In Frankfurt
he also became a close friend of Theodor W.
Adorno, his wife Gretel and Max Horkheimer.
A book of aphorisms, One Way Street, was
published along with the book on tragedy in
1928, establishing him intellectually, but not
financially. His family had been ruined in the
inflation. After 1933, in exile, his financial
position worsened until, late in 1935, he was
provided with a small income by Horkheimer's
Institut fur Sozialforschung that had moved
from Frankfurt o Geneva in 1933 and later
moved on to Paris and New York. During this
period he was closely involved with the
complex developing relationships between
avant-garde art and the Communist
movement. This involvement gave rise to two
crucial essays, The Author as a Producer
(1934), on the artist's relation to the
proletariat, and The Work of Art in the Era of
its Mechanical Reproduction (1935), on the
161
avant-garde. But the major preoccupation of
the last 10 years of his life, the work which
tied him to Paris, was a study of 19th century
France known as the 'Arcades Project', for
which the text we print here is a crucial
provisional draft. His other work was short
articles for reviews and newspapers, some in
series which have since been collected
together as books, notably Childhood in
Berlin around Nineteen-hundred and City
Portraits.
Despite the fragmentary nature of much of his
work, Benjamin occupies a crucial place in
the development of German Marxism and
German criticism, since he was the only
theorist who linked the dominant current of
Marxist philosophy and aesthetics, the neo-
Hegelianism introduced by Bloch and Lukacs
and taken over by the philosophers and
critics of the Frankfurt school, with the avant-
garde currents in the arts in the inter-war
period: with surrealism, with the Dada
movement and its descendents - notably
John Heartfield, whose photomontage
technique Benjamin claimed 'has made the
cover of a book into a political insrument' -
and with the epic theatre of Brecht and
Tretyakov. The gap between revolutionary
philosophy and revolutionary art has
widened again since his death. The study of
his work is significant to the extent that it will
help to bring the two together again.
Benjamin's fascination with Paris dates back
to 1913, when, at his father's instigation, he
made his first visit to the city. For the rest of
his life his travels gravitate around Paris, and
after leaving Germany in 1933 he made it his
home. In the early '20's he translated
Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens and poems
from Les Fleurs du Mal. In 1925 he embarked
on a translation of Proust in collaboration
with Franz Hessel; the latter introduced
Benjamin to surrealism, and the first idea of
the Arcades Project originated in discussions
between them. Benjamin saw his own work in
terms of 'cycles' in which the various parts
represented the contradictory moments of a
synthetic unity (the image of an arch between
opposing pillars is also characteristic). In
1928, when a first draft of the Project was
nearing completion, he wrote to Gerhard
Scholem, 'Once I have finished ... the work
with which I am at present, circumspectly,
provisionally occupied - the highly
remarkable and extremely precarious essay
The Parisian Arcades: a Dialectical Fairyland
- this will close for me a productive cycle -
that of One Way Street- rather in the sense
that the Tragedy book closed my germanistic
cycle. In it the worldly themes of One Way
Street will march past in an infernal
Ben Brewster