Radio Benjamin

CHAPTER 1. Berlin Dialect

Today I’d like to speak with you about the Berlin Schnauze. This so-called big snout is the first thing that comes to mind when talking about Berliners.¹ The Berliner, as they say in Germany, well, he’s the clever one who does everything differently and better than the rest of us. Or so he would have you believe. That’s why people in Germany don’t like Berliners, or so they let on. Still, at the end of the day, it’s a good thing for people to have a capital they can grumble about now and again.

But really, is this true about the Berlin Schnauze? It is and it isn’t. Every one of you surely knows lots of stories where Berliners open their big traps so wide that the Brandenburg Gate could fit inside. And later on I’ll tell you a few more that perhaps you’ve never heard. But if you look at it a little closer, much of what you think you know about the big snout isn’t actually true. It’s quite simple: for example, other peoples and other regions make much of their particular way of speaking; “dialect” is what we call the language spoken in an individual city or area. They go on and on about it; they’re proud of it; and they love their poets, like Reuter who wrote in Mecklenburg Low German, Hebel in Alemannic, and Gotthelf in Swiss German.² And they’re right to do so. But Berliners, as far as “Berlining” is concerned, have always been very humble. In fact, if anything they’ve been ashamed of their language, at least around sophisticated people and with foreigners. Needless to say, when among themselves, they have a lot of fun with it. And of course they also make fun of Berlining, just as they do of everything else, and there are many pretty stories to show for it. For example: a man sits at the table with his wife and says: “Huh, beans again today? But I et ’em just yesterday.” Then his wife one-ups him and says: “It ain’t ‘I et,’ it’s ‘I ate.’ ” To which the man replies: “Maybe you call yourself that, but I sure as heck don’t.”³ Or the well-known story of a man walking with his son, who points to a sign and asks: “How do you prenounce that word, papa?” And the father corrects him: “ ‘Prenounce’ is prenounced ‘pronounce.’ ”

Berliners needed encouragement to own up to their language with outsiders. But this wasn’t always the case. One hundred years ago there were already writers creating Berlin characters that would become famous all across Germany. The best known include the Bootblack, the Market Woman, the Innkeeper, the Street Hawker and, above all, the famed Nante the Loafer.⁴ And if you’ve ever had your hands on old issues of the funny pages, you’ve probably come across the two famous Berliners, one short and fat, the other tall and skinny. They would talk politics, sometimes going by the names Kielmeier and Strobelweber, or Plümecke and Bohnhammel, or Meck and Scherbel, or finally just plain Müller and Schulze, and they came up with some of the greatest lines about Berlin. The newspaper had something new from them each week. But then came 1870 and the founding of the German Reich. Suddenly Berliners had grand ambitions and wanted to become refined. What was missing was a few great, widely respected men to give them back the courage of their own dialect. Strangely enough, two of them were painters, not writers, and we have a slew of lovely stories about them. The first, whom most of you won’t know, is the famous old Max Liebermann, who is still alive and still feared for his dreadful Schnauze. But a few years ago, another painter, one by the name of Bondy took him to task.⁵ The two of them were sitting across from one another in a café having a friendly chat, when all at once Liebermann said to Bondy: “You know, Bondy, you’d be a real nice guy and all if your hands weren’t so disgusting.” Bondy then looks at Professor Liebermann and says: “You got it, Professor, but you see, these hands here, I can just slide ’em in my pockets, like so. What do you do with your face?” And the other great Berliner, whom many of you know by name and who only recently died, is Heinrich Zille.⁶ If he heard or observed a particularly good story, he didn’t just run out and have it published. Instead he drew a splendid picture of it. These illustrated stories have just been collected after his death, so now you can ask for them as a gift. You’ll recognize many of them, but perhaps not this one: A father is sitting at the table with his three boys. They’re having noodle soup when one says: “Oskar, look how the noodle’s dangling from papa’s snout!” Then the oldest, Albert, says: “Gustav, you can’t call your papa’s mug a snout!” “Nah,” says Gustav, “the old buffoon don’t mind!” But now the father has had it and jumps up to fetch his cane. The three boys, Gustav, Albert, and Oskar, scurry under the bedstead. The father tries to get at them but can’t. Finally he says to the youngest: “Come out from under there, Oskar, you ain’t said nothin’. I ain’t gonna do nothin’ to you.” Oskar replies from under the bed: “And face a wretch like you?” Later on I’ll tell you a few more stories about fresh little brats.⁷

But don’t think Berlinish is just a collection of jokes. It is very much a real and wonderful language. It even has a proper book of grammar, which was written by Hans Meyer, director of the old Gray Cloister School in Berlin. It’s called “The True Berliner in Words and Phrases.”⁸ As much as any other language, Berlinish can be spoken in a manner that is refined, witty, gentle, or clever, but of course, the speaker must know when and where to do so. Berlinish is a language that comes from work. It developed not from writers or scholars, but rather from the locker room and the card table, on the bus and at the pawn shop, at sporting arenas and in factories. Berlinish is a language of people who have no time, who often must communicate by using only the slightest hint, glance, or half-word. It’s not for people who meet socially from time to time. It’s only for those who see one another regularly, daily, under very precise and fixed conditions. Special ways of speaking always arise among such people, which you yourselves have a perfect example of in the classroom. There is a special language for school kids, just like there are special expressions used among employees, sportsmen, soldiers, thieves, and so on. And all these ways of speaking contribute something to Berlinish, because in Berlin all these people from all walks of life live piled together, and at a tremendous pace. Berlinish today is one of the most beautiful and most precise expressions of this frenzied pace of life.

Of course, this was not always the case. I will now read you a Berlin story from a time when Berlin was not yet a city of four million people, but just a few hundred thousand.

BRUSHMAKER (carrying his brushes and brooms, but so drunk that he’s forgotten what he’s actually selling). Eels here! Eels here! Get your eels here! Who’s got cash!

FIRST BOOTBLACK: Listen up, Sir Scrubber, whoever eats a couple eels gets swept away. (He leaves the drunkard and runs madly through the streets, screaming.) Holy cow, this one takes the cake! No more smokin’ from the window!

SEVERAL PEOPLE: What are you talkin’ about? Really? You can’t smoke from the window anymore? Now they’ve gone too far.

FIRST BOOTBLACK (running away): Yep! You gotta smoke from a pipe! — Hah!

BRISICH THE LOAFER (in front of the museum): I like this building, it cracks me up.

LANGE THE LOAFER: How come it cracks you up?

BRISICH (staggering a bit): Well, because of the eagles on top!

LANGE: What’s so funny about the eagles?

BRISICH: Well, they’re royal eagles but still they sit there loafin’ on the corner! Just think if I was a royal eagle and got to loaf on the corner of the museum just for decoration! I tell you what I’d do. If I was thirsty, I’d quit my decorating for a while and pull out my bottle, take a couple swigs and holler down to the people: “Don’t think bad about the museum! A royal eagle’s just takin’ a break!”⁹

All languages change quickly, but the language of a metropolis changes much more quickly than does language in rural regions. Now, compare the language you just heard to that of a crier in a story from today. The man who wrote it is named Döblin, the same Döblin who told you about Berlin one Saturday not long ago.¹⁰ Of course, he wouldn’t have heard it exactly as he wrote it. He often just hung around Alexanderplatz and listened to the people hawking their wares and then cobbled together the best bits of what he heard:

How come the elegant man in the West End wears a tie and the prole wears none? Gentlemen, come closer, you too Fräulein, that’s right, the one with the man on your arm, and minors are allowed too, they’re for free. Why are there no ties on a prole? Because he can’t tie ‘em. So he buys himself a tie-holder and once he’s got it, it’s no good ‘cuz he can’t tie it. It’s a scam and it embitters the masses and sinks Germany into even deeper misery than she’s in already. Tell me, for example, why no one wears these big tie-holders? Because no one wants to tie a dustpan around his neck. Not men, not women, not babies if they had a say. It’s no laughing matter, gentlemen, laugh not, we don’t know what goes on in that sweet little baby brain. Dear God, the sweet little head, what a sweet little head, with its little hairs, but what’s not pretty, gentlemen, is paying your alimony, that’s no joke, that gets a man into trouble. Go buy yourself a tie at Tietz or Wertheim, or somewhere else if you won’t buy from Jews. I’m an Aryan man. The big department stores don’t need me to pitch for ‘em, they do just fine without me. So buy yourselves a tie like I have here and then think about having to tie it every morning. Ladies and gentlemen, who has time nowadays to tie a tie in the morning and give up an extra minute of precious sleep? We need all the sleep we can get because we all work so much and earn so little. A tie-holder like this makes you sleep easier. It’s putting pharmacists out of business, because whoever buys one of these here tie-holders needs no sleeping potion, no nightcap, no nothin’. He sleeps safe and sound like a baby at his mother’s breast, because he knows there’s no hustle in the morning; what he needs is right there on the dresser, tied and ready, just waitin’ to be shoved into his collar. You spend your money on so much rubbish. You must have seen the crooks last year at the Krokodil Bar, there was hot sausage in front, and behind lay Jolly in his glass case, with a beard like sauerkraut growing around his mouth.¹¹ Every one of you saw it — come a little closer, now, I wanna save my voice, I haven’t insured my voice, I’m still saving up for the down payment — how Jolly was lying in the glass case, you all saw it. But how they slipped him some chocolate? You didn’t see that! You’re buyin’ honest goods here, not celluloid, but galvanized rubber, twenty pfennigs apiece, fifty for three.¹²

This shows you just how useful the Berlin Schnauze can be, and how someone can earn his money with it, drumming up as much interest in his ties as if he were running an entire department store.

Thus a language renews itself every second. All events, great and small, leave their mark on it. War and inflation as much as a Zeppelin sighting, Amanullah’s visit, or Iron Gustav.¹³ There are even speech fads in Berlinish. Perhaps some of you still remember the famous “to me.” For example: if a Berliner is being chatted up by someone he doesn’t want to talk to, he says, “That’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church to me,” which means “nave.” And, as everyone knows, a “knave” is a scoundrel. Or someone is giving an order to a young boy and says to him, “Can you manage it?” And the boy replies, “That’s abacus to me.” (You can count on me.)

By now you will have noticed that in many of these stories, there’s more to Berliners than just the big Schnauze. For instance, people can be very impertinent yet also very awkward. Berliners, however, at least the better ones, combine their impertinence with a whole lot of quick wit, spirit, and jest. “A Berliner ain’t never taken for a fool,” as they say. Take, for example, the nice story of the fellow, who’s in a great hurry and riding in a horse-drawn carriage that’s going too slow: “My God, driver, can’t you move a little faster?” “Sure thing. But I can’t just leave the horse all alone.” But a true Berliner joke is never only at the expense of others; it’s just as much at the jokester’s expense. This is what makes him so likable and free: he doesn’t spare his own dialect, and there are many wonderful stories to prove it. For example, a man, already a bit drunk, walks into a bar and says: “What ales you got?” And the barkeep replies: “I got gout and a bad back.”¹⁴

And now for the stories I promised you about children. Three boys enter a pharmacy. The first one says: “Penny o’ licorice.” The shopkeeper fetches a long ladder, climbs to the top step, fills the bag, and climbs back down. Once the boy pays, the second boy says: “I’d also like a penny o’ licorice!” Before climbing the ladder again, the shopkeeper, already annoyed, asks the third boy: “You want a penny of licorice, too?” “Nope,” he says. So the shopkeeper climbs back up the ladder, and then down again with the full bag. He now turns to the third boy: “And what do you want, lil’ man?” And he answers: “I want the licorice for a ha’penny.” Or, a man sees a young boy on the street: “Huh, smokin’ already? I’m gonna tell your teacher.” “Do what you want, you old fool, I ain’t big enough for school yet.” Or, there’s a fifth-grader at school who can’t get used to calling his teacher “sir.” The teacher’s name is Ackermann and he lets it pass for a while until finally he gets angry: “By tomorrow morning you’ll write in your notebook 100 times: ‘I shall never forget to call my teacher “sir.””‘ The next day the boy comes to school and gives his teacher the notebook, in which indeed he has written 100 times: “I shall never forget to call my teacher ‘sir.’ ” The teacher counts and, sure enough, there’s 100. And the boy says: “What’s up, Ackermann, surprised?”

We’ll hear some more Berlinish another time if you want, but there’s surely no need to wait. Just open your eyes and ears when you’re walking through Berlin and you’ll collect many more such stories than you’ve heard on the radio today.

“Berliner Dialekt,” GS, 7.1, 68–74. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin. The exact date of broadcast has not been determined, but it was almost certainly one of several broadcasts Benjamin gave in November and December of 1929 on subjects related to Berlin; during these months, the Berlin radio journal Funkstunde [Radio Times] advertised, without specific titles, several broadcasts by Benjamin during the Berlinstunde [Berlin Hour].

¹ Berliner Schnauze, which can be loosely translated as “Berlin snout,” refers to both a way of speaking and an attitude. It connotes both the physiological (snout, schnoz, nose, muzzle, gob, or mug) and the linguistic-cultural (insolence, coarseness, lip, sass, wit, yap). It designates a style specific to Berliners, and more exclusively, to working-class Berliners. For more of Benjamin’s comments on Berlin dialect, see “Wat hier jelacht wird, det lache ick” [If anyone’s laughing here, it’s me] in GS, 4.1, 537–42 (first published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, May 5, 1929). Both in its stated emphasis on Berlin dialect as spoken, everyday language and in the rhythm and inflections of Benjamin’s own syntax (which here includes, even in its typescript form, indications for what some linguists call “filler” words or, in German, modal particles, words such as “so” and “well” and “now”), “Berlin Dialect” stands out, in focus and style, as perhaps the most “spoken” of Benjamin’s radio talks for children.

² Fritz Reuter (1810–1874) was a writer from Mecklenburg in Northern Germany known for his contributions to Low German literature; Johann Peter Hebel (1760–1826) wrote in the German dialect of Alemannic; Jeremias Gotthelf (1797–1854) was a Swiss novelist.

³ Our English translation does not pick up the bawdy humor at play in the Berlin dialect. In addition to the comedy of the woman correcting her husband’s grammar while making grammatical mistakes of her own, the preterite of the German verb essen (to eat) is aß (ate), which in Berlin dialect sounds like Aas, or carrion, but which also has a slang meaning of “bitch” or “bugger.” Her response, in other words, amounts to both “I ate” and “I’m a bitch.”

⁴ The character of Nante the Loafer (Eckensteher Nante, or Nante, the man on the corner) is a figure of working-class Berlin, popularized in the work of Adolf Glassbrenner. See also in this volume “Theodor Hosemann.”

⁵ Max Liebermann (1847–1935) was a German-Jewish painter, printmaker, collector, lifelong Berliner, supporter of Impressionism in Germany, and first president of the Berlin Secession. He served as the president of the Prussian Academy of Art from 1920 to 1933. Walter Bondy (1880–1940) was a Jewish painter, editor, art critic and collector. Born in Prague and raised in Vienna, he studied and lived in Berlin, where he was affiliated with the Berlin Secession.

⁶ Heinrich Zille (1858–1929), German illustrator known for his humorous depictions of working-class life in Berlin.

⁷ Here Benjamin uses the word Göre, or brats, but spelled as it would be pronounced in Berlinish: Jöhre. Throughout, his quotations have reproduced the variant spelling of Berlin dialect, but here he has incorporated it into his own language.

⁸ Hans Meyer, Der Richtige Berliner in Wörtern und Redensarten (Berlin: H. S. Hermann, 1904).

⁹ This passage appears in Hans Ostwald, Der Urberliner in Witz, Humor und Anekdote (Berlin: P. Franke, 1927), 39, as well as in Adolf Glassbrenner, Berliner Volksleben, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1851), 248–9. In this instance, Benjamin’s typescript, rather than giving a full quotation, refers only to “Ostwald, p. 39”; it is unclear whether Benjamin read aloud from this particular passage or from another of Ostwald’s many books. As Benjamin’s typescript does not provide a full quotation, we follow the editors of the GS, who provided the passage.

¹⁰ Alfred Döblin was a speaker on the Berlin Radio Hour from 1925 through 1931, with most of his work for the radio done between 1928 and 1930. Perhaps his most famous contribution to Weimar radio was a never broadcast script, The Story of Franz Biberkopf, the radio play for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929); scheduled to go out on September 30, 1930, it was cancelled at the last minute due to fear over Nazi reprisals. As Peter Jelavich puts it, “In the atmosphere of fear and panic in the weeks following the elections of 14 September 1930, when the Nazis emerged as the second strongest party in the Reichstag, the political oversight committee of Berlin’s station balked at airing a work by a well-known leftist Jewish author” (Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture, 93). For Döblin’s early contributions to Weimar radio, see ibid., 75–8; and for a reference to Benjamin’s reading of the necktie-holder vendor scene from Berlin Alexanderplatz, and the political and formal issues raised by its transposition to radio, both in Benjamin’s reading and in Döblin’s radio script, see ibid., 29–30, 102–3. See also Benjamin’s discussion of Döblin’s novel — as a new form of epic narration, as well as “a monument to the Berlin dialect”—in “The Crisis of the Novel” [1930], SW, 2, 299–304 (GS, 231–6).

¹¹ In March 1926, a “hunger artist” named Jolly sold tickets to an exhibition of himself fasting, setting a new world record of going without food for forty-four days.

¹² Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1929), 72ff. The passage, slightly modified from Döblin, is provided by the editors of the GS based on Benjamin’s page number reference in the typescript.

¹³ Amanullah Khan, sovereign of Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929, visited Berlin in 1928. “Iron Gustav” was a coachman who drove his carriage from Berlin to Paris and back in 1928.

¹⁴ The German here is a pun on the verbs kriegen (to get) and kriechen (to crawl). When the drunkard asks, “Kricht man hier Rum?” [You got any rum here?], the barkeep pretends to have heard “Kriecht man herum?” [Does one crawl around?], and answers “Hier setzt man sich” [In here we sit]. The pun depends on the words being pronounced in Berlin dialect.

CHAPTER 2. Street Trade and Markets in Old and New Berlin

Are you familiar with the fairy tale, “The Golden Pot”? Do you recall the strange old apple monger whom the student Anselmus runs into as the story begins?¹ Or do you know Hauff’s tale “Little Long-Nose,” which begins at a market where a witch touches all the goods with her spidery fingers to pick out the best ones?² And when you visit the market with your mother, is it not sometimes thrilling and festive? For even the most ordinary weekly market has some of the magic of oriental markets, such as the Samarkand bazaar. Have you seen the new film shot at the market at Wittenbergplatz?³ It’s more thrilling than most detective films. One thing that’s missing in the film — and even books seldom deal with it — is the market talk: the bargaining and trading, all the back-and-forth of goods and money that is, in its own way, as rich and sumptuous for the ear as the image of the market is a feast for the eyes. This is particularly true of the Berlin market. Some months ago I spoke to you here about the dialect of Berlin. The market, and street trade in general, is now one of the places where Berlinish can best be overheard and appreciated in its richness and variation. It’s the street trade of old and new Berlin that I’d like to talk to you about today.

Market women were already something very special in old Berlin. Of all merchant women, they were alone in having permission to offer their wares at the weekly market, and were mostly women farmers peddling their own produce. Quite different were the so-called hawker women. They were forbidden to sell the better goods and, as compensation for being permitted to trade, were forced to spin four pounds of wool per month for the warehouse. As even their purchasing was greatly restricted — they were not allowed to buy directly from farmers, but had to stock up on left-over goods from other vendors at closing time on market days — the hawkers did measly business, eking out only a meager living for their families. This was still the case as late as the eighteenth century. And if a woman of low standing wanted to contribute to the family budget, as so many soldiers’ wives did, there was sometimes no other option but to become a hawker. For a proper market woman, then, there was no greater insult than to be called a “hawker.” So, in one of his best scenes, Glassbrenner depicts a market woman and everything that comes to her mind as she tells off, with her world-famous Berlin Schnauze,⁴ a customer who has just muttered “hawker” in her direction. “Hawker?” she repeats, standing up, arms akimbo: “Listen here, you old dog, go bark at some other stall or I’ll stomp on your paw so hard you’ll be whining for eight days.” The man says: “Well, well, isn’t it remarkable how these hawkers can scold.” Hawker: “Scold? Such a daffy beanpole of a guy like you, you can’t even be scolded; you’re already two or three times worse than anything vile I’d say about you. Such a shadow of a male specimen you are, always trying to get the best of someone. You filthy pedant, you wanna bully us around? Is that it? Why not just hang yourself, so no decent person’s forced to commit a crime against you. Go curl up in a ball. Go see the rag man and sell yourself for a quarter pound of rags. Take some gravel and rub yourself clean so there’s nothin’ left of you. Go hang yourself from the moon so the good-for-nothings can go home early! And steer clear of the choirboys, or they’ll start singing: God of my mercy shall preserve me!”⁵ It had become an actual sport to lure the market women to rant. And you can see here that it paid off.

To spew insults straight from the heart, and with such perseverance, is indeed a great talent, one reserved for a privileged few. It requires not only a high degree of crassness and a healthy lung, but also a large vocabulary and, not least of all, great wit. That one attributes such wit to the stall owners and market women is borne out by many wonderful stories. For example this one, which tells of a fruit peddler lying on her deathbed, suffering terribly at the prospect of dying. Her husband stands beside her, not knowing what to say but trying to comfort her: “Don’t worry too much that you have to die; everything’ll be ok, it’ll all work out. We all have to die once in our lives!” “Muttonhead,” the poor woman whispers, “that’s the whole point. If we had to die ten or twelve times, I wouldn’t care so much about this time.” The great Berlin catchphrase “Nothing to fear!” was also the motto for this sort of person. As you probably know, Berliners are not particularly impressed by education or refinement. And if they are, they never show it. There’s a wonderful Berlin scene from the middle of the last century, back when there were still no funny pages, but bookshops and stationery stores sold individual pictures, with captions and usually in watercolor, by known artists like Hosemann, Franz Krüger, or Dörbeck.⁶ Let me tell you about one: somewhere close to the Brandenburg Gate you see a fat fruit seller, and standing next to her is a more refined gentleman with a lady friend, both foreigners. You can tell just by looking at them that they don’t know much about Berlin. “My dear lady,” says the man, pointing at the Victoria statue atop the Brandenburg Gate, “can you tell me who that is on top of the gate?” Answer: “Yeah, sure, that old thing? Ancient Roman history, the Electors of Brandenburg, the Seven Years’ War. That’s all.” “Aha,” says the man, “Thank you kindly.”

I do not want to suggest that this sort of Berliner has died out, only that the class divide has become more marked. People stay more and more among their own kind so that, as a customer, it’s no longer so easy to get close to these sellers amid the hustle and bustle on market days. So as for the exquisite scoldings like the ones Glassbrenner passed on to us, there’s just no more time for them. Today’s market women have become more like businesswomen, and the butchers who come to the market have large, refrigerated storerooms where they load up on stock before heading to the market and offload their unsold goods afterwards. This brings us to another spectacle, which was as scrumptious for the eyes as the old Berlin weekly market was a feast for the ears: the market halls. When I was little, it was cause for celebration to be taken to the Magdeburger Platz market halls, where it was always so warm in winter and on hot days so cool. Everything is different there compared to the outdoor markets. First of all, there are huge mounds of one kind of goods, right next to another booth packed with something else. But above all there is the smell, a mix of fish, cheese, flowers, raw meat, and fruit all under one roof, which is completely different than in the open air markets and creates a dim and woozy aroma that fits perfectly with the light seeping through the murky panes of lead-framed glass. And let’s not forget the stone floor, which is always awash with run-off or dishwater and feels like the cold and slippery bottom of the ocean. Because I’ve rarely been to a market hall since I was little, going to one now brings back all the charm of visits long ago. And if I really want a special treat, I go for a walk in the Lindenstraße market hall in the afternoons between four and five. Maybe someday I’ll meet one of you there. But we won’t recognize each other. That’s the downside of radio.

Most of this sort of business has utterly vanished from the streets of Berlin. And with it, the sand wagons, whose drivers, up until around 1900, would holler in front of every house and in every courtyard: “Sand, getcha white sand!” They would come from the Rehberg Mountains in the North, from Kreuzberg in the South and from all over with the white sand that housewives used to scrub their floors clean and white. Or the kipper wagons. Or colporteurs, door-to-door book peddlers who earned meager livings selling pulp novels with colorful pictures and, quite often, sheet music and song lyrics. Before the advent of advertising, publishers had turned to colporteurs to market their books to the people. It’s fun to imagine the quintessential book traveler from this time among these social classes, bringing ghost stories and tales of noble knights into servants’ quarters in the city and farmhouse parlors in the countryside. He himself featured in many of the stories that he sold. Not as the hero, of course, and not as the young, outcast prince, but rather as the wily old man, the warner, or the seducer. Selling in those days for just a few pennies, these broadsheets, especially the so-called Neuruppiner Bilderbogen by Gustav Kühn, have now become very rare and valuable items.⁷

Colporteurs have all but disappeared, at least in today’s Berlin, where they have been replaced by the book cart. The bookseller on the streets of Berlin is the only book dealer that can actually be found reading the books that he sells. Often seated on the narrow stone ramp of a garden or on a canvas stool he has brought with him, he is unfazed by people rummaging through his wagon; he knows that not even one in ten has any real intention to buy. Anyway, were he to depend on people coming with a serious intention to buy, he’d be in sorry shape. But that’s the thing with the book carts: people buy books they never would have dreamt of buying when they set out from home in the morning. Casual readers. Casual enthusiasts. Only during the great inflation was it any different.⁸ Those who could spare just one extra penny for books could get something worth a hundred or a thousand times its price. The currency devaluation combined with the naïveté of the sellers, who were not all that well informed to begin with, created a situation ripe for collectors to exploit.

The book cart seller is rather quiet. He is, however, an exception; for in general, the Berlin street trade is the elite training ground of the Berlin Schnauze, a veritable academy for Berlin dialect. To conclude for today, I will recite for you a masterpiece of Berlinish, something you don’t get to hear every day on the street. As you might have noticed, such a speaker gathers momentum, before anyone is listening or paying him any attention, by setting himself up in front of his “Universal Spot Remover,” his necktie, or his Crystal Palace glue. Then, in a death-defying manner, he lets loose a diatribe, accompanied wherever possible by gestures, until someone, just anyone, bites. But by “bites,” I don’t mean “buys.” In the street trade, the sale is but the last link in a chain. The first being the enthusiasm of the speaker, and the second, that he draw as many listeners and spectators as possible. The street seller stands in the center. Having learned his speech by heart, he repeats it over and over. His listeners know it just as well as he does. For them, the interesting part is how he always pulls it off, albeit with digressions and slight variations, or how each time at certain critical points he reproduces the exact same intonation with the precision of a gramophone. Should one of the bystanders finally break down and buy something, he must step forward and stand with the seller in the middle of the circle, like two actors sharing the stage in an arena. The allure of being part of the performance, playing a role, and being seen is a key incentive for the buyer.

And so, our man with the collar stiffener: “Ladies and gentlemen! Don’t think I want to deceive you into acquiring something that isn’t tried and true. A group of experts from the field have analyzed this collar stiffener and put it to the test. Would you like to see it? Then step right up! My collar stiffener is the best on the market and the most practical of its kind. So simple, so elegant, yet cheap as can be! In these times, when we all have to pinch our pennies before we spend ‘em, but if we want to get somewhere in life we must still look clean, this collar stiffener is a saving grace for the whole world. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you may laugh. But one day you’ll see I’m not exaggerating.” In the meantime a larger crowd of about twenty or thirty people has gathered around the seller. He picks up his stiffener and explains how it works. “Observe, ladies and gentlemen, you take the flimsy turn-down collar, open it up, put in the collar stiffener, close it up, fasten the collar, and now how’s it look? Firm and elegant! Firm and elegant! Even the necktie sits so much better now. Before, the collar used to look dirty after just a few hours, but now you can wear it for eight days! Always firm and elegant! When you are up for a job wearing my product, you’ll stand head and shoulders above the rest. The boss will point at you and say: Yes, that man is firm and elegant!”

When you hear a speech like this, there’s no need to mourn old Berlin, because it can still be found here in the new Berlin, where it’s as indestructible as our speaker’s collar stiffener.

“Straßenhandel und Markt in Alt- und in Neuberlin,” GS, 7.1, 74–80. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin. The exact date of broadcast is not known, but it was likely delivered at the end of 1929 or the beginning of 1930, as one of Benjamin’s contributions to the Berlin station’s Berlin Hour. As can be gleaned from comments Benjamin makes within the text, it was broadcast after “Berlin Dialect.”

¹ E. T. A. Hoffmann, Der goldne Topf: Ein Märchen aus der neuen Zeit (The Golden Pot: A Modern Fairy Tale) (Bamberg: Kunz, 1814).

² Wilhelm Hauff, “Zwerg Nase” (Stuttgart: Gebrüder Franckh, 1827).

³ Benjamin is likely referring to Wilfried Basse’s film Markt am Wittenbergplatz, 1929.

⁴ See “Berlin Dialect.”

⁵ See Adolf Glassbrenner, “Die Hökerin: Szene auf dem Spittelmarkte” [The Hawker: Scenes from the Spittelmarkt], in Berliner Volksleben, with illustrations by Theodor Hosemann, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1847), 159.

⁶ Theodor Hosemann (1807–1875), German illustrator; Franz Krüger (1797–1857), German painter, lithographer, and portraitist; Franz Burchard Dörbeck (1799–1835), a Baltic German illustrator and satirist. For Hosemann, see also “Theodor Hosemann” in this volume.

⁷ The Neuruppiner Bilderbogen were colorful nineteenth-century broadsheets printed in Neuruppin by the Kühn printing house.

⁸ The hyperinflationary period in Weimar Germany during the early 1920s.

CHAPTER 3. Berlin Puppet Theater

Children who want to go to the puppet theater don’t have an easy time of it in Berlin. In Munich, there’s the famed Papa Schmidt, who performs at least twice a week in a theater of his own, built for him by the city.¹ In Paris there’s the ongoing Kasper Theater, several even, located in the Luxembourg Gardens, the equivalent of Berlin’s Tiergarten. And in Rome, there’s the famous “Teatro dei piccoli,” which means “theater of the little ones”: not something for but rather by little ones, namely puppets, and which has certainly become a place for big folks, too. This is what’s happened to the puppet theater in general. For a long time puppet theater was mainly for children and common folk. It then gradually deteriorated as it lost popularity, until it was rediscovered and suddenly became something very refined, just for grownups, and very sophisticated ones at that. Only Kasper Theater has always remained for children. During summer, even in Berlin, you can still see an absolutely wonderful rendition of Kasper Theater. At Luna Park, just at the end of the grand entrance way, there’s one that goes on all afternoon, even if it is rather short and too often the same thing.

A hundred years ago it was just the opposite. Kasper came in winter. And exactly around this time, just before Christmas. And with him came a bunch of other puppets, mostly under his command. That’s the remarkable thing about Kasper: he appears not only in the plays that were written for him; he also sticks his saucy little nose into all sorts of big, proper theater pieces for adults. He knows he can risk it. In the most terrible tragedies nothing ever happens to him. And when the devil catches up with Faust, he has to let Kasper live, even though he’s no better behaved than his master. He’s just a peculiar chap. Or in his own words: “I’ve always been a peculiar fellow. Even as a youngster I always saved my pocket money. And when I had enough, you know what I did with it? I had a tooth pulled.” When Christmas drew near, posters would appear on street corners, red or green, blue or yellow, one of which read:

The Robber Baron Flayed Alive, or Love and Cannibalism, or Roast Human Heart and Flesh. Followed by a Great Ballet of Metamorphoses featuring several true-to-life dancing figures and transformations that will pleasantly surprise the beholder’s eye with their delicate and nimble movements. And finally, Pussel the Wonder Dog will take the stage.² For the sake of all attendees, uncivilized young men will not be admitted; and the price: 2 Silbergroschen and 6 Pfennig, for children as well as adult persons.

Such performances were always combined with the so-called “humorous Christmas exhibitions” that took place every year in a few renowned pastry shops. These exhibitions consisted of nothing more than a few colorful figures made from sugar. For example: “On display at Zimmermann’s shop in Königstraße are exquisite confections of all kinds, including the Brandenburg Gate made from vegetable gum.” But the main attraction was of course the puppet theater. Things were not always very proper or civil in the auditorium. Especially later, when the shows in the pastry shops were replaced by Julius Linde’s mechanical marionette theater and Nattke’s great Baths-and-Basins Theater Salon, Palisadenstraße 76, which advertised their performances like this: “Entertainment with good humor and tasteful wit of universally recognized quality.”³ The “tasteful” entertainment, however, did not, so we hear, prevent boys of a certain class, ages ten to fourteen, from lounging about there with large pipes and cigars and drinking tall glasses of beer.

Glassbrenner, the famous Berlin writer who described such performances, never failed to mention the music: the quartet, which he said consisted of five men, one of whom accompanied only with brandy or schnapps.

Shall we hear some titles of the shows they put on? “Around the World in Eighty Days,” “Murder in the Wine Cellar,” “Käthchen von Heilbronn,” “The Rogues’ Ball or the Ill-Fated Monkey with Fireworks,” “The Sharpshooter.”

If you ask someone how the puppet theater came about, he would probably say: “Because it’s so much cheaper than real theater.” And that’s certainly true. But it’s only one little, welcome side effect of these puppets that they eat nothing and ask for no money. In olden times, the puppet theater was not just something fun, but also something sacred, because the puppets represented the gods. (This is still the case for many peoples of the South Sea Islands, where they make puppets out of straw up to thirty meters high. Then they put a man inside the puppet, and he moves, capering a few steps. When finally he collapses from the weight and the puppet falls, the savages pounce on it, rip it apart, and carry the shreds back home as charms to ward off evil spirits.)

But the way in which the puppet theater later came to Germany is even more remarkable. It was after the Thirty Years’ War and masses of mercenaries were wandering about the countryside. They had nothing to do, had no more pay, and were making the roads unsafe. So unsafe that actors, who by trade were often on the road but only knew how to fight with stage guns and swords, were put off from traveling. Then someone had the idea to replace the actors with marionettes, and soon it was widely appreciated what a wonderful theater instrument a puppet was: above all, it never talks back. And although it too has a head, it’s much larger and heavier in relation to its body than an actor’s; and as for expressiveness, its face is much more stubborn and rigid. But that’s what makes it special, as you yourselves have surely observed at the puppet theater. The expressions on such wooden and focused faces seem to suit all the slight and subtle twitching produced in the little body when the proper puppeteer is in charge. A proper puppeteer is a despot, one that makes the Tsar seem like a petty gendarme. Imagine, if you will: he writes his shows alone, paints the decorations himself, carves the puppets any way he likes, and plays five or six roles, sometimes many more, all with his own voice. And he never lets complications, inhibitions, or any kind of obstacle slow him down. On the other hand, he has to get along with his puppets, because for him they’re alive. All great puppeteers maintain that the secret of the trade is actually to let the puppet have its way, to yield to it. In his essay on the marionette theater, the great poet Heinrich von Kleist (I say this for the few adults that have snuck in here today and think I don’t see them) has even proved that the puppeteer must have the exact skills and demeanor of a dancer if he wants the figures to move as they should.⁴ Then comes the most wonderful sight, as the little puppets make as if they’re tickling the floor of the stage with their tiptoes, for they, like angels descending from above, are not gravity-bound as real actors are.

But their superiority has already provoked much hate and persecution. First from the church and the authorities, because puppets can so easily mock everything without being malicious. They take the greatest of men and mimic them, as if to say: “What man can do, so can any puppet.” In old Austria, for example, they ridiculed the tyrants. But then at times they made for dangerous competition for the proper theater, as in Paris, where the actors didn’t rest until they had chased the puppets from the city center to the farthest reaches of the metropolis.

It’s widely known that the great puppet-masters were true originals. First off, they live for their puppets; nothing else matters to them. Which is why they live to such an old age. Munich’s Papa Schmidt reached ninety-one. And the renowned puppeteer Winter, who ran the Cologne puppet shows where the Kasper figure is called “Hänneschen,” lived to be ninety-two.⁵ Secondly, to be a puppeteer is to be a member of a kind of secret brotherhood. The skills of the trade are passed from father to son. The routines are learned by imitation and memorization, so the puppeteer always carries all of his stories in his head. Every one of them must swear an oath that he will never commit to paper even one line of the text, so as to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands and jeopardizing their livelihood. At least that’s the way it used to be. Today many puppet plays are available in print, but the best ones are surely the unpublished ones that children and puppeteers create themselves. Of course there are exceptions, like the wonderful Kasper comedies by Count Pocci, which are still performed everywhere.⁶ There was once a great puppeteer named Schwiegerling. I saw the Schwiegerling Marionette Theater myself in Bern in 1918, but then it was never read or heard of again. It was more beautiful than anything you could imagine. Schwiegerling invented the so-called “transformation puppets,” or “metamorphoses.” His marionette theater was actually more of a magician’s den. There was only one performance each night. The puppet art was on display prior to the show. I can still remember two of the numbers. Kasper comes dancing on stage with a pretty lady. Then suddenly the music turns very sweet and the lady folds up, transforming herself into a balloon that Kasper, out of love, grasps onto, carrying him off into the sky. For one minute the stage remains empty, and then Kasper falls from above with a frightful crash. The other number was sad. A girl, who looks like an enchanted princess, is playing a sorrowful melody on a barrel organ. All at once the barrel organ folds in on itself and twelve tiny little doves fly out. Then the princess, with her hands held high, sinks dumbfounded into the ground. And just as I’m telling you this, another memory from the show comes to mind. A tall clown stands on the stage, takes a bow and begins to dance. During the dance, out of his sleeve he shakes a small dwarf clown who’s wearing the same red and yellow flowery clothes as he is. And then with every twelfth measure of the waltz, a new one slides out, until finally there are twelve identical dwarf or baby clowns dancing around him in a circle.⁷ I know this sounds unbelievable, but it’s true. On a different puppet stage the main attraction was a soldier, who blew tobacco smoke from his mouth. A rival of Schwiegerling in Hamburg put on The Beheading of Saint Dorothea, and, during the applause after the beheading, reattached her head so she could be decapitated all over again. The same Hamburg puppeteer always gave his Kasper a dove, while a rabbit would appear alongside his Viennese Wurstl and a cat with his French Guignol, which is Kasper’s name in France.

But now back to Berlin. Another time I’ll tell you more about puppets, but meanwhile you can pick up a copy of Storm’s Paul the Puppeteer, which tells of one of the great original puppet-masters.⁸ We still hear of a puppet show, a silent one, which used to be performed in Berlin around Christmastime. It’s actually a secular Berlin variation on the South German nativity scene, and it’s called “Theatrum mundi,” or “Theater of the World.” On stage you would see various, parallel-running depictions of daily life, separated from one another by simple set pieces and continuously moving along invisible rollers. Wild game pursued by hunters and hounds; wagons, riders, and pedestrians; grazing cattle; steamships and sailboats; a train; boys scuffling about — everything came again and went in set intervals. It was a sort of mechanical forerunner to today’s cinema.

And finally, tableaux vivants, but performed by puppets. For example: “The Three Men in the Fiery Furnace,” “The Lisbon Earthquake,” “The Battle of Zorndorf,” “The Casino in Baden-Baden,” “The Discovery of America.”

And now, to conclude, let’s hear how the compère, a true Berliner of course, explains the scene to the children of Berlin: “Here we have a very interesting group. The song of ‘The Three Men in the Fiery Furnace.’ This one’s exceptionally beautiful and the flames are quite beguiling. In the middle of the furnace stand three men wondering why they’re not drenched in sweat; over there in the corner is the cruel King Nebuchadnezzar ordering a basket of peat to be thrown onto the flames, and shouting: ‘I’ll break you yet!’ But the three men take not a bit of notice, and start singing instead: ‘Be ever true and constant too, until your chilly grave.’ At this bit of impertinence the king becomes nasty and, to anger him even more, one of them sticks his head out the door and yells in a booming voice: ‘Be so good as to shut your royal trap!’ ”

Or here’s the discovery of America: “First, we have Christopher Columbus standing before you in the midst of his invention of America. The sky, you may notice, is rather gloomy, but the sea is calm, almost indifferent to the event. Columbus’s crew are alternately running around the deck shouting ‘Land ho!’ and hugging one another, or dropping themselves at his feet. He, however, leans calmly against the mast, pointing in front of him and saying in a serious voice: ‘That is America!’ Far in the background you’ll notice the peaks, the stretch of green where the waves are breaking, and a naked man standing there in a fig leaf. This is America’s lookout. As soon as he spots the great ship, he shouts in his mother tongue: ‘Who goes there?’ To which Columbus replies: ‘My good friend, I call myself Columbus.’ ‘What do you want here?’ asks the New Worlder. ‘Simply to discover.’ ‘Look no further’ says the native, saluting by placing two fingers on his head. ‘Come closer, for a long time now we’ve wanted to be discovered.’ And this is how America was discovered, which is now a republic that for a number of reasons I cannot recommend. As soon as this republic gets a king, it will be a monarchy; that’s just the way it is.”

And with this nice speech, we’re finished for today. Hopefully we can begin next time with one just as nice.

“Berliner Puppentheater,” GS, 7.2, 80–6. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, December 7, 1929. Benjamin dated the typescript December 7, 1929, and for this date the Funkstunde announced an untitled “Youth Hour (Berlin) with Dr. Walter Benjamin at the microphone, “from 5:30–6:00 pm.

¹ Josef Leonhard Schmid (“Papa Schmidt”) (1822–1912) was a founder of the Munich Marionette Theater.

² For this reference, see also Benjamin’s “Altes Spielzeug,” GS, 4.1, 513 (“Old Toys,” SW, 2, 99; originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung on March 21, 1928). There, Benjamin mentions the poster as part of his review of an exhibition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century toys, which he admired for having included “not just ‘toys,’ in the narrower sense of the word, but also a great many objects on the margins” (“Old Toys,” 98), such as this poster, as well as other occasional texts and advertisements.

³ See “Old Toys,” where Benjamin makes reference to the display at Zimmermann’s Confectionery as part of “a Berlin advertisement from the Biedermeier period” and again to the advertisement for Julius Linde’s marionette theater (99).

⁴ See Heinrich von Kleist, “Über das Marionetten Theater” (On the Marionette Theater), Berliner Abendblätter (December 12–15, 1810).

⁵ Johann Christoph Winter (1772–1862) founded the Hänneschen puppet theater in Cologne.

⁶ Franz Graf von Pocci (1807–1876) collaborated with Josef Schmid in founding the Munich Marionette Theater and was one of its writers.

⁷ Benjamin gives a similarly worded account of Schwiegerling’s puppet theater in his “Lob der Puppe: Kritische Glossen zu Max v. Boehns ‘Puppen und Puppenspiele’ ” [In Praise of Puppets: Critical Comments on Max von Boehn’s “Puppets and Puppet Plays”] (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1929), in GS, 3, 215–16 (published in Die literarische Welt on January 10, 1930).

⁸ Pole Poppenspäler [Paul the Puppeteer], by Theodor Storm, originally published in 1874 in the journal Deutsche Jugend, and then in book form in 1875.

CHAPTER 4. Demonic Berlin

I will begin today with an experience I had in my fourteenth year. At that time I was a student at a boarding school. As is customary at such institutions, children and teachers would assemble several evenings each week to make music, or for a recitation or poetry reading. One evening the music teacher gave the “oratory,” as these evening assemblies were called. He was a peculiar little man with a grave, unforgettable gaze; he had the shiniest bald pate I’ve ever seen, and around it lay a half-open wreath of tightly coiled curly dark hair. His name is well-known among German music lovers: August Halm.¹ This August Halm held the oratory that day to read us stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann, the very writer I want to tell you about today. I no longer know what he read and it doesn’t really matter, because what I do remember is one single sentence from the introductory speech he gave before reading to us. He elucidated Hoffmann’s writing, his predilection for the bizarre, the unconventional, the eerie, the inexplicable. I think what he said was meant to fill us children with suspense for the stories to come. But then he concluded with this sentence, which I have not forgotten to this day: “To what end someone would write such stories, I will tell you sometime soon.” I’m still waiting for this “sometime soon,” and as the good fellow has since died, this explanation will have to come to me, if it ever does, in such an uncanny way, that I prefer to preempt it and will try today to honor, for you, the promise that was made to me twenty-five years ago.

If I wanted to cheat a bit, I could make it a lot easier on myself. Instead of the words “to what end,” I could have said “why,” and the answer would be very simple. Why does an author write? For a thousand reasons. Because he enjoys making things up; or because ideas and images take such possession of him that he can only achieve peace once he has written them down; or because he’s burdened with questions and doubts to which he can find a resolution of sorts in the destinies of his invented characters; or simply because he has learned to write; or because, and unfortunately this is very often the case, he has learned nothing at all. Why Hoffmann wrote is not difficult to say. He was one of those writers possessed by his characters. Doppelgangers, monstrous figures of every kind: when he wrote, he actually saw them all around him. And not only when he was writing, but sometimes in the middle of the most innocent dinner-table conversation, over a glass of wine or punch. More than once he interrupted one or another of his dinner companions with these words:

“Pardon me for cutting you off, my dear, but do you not see that accursed little imp creeping out from under the floorboards in the corner, just over there to the right? Just look what the little devil’s up to! Over there! Over there! Now he’s gone! Oh, don’t be bashful you sweet little creature, won’t you please stay here with us? And kindly listen to our exceedingly pleasant conversation — You wouldn’t believe how much we would appreciate your amiable company — Ah, there you are again — Wouldn’t you care to come a little closer? — What’s that? — You say you’ll stay a while? — Come again? — What’s that you’re saying? — Eh? — You’re leaving? — Your humble servant am I.”²

And so on. Hardly had he finished speaking such gibberish, his vacant eyes fixed on the corner from where the vision came, when he would reemerge, turn again to his dinner companions and beg them altogether calmly to carry on. Such are the descriptions of Hoffmann by his friends. And we ourselves feel the presence of similar spirits when we read such stories as “The Deserted House,” “The Entail,” “The Doubles,” or “The Golden Pot.” Under favorable conditions, these ghost stories can have an astonishing effect. This happened with me, where the favorable condition was that my parents had forbidden me from reading Hoffmann. When I was young, I could only read him in secret, on the evenings when my parents were not at home. I remember one such evening. There was not a sound to be heard in the entire house. I was reading “The Mines of Falun,” sitting alone under the hanging lamp at our giant dining room table — this was on Carmerstraße — when all the terrors, such as fish with stubby snouts, gradually gathered in the darkness along the edge of the table. My eyes clung to the pages of the book, the source of all these terrors, as if to a life raft. Or another time, earlier in the day: I still remember standing at our library cabinet, its door slightly ajar, reading “The Entail” and ready to stuff the book back onto the shelf at the slightest sound of disturbance, my hair standing on end, and so wracked with the double horror of the book’s terrifying contents and the fear of getting caught, that I understood not a word of the entire story.³

“Even the devil,” Heinrich Heine said of Hoffmann’s work, “could not write such devilish stuff.”⁴ Indeed, there is something inherently satanic in the eerie, spooky, uncanny quality of these works. Pursuing this line further, we proceed from the answer to the “why” of Hoffmann’s stories and arrive at the answer to the mysterious “to what end.” Along with his many other peculiarities, the devil is renowned for his ingenuity and knowledge. Those who know a little of Hoffmann’s stories will immediately understand when I say that the narrator is always a very sensitive, perceptive fellow able to sniff out spirits in all their cunning disguises. In fact, this storyteller insists with a certain obstinacy that all the reputable archivists, medical officers, students, apple-wives, musicians, and upper-class daughters are much more than they appear to be, just as Hoffmann himself was more than just a pedantic and exacting court of appeals judge, which is how he made his living.⁵ In other words, Hoffmann did not simply conjure the eerie, ghostly figures that appear in his stories out of thin air. Like many great writers, he pulled the extraordinary not from his mind alone but from actual people, things, houses, objects, streets, and so forth. As perhaps you have heard, a person who can observe other people’s faces, or how they walk, or their hands, or the shape of their head, and can tell from this their character, their profession, or even their destiny, is called a physiognomist. So, Hoffmann was less of a seer than an observer, which is a good synonym for physiognomist. And a principal focus of his observation was Berlin, the city and the people who lived in it.

In the introduction to “The Deserted House”—which in reality was a house on Unter den Linden — he speaks with a certain bitter humor about the sixth sense that was conferred on him, that is, the gift of beholding in every phenomenon, whether a person, a deed, or an occurrence, the most unusual things, to which we have no relation in our everyday lives. His passion was to wander alone through the streets, to contemplate the figures he encountered, and even to cast their horoscopes in his mind. For days he would follow strangers who had something unusual about their gait, their clothing, their voice, or their glance. He felt he was in constant contact with the supernatural; even more than he was pursuing the spiritual world, the spiritual world was pursuing him. At noon, in the light of day, it blocked his path in this rational Berlin; it followed him through the noise of Königstraße to the few remaining traces of the Middle Ages in the area around the crumbling City Hall; it let him smell the mysterious scent of roses and carnations on Grünstraße; and for him it cast a spell over the elegant gathering place of refined Berlin, the Linden. Hoffmann could be called the father of the Berlin novel, whose vestiges were later lost in generalities as Berlin became the “capital,” the Tiergarten the “park,” and the Spree the “river,” until our own time, when it has come alive again — Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz comes to mind. As one of Hoffmann’s characters says to another, whom he thinks of as himself:

You had specific reasons to set the story in Berlin, citing particular streets and squares as you did. In my view it is generally not at all a bad thing to indicate a setting precisely. Not only does it lend the whole story a semblance of historical truth, which aids a sluggish imagination, but, especially for those who are familiar with the setting, the story becomes so much more accessible and alive.⁶

I could easily enumerate the many stories in which Hoffmann proves himself as a physiognomist of Berlin. I could point out the houses that he features in his stories, beginning with his own apartment on the corner of Charlottenstraße and Taubenstraße, followed by the Golden Eagle on Dönhoffplatz, and Lutter & Wegner on Charlottenstraße, et cetera. But I think we’d be better off investigating more closely how Hoffmann studied Berlin and the impression of the city left behind in his stories. Hoffmann was never a great friend of solitude, of nature. Communicating with people, observing them, merely seeing them, mattered more to him than anything else. If he went for a stroll in summer, which he did every evening when the weather was good, it was only to get to public places where he was likely to find people. And while he was out, he could not pass a wine tavern or pastry shop without going in to see if people were there and who they were.⁷ But it wasn’t just that Hoffmann would look around these spots for new faces to supply him with new and strange ideas: for him the wine tavern was more like a writer’s laboratory, or an experimentation chamber where every evening he tested the complexities and effects of his stories on friends. Hoffmann indeed was less a novelist than a storyteller, and even in his books, many if not most of his tales come from the mouth of one of the characters. Of course, in a manner of speaking Hoffmann himself is always this narrator, sitting around a table with friends as each tells a story in turn. One of Hoffmann’s friends explicitly recalled that he never sat idly in a bar as people so often do, just sipping and yawning. No, he would look all around with his eagle eye, noticing whatever was ridiculous, striking, or even particularly moving and making it into a study for his writing, or he would draw what he saw with his forceful pen — Hoffmann was a very deft sketch artist. But if ever he was dissatisfied with the company gathered in the tavern, or irked by the narrow-minded, petit-bourgeois guests around him at the table, he could become absolutely insufferable, putting to frightful use his talent for making faces, embarrassing people, even terrifying them. For him, however, the greatest horror sprang from the so-called aesthetic tea societies that were all the rage in Hoffmann’s Berlin: gatherings of unlearned, uncouth dilettantes who boasted of their interest in art and literature. In his Fantasy Pieces he described one such society to great comic effect.⁸

As we now draw to a close, let us not be accused of forgetting our question, “to what end?” Not only have we not forgotten it, we’ve already answered it without even knowing. To what end did Hoffmann write these stories? He certainly had no conscious purpose. But we can read them as if he did. And that purpose is nothing other than physiognomic: to show that this prosaic, sober, enlightened, and rational Berlin is full of things to charm a storyteller — not only in its medieval nooks, secluded streets, and somber houses, but also in its working inhabitants of every social rank and from all corners of the city — which can only be teased out by dint of observation. As if Hoffmann set out to teach this to his readers through his work, one of his very last stories, dictated from his deathbed, is nothing less than a seminar on physiognomic seeing.

This story is called “My Cousin’s Corner Window.”⁹ The cousin is Hoffmann, the window is his apartment’s corner window overlooking the Gendarmenmarkt. The story is actually a dialogue. The crippled Hoffmann sits in an armchair watching the weekly market below and instructing his cousin, who is there on a visit, how much can be divined, and moreover devised and concocted, from the clothing, pace and gestures of the market women and their customers. After having said so much to Hoffmann’s credit, I shall close with something that most Berliners would not suspect: that he is the only writer who made Berlin famous abroad, and that the French loved him and read him at a time when in Germany, even in Berlin, a dog would not eat a biscuit from his hand. Now things have changed. There are a great many affordable editions of Hoffmann, as well as more parents than there were in my day who allow their children to read him.

“Das dämonische Berlin,” GS, 7.2, 86–92. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, February 25, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript, “Radio Berlin, 25 February 1930.” For this date, the Funkstunde announced a “Youth Hour (Berlin), Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin,” from 6:00–6:25 pm.

¹ August Halm (1869–1929), German writer, music critic, composer, and music educator. From 1903 to 1906, Halm was an instructor at the Hermann Lietz School in Haubinda. Benjamin attended the school from 1905 to 1907.

² Benjamin borrows here from the biographical notes by Julius Eduard Hitzig in Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann: Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 15 (Stuttgart: Brodhag, 1839), 29.

³ For a related description of reading texts by the forbidden Hoffmann as a child, see Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, GS, 4.1, 284–5 (Berlin Childhood Around 1900, SW, 3, 402).

⁴ See Heinrich Heine, Briefe aus Berlin [1822], in Werke und Briefe in zehn Bänden, vol. 3, ed. Hans Kaufmann (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1972), 556.

⁵ Benjamin will make the same comment about Hoffmann’s narrator, and about Hoffmann himself, in his “E. T. A. Hoffmann and Oskar Panizza” (269).

⁶ See E. T. A. Hoffmann, Die Serapionsbrüder I [1819–1821], in Poetische Werke, vol. 5 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1957), 165 (“Ein Fragment aus dem Leben dreier Freunde”).

⁷ Beginning with “Hoffmann was never a great friend of solitude,” this passage is an unattributed quotation of Hitzig, in Hoffmann, Ausgewählte Schriften, 32–4. Benjamin quotes the same passage, with attribution, in Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, GS, 1.2, 551–2 (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, SW, 4, 28), and Das Passagen-Werk [M4a, 2], GS, 5.1, 536 (The Arcades Project [M4a, 2], 425–6).

⁸ See Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier: Blätter aus dem Tagebuche eines reisenden Enthusiasten [Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner: Pages from the Diary of a Traveling Romantic] (Bamberg, 1819); and “Die ästhetische Teegesellschaft [The Aesthetic Tea Society]” in Die Serapionsbrüder 4, Poetische Werke, vol. 8. [1819–1821].

⁹ “Des Vetters Eckfenster” (1822), in Späte Werke, eds. Walter Müller-Seidel and Friedrich Schnapp (Munich: Winkler, 1965).

CHAPTER 5. Berlin Guttersnipe

I bet that if you try, you can remember seeing wardrobes or armoires with colorful scenes, landscapes, portraits, flowers, fruits, or other similar designs inlaid in the wood of their doors. Intarsia is what it’s called. Today I’d like to present you with some scenes inlaid not in wood, but in speech. I’ll be telling you about the childhood of a Berliner, who was a small boy roughly 120 years ago, and about how he saw Berlin, about what kind of games and practical jokes were common back then. Amid all of this, I’d like to inlay the story with a few things that have nothing at all to do with our subject, but will, or so I hope, stand out from the story of Ludwig Rellstab’s youth as vividly and colorfully as does intarsia in paneled wood.¹

Don’t worry that you’ve never heard the name Ludwig Rellstab. And whatever you do, don’t ask your parents; they’ve never heard of him either, and they won’t have a clue what to say. This Rellstab is not a famous man. Or rather, to be more precise, in his time he was one of the best-known people in Berlin. The short of it is, little remains of him. Today he is not even known for his greatest accomplishment: his autobiography, parts of which I’ll read to you later.

That this autobiography should be so beautiful without there being too much of any importance to say about its author isn’t all that surprising. For it is not always the most famous or gifted people who retain the profoundest love and memories of their childhood. Moreover, this is rarer for a city dweller than for someone who has grown up in the countryside. It’s hardly common for a child to forge such harmonious and happy connections with a large city so that later, as a mature man, it’s a joy for him to recall his boyhood memories. Rellstab knew this joy; you can sense it throughout the book, even if he never explicitly says that his childhood was a particularly happy one.

Now let’s dive right into the story. What do you say to the fact that his father “took a house in the country with his family every summer”?² And where do think it was? Right there in the Tiergarten. Let’s let Rellstab himself tell us how the Tiergarten looked at a time when you could take a summer vacation there:

As far back as I can remember, I see myself in summer in the green of the Tiergarten, which back then had a more rustic character than it does now. It remains the most beautiful setting of my earliest memories, as well as of those that would come much later. In those days it was even more suited to playing than it is now. The woods provided large areas where everything was left to become overgrown. Except for the road to Charlottenburg, there wasn’t a single paved way, only deep sandy paths that crossed the terrain. So there were relatively few wagons even in the larger avenues, and they moved slowly and with difficulty. When I look at the Tiergarten now, I can hardly believe that it once housed genuine wilderness, where raspberry bushes grew between thickets on the moist meadows, and their bountiful fruits would quietly ripen for us, the inhabitants. The strawberries also provided abundant harvest. To us everything seemed far removed from people, and as lonely as a primeval forest. We literally took it over. Each playmate claimed his own rightful plot. We carved out lawns, made rustic lodgings from the dense thickets, and wedged small boards in trees to sit between branches; we even made a border out of little pickets stuck in the ground like a garden fence. All told, we ruled over our lots as if they were our very own. We could go for weeks without visiting our little wilderness colony, but when we did return, nothing was disturbed, so solitary was the forest back then. Today it has been transformed into a garden, terribly noisy and overrun with people.³

Thus did an old Berliner describe the Tiergarten of 1815. I find this description very beautiful. But now, time for an inlay. I would like to show you how a friend of mine, born eighty years after Rellstab, described his Tiergarten childhood. And, despite the differences, this description shows that the true Berliner never stops loving it. This new true Berliner is my friend Franz Hessel, who writes in Spazieren in Berlin [On Foot in Berlin]:

In the waning twilight it is still as rough and disorienting today as it was thirty or forty years ago, before the last Kaiser had the nature park transformed into a more open and respectable place. While his orders to clear the undergrowth, widen many of the paths, and improve the lawns are certainly commendable, much of the Tiergarten’s beauty has been lost: its charming disorder, branches crackling underfoot, the rustling of leaves along neglected narrow paths. However, he left a few wild spots that managed to survive into the days of our childhood. What I remember most from this time are the tiny sloped footbridges spanning the streams, which were sometimes presided over by vigilant bronze lions, holding in their jaws the chains that served as guard rails.⁴

Hessel goes on to describe the entire Tiergarten up to where it borders the Cornelius Bridge. If we had more time, there would be so much more to say, for example, about this bridge that still today clings to its private, almost rustic appearance. This formerly seldom used and rather isolated bridge now funnels all the city’s automobile traffic as it spills toward the west. If you think about it, this bridge’s fate is as remarkable as that of many men.

But now back to Rellstab. In the whole of his tale of youth, there’s one thing he complains about repeatedly and never seems to have completely got over: the music lessons forced upon him by his father. These after-school lessons were the worst part of his day. He relates how unhappy he was that they forced him to forgo the games and antics his schoolmates would use to prolong the way home from school. Many of these games were rather curious, and we hear about how they were already being diligently prepared during class. “For some time,” says Rellstab,

it was our habit, while still in school during our last class, to make little boats out of paper and bark, and then, and this was especially entertaining after a strong rain, to let them float down the gutter until they vanished at the corner of Mohrenstraße and Markgrafenstraße, where the runoff feeds into an underground canal. There was nothing more interesting than following the routes of our little boats; we held our breath watching as they disappeared into a little drain tunnel and greeted them with joy as they reemerged on the other side. I had the hardest time tearing myself away in order to head home along my solitary path to my piano lessons.⁵

You can imagine that it was no easier for him to leave when “Zillrad” was the game of the day. But what was this inexpressibly magical game, as he calls it? Thank goodness he explains it to us; otherwise we might wonder forever and never find out. Here’s how it works. A bunch of boys — the more the merrier — would climb atop an empty hay wagon, a common sight in the streets back then. One boy, chosen by counting out a rhyme, would run around the wagon trying to tag the feet of the boys above. Whoever was tagged then had to climb down and give it a go himself.⁶

Rellstab’s father must have been a very peculiar man. He was an editor of the Vossische Zeitung.⁷ One evening he was supposed to attend a magic show and then write about it for the newspaper. Having no desire to go and a very busy schedule, he sent his son, who was just twelve years old at the time. When he got home, he had him write down his impressions. Then he fixed the article up a bit and sent it on to the Vossische Zeitung. This was Rellstab’s first published work. But the visit had a curious effect. After the show the magician explained a few of his tricks to those who had waited around the theater. The young Rellstab heard these explanations and for weeks could think of nothing but magic. He managed to find a shop in Berlin that sold magic supplies, contraptions with secret mechanisms, boxes with double bottoms, playing cards with hidden marks. He also searched out any book that would help him study magic as a science.

Nothing much came of this, he admits. But who knows whether he wouldn’t have become a famous magician if back then he had had the splendid book which, as our second inlay, I’d like to tell you about now. Despite technology, cars, electric generators, radio, etc., it seems that many children are still interested in magic. True, the golden age of magic has passed. There was a time when, every summer in all the big seaside resorts, world-famous magicians, the likes of Bellachini or Houdini, performed before packed houses. Just now a book has finally appeared in which all kinds of magic, including hundreds of tricks and some of the most incredible and astounding things you could ever imagine, are depicted and explained in clear detail. It’s called Das Wunderbuch der Zauberkunst [The Wonder Book of Magic] and was written by Ottokar Fischer, who calls himself “a formerly practicing artist and director of the Kratky-Baschik Magic Theater in Vienna.”⁸ One glance at the table of contents and your eyes are popping at the abundance of magic on offer. And don’t worry that knowing what’s behind the tricks could stop you from enjoying magic shows. To the contrary, only when you know to watch very closely, and no longer let yourself get caught up in the magician’s clever patter, always keeping an eye on what’s coming next — only then will you appreciate the magician’s unbelievable skill and recognize that it is his speed, the result of so much practice and determination, that is oftentimes behind the sorcery. Another time soon we’ll speak more about magic, so I’ll say nothing more today other than to list a few headings from our book: The Bottomless Punchbowl — The Devil’s Target — The Queen of the Air — Schiller’s Bell — The Indestructible Cord — The Swami Seer’s Wristwatch — Ladies Scorched, Perforated and Cut in Half — The Wonder of Ben Ali Bey — The Disappearance of Twelve Members of the Audience — and many more.

But it is getting late and Rellstab wants to tell us about a few more pranks:

My Tiergarten pals and I got into all sorts of other mischief: performing daring raids on fruit trees and fruit sheds; driving a fruit seller crazy by fastening a meaty bone, which hung unnoticed behind a fence, to her service bell so that every passing dog was enticed to ring it; holding a string across the path just outside a tavern, where it wasn’t rare to see tipsy guests stumbling about in the evening, until a group tripped over it and fell into the wet grass and then, after immediately releasing the string, innocently setting out to find the cause of the stumble. I’ll say no more just now, except to mention briefly that in this way, too, I was no better than other children, and actually much worse.⁹

And so you can see, from his own words, how a real Berlin guttersnipe cavorted about the city at a tender age. As later in life we often succeed best at precisely those things we loved and plotted early on, the same was true for Rellstab. His greatest achievements arose not from music criticism, from which he later earned his living, but rather from things intimately associated with Berlin. In addition to these childhood memories, he also has a book, simply titled Berlin, a description of the city and its nearest surroundings, including many beautiful steel engravings.¹⁰ On the title pages there’s one such engraving that depicts the Tiergarten memorial to Frederick William III. Of all the areas of the Tiergarten, my most beloved is the spot where this memorial is tucked away. I played there as a very small child and to this day I’ve never forgotten how exciting it used to be to meander along the winding paths to the Queen Louise Memorial, which was even more secluded, hidden among the bushes and separated from the king by a narrow stream. The area around these two monuments was the first labyrinth I would encounter, long before I would sketch them on blotting paper or my desk during school.¹¹ In this regard I’d say little has changed: your blotting paper doesn’t look all that different than mine did.

In any case, for those of you who enjoy labyrinths, I will close with one last inlay. I’d like to reveal the exact location of the most beautiful labyrinths you’ll ever see: the home of the bookseller Paul Graupe, a large and wonderful house with an entire hall dedicated to fascinating labyrinths of cities, forests, mountains, valleys, castles, and bridges, each meticulously drawn in pen by the Munich painter Hirth so as to invite you to wander with your eyes.¹² But clean your boots on the way in; Paul Graupe’s is a very elegant place. And when you’re standing among the maps, plans, and cityscapes you’ll find there, have a look out the window, and right before your eyes you’ll see the Tiergarten again; which means our walk today has been rather labyrinthine, leaving us, without ever having noticed, right back where we began twenty-five minutes ago.

“Ein Berliner Strassenjunge,” GS, 7.1, 92–8. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, March 7, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Berlin Radio, 7 March, 1930.” For this date, the Funkstunde announced “Youth Hour (Berlin). Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin,” from 5:30–6:00 pm.

¹ Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Rellstab (1799–1860), German poet and critic, author of Aus meinem Leben [From My Life] (Berlin: J. Guttentag, 1861).

² Rellstab, Aus meinem Leben, 18.

³ Ibid., 18–20.

⁴ Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin (Leipzig and Vienna: Verlag Dr. Hans Epstein, 1929). References to and discussions of Hessel (1880–1941), with whom Benjamin collaborated on the translation of Proust, appear frequently in his work. See, for instance, “Die Wiederkehr des Flaneurs,” a review of Spazieren in Berlin, in GS, 3, 194–9 (“The Return of the Flâneur,” SW, 2, 262–7).

⁵ Rellstab, Aus meinem Leben, 38–9.

⁶ On “Zillrad,” see Rellstab, Aus meinem Leben, 41.

⁷ The renowned Vossische Zeitung was published in Berlin and was the city’s oldest daily newspaper. Rellstab’s father, the music publisher and composer Johann Carl Friedrich Rellstab (1759–1813) was a critic for the Vossische Zeitung from 1808 to 1813.

⁸ Ottokar Fischer (1873–1940), who, from 1898 to 1911, managed and appeared at the Kratky-Baschik Magic Theater in Vienna, wrote Das Wunderbuch der Zauberkunst (Stuttgart: F. A. Perthes, 1929).

⁹ Rellstab, Aus meinem Leben, 152–3.

¹⁰ See Rellstab, Berlin und seine nächsten Umgebungen in malerischen Originalansichten: Historisch-topographisch beschrieben (Darmstadt: Gustav Georg Lange, 1852).

¹¹ For Benjamin’s memories of the Tiergarten and the motif of the labyrinth, see Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, GS, 7.1, 393–5 (Berlin Childhood Around 1900, SW, 3, 352–4).

¹² Paul Graupe (1881–1953) was an antiquarian bookseller, auctioneer, and art dealer who, until he fled the Nazis in 1936, was located in Berlin. The “Munich painter Hirth” is Otto Albert Hirth (1899–1969). Benjamin discusses an exhibition at Graupe’s featuring works by Hirth in his article “Unterirdischer Gang in Der Tiergartenstrasse” [Underground Passageway in Tiergartenstrasse], GS, 4.1, 563–5, published in Die literarische Welt on March 28, 1930, just a few weeks after the broadcast of “Berlin Guttersnipe.”

CHAPTER 6. Berlin Toy Tour I

Are any of you familiar with Godin’s book of fairy tales?¹ Of all the children out there listening, perhaps not a single one of you. In the last thirty years of the previous century, however, it could be found in many a nursery, including the one in which the man speaking with you now spent his earliest days. The publisher kept reissuing new editions, each time with a different look, varying the colorful pictures according to the fashion of the time. However, quite a few of the somber images have remained the same since the very first edition. Let’s begin with a tale from this book: “Sister Tinchen.”² Right on the second page of the story is one of these somber pictures. It shows five children miserably huddled together next to a dilapidated hut. They are in a truly wretched state. Their mother died that morning, and it’s been quite some time since they had a father. There are four boys and one girl. The girl’s name is Tinchen. But this is only the foreground of the picture. In the background one sees a fairy, delicate and doll-like, holding a lily. Her name is Concordia, which means “harmony.” She promises the children that she will protect them so long as they always get along. Scarcely upon hearing this, an evil wizard, the fairy’s enemy, arrives with a pile of gifts which he promptly throws to the children, causing them to quarrel. The boys, as boys will, begin to scuffle. Only the little girl does not join in the fray, so the devils cannot ensnare her in their sack as they did with the boys right away.

So far, you will tell me, this is a rather absurd story. And I would agree. But wait for what happens next. The little girl must, of course, free her brothers from the wicked sorcerer’s lair where the devils have taken them. And there, thanks to the good woman who thought up this tale and was otherwise not particularly known as a writer, something wonderful occurs. You’re surely familiar with the obstacles that rescuers must overcome in fairy tales. First they have to get through a door guarded by two savages with clubs, as on the former title page of the Vossische Zeitung.³ And then they come to an immaculate, gleaming hall where they must pass between two freshly burnished fire-breathing dragons. And finally, in the last room they encounter a toad, or some other beast, which they have to kiss so that it transforms into a princess. In “Sister Tinchen,” whose heroine after all is just a little girl, who no one would imagine capable of such heroic and bloodthirsty deeds, everything is much more civilized. That is to say, she must do absolutely nothing if she is to free her brothers. For her entire journey through the land of the evil sorcerer she can’t pause even for a moment — until she reaches his cave. The sorcerer, who of course wants to make this impossible for her, conjures enticing images to coax her to linger. Were she to say, even just once, “Here I’d like to stay,” she would fall under his spell.

Now I’ll read to you some of the traps he laid for her: Tinchen bravely crosses the border into the magic land, thinking only of her brothers. At first she sees nothing special. But soon she arrives in a vast room filled with toys. Everywhere are little booths laid out with every possible distraction: carousels with ponies and wagons, slides and rocking horses, and above all, the most magnificent dollhouses. Seated in armchairs at a small, decorated table are some large dolls. Upon catching Tinchen’s gaze, the largest and prettiest among them stands up, bows gracefully, and says to her in an exquisite little voice: “We’ve been expecting you for some time, dear Tinchen, come and lunch with us.” As she speaks, all the other dolls rise to their feet; even the baby dolls in their cribs lift their little heads to see her, and Tinchen, enraptured, sits down in the small armchair awaiting her at the table. Tinchen relishes the delectable treats and after lunch, as the dolls begin to dance and more toys begin to stir around her, Tinchen is so beside herself with joy that she claps her hands and cries: “Oh, how beautiful it is here. Here I’d like to …” What did she want to say? Of course she wanted to say: “Here I’d like to stay.” But she’s not allowed to say that if she wants to free her brothers. So, a small blue bird suddenly appears, sits on her shoulder and sings her a little reminder:

Tinchen, dearest Tinchen mine,

Think about your brothers thine!

Thus she makes it through all sorts of enchanted lands, with the little bird always appearing just in time. We could follow her everywhere if this weren’t the radio station’s Berlin Hour and I didn’t have to zip back to Berlin through secret underground tunnels while Tinchen stays in the magic kingdom. After all, even while she stands in front of a gingerbread house, Tinchen is coming to Berlin as well. As the door opens, out come two little brown people, who approach her, curtsying daintily: “Welcome to our land.” “And who are you, and what is the name of this land of yours?” she asks curiously. “Well now, you’ve never heard of the Land of Plenty?” said the two little people in unison. “We’re the gingerbread man and gingerbread lady. And I’d like to give you my great big heart!” says the little man with a smile, as he pulls from his breast a heart encircled with almonds. “And I give you my pretty white flower,” says the little lady as she hands her the tulip she was holding. Then a mob of cakes and chocolates gather around, beckoning her to stay. “Oh, how I’d like to,” says Tinchen. But again the bird appears to make sure she doesn’t forget.

Perhaps you’ll remember this fairy tale in a few years when, in the higher grades at school, you hear some of Goethe’s greatest dramas, Faust in particular. As you probably know, Faust made a deal with the devil. The devil has to do whatever Faust wants, and in return he gets Faust’s soul. But the question is when he gets to have it. He’s not allowed to take it until Faust is perfectly content and happy and wants everything to remain just as it is. Unfortunately for Faust there’s no little blue bird, and sure enough, one day when he’s already a very old man he declares:

To the moment I would like to say:

Please stay a while, you are so fine!⁴

And then and there he drops dead.

You must be thinking, this fellow will never make it to Berlin. But it’s like the race between the tortoise and the hare. As is well known, the tortoise is sitting in a ditch when the hare arrives, completely out of breath. The tortoise says: “I’m already here.” And sure enough, I’m already here in Berlin, just where you would all like to be. Because just as I’ve told you about the charmed attractions that little Tinchen has to bravely pass by without lingering, I could tell you of many attractions in Berlin that all of you, just as courageously, have passed by without lingering. Or if your mother had the time, perhaps you were able to stop. By now maybe you’ve guessed where I’m heading: straight to the middle of Berlin, where we have these long galleries of toys without fairies or sorcerers. In the department stores.

I was thinking, grownups have all sorts of specialized shows on the radio, shows of great interest to them, although, or even because, they understand at least as much about the subject as the speaker. Why shouldn’t we make such special shows for children as well? For example about toys, although, or even because, kids understand at least as much about toys as the man who’s speaking to you here. So, one day at around noon, when the department stores are as empty as they ever are, I took a leisurely stroll from table to table, as I was never allowed to when I was a boy. I studied everything very closely: the new toys, how the old ones had changed since I was little, and which ones had disappeared altogether. And now I’d like to begin with these, the ones that have vanished. Today we’ll only have time to get started; if you enjoy the tour, next week you can hear about its continuation.

I looked everywhere for an old party game called “The Lucky Fisherman.” It seems that this no longer exists. I got it for my birthday once. It’s so wonderful that I want to tell you about it now. Opening the box, the first thing you see are four cardboard walls glued together. You take them out and set them on a table. The walls are covered with shiny printed paper showing aquatic plants, fish, mussels, and seaweed: everything that swims around in the sea or lies on the ocean floor. In another compartment there are around twenty or thirty different fish, each of which has a ring in its nose. Why a ring? Something that’s usually the privilege of camels? Here’s why. The ring is made of iron. And the fishing rods are five or six elegant little sticks, each with a thin red string that, instead of an earthworm, has a pretty little magnet hanging from it. Whoever catches the most fish wins the game. But there are of course rules and the fish in this water are all numbered differently, and when the fishing is over, there’s no eating up the catch; there’s arithmetic instead. This is one example of what has disappeared. It seems, however, that something much more beautiful has vanished: a special type of music box. Perhaps many of you haven’t even seen one: a box that has music inside, a crank on the side, and some kind of landscape or cityscape atop, which, when you turn the crank, starts to move to the music. I got to see all sorts of music boxes on this tour, for example, cows being milked, a dog jumping up in the air, a shepherd stepping out of his hut and walking back in. They’re wonderful but not nearly as strange and enthralling as the particular music box I have in mind. I never owned it; I only saw it one day in a shop when I was little. If you wound it, exquisite battle songs would sound from the box, heavy cardboard gates would open onto a dark fortress that you could not see into from above, and a company of soldiers would march out. To the sound of drums they would make a loop through the green grass and then reenter the fortress from behind through a gate, which had since opened, and then wait inside for a short while, in the dark, all the time accompanied by music. The devil only knows how they fared in there before they neatly filed out again.

I’ve looked for something like it ever since. I can’t even find the little books that we used to get at the school bookstore that would sweeten the purchase of arithmetic books — a purchase that was possibly even more despicable than each individual math lesson, because the notebook contained in its empty squares all the lessons added up into one single sum of horrors — flip books, or whatever they were called, sequences of tiny photos showing a wrestling bout or soccer match in all its phases. You had to navigate quickly with your thumb so the images would shoot by, each close on the heels of the next. With such a book cupped in your hand you could easily transform a math lesson into a cinema show. But at least the elaborate toy with the delightful name “Wheel of Life” still exists. It relies on exactly the same trick, only the images aren’t bound in a book, but instead are mounted on a disk with the surfaces of the images facing inward. Around the disk is a wall with slits in it. And when you spin the disk quickly — while the wall remains stationary — through the slits you see people as if they were moving and alive, which is why the whole thing is called a wheel of life. I saw this in the “toy” department.

Before I tell you more about it, however, I’d like first to describe the toy gallery in full. By chance I began with the kingdom of dolls, but I’ll tell you about that next time. Up next: the animal aisle, which would put any magician to shame. It’s hard to describe the sorts of animals I came across there. Blue and pink dogs, horses so yellow that from afar they looked like shapes made of orange peel, apes and rabbits so artificially colored as to resemble the tulips the flower ladies sell at Potsdamer Platz. Not to mention Felix the Cat, who was available in large quantities, and the tiny Bibabo puppets, which you can slip over your fingers as the nice sales lady did before putting on the most indescribable little theater piece. She only stopped once she realized that under no circumstances would I buy what was on offer, which is how I felt in the animal gallery as well. But later on I just couldn’t resist and I bought something. It’s a very strange game, rather new, I think, but in any case I had never heard of it. It was nothing more than a small box with fifteen or so different rubber stamps. Each stamp had a piece of a landscape on it: houses, figurines, dirigibles, cars, boats, bridges, etc. It also came with an ink pad. With just a large sheet of paper you could spend hours stamping together various landscapes, neighborhoods, events, and stories. But that was already in the “party games” department, which came just after the animals. I nearly forgot to say how many Easter bunnies there are now in the animal gallery. Department stores have now become strategic locations; they would be the first to be occupied by the Easter bunnies if they ever planned an attack.

Cover your ears for a moment. What I have to say now is not for children to hear. Next time I will tell you the conclusion of my tour. I’m worried sick I’ll soon be swamped with mail, letters along the lines of: “What? Are you completely mad? You think that kids don’t already whine from morning to night? And now you’re putting ideas in their heads and telling them about thousands of toys that, up until now, thank God, they knew nothing about, and now they want all of them, and probably things that don’t even exist anymore?” How should I answer them? I could just take the easy way out and beg you not to repeat a word of our story, don’t let on a thing, and then we can continue next week just like today. But that would be mean. So it’s left to me to calmly say what I really think: the more someone understands something and the more he knows of a particular kind of beauty — whether it’s flowers, books, clothing, or toys — the more he can rejoice in everything that he knows and sees, and the less he’s fixated on possessing it, buying it himself, or receiving it as a gift. Those of you who listened to the end, although you shouldn’t have, must now explain this to your parents.

“Berliner Spielzeugwanderung I,” GS, 7.1, 98–105. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, March 15, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Berlin Radio, 15 March, 1930,” and for this date the Funkstunde announced a “Youth Hour (Berlin), Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin” from 3:20–3:40 pm.

¹ Amélie (Linz) Godin (1824–1904), author of Märchen von einer Mutter erdacht (1858), Neue Märchen von einer Mutter erdacht (1869), and other collections of fairy tales. Benjamin refers to Godin’s work as his and his wife Dora’s “favorite collection of fairy tales” in a letter to Scholem (letter dated January 13, 1920, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 155).

² See “Schwester Tinchen,” in Godin, Märchenbuch, 3rdedition, mit 137 Holzschnitten und 6 Bildern in Farbendruck: nach Originalzeichnungen von Otto Försterling, Gustav Süs und Leopold Denus (Glogau: Carl Fleming, c. 1870–1880), 401–9. The image Benjamin discusses can be found on p. 402. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin attributes a version of the story to Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer (Das Passagen-Werk [Z1, 2], GS, 5.2, 847 and 1055; The Arcades Project [Z1, 2], 693 and 881), but it has not been found in Hackländer’s Märchen (Stuttgart: Krabbe, 1843).

³ Benjamin refers to the front page of Berlin’s newspaper, the Vossische Zeitung, which featured two men holding spiked staffs standing on either side of the king.

⁴ See Goethe, Faust II, lines 11581–2 and Faust I, lines 1699–700.

CHAPTER 7. Berlin Toy Tour II

Many of you will probably want to know where this grand toy store is located, the galleries of dolls, animals, electric trains, and party games that I led you through last time and will continue to lead you through today. Nothing would be easier than to tell you where it is. But advertisements are not permitted on the radio, even subtle ones, so I cannot give you a name.¹ What shall we do? Some children might like to confirm that what I said is true. And since it really is true, I would like nothing more than to do just that. Thus I must be cunning in revealing to you the following: as you have surely figured out by now, I was in a large department store.

Now have a look around, and be sure not to miss the huge metal model of the new Lloyd steamboat, the “Bremen.” It’s so big, you can see it from afar. The entire thing was made from a mechanical building set. I’m not sure how many of you could rebuild it. To do so you would need the construction kit in size 9, which is the largest, and costs 155 marks. Have you ever heard of the Paris World’s Fair, which all of Europe was talking about in 1900? On all the picture postcards made for the exhibition, you could see in the background of the city of Paris a gigantic wheel with maybe sixteen cabins on moving hinges. The wheel turned slowly, and the people sitting in the cabins could look out over the city, the Seine, and the exhibition below until the double motion, from the swaying of the cabin on its hinges and the rotation of the giant wheel, made them feel sick. Even this wheel has been replicated in a model kit. Its parts move, and the little cabins sway just like the real ones did thirty years ago when your grandparents might have sat in them. All of this was located in the “party games” section. I won’t dwell too much on the games I saw there. You’re surely familiar with all the different variations of Quartet, this lovely game that teaches you to be sly, mischievous, and polite all at once, and you also know the dice games played on big boards like “Game of the Goose,” “Travels Around the World,” “Carnival at Schröppstedt,” as they used to be called; “In the Zeppelin,” “Northern Voyage,” and “The Good Copper,” as they’re called today. I’d rather tell you about an electronic question-and-answer game. It is made up of one little battery, a bulb, and two plugs. You push one of the plugs into a board covered with questions, next to each of which is a little metal rod. Next you look for the answer on a different board. For example, if you stick one plug on the question “Which river flows through Rome?” you then look for the answer with the other plug, and if you find the right spot, the electric bulb lights up. This toy is really quite ingenious, in that the teacher has artfully transformed himself into an electric bulb.

And there are still other, very subtle educational tidbits hidden in toys. I was most impressed with a completely new toy designed for six-year-olds just learning their sums. It is a beautifully polished wooden apple, scented as well, not like a Borsdorfer or Russet apple, but just like wood. Were you to look at it up close, you’d see how cleverly it is constructed, and that it comes apart into six different pieces that can be used to teach arithmetic to the youngest pupils. If only it had a core, it could be used for the older students as well. But is it still a toy? And the so-called activity toys, pearls to be threaded on strings, weaving patterns for kindergarteners, all of which you can find nearby, are these really toys? And decals? And most of all, what about the Oblaten?² I don’t know. But I’d like to talk to you about the Oblaten. Not just because I liked them as a boy, but also because I put together a very beautiful collection of my mother’s Oblaten, which included things that you can no longer get today in stationery stores, such as entire fairy tales: Tom Thumb, Snow White in colorful detail, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, Robinson Crusoe, and more. I don’t know why, but I still see these tiny little images, showing the terrible genie with snarling teeth appearing before Aladdin, who’s quaking in terror, or Robinson as he nearly drops his parasol with shock when he first discovers the nibbled human bones on the island — these moments, which are depicted in many children’s books, are always in my head as if I still had my Oblaten albums open before me today. This is a good counterweight to all those kissing turtledoves, cherubs, flower carts, and ruffled angels; you’ll need scissors if you want to remove them from their paper packaging, right next to the manufacturer’s name or “UX 798” or some other such business gibberish printed in little red letters.

As far as I’m concerned, nothing is better than a paper toy, starting with the little folding boats or paper caps, which are usually the ones we encounter first, and onto the insert-books I’d like to tell you about now. Imagine a picture book with just a few pages inside. On the first page maybe there’s a room, on the second a landscape with mountains, fields, and a forest, on the third a city with its streets, gates, public squares, and houses. Now look a little closer and you’ll see that each of these pictures is full of tiny slots: openings between window and windowsill, between threshold and door, between fountain and pavement, between seat and armrest, between river and shore, etc. In the back of such a book there’s a little pocket with all sorts of people, furniture, vehicles, ships, food, and plants, each of which has a little ridge that you can slide into the slots on the pictures. So you can furnish the room in a hundred different ways, decorate the landscape with a hundred different sorts of flowers and animals, and show the city first on a market day and then on a Sunday, and, if you feel like it, you can even have deer and squirrels walking down the street. Sure, books like these no longer exist. But it won’t be long before they’re back again and already you can find some that are just as beautiful. For instance, why not treat yourself to the The Magic Boat by Tom Seidmann-Freud, which works almost the same way as the one I just told you about.³

Now maybe you’re wondering, what does all this have to do with Berlin? In which case I would beg you to put on your thinking caps when I ask you: where in Germany can you imagine taking a tour through the entire kingdom of toys other than here in a Berlin department store? I’m not saying there aren’t toy stores where you can find just as many things. The big difference is that the department stores simply have more space to put out their giant tables so that nothing remains hidden and anyone with eyes gets to look at everything that would otherwise be stowed away in closets and crates. Mind you, it’s been a long road to arrive at these galleries we are wandering through. Most of all, you must not think the toy began as some sort of invention by manufacturers of playthings. On the contrary, the toy emerged gradually from the workshops of wood carvers and tinsmiths. At first, children’s toys were actually produced by craftsmen in their spare time, since toys are essentially objects from everyday life recreated in miniature. The carpenter would make, by order, tiny furniture for dollhouses, the tinsmith and coppersmith the pots and plates for the doll kitchens, and a potter would make the tiny ceramic ware. In short: each craftsman was allotted his share in the creation of such miniaturized household items. However, in the Middle Ages, strict regulations enforced by trade guilds set limits on each professional craft, making proper toy manufacturing impossible. Each master craftsman was only allowed to make that which fell in his particular domain. The carpenter was forbidden to paint his wooden dolls himself; he had to leave the finishing work to the “bismuth painters,” as they were known, while the chandler had to turn to the carpenter if he wanted his wax dolls or angels to hold some sort of wooden object like a candlestick in their hands. You can imagine how unbelievably laborious it must have been in those days to build a dollhouse when so many different craftsmen had to be involved, and this was true right into the nineteenth century. Hence their great value. Early on, only princes could afford them, and they were used as showpieces in castle nurseries, or sometimes they were on exhibit at fairs for paying customers. We know of one such showing. Around 300 years ago a little old lady came to Nuremberg with the idea of earning some money by illustrating to children the basics of proper homemaking, using a dollhouse in which everything was recreated as true-to-life as possible. I suppose the parents of these kids were taken in by her sales pitch and sent their little girls into her tent. But for the kids it was more fun than anything else. And anyway, in reality the interiors of these houses were not at all true-to-life, but only a series of rooms one after the next, cobbled together just for show. Most dollhouses don’t even have stairs to connect the various stories.

You surely know the so-called Nuremberg toys. Remember your Noah’s Ark, all the tiny painted animals and human figurines? On my tour I was astounded to see how this biblical and pastoral world of toys has grown to include many modern urban scenes. Alongside Noah’s Ark, there are now rental barracks, railway stations, swimming pools, and even Berolina sightseeing cars, complete with dolls dressed as foreign drivers and passengers. In a little while we’ll get to why these are called Nuremberg toys. The truth is that today most of them come from the Ore Mountains and Thuringia. These toys have been manufactured there for several hundred years. Their story once again shows how the manufacture and sale of toys back then differed from that of today. It’s not by chance that the villages where these toys were created lay deep in the forests of Thuringia and Bohemia, where the long winter days, when traffic on the snowed-over streets and icy passes came to a halt, forced the farmers and craftsmen who lived off this traffic in the warmer seasons to find other work to keep them busy. With wood so readily available, naturally they took up carving. At first it was just wooden spoons, kitchen utensils, simple needle boxes and the like. But those with any talent were not content for long, and soon ventured to carve little dolls, small wagons, and animals they knew from their local surroundings. Merchants passing through the area in the summer would buy up these charming and inexpensive works of art to bring home as gifts for their children. The easy earnings appealed to the carvers who, seeking more than just seasonal sales, packed up their goods in baskets and peddled them across the country. Businessmen then began snapping up these toys and selling them all over the world. The dolls would eventually reach Astrakhan and Archangel, Petersburg and Cadiz, even Africa and the West Indies, as sailors took them overseas to trade the colorful little figures with the natives in exchange for jewels, pearls, bronze, and other such valuable wares.

You must be thinking: what a strange toy tour; we’re almost finished and he’s yet to mention either dolls or soldiers. And you would be right. But today he’s dwelt on the more peculiar and unconventional, and so he will continue until the very end. He will tell you what has surprised him most on this tour. It was not a new discovery, but something he had not thought about in an awfully long time: scaly bath toys. On a piece of soft cotton are ducks and goldfish, and in the middle, a ship that is also scaly and comes with colorful metal sails and a magnetic stick that a child can use to steer the boats while his mother washes his hair. The entire thing was coated in celluloid, which made the fish, ships, and ducks look like they were frozen in ice. It reminded me of the smallest and most exciting of toys, those you can’t touch because they’re behind glass, like the ships, crucifixes, and collieries enclosed in sealed bottles. Have you ever seen these bottles? Have you ever racked your brains figuring out how those things get in there? I have, for years. And it took years before I learned how they do it, how sea captains, who bring them home after long journeys, go about creating such things. It’s not sorcery, just patience that is required, the immense patience possessed only by a skipper who, in his solitude at sea, has nothing to miss out on. All the parts of the ship or crucifix, connected by threads, are movable and narrowly packed together so they can fit through the neck of the bottle. Once they are inside, all the pieces and joints are pulled upright with long pins and tweezers until the ship, crucifix, or whatever else takes its proper form. Finally, colored sealing wax is dripped to make the waves or rocks and to permanently set the little houses or figurines. The inside of the bottle looks like something out of the magical land of Vadutz, as described by the poet Clemens Brentano: “All the magical mountains from storybooks, the world of fables and fairy tales, Himmelaya, Meru, Albordi, Kaf, Ida, Olympus, and the Glass Mountains lie for me in the little land of Vadutz.”⁴ In his imagination Brentano brought together all the toys that he loved into one country that he called Vadutz. He tells us this in the introduction to his most wonderful fairy tale: Gockel, Hinkel, and Gackeleia. Now that our toy tour is finished, you have something to wish for on your next birthday. But what I wish from you is that you remember our tour, if sometime later you happen to read the story of Gockel, Hinkel, and Gackeleia.

“Berliner Spielzeugwanderung II,” GS, 7.1, 105–11. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, March 22, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Berlin Radio, 22 March, 1930,” and for this date the Funkstunde announced “Youth Hour (Berlin), Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin” from 3:30–3:45 pm.

¹ Radio advertising in the Weimar Republic was controlled and regulated by the centralized Postal Ministry, and, in contrast to the commercial model of the United States, where advertising paid for broadcasting, the German system was based on subscription, requiring listeners to pay a licensing fee to receive transmissions. While some kinds of commercially sponsored programming were permissible, including the indirect advertisements of programs financed by private companies seeking to promote their products by having them featured on air, advertising was explicitly scheduled and highly regulated.

² Oblaten were embossed, colorful, small-format images mass-produced in the second half of the nineteenth century. Collected by children as well as adults, they were placed in scrapbooks and cards and were a trend in Germany, Austria, and England.

³ Tom Seidmann-Freud (pseudonym of Martha Gertrude Seidmann-Freud, 1892–1930), writer and illustrator, niece of Sigmund Freud. Her book, Das Zauberboot [The Magic Boat] (1929), featured movable parts. Benjamin discusses her work in “Chichleuchlauchra, Zu einer Fibel” (1930) and “Grünende Anfangsgründe, Noch etwas zu den Spielfibeln” (1931), in GS, 3, 267–72, 311–14.

⁴ See Clemens Brentano, Gockel, Hinkel, und Gackeleia (Frankfurt: S. Schmerber, 1838).

CHAPTER 8. Borsig

We’ve already experienced quite a lot of Berlin: we’ve learned about the markets and street trade, about traffic, about the old Berlin schools, about the uncanny Berlin of a century ago, about the Berliner dialect, even a bit about the construction history of Berlin, not to mention our grand toy tour.¹ However, we have conspicuously avoided touching upon the one thing that has allowed Berlin to become a city of three million inhabitants — of which we are but a few — and it’s perhaps to this that we owe our knowing one another as Berliners. This thing is big industry and wholesale trade. Today we won’t talk about trade, I’ll be showing you an industry instead, just one single company, to be exact, in which you’ll find one thousandth of Berlin’s three million inhabitants. It’s actually even more than that: the workforce at Borsig, which I will tell you about today, is 3,900 strong, plus 1,000 clerks, which leaves you with an operation that in good times employs 5,000 people.

What is Borsig? Many of you have heard the name. And you probably know that Borsig is a machine works. From your Sunday excursions many of you know where it’s located. When you head out of Berlin on the street toward Oranienburg and Velten, you pass through Tegel where it’s already in plain sight. On your class trips to Tegel, your teacher has surely shown you the villa belonging to the Humboldt family. I mean the two brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, who sit atop the columns in front of the university, as if they still haven’t graduated or they’re playing hooky.² One of these two Humboldts will appear again shortly, in exactly seventeen minutes. Then there’s the prison in Tegel, of which you can see more from the outside than you usually can with prisons; a great number of cell windows face the street. But it seems they’re so high that the poor inmates cannot see out. Then walk a few more minutes down the street toward Oranienburg and you’re at Borsig. The main gate opens onto a hall, which, like all other Borsig buildings, is constructed of red brick. In this hall there’s already something quite startling: a row of posts or stands covered from left to right and top to bottom with numbers, and next to each number a name, and under each name a little slot. Many of these slots have cards peeking out of them, which say, for instance, that employee no. 698 or no. 82 or no. 1014 is currently not at the factory. Each person, upon arrival, must take his card from his slot and stamp it with the automatic time clock, and then, usually after eight hours, have it stamped again when he leaves. Ultimately he gets paid according to the number of hours indicated on this control card.

Walking through the gate, the first thing that would strike you would probably be how difficult it is to find your way around, how foreign the place feels, how someone that doesn’t work at the factory has no business being here at all. What are we supposed to make of these more than twenty halls and workshops, sheds and chimneys, randomly connected not so much by streets as by rails? The trains drive right into the factory. The boilers, the ship engines, the steam turbines, the ovens, the chemical contraptions, and the countless other products manufactured here are loaded right on the premises. But they’re loaded not only onto freight trains. These large grounds are bordered on the other side, opposite the entrance, by Lake Tegel. From here, the barges, laden with machines ordered from Borsig by overseas customers, begin their slow journey along the Havel and the Elbe until they reach Hamburg, where their cargo is loaded onto ships. The second thing that strikes you is a tower. Twelve stories high and built from beautiful glass bricks, its sixty-five meters made it the tallest structure in Berlin when it was built back in 1923. And by the way, it’s still not completely finished, as there’s always something more urgent to spend money on at the factory.

Let’s say someone asks you which part of the factory grounds you would like to see, the hall where they make airlift pumps, perhaps, or tempering devices with agitators, or coil-tube boilers, or low-pressure rotators with high-pressure leveraging? You’d stand there with your mouth agape and understand what it is to know German. You could easily realize that you’ve never in your life heard at least three quarters of the most important words that are used here, year in and year out, from early morning to late at night, and that you can’t even guess at the meaning of some, even if you should recognize a couple of the easier ones and know, for instance, what a lathe is, or a milling machine. However, other children, some even younger than you, know all about it, at least those who are apprenticing at Borsig. For up on the fifth floor of one of these factory buildings — I took an elevator up there, a strange feeling, I must say, because it’s usually only used to carry chains, machine parts, and other such things — there’s a training department where almost 300 apprentices, for the most part children of men who have been employed at the plant for some time, are molded into future workers. They have 100 machine tools up there to help them learn. The company is proud of this department, because it began as a program to hire apprentices not merely on a case-by-case basis when they needed new employees, but instead to systematically train them from the outset. In addition to the apprentice workshop, there’s a factory school with classrooms, teachers, a cinema, and proper theoretical training that the youngsters must complete over four years.

But let us not dally any longer with the particular names of machines or the many more I’d like to tell you about; instead let’s proceed into one of these halls. Assume we are lucky enough to be there when Borsig is busy building locomotives. Then we could see the various departments, but let’s only concern ourselves with the first and the last. And sure enough, we’re in luck. Just now Borsig is building seventy locomotives for Serbia, to settle war reparations. The first station is the boiler shop. Let’s go in. Every year around 600 locomotive boilers are forged here. The noise that greets us sounds like the 600 are being forged right now and all at once. Forty to fifty people, not more, might be at work in this giant hall. And since it’s over 100 meters long, the individual naturally disappears. But that’s the remarkable thing: the noise is deafening yet you barely see anyone. At first, until you’re accustomed to being here, you move with caution, step by step. Because not only are there rail tracks everywhere below, but there are even more overhead, where large cranes, fixed on wheels, roll from one end of the hall to the other hauling loads, ironware, boiler parts, and wheel halves, since large wheels are always manufactured in halves and then welded together afterwards. You never know when one of these graceful gems might swing back and forth above your head. The boilers are riveted using a so-called hydraulic riveter, a type of pump, with pistons under extremely high pressure. One man alone operates this machine, riveting together parts under 2,000 hundredweights of pressure. But don’t think the Borsig manufacturing process begins here. No, the individual parts that are forged to make this boiler are manufactured in a separate shop, located in a different hall, the so-called hammer works, housing twelve forging furnaces and eighteen steam hammers, seven hydraulic presses and whatever else is used to process raw iron into the desired form. Of course Borsig itself does not own the iron ore from which this crude iron is extracted; it is bought in Germany or Scandinavia. But from then on, everything up to the finished product, the locomotive, is handled in-house. The raw iron is not extracted from the ore here, but rather in Borsig’s factories on the Polish border in Upper Silesia. Such a system, where everything from raw materials to the finished goods is produced by a single firm, is called vertical integration. One imagines the iron lying in the farthest depths of the Earth and then the production process rising higher and higher, refining itself more and more, until it culminates in the finished product, in this case the locomotive.

You have no idea how wide the variety of locomotives is, all sorts of which are manufactured here: electric locomotives, locomotives that burn coal and those that burn wood (for Brazil, for example, where fuel is so expensive that they have to operate as economically as possible), fireless locomotives, which run on superheated steam, for use in fire-sensitive operations or around stockyards where black soot must be avoided. All these things are made at Borsig. Every country requires something different; every client has his special demands, which sometimes must be met with uncanny speed. When the Spree had to be tunneled under to build the stretch of subway between Spittelmarkt and Alexanderplatz, the head of the completed tunnel section started to collapse. Water began seeping into the tunnel and the entire construction was in danger. At 10 am the site managers had a meeting with Borsig. Borsig proposed installing five giant pumps that together would drain 125 cubic meters of water per minute. At 3 pm the order for the proposed pumps was received at Tegel. Although all the sketches needed to be reworked, by 11 pm all five giant pumps were ready and rolled out to the gate. The next morning they were put into operation and in two hours the subway construction was saved.

But now back to our locomotive. We’re skipping over many stations to find it at last in the assembly hall, where it’s pieced together from its individual parts and ultimately painted. The painting alone takes about eight days. When I entered the hall it was right at lunch break. It was silent. The workers were sitting on the floor unpacking their lunches. It smelled like paint. In front was a large panel, the locomotive’s breastplate, if you will. It was open and you could look inside. Between the rails on which it rested was a deep trench, so people could work on the undercarriage. These locomotive stands are built the same way as dry docks, where the objective is easy access to the underside of the ships. Borsig has thirty-nine such locomotive docks. When these locomotives are finished, they are then driven to Serbia by people from Borsig itself. This is true not only for the locomotives, but for most of the large machines that are ordered, whether it be steam turbines, pumps, oil refining equipment or the like. Sending such merchandise to customers is not as easy as sending, say, an armoire; they must be precisely tuned and fitted at the final destination, and then put into operation. This task requires several workers. These are the construction supervisors, whose job often takes them all around the world. It happens that such people stay away for quite a while, as in the case of one Borsig construction supervisor who left for Lahore, India, in 1925 and stayed for two years in order to install a pipeline, manufactured at Borsig, in a power station there. How do I know this? Well, of course no one in such a factory has the time to sit down for hours and tell people all these interesting things, so I had to make do on my own. Since I knew that at Borsig, as at many other very big factories, there’s a newspaper for those affiliated with the firm, I read up a bit on the company news. I found not only the entire Lahore story, but also, notably, all the latest technical engineering inventions. There were also articles by workers, advice columns, and sometimes even complaints. And above all, every issue has a directory of people who have suggested improvements for whatever aspect of the company that they were especially familiar with. These suggestions are reviewed by the front office and sometimes remunerated.

Had you accompanied me to Borsig, right at the start you would have seen something that, in closing, I will tell you about now. Standing quite gracefully in the green grass of the front courtyard, on a small red-brick pedestal and looking rather like memorials, are two Borsig products of special significance. One is a machine with a giant flywheel and the other a small steam boiler. They are among the factory’s oldest products. The boiler had been at one company for fifty years until Borsig bought it back for a pretty penny to mount it here as a souvenir of sorts. The firm takes great pride in such relics of times past, and if you stop to consider that in seven years Borsig will celebrate its 100th anniversary, you can understand why. For a factory to reach such a great age is as little a result of chance as for a person. Just as a man, in order to become old, must take the long view, not dwell on the little things, and not snack on everything that suits his momentary desire, so must a large company, if it wants to become old, act with great prudence, caution, and thoroughness. I could tell you just as much about the Borsig of years past as I have about the Borsig of today. Like how the little engine factory, which built Germany’s first locomotives in 1841, became the huge factory it is now. Perhaps another time, when I tell you about the different neighborhoods of Berlin. Early on, Borsig was not part of Tegel, but rather Moabit, to which the entire history of industrialization in Berlin was closely linked. But the day is over and now I only owe you Alexander von Humboldt, whom I promised you seventeen minutes ago. How can I fit him into the little time we have left? In a nutshell: no doubt as a relief from the heavy and dull machinery he had to take care of day in and day out, the man who founded Borsig set up greenhouses, which were the most famous in Berlin at the time and showcased many foreign and exotic plants.³ The great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt studied and marveled at these plants. He was also witness, in 1847, to the great festivities celebrating the completion of the 100th locomotive at Borsig. And because the Borsig Works counts finished locomotives the same way people count years, we will also conclude with a locomotive. The 12,000th, to be exact. It was built by Borsig five years ago as a standard locomotive and as the model for all locomotives of the Deutsche Reichsbahn.

“Borsig,” GS, 7.1, 111–17. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, April 5, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Berlin Radio, 5 April, 1930.” For this date, the Funkstunde announced “Youth Hour (Berlin), Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin” from 3:20–3:40 pm.

¹ In addition to the broadcasts of “Street Trade and Markets in Old and New Berlin,” “Berlin Dialect,” “Berlin Toy Tour I,” and “Berlin Toy Tour II,” Benjamin seems to allude here to two broadcasts that are now missing or lost. Based in part on this passage, Schiller-Lerg speculates that Benjamin likely gave broadcasts on the subjects of Berlin Traffic [Berliner Verkehr], Berlin Schools [Berliner Schulen], and Berlin’s Building History [Berliner Baugeschichte] (Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 141–3).

² Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), philosopher, philologist, diplomat, and educational reformer, is considered the founder of the modern university system. In 1810 he founded the University of Berlin (later renamed Humboldt University); Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was a naturalist, geographer, and explorer. Statues of the brothers flank the entrance of the university.

³ Johann Friedrich August Borsig (1804–1854) founded the Borsig Works in 1837.

CHAPTER 9. The Rental Barracks

There is no need to explain to you how the subject of today’s talk relates to Berlin. And I need not describe the rental barracks to you either, I’m afraid. You’re all familiar with them. And most of you know them from the inside as well. And by that, I don’t mean just the apartments and rooms, but also the courtyards, the three, four, five, and even six courtyards of tenements in Berlin. Berlin is the biggest tenement city on Earth.¹ Today I will try to explain to you how over the centuries this gradually became our misfortune. Prick up your ears and I’ll tell you something you won’t often hear in your German lessons, or in geography, or in social studies, but someday it might be important to you. For you should all understand what is at stake in the great battle against the rental barracks, which has been waged by Greater Berlin since 1925.

They always say Berliners are so critical. And it’s true. They’re quick-witted, not so easily fooled. They’re bright. But it must be said that as far as their buildings and apartments are concerned, for centuries they’ve gotten the short end of the stick. And if in the beginning they might have blamed the authorities, or the king who dictated what and where to build, things didn’t improve even a tiny bit when they later governed the city themselves; in fact, they got worse. Perhaps they were so free with their skeptical humor and wit because they all too seldom thought about putting them to practical use. And the worst of it is that even though Berliners are regarded rather critically within the Empire, and their city is hardly considered the model for much, their rental barracks have been replicated all over Germany.

Rental barracks — that sounds so military.² Not only does the word suggest the military, but the rise of the rental barracks is indeed closely tied to the army. Berlin has been a military city since the Hohenzollerns, and there have been times in which the military, that is the soldiers and their families, has constituted one third of Berlin’s entire population. When the Prussian army was not yet so large, the soldiers and their families were often lodged in the homes of townspeople. Fourteen days ago I told you about Berlin’s building history under Frederick William I.³ You heard then how every Berliner was obligated to put up a certain number of soldiers, depending on the size of his house or apartment. This was still possible under Frederick William I; although it was very burdensome for the townspeople, the army was still small and so much was being built that there was no real threat of a housing shortage. When Frederick William I died, Berlin’s garrison numbered roughly 19,000. But when Frederick the Great died in 1786, there were some 36,000 men stationed in Berlin. It was no longer possible to house this number of troops in the old way, so Frederick the Great built a whole series of barracks, eight alone during the last four years of his reign. The barracks housed not only soldiers, but also their families. To us, it may seem funny for soldiers to live in barracks together with women and children. The reasons for this, however, were anything but funny. Simply put, Prussian military culture was so dreadfully inhumane that many were driven to desert at the first opportunity. If soldiers were allowed to go home to their families every evening, or even a few times a week, perhaps only half would return the next morning, which is why they were kept with their families in barracks and seldom allowed to leave, and then only with special permission.

Frederick the Great went on to impose this housing remedy, barracking, on Berlin’s civilian population. Unlike his father, who enlarged the capital horizontally, he extended it vertically, up into the air. He used Paris as a model, but this was unwarranted. Paris was a fortress; the city could not expand beyond its forts and bastions. And since its 150,000 citizens made it Europe’s largest city, the Parisians had no choice but to construct buildings of many stories. Berlin in Frederick the Great’s day, however, was even less of a fortress than it is now. Thus, the city could easily have been extended horizontally. When the Emperor of China at that time was shown images of buildings of such unusual height, he said disdainfully: “Europe must be a very small land indeed if the people have so little space on the ground that they must live in the air.” For the Berliners’ health, of course, the old building scheme would have been better; instead they were crammed with as many people as possible into tenements that were as high as possible. But the economic effects resulting from these constructions were even more dire than the health risks. Since Frederick the Great, people no longer cared to develop and build on new and inexpensive land along the former city limits; rather, building upon already developed lots, they constructed multi-story buildings and rental barracks where once there had been one- and two-story single-family homes. Because these rental barracks, with their many tenants, brought in much more for their owners than the previous smaller houses, the land on which they stood became more and more valuable. Very soon this influenced the prices of undeveloped lots, which could still be found all across the city. When building lots were sold, sellers could demand prices buyers could only afford if they stuck to the rental barrack scheme and built one apartment piled on top of the next to offset the high property prices with more rent.

A description of Berlin from the year of Frederick the Great’s death shows how awful things already looked then. But in those days, of course, the ill-effects of this building style were rarely visible, so that Nicolai, a born Berliner and the writer who gave us this description, is filled with pride that almost half of the apartment blocks had handsome side and rear buildings, which in many areas of the city were almost as densely populated as the front ones. There were buildings in which about sixteen families lived. In most cities, 6,500 apartment blocks would likely house no more than 145,000 residents.⁴ That makes for an average of twenty-two occupants per building. In Berlin today, however, we take it for granted that there are apartment buildings that house well over 500 people. One hundred and twenty years after Nicolai’s account, an apartment house on Ackerstraße is home to over 1,000 people. It’s at number 132. Go and see for yourselves. If you look from the street down the row of courtyards, it’s as if you were looking into a tunnel.⁵ In Nicolai’s time, the industrialization of Berlin was still in its infancy. The real catastrophe would occur much later, when all attempts by Baron vom Stein to help Berliners through Prussian municipal reforms went awry and, in 1858, the horrific Berlin development plan was executed, making way for the rental barracks to dominate.⁶ To understand today’s Berlin, we must take a look at this development plan, according to which the average rental barracks had three courtyards. Each of these courtyards was required — it sounds completely unimaginable, but it’s true — to be just slightly over five square meters in size. Rental barracks were laid out with twenty meters of street front and extended fifty-six meters deep. If such a house occupied the customary seven stories, including the ground floor, up to 650 people could be crammed inside. You have to wonder how such poor and harmful regulations were possible. And really, the rationale was as convoluted and unhealthy as the homes it produced.

The story begins quite harmlessly. The great development plan was intended to resolve Berlin’s problems for many decades to come. The plan was drawn up in the police headquarters. Then it turned out that many of the planned streets crossed land held by private owners. The state, which was executing the development scheme, would have needed to reimburse those private owners. That would have cost a lot of money, especially at a time when there was still no law by which property could be seized in the public interest. If the state wanted to build its streets but not spend any money, it had to win over the property owners. Some crafty public officials said to themselves: We need to allow people to develop their properties, so that they can get much more money from renters than if they were to sell to us, at such a high price, the little plots of land that we need for our streets. This clever idea would bring about the greatest misfortune. And there was worse. As it happened, the scheme was not carried out according to plan. The plan, originally including only the main roads, was to be expanded to open up side streets that would have provided much air and light. But later on, the thinking changed. The money for the new streets was to be saved, leaving these massive building lots packed with giant rental barracks only occasionally intersected by streets.

The worst came twenty years later, in 1871, with the victory over France that marked the beginning of the so-called Founding Years, in which people all over Germany lost their minds and speculated seemingly at random.⁷ At that time the Berlin authorities suffered from delusions of grandeur. An enormous building scheme was hatched, that was supposed to last for centuries, and over the years would have incorporated lands with the goal of housing no fewer than 21 million people. The wild fever of speculation, which rattled Berlin in the Founding Years and, as is well known, ended with the Great Crash of 1873, was to a large extent a result of these bloated plans for expansion. All at once, acres of land, which were still producing grain or potatoes, became building plots and in a few months the sandy soil of the Mark Brandenburg was transformed into fields of California gold for its owners. At the beginning of the 1870s, farmers, some of whom had been born into serfdom, became rich overnight, and sometimes millionaires, without the slightest bit of effort or merit. It was then, during the Founding Years, that the expression Millionaire Peasant was coined. Folks everywhere founded companies, purchased and speculated on land, but almost never developed it. For people at that time, nothing was good enough or expensive enough. When something was actually built, two rules held sway: one, that as many apartments as possible were piled under one roof, and two, that the building looked magnificent from the outside. Especially in the outskirts, so-called boulevards were built that ran from one end of the district to the other and then just fizzled out or terminated in a side street. Even the villas erected there were mostly just disguised rental barracks with basement apartments, cramped sleeping quarters, and scaled-back common areas. The vast and pretentious living rooms overlooked the street regardless of whether it ran north, never allowing sunlight to enter the room.

The egoism, shortsightedness and arrogance that gave rise to the rental barracks was the order of the day almost everywhere in Berlin until the World War. If you have a look around the fringes of Berlin, you’ll notice that much has changed since then. And not just the elegant western suburbs with their villas, in Dahlem or in Lichterfelde, but also down in Frohnau by the Stettiner railway, or in Püdersdorf, or closer to Berlin in Britz or Tempelhof. Tempelhof is a particularly good example of what has improved in Berlin since the revolution. You need only compare the houses erected from 1912 to 1914 on the old parade ground with those that lie today in the garden city on Tempelhof Field, each with its own patch of green. More telling than standing in front of the houses is looking at photos taken from a bird’s eye view, as if you were peering down on the premises. At first you see how grim, severe, gloomy, and military the rental barracks look in comparison to the peaceful houses of the garden plots, which are so amicably juxtaposed with one another. And you understand why Adolf Behne, who has done so much for this new Berlin, calls the rental barracks the last of the castle fortresses.⁸ Because, he says, they arose from a few landowners’ egotistical, brutal struggle over the land that they would dismember and divide among themselves. And this is why rental barracks have the shape of fortified and warlike castles, with their walled-in courtyards. As the owners are locked together in hostile confrontation, so too are the residents living in the hundreds of apartments that usually make up these city blocks. Have a look at the April edition of Uhu magazine and you’ll see images of a completely new form of American skyscraper.⁹ Long tenement blocks, so to speak, that are either set on their short end so that they project upward, or that lay on their broad side to make long rows of houses. I’m thinking to myself, this must be Uhu magazine’s idea of an April Fools’ joke. But the joke clearly shows how the rental barracks are on the way out: through the abolition of the somber and monumental stone building that has stood still, immovable, and unchanged for centuries. The stone is replaced by a narrow frame of concrete and steel, the compact and impenetrable façades by giant glass plates, and the four blank walls by deep-set and exposed stairs, platforms and roof gardens. The many people that will live in such buildings will gradually be transformed by them. They will be freer, less anxious, and also less belligerent. This future image of the city will inspire people at least as much as airships, automobiles, and ocean liners do today. And they will be grateful to those who led the struggle for liberation from the old, fortress-like, and gloomy barrack city. An important person for Berlin in this regard is Werner Hegemann, author of the book Das steinerne Berlin [Berlin, City of Stone], which offers a history of the city that is very much in favor of this new Berlin and from which you and I have learned all that we now know of the rental barracks.

“Die Mietskaserne,” GS, 7.1, 117–24. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

The precise date of broadcast of “The Rental Barracks” has not been determined. It was most likely broadcast in the spring or summer of 1930. Benjamin’s reference to the April 1930 issue of Uhu magazine suggests a date at some point after the April 5, 1930 broadcast of “Borsig.” Bracketing it on the other end is the September 14, 1930 publication of Benjamin’s discussion of Werner Hegemann’s Das steinerne Berlin (GS, 3, 260–5), which almost certainly appeared after the broadcast of “The Rental Barracks.” Sabine Schiller-Lerg tentatively concludes that the broadcast took place on April 12, 1930 (Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 112,142, 532).

¹ Here, Benjamin’s language echoes the subtitle of Werner Hegemann’s Das steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der größten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt [Berlin, City of Stone: The Largest Tenement City in the World] (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1930), to which he will refer below. For Benjamin on Hegemann’s text, see also “Ein Jakobiner von Heute: Zu Werner Hegemanns Das steinerne Berlin [A Jacobin of Our Time: On Werner Hegemann’s Berlin, City of Stone], GS, 3, 260–5, first published in the Frankfurter Zeitung on September 14, 1930.

² The term Benjamin uses throughout is “Mietskaserne”, which can be translated as both “tenement” and “rental barracks.” To emphasize the military history and resonance, as does Benjamin, we use “rental barracks” here and in the title.

³ It appears that this is a reference to a radio broadcast that has gone missing. Perhaps it is the same text Benjamin refers to in “Borsig” when he mentions having previously spoken about “the construction history of Berlin” (see “Borsig,” 50). Schiller-Lerg has given this reference the provisional title “Baugeschichte Berlins unter Friedrich Wilhelm I” [The Building History of Berlin under Frederick William I] and dates it as having likely been broadcast on Radio Berlin on March 29, 1930 (Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 141–3, 530).

⁴ Here Benjamin paraphrases a citation of the German writer and critic Christoph Friedrich Nicolai’s Beschreibung der königlichen Residenzstädte [A Description of Royal Capitals] (Berlin 1786) that appears in Hegemann’s Das steinerne Berlin.

⁵ Berlin’s largest tenement, Meyers Hof, built by textile factory owner Jacques Meyer, was located at Ackerstraße 132/133. Completed in 1875, it had six courtyards and, at its peak, housed 2,000 tenants. It was demolished in 1972.

⁶ Heinrich Friedrich Karl, Freiherr vom und zum Stein (1757–1831), Prussian government minister and reformer who helped initiate municipal self-government in Berlin. The Hobrecht Plan, initiated in 1858 by the Prussian Interior Ministry and designed by the urban planner James Hobrecht (1825–1902), was finalized in 1862. It created the master framework for urban development in Berlin.

⁷ The Gründerzeit, or Founding Years, is a broad term used here to refer to the economic boom period from 1871 to 1873.

⁸ Adolf Behne (1885–1948), Weimar architectural critic. See Adolf Behne, Neues Wohnen, neues Bauen [New Living, New Building] (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker Verlag, 1927), which includes a chapter entitled “Die Mietskaserne als letzte Ritterburg” [The Rental Barrack as the Last of the Castle Fortresses].

⁹ See Uhu magazine, vol. 6.7 (April 1930), which features two images of a skyscraper, one in which the building is turned horizontally, “like an apartment block” (59).

CHAPTER 10. Theodor Hosemann

Are you familiar with this name? Probably not. You can no longer find him in any of your storybooks. But if one day you dig up an old book that belonged to your father or mother, you might discover this name on the title page, where it might say that he drew the pictures in the book. But because he was a very humble man, he didn’t always take credit for all the books he illustrated, so it could be that you know some of his pictures without ever having heard his name.

So, Hosemann was a painter. Why do we talk about him during the Berlin Hour? For starters, he wasn’t at all a real Berliner; he was born 123 years ago in Brandenburg, on the river Havel.¹ Moreover, is it not a crazy idea to talk about a painter on the radio? It’s out of the question, of course, that I stand here and describe Hosemann’s pictures to you. But, even without describing any of his pictures, I can just tell you how he came to paint, draw, and make illustrations, and what people thought of his pictures, and how they were received. You’ll soon find out what was special about this man, and you’ll quickly grasp why I’m talking about him in the Berlin Hour even though he was from Brandenburg.

Hosemann was not coddled during his lifetime, certainly not by Berliners, among whom he lived and for whom he worked. We will soon learn why this was so. He was quite surprised when one day he received a letter from a professor from his hometown. The man was inquiring about his childhood for a book he wanted to write about Hosemann. Now we’ll read some of his reply, written five years before his death: “In 1816, from which point on my memory is quite clear,” so he was nine years old at the time,

we landed in Düsseldorf, on the Rhine, in a miserable little tarpaulin-covered fruit boat. Times were tough, the war against Napoleon and all the moving about had bankrupt my parents, and with prices rising my father’s monthly wage of sixteen or seventeen thalers was barely enough for even the most essential provisions. Our first apartment in Düsseldorf was a small, whitewashed room under the roof of a lodging house for sailors. Thanks to my youth I was cheerful, in good spirits and couldn’t understand why my mother and sister were crying every day. I took comfort in my box of paints and considered myself lucky if I could get hold of a piece of paper somewhere. But our life grew ever harder. I can still see my poor, sick mother and my sister crocheting curtain fringes from early morning till nightfall, and in winter by the light from a tin lamp. I needed to help earn something, so I went down to the color printing house of Arnz & Winckelmann, where soon I would while away entire days, drawing and painting to my heart’s content. I was the happiest child in the world when at the end of the week, on top of everything, I could bring home a few pennies to my tender, beloved mother.²

How often Hosemann would later depict such a humble, tranquil family, toiling day after day with busy hands to earn a paltry wage. Often there would also be a sick mother or a feverish child lying in bed, because back then publications for young people, which Hosemann illustrated, loved to appeal to children with rather maudlin stories, hoping to influence their behavior for the better. But that was probably misguided. Kids are naturally interested in everything. If you show them the world only from the good and agreeable side, they’ll go out of their way to find out themselves about the other side. And even so, no one’s ever heard of kids learning naughty tricks from, say, Max and Moritz and trying to plug their teacher’s pipe with powder.³ But now back to Hosemann. When he wrote this letter, he was already a professor and a member of the Academy of the Arts. But what a hard road it was to get there; the boy was barely twelve years old when he had to start earning his keep. That it wasn’t just for fun, that he learned a great deal and that he trained himself very ably is made clear by the fact that when he was just fifteen he became the youngest illustrator employed at his firm, earning a yearly wage of 200 thalers.

We should say a bit more about this Winckelmann firm, as it determined Hosemann’s entire life. Having survived for almost exactly a half century, it relocated a few years later from Düsseldorf to Berlin and has only just recently disappeared. Like Hosemann himself, the company grew up with lithography. Lithography is the art of creating a drawing with chemical chalk or a pen on a stone plate, so that after the plate is covered with dye, it can be printed. This technique was invented at the end of the eighteenth century, but it took roughly twenty years before it was applied on a larger scale. Especially in France and Germany, this placed illustration on an entirely new footing. When in 1816 the first beautifully illustrated children’s book was published — Hey’s One Hundred Fables, with pictures by Otto Speckter — the idea came to Winckelmann to make such lithographic children’s books his main line of business.⁴ To enlarge his firm he went to Berlin. He couldn’t have found a better employee than Hosemann. And in turn, Hosemann’s work, linked as it was to his publisher, firmly established him in Berlin, where his keen observation and attentive study brought him closer to Berlin life than anyone else of his time. Hosemann had no interest in the grand art tours to Paris and Italy that were common among painters in his day. His travels would take him only as far as Antwerp and Tyrol. But his favorite destinations were Charlottenburg and Schöneberg, right here in Berlin, and in the summer he sometimes traveled with his family to Bad Freienwalde, in the surrounding Province of Brandenburg, which he found very elegant and about whose high prices he sometimes bitterly complained.

His art arose entirely from craft. With Hosemann there are neither grand ideas nor a proper artistic development, other than that he always grew more skillful. But the sobriety of his observations, the precision of his drawings, his sense of the comical, even a certain sentimental quality, entwined him so intimately with his closest subject, Berlin, that in the fifty years he lived here, he made pictures and drawings that show us life in Berlin from the widest range of perspectives: Sunday amusements for the petite bourgeoisie, a country outing or a game of skat in a tavern, as well as the craftsman at work, the chimney sweep, the bricklayer and the cobbler, the activities of rag pickers, soldiers and servants, dandies, Sunday riders, musicians. You would think that Berliners, out of pride, would have seized on a painter who exhibited such love for their city by documenting it in minute detail. But that wasn’t at all the case. Their sense of superiority would again rear its head. Berliners found Hosemann’s art to be a bit ordinary, inelegant, lacking in refinement. They were at odds with one another over such aesthetic questions as: Should one paint historical tableaux, great battles, scenes from the Reichstag and royal coronations? Or so-called genre paintings, by which they meant contrived, eccentric, embellished scenes from everyday life, with no kaisers and no military, but featuring monks, salon-goers, pedants, and dandies. It was in style to paint, for instance, a portly monk raising his wine glass and grinning as the sun shines through the wine. Or a young lady reading a love letter, and behind her, the suitor who wrote it peeking through a crack in the door, surprising her. Berliners back then were fond of such nonsense, at least the pretentious ones.

But thank goodness there were others as well. The common people and the children. It was for them that Hosemann worked. His love for the people, and especially for Berliners, brought him into contact with the famous Adolf Glassbrenner, who first brought the people and dialect of Berlin to literature. In 1834 their first collaborative work was published: a book in the collection Berlin, wie es ist und trinkt.⁵ It was the model for a good many similar series of publications that were sold in paper shops at the time, as illustrated journals are today. However, these booklets, with titles like “Berlin in Color” or “Humorous Pictures of Soldiers,” “Berlin Town Gossip,” or “Strange Court Scenes,” were much smaller. You could easily fit one into your pocket without bending the lovely color picture on its front, which each of them had. But there was something else about these writings. Perhaps you know what is meant by the so-called pre-March period. That was the time before the outbreak of the March Revolution of 1848. Before the Wars of Liberation, the king of Prussia famously promised universal suffrage and then later went back on his promise. Instead, there was what is known as the reaction, during which everyone who wrote was closely monitored to ensure that nothing was written that the government did not approve of. How often in history have there been such times when everything printed was strictly controlled and, if it did not conform, banned; and how often have people who refused to back down searched for ways to say what they thought so that everyone understood them but the police could not hold them accountable. Such was the case of Glassbrenner, who said: “We are separated from the great mass of the people by everything, by eccentric habits and education, by money, by our speech, and by our clothes. Unless we join hands with the people and come to an understanding with them, no freedom is possible.”⁶ Glassbrenner created his famous Berlin characters to show the power of the common man and of his language, how much can be learned from him and, above all, how he cannot be kept forever at bay. Like Nante the Loafer, who represents the Berlin proletariat, and Buffay Bourgeois, typifying the Berlin citizen, who in his way thinks no differently from Nante when it matters most. And indeed, this was the case when a large portion of the Berlin bourgeoisie stood arm in arm with the workers of Berlin in front of the castle in 1848.

Such were the thoughts of this Glassbrenner, Hosemann’s collaborator. Hosemann, however, was a rather careful man, even a bit bourgeois. For instance, when in November 1848 he was reporting to a friend on the unrest in Berlin, his letter read: “I write to you now, my dear Schulz, of events as I myself experienced them, but I take the liberty of offering no further judgment as regards them. And I beg you likewise to please refrain from any judgments and other remarks not concerning the facts at hand. We will surely be able to imagine the rest. Understood?”⁷ It seems to have been a cowardly time back then in Berlin, and even our Hosemann had to play along a little. But he only needed to make pictures. And in principle he was most certainly at one with his friend Glassbrenner when he depicted, for instance, Nante the Loafer, as the Berliner who stood up for himself and even prevailed when facing an official endowed with significant authority. And now I will conclude, not by describing a picture by Hosemann, but by reading part of a court trial against Nante presided over by a court clerk. “Approach the bench,” says the clerk. “Great,” says Nante, as he approaches, brushing the hair from his face and assuming an imposing stance. “There. Now you can truly appreciate me, Herr Justice.”

CLERK: The defendant’s name?

NANTE: You.

CLERK: What’s that supposed to mean?

NANTE: Well, that’s what I say when I’m talking to myself. I wouldn’t call myself “Herr Nante.”

CLERK: I wish to know the defendant’s name. Is it not Nante the Loafer?

NANTE: Yes, I flatter myself with such a name. And don’t pretend you don’t know me. Who else would I be if not Nante? Nante remains Nante, the one and only.

CLERK: Born?

NANTE: Yep. Born I am. Je suis. Pardon me if I sometimes pour a little French into my talking.

CLERK: I’m asking where the defendant was born.

NANTE: I see, where! On Horse Street, but as a human. Before I was born I lived at my mother’s. After that I moved out and cried, because I grew two legs, and then ate.

CLERK: Eight legs?

NANTE: Ate, I said. With these teeth right here. But it’s bad luck that a guy gets teeth and nothing good to bite on.

CLERK: Religion?

NANTE: Religion?

CLERK: What religion are you?

NANTE: I see. I thought I was supposed to repeat after you. Protestant!

CLERK: Have you been under investigation once before?

NANTE: Heaven forbid, no! Twice! Once, when I was out of work, I investigated whether I could live on the wind, and then a little bit later I was under investigation here because I’d borrowed a couple rolls from a baker without telling him about it. Oh, and a third time I was also under investigation here, because I’d found a horseshoe.

CLERK: Investigated for that? Had they gone crazy?

NANTE: Crazy? Heaven forbid. Not as crazy as you … would think.

I found a horseshoe in the street and when I took a good look at it at home, there was a horse on it. That was some bad luck.

CLERK: Enough, enough.

NANTE: Great. (He turns around and starts to leave.)

CLERK: Stop, you are not even close to being finished.

NANTE: I see, I thought you’d had enough of my chatter. Guess not, so much the better! Because I still have a couple stories to tell you. If you like gruesome ones, I’ll tell you about something that happened to yours truly along with my wife and three kids. How we were thrown out of our house just because we couldn’t pay our three thalers of rent.

CLERK: Very sad, but I don’t have time to hear your stories. I can’t go on any longer listening to you.

NANTE: Can’t go on any longer? I can’t go on any longer than I am, either. Whatever I do I’m just as long as nature intended me to be, and no longer. But I’m hungry and I ain’t getting served around here. The only thing served around here is justice and I ain’t biting. Well, so long, Herr Justice Server.⁸

So now I’ve just shown you the speaking Nante instead of the drawn version. No matter that at the end of today Hosemann has crept a bit into Glassbrenner’s shadow. Because one day we’ll talk some more about Glassbrenner and then Hosemann will emerge again from behind him.

“Theodor Hosemann,” GS, 7.1, 124–30. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, April 14, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Berlin Radio, 14 April, 1930,” and for this date, the Funkstunde announced “Youth Hour (Berlin), Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin,” from 5:45–6:10 pm.

¹ Theodor Hosemann (1807–1875). Though he died in Berlin, he was born outside the city, in Brandenburg an der Havel.

² For this passage, see “Briefe von Theodor Hosemann” [Hosemann’s Letters], in Lothar Brieger, Theodor Hosemann, ein Altmeister Berliner Malerei: Mit einem Katalog der graphischen Werke des Künstlers von Karl Hobrecker [Theodor Hosemann, An Old Master of Berlin Painting: With a catalog of the artist’s illustrated works compiled by Karl Hobrecker] (Munich: Delphin, 1920), 103–4.

³ Max and Moritz are the title characters of a popular German illustrated children’s book by Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz — Eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen [Max and Moritz: A Story in Seven Pranks] (1865).

⁴ Johann Wilhelm Hey’s “Hundert Fabeln” mit den Bildern von Otto Speckter [“One Hundred Fables” with Illustrations by Otto Speckter] first appeared anonymously in Hamburg in 1833 as Fünfzig Fabeln [Fifty Fables]; the complete edition (Hundert Fabeln) was first published in 1884.

⁵ Adolf Glassbrenner, under the pseudonym Brennglas, wrote Berlin, wie es ist und trinkt [Berlin, As It Is — and Drinks] (Leipzig: Vetter and Rostosky, 1836), a series to which Hosemann contributed some of the illustrations.

⁶ See Glassbrenner, Unterm Brennglas: Berliner politische Satire, Revolutionsgeist und menschliche Komödie [Under Glassbrenner’s Magnifying Glass: Berlin Political Satire, Revolutionary Spirit, and Human Comedy], ed. Franz Diederich (Berlin: Paul Singer, 1912), 75.

⁷ Hosemann, letter dated November 15, 1848, in Brieger, Theodor Hosemann, 109–10.

⁸ See Unsterblicher Volkswitz: Adolf Glaßbrenners Werk in Auswahl [Immortal Joke-Lore: Selected Works by Adolf Glassbrenner], eds. Klaus Gysi and Kurt Böttcher (Berlin: Das neue Berlin, 1954), vol. 1, 95ff. In this passage, Nante’s parts are written in Berlin dialect, whereas the court representative speaks in standard High German.

CHAPTER 11. A Visit to the Brass Works

I can imagine that upon hearing something like “A Visit to the Brass Works” on the radio, a listener might think: “Oh dear, another of those harebrained topics. You have to see something like that, you can’t describe it.” If that listener did not turn off his radio a few seconds ago, then I beg him to be good enough to give me just a few moments more, because it is precisely to him that I wish to speak.

One thing I would admit to him right away: one can really describe only the smallest part of all that meets the eye there. The writer or poet has yet to be born who is capable of describing a three-high rolling mill or a rolling shear or an extrusion press or a high performance cold rolling mill so that others can imagine them. An engineer could hardly do that. He simply draws the things. But what of the observer? I mean, for instance, what if one of you went into the Hirsch-Kupfer Brass Works near Eberswalde, and walked from one of those machines with the almost unpronounceable names to the next? What would you see? Very simple: just about as much as I can describe here with words. That is: next to nothing. And what would be the point of describing such a machine purely by its appearance? It is not made to be looked at, unless perhaps by someone who has first grasped its structure, its functional performance, its purpose and because of that knows what he should pay the most attention to as he observes it. One can only correctly comprehend something from the outside if one knows it on the inside; that is true for machines just as it is for living things.

But of course, you cannot get to know a machine from the inside, even if you are directly in front of it. Let’s assume you are standing in one of the giant halls: it would be fascinating to see how the mixture that is melted to brass is poured into the ovens, how the brass plate comes out of the ovens, how the fat, short metal plates go into the rolling mill and come out the other end all thin and long, how the short, round cylindrical rods get pushed automatically into the pressing mill and appear again as long, delicate, narrow tubes. You would see all of that. But you would not see how it was done, and what with the deafening racket of the machines at work, the rolling cranes, the dropping of loads, no one could explain it to you either.

Thus one can say that the closer one wants to get to what is going on in such an immense plant — should one witness such an operation some day — and the more one longs to understand a little bit of it, the further one has to distance oneself from it. And we should think of our few minutes here on the radio as if they were the gondola of a tethered balloon from which we can see into the whole operation down there in the Hirsch-Kupfer Brass Works, and can single out the points that must first be grasped in order to master the whole. Even then it will be difficult enough for us. For are there not many such crucial points? First we have the whole science, everything that physics and chemistry can tell us about brass. What is brass? What is its melting point? What is its hardness grade? How does it expand when it is warmed? What is its specific weight? And so on. Not one of these questions would be unimportant to the technical operations in a brass works. Or we could approach it from a completely different angle: What does such a plant have to produce in order to sell its products well? What is produced there? We’ll hear later, for example, that it’s none of the brass objects we normally handle. None of the things that were made there 200 years ago, when the Brass Works was founded by the Great Elector. Neither kettles nor ornamental coverings, neither candlesticks nor cutlery. All of these are made by specialized factories, and it is precisely to these specialized factories that the Hirsch-Kupfer Brass Works delivers its material. That means that it is here that the semi-finished products are made: metal plates and bands, rods, bars, wires of all sorts of different lengths, qualities, and sizes that are then further processed in other metalware factories or electro-technical businesses.

Or another point: How did such an enormous business, employing about 2,000 workers and 400 administrators, emerge? Naturally not from one day to the next. And this Hirsch-Kupfer Brass Works, the biggest of its kind in Europe, is also one of the oldest businesses. It dates back to the year 1697. It would be another story in itself to tell how it came about. But the only thing that matters to me now is that, as you contemplate the innumerable parts, conditions, and difficulties of such an enormous factory, you have your breath taken away exactly as if you had unexpectedly stepped into one of its roaring halls. So there are ever more such points that one has to keep in mind in order to even begin to understand the whole. For example, the power industry. Where does the mighty power, harnessed to the metal works day and night, come from? It comes from the Mark Brandenburg’s electric power plant, which lies only a kilometer away from the Brass Works. The electricity alone costs the Brass Works approximately 100,000 marks a month. Naturally, such huge customers pay the electric power plant at a special rate. There, too, every detail is given the sharpest consideration, and is subject to the most exact accounting. For such an operation must make sure to have as constant a power consumption as possible, day in, day out, even at any given hour, because the power plant will demand more payment the more irregular the use of power.

I could go on this way for quite a while, explaining one point after another, and still it would be only the most important and necessary ones. We haven’t said a word about the workers yet, about their training, or the complicated calculation of their wages. We also still haven’t said a word about the calculations, the responsibilities of the management, who not only have to organize the work procedure but also have to simultaneously keep an eye on the world markets, who have to see to it that they don’t buy at too high a price and that they always get enough orders to keep the plant running at full capacity, who have to ensure that the stock is never too great, because that costs interest, and never too small, so that the most urgent orders can be filled quickly.

If you now know how infinitely much there would be to say, to ask about all of this, and if you remember that we only have twenty minutes for our conversation, then you will see that there is no point running ahead in our seven-league boots, and that we should rather take our time at a few, individual stations. I suggest we start with the hall where the casting is done. What is brass? Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. Some of you will surely know the difference between a compound and an alloy. Two elements must always form a chemical compound in a specific manner according to their atomic weights. You learn about it in school as Dalton’s Law. They can be alloyed physically by smelting them in very different proportions. The average proportion of copper and zinc in brass is sixty-three parts copper to thirty-seven zinc for the plates, and fifty-eight to forty-two for the rods. So there are different kinds of brass, and very different kinds are cast in the individual ovens, of which there are twenty-three in all. Which kind depends on the orders that have been received at the time. But it is not as if copper and zinc are simply weighed out in specific proportions and then poured into the ovens. If one were to proceed like that, a very poor, irregular brass would be the result. Zinc melts at about 600 °C and copper only at about 1100 °C. The solid bits of copper would swim around for a long time in the liquid zinc and would then, when they finally began to melt, dissolve only very irregularly in it. Therefore a balancing, as it were, mediating mass is added, namely old brass waste. It melts at about 900 °C, and thus makes the melting process constant. Not very long ago, such a casting could not be heavier than thirty kilograms. However, in the new ovens that the Brass Works put into operation in 1920, blocks of up to 600 kilograms can be produced. When the casting is done, the receptacles — they are called coquilles — that contain the blocks open, like a book, and one can see the brass inside. It is not, however, yellow and shiny but unsightly; there is a black, pitted skin from the casting process covering it, and that first needs to be scraped off. Then each block gets marked with its own special symbol, indicating what combination of metals the brass has and from which oven it came. Before it can be further processed, the casting is tested in the laboratory, not only for its purity but for its strength, ductility, hardness, elasticity, et cetera. For all these tests, there are special devices, among them a so-called tensile testing machine, which utilizes its 40,000 kilogram weight to test the plates or tubes. It is only in the laboratory that one can see how different the interiors of the individual kinds of brass look, because each of them presents a different image under the microscope depending on whether it was cast, or hard-rolled, or heated after its rolling.

Now the brass is there. But the immense work process is only just beginning. The massive blocks, the heavy cylinders that come from the foundry must be transformed into millimeter-thin sheets, fine-as-a-hair threads, narrow bands. These manufactured products, which are very long, naturally demand to be processed in much bigger rooms than the products of normal mechanical workshops. Years ago, the situation was remedied by building one factory hall next to the other when needed. But during the course of the war, the Brass Works started enlarging and transforming its entire operation, and it was clear from the start that the entire rolling process had to be housed in a single, great hall. And in the year 1920, the 215-meter-long rolling-mill hall was inaugurated. The history of its construction was a long chain of difficulties. Wherever the ground was probed for its suitability to support such a big building and the enormous load created by the machines, groundwater was discovered, and in the end, nothing could be done except anchor all the iron posts and all the machines’ bases in deep, extra-thickly sealed concrete troughs. Thus every single press, every single rolling mill had to have its own, very exact, unchangeable spot in the blueprints even before the hall was built. In addition, because no above ground electric lines could be tolerated due to the danger they posed to operations, a blueprint for the distribution of electric cables had to be worked out from the start. A blueprint for the distribution of electric cables at the same site, and for the same Brass Works, where 150 years earlier the operations had been powered by charcoal made by charcoal burners in the kilns around Eberswalde.

If we now enter the rolling-mill hall, we must take our leave of the beautiful, bright flames of the smelting furnaces and the golden mountains of brass waste. It gets grayer and more monotonous. All the more strange and lively, therefore, is what we see disappearing into the machines and then gliding out of the machines, transformed. There are the hydraulic presses, which seize hold of a short, massive brass cylinder with a pressure of more than 1,000 metric tons and then release a bundle of glowing tubes, as soft as an animal’s viscera, at the other end. Outside, at the mouth, workers stand already waiting for them with tongs, and stretch them the entire length of a ten- to fifteen-meter-long trough like a canal. After that, they are put in a corrosive bath in which they are cleaned; and here at these corrosion machines, as in a few other places, one can still see the old manual operation next to the new automatic one and make comparisons. Some of you have heard talk of rationalization. This is the technical escalation of the work process, which is thereby made cheaper through savings in the workforce and work time. The bigger and more modern a workplace is, the better it can be used to gauge what rationalization means. In the Brass Works there are now thirty ovens, or muffle furnaces as they are called, to reheat the metal that has cooled in the rollers, and two workers are needed to service these thirty ovens, whereas in the old factory no less than twenty-eight were employed for fifteen ovens. These muffle furnaces are necessary because the rods and plates get very hard in the rolling process and, to soften them up again, they need to be constantly reheated so that they can continue to be formed. Perhaps you can get an idea of the rollers, which are staggered in three rows behind one another, when I tell you that just one of them cost 500,000 marks and that it took eight weeks to set it up.

If you ever have the opportunity to see this Brass Works or a similar gigantic enterprise, then you must first have a good night’s sleep, keep your eyes open, and, especially, have no fear. That is necessary because otherwise you would stumble over the tracks and workpieces that cover the floor of the hall; you would have no eye for the work and instead would constantly look up in case one of the ton blocks, which are being swung through the air by cranes, was about to fall on your head; you would see only an impenetrable linkage, a network that seems to flicker, and not the clear, sharp division of the hall, where every worker has his specific place and every machine has, in a way, its own small office, from which the manager, with his eye on the automatic electricity, pressure, and temperature gauges, directs it. But if you then step outside, your head spinning from so much noise, so many great impressions, some understood and some not, and think that now you are in open nature, which has nothing to do with the labor and the racket going on inside, then the factory guide, who hopefully will explain everything to you as clearly and in as much detail as he did to me, will tell you that a large part of this countryside depends on the fate of the factory. Because this fate is closely tied to transportation. The Brass Works could not have become what it is without the now aging Finow Canal and without the new, modern Hohenzollern Canal, on which freight barges bring its raw materials, copper from Chile and Africa and brass waste from German factories, and export its products to India, China, Australia, et cetera, via Hamburg. The land between the Brass Works and the Hohenzollern Canal is still open. Yet, because nowadays industries spread out in ten years as much as they used to in a hundred, it is possible that later one of you, when he enters the Brass Works as a visitor, a worker, or an engineer, will step into new halls and factories that are mirrored in the water of the Hohenzollern Canal.

“Besuch im Messingwerk,” GS, 7.1, 131–7. Translated by Lisa Harries Schumann.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, early July 1930, most likely on July 12, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript, “Radio Berlin, 11 July, 1930.” The Funkstunde announced what was probably a related broadcast for July 1, 1930, and for the Youth Hour on July 12, 1930: “ ‘A Walk through a Brass Works [Gang durch ein Messingwerk].’ Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin,” from 3:20–3:45 pm.

CHAPTER 12. Fontane’s Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg¹

Some of you may know this, but many will be astounded when I tell you: the beauty of the Mark Brandenburg was discovered by the youth of Berlin.² By their vanguard, the Wandervogel.³ The Wandervogel movement is now about twenty-five years old, and it’s been just as long since Berliners ceased being ashamed of “The Good Lord’s Sandbox,” as the Mark is commonly known. And still it took some time before they really started to love it. For in order to love it, you have to know it. In the last century, however, that was something quite rare. Earlier on, only craftsmen and the more well-to-do hiked in the Alps. It occurred to very few people to do so in Germany, and especially in the Mark, until just around 1900 when this great, important movement began among students in Berlin: the Wandervogel. They had had enough, not only of the city, but also of the ritualistic Sunday stroll with their parents; they wanted something more than the same, over-grazed patches of the city; they wanted something new, to walk free in the open air among themselves. They didn’t have money so they couldn’t stray far, and they only had Sundays off. If they really wanted to make use of the short time they had, they needed to find places where they were safe from Berlin’s petite bourgeoisie. Areas without train access or hotels. You know how many such hidden locations still exist today in the Mark, despite the ever-tightening web of light railways across the countryside. But before the train and before the students, individual poets and painters always loved the Mark. Caspar David Friedrich and Blechen were two famous Brandenburg painters from the last century.⁴ Among the poets, however, none has done more for this landscape than the Berliner Theodor Fontane, who published his Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg in 1870.⁵ Far more than tedious descriptions of landscapes and castles, these books are full of stories, anecdotes, old documents, and portraits of fascinating people. Let’s hear from Fontane himself how he felt about these wanderings, and how he got to know the Mark so well.

“Only foreign lands teach us what we have at home.” I learned this first-hand, and my first inspirations for these “Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg” came to me on excursions in a foreign land. The inspirations became desire, the desire became resolve. It was in the Scottish county of Kinross, whose prettiest point is Loch Leven. In the middle of the loch lies an island, and on the middle of the island, half hidden behind ash trees and black firs, rises an old Douglas castle, the Loch Leven Castle of song and legend. On returning to land by boat, the oars rapidly engaged, the island became a strip, finally disappearing altogether, and for a while, only as a figure of the mind, the round tower remained before us upon the water, until suddenly our imagination receded further into its memories and older images eclipsed the images of this hour. They were memories of our native land, an unforgotten day. It was the image of Rheinsberg Castle that, like a Fata Morgana, hovered over Loch Leven, and before our boat reached the sand of the shore, a question posed itself: beautiful was this image that Loch Leven and its Douglas castle unfurled before you. And that day when you journeyed in your flatboat across Lake Rheinsberg, was it actually less beautiful than the imaginings and memories of a splendid time that engulfed you here? And I answered: no. The years gone by since that day on Loch Leven have returned me to my native land, and the resolutions from that time remain unforgotten. I traversed the Mark and found it richer than I dared hope. Each footbreadth of earth came alive, taking on shapes, and if my descriptions do not satisfy, I must forgo an apology that it was meager surroundings that I was forced to ameliorate or embellish. To the contrary, I was confronted with abundance, leaving me with the certain feeling of never being able to take it all in. And free of care, I gathered it in, not as someone approaches the harvest with sickle in hand, but rather as a rambler, plucking individual ears from the affluent fields.⁶

So goes Fontane’s preface. Now we will see how he describes a small village in the Mark, about which there seems nothing particularly noteworthy. But one can’t describe something one only sees and knows nothing about. It is not always necessary to know what the experts know. A painter who is painting an apple tree, for example, does not need to know what kind of apples grow on it. He only knows how the light falls through the various types of leaves. How it changes its appearance at different times in the day. How strongly or gently the shadows fall on the grass, stones, or soil. But while it can be seen, it can only truly be seen with experience, with repeated viewings, and with comprehension. So it is with Fontane. There aren’t many lyrical descriptions of nature, and no moonlight rhapsodies, no fancy speeches on the solitude of the forest and other such things you sometimes struggle with at school. Fontane simply wrote what he knew, and that was a lot; not only about kings and castle owners, fields and lakes, but also about simple people: how they live, what they care about, and what sorts of plans they have. Most of you are familiar with Caputh, so you can easily judge for yourselves the description I’ll read to you now.

Caputh is one of the largest villages in the Mark, and certainly one of the longest; it easily measures a half-mile. Its name points to the fact that it’s Wendish. There are too many theories as to what the name actually means for any to have much merit. As certain as the meaning of the name is uncertain was the poverty of its residents in the old days. Caputh has no fields, and the large expanse of water at its doorstep, the river Havel, along with Lake Schwielow, was jealously guarded and exploited by the local Potsdam fishermen, whose time-honored dominion stretched over the entire middle Havel until Brandenburg. So, things were bad for the people of Caputh; farming and fishing were equally unavailable. But necessity being the mother of invention, ultimately the people of this narrow strip of coastline found a way to survive. They devised a two-pronged scheme to make ends meet; men and women divided to attack the problem from two sides. The men became boatmen while the women took up gardening.

Proximity to Potsdam, and above all the rapid growth of Berlin, favored the Caputher’s transformation from day laborer into boatman or boat-builder, perhaps even evoked it. Brickworks sprung up all along the Havel and Schwielow, and the millions of bricks baked year in and year out on the shores of these lakes and their inlets required hundreds of boats to ferry them to the Berlin market. For this the Caputhers lent a hand. An entire fleet arose, and at this very moment more than sixty vessels, all built at village wharves, are plying Schwielow, the Havel, and the Spree. The usual destination, as already implied, is the capital. A fraction, however, also sails down the Havel to the Elbe and ultimately does business in Hamburg.

However, Caputh — the Chicago of Lake Schwielow — is not merely the great trade emporium of this region, not merely a point of arrival and departure for the Zauche-Havelland brick districts, no, it is also a port that all Havel traffic must pass through. The detour through Schwielow is unavoidable; for the time being there is only this one navigable strait. A shortened route through the North Canal has been planned but not yet carried out. And so, Caputh, home to a fleet of boats made from its own resources, would fare perfectly well on its own if it ever needed to. At the same time it has become an all-around maritime and trading center, a harbor for ships from other regions, and, were disaster to strike or hurricanes to loom, the flotillas of Rathenow, Plaue, and Brandenburg could descend and drop anchor here. But the strait through Caputh is most exciting when there’s some big festival and custom dictates closing it to traffic. Pentecost is a particular highlight, when everything converges here; on either side of the strait lie a hundred ships or more, banners waving, and high atop the masts, a delightful sight: one hundred May bushes saluting the horizon.

This is the grand side of Caputh life, but there’s also a small side. The men possess the recklessness of the seafarer; their money acquired over months of work is spent in just a few hours, when it then falls to the women to bring the accounts into order through their industriousness and the earnings brought by their small labors.

As we already mentioned, they are gardeners; nurturing the soil requires meticulous care, and individual crops are so skillfully cultivated that the Caputhers can even compete with their neighbors in Werder. Chief among their crops is the strawberry, which also reaps benefits from the close proximity of the two capitals: there are small-scale gardeners who in three to four weeks, with a half-acre garden plot, take in 120 thalers for their pineapple-strawberries. However, these ventures remain small-scale, and even here in Caputh it is apparent that the more sophisticated crops don’t add up to much and that fifty acres of wheat is still the best and easiest option.⁷

It’s always nice when what’s in a book is not just what the title promises, but all sorts of wonderful things you never would have imagined when you picked it up. Such is the case with these Wanderings. Not only does Fontane talk about the Mark and its inhabitants in his day, he also tries to imagine what it looked like in earlier times. He is especially intent on discovering the peculiarities and quirks of the former inhabitants of the Mark. Among the strangest stories he happened upon concern the conspiracies circulating in this region before 1800, especially among the Potsdam aristocracy. These plots and secret alliances were not so much about people as about nature, from which they hoped to wrest the secret of gold. If you could synthesize gold, so people thought, you would know all of nature’s secrets. In those days only very fanciful people believed it was possible to make gold. Today, even great scholars no longer hold it to be impossible. But people no longer pride themselves on having nature in their grasp. We are continually working on an infinite number of technical problems whose solutions would be much more significant in a practical sense than making gold. In those days no one ever dared dream of such things as power generation, transportation systems, radio photography,⁸ the manufacture of synthetic medications, and so on, which is why people were so interested in making gold. Potsdam was home to several societies intent on the pursuit of the “philosopher’s stone,” the name for the magic that would materialize gold and whose possessor would become not only rich, but also wise and all-powerful.

Fontane tells us of one such society. From a letter found in an old book we learn of an order in whose ceremonies the harmonica plays an important role. The letter, from a harmonica virtuoso, reads as follows:

The address you gave me has provided me with a very interesting acquaintance in Herr N.… The harmonica meets with his utmost approval; and he speaks as well of various special attempts, which at first I did not properly grasp. Only yesterday did things become clear to me: —Yesterday evening we drove to his country estate, which leaves an extraordinarily handsome impression, especially the garden. Various temples, grottoes, waterfalls, labyrinthine pathways, and underground vaults, etc., treat the eye to such manifold diversity that the observer is left transfixed. Only the height of the all-encompassing wall would I do without; it robs the eye of a terrific view. — I had the harmonica and had to promise Herr N. that I would play it, on his cue, for just a few moments at a specific location. While waiting for this moment, he led me into a large room in the front part of the house and left me there, explaining that his presence was required to arrange the details and lighting for a ball. It was already late and just as sleep was upon me, I was roused by the arrival of several carriages. I opened the window but saw nothing conspicuous, understanding even less of the soft and mysterious whispering of the arriving guests. Shortly afterwards I once again succumbed to my weariness and fell sound asleep. I must have slept for an hour when I was awoken by a servant, who at once offered to carry my instrument and beseeched me to follow him. Because he was moving at a hurried pace, I could only follow at some distance, which allowed me the opportunity to indulge my curiosity and pursue the muffled sounds of several trombones that seemed to be coming from the depths of the cellar.

Imagine my astonishment when, halfway down the cellar steps, I spied a crypt in which, amid funeral music, a corpse was being laid into a coffin and a man, dressed in white but spattered all over with blood, was having the veins in his arm bandaged. But for the assistants, everyone was cloaked in black robes with unsheathed swords. At the entrance lay a heap of skeletons and the crypt was lit by torches whose flames appeared to emanate from burning wine-spirits, making the spectacle all the more gruesome. I hurried back so as not to lose my guide, who was just coming in from the garden as I arrived at the very same door. Impatiently, he grabbed me by the hand and dragged me away with him.

Entering the garden was like something from a fairy tale: everything lit by green fire; countless flaming lamps; the murmuring of distant waterfalls. Nightingales singing, the scent of blossoms, in short, everything seemed supernatural, as if nature had given way to magic. I was assigned my spot behind a garden house with a lavishly adorned interior. Moments later an unconscious man was carried in, presumably the same fellow who had had his veins opened in the crypt. But I don’t know for sure because now the color and cut of everyone’s garments were refined and glamorous, so they were all new to me. Then and there I received the sign to begin playing.

As I now needed to focus more on myself than on the others, I must admit that I missed a lot. This much I’m certain is true: the unconscious man revived after hardly a minute of my playing and asked in amazement: “Where am I? Whose voice am I hearing?”

Exultant cheering and trumpets and kettledrums were the reply. All at once everyone reached for their swords and hurried deeper into the garden where whatever happened subsequently was lost to me.

I am writing this to you now after a short and fitful rest. Only yesterday, before I went to bed, I certainly would not have recorded this scene in my journal, as I would have been more inclined to think it all a dream. Farewell.⁹

Let us hasten to return from this uncanny nocturnal rite to the light of day. We will now hear something of the inspection conducted by Frederick the Great in the vicinity of Rathenow on July 23, 1779, around the same time this ghost story takes place. The setting was the Dosse floodplain, which after years of work was finally drained. 1,500 settlers were moved there and twenty-five new villages were established. We have the precise transcript of how the king made the head magistrate, Fromme was his name, follow along beside his carriage for hours as he delivered his full report. You can see how sometimes it must not have been all that much fun to answer him.

The carriage was readied and the journey continued. Just as we passed the canals dug in the Fehrbellin marsh at His Majesty’s expense, I rode up to the carriage and said: “Your Majesty, here are two new canals, realized with Your Majesty’s grace, that are keeping the marsh dry for us.”

KING: Tell me, has canalizing the marsh helped you much here?

FROMME: Oh yes, Your Majesty!

KING: Are you rearing more cattle than your ancestors?

FROMME: Indeed, Your Majesty! On this estate I keep forty, on all estates another seventy cows more!

KING: That’s good. But there’s no cattle plague here in this area?

FROMME: No, Your Majesty.

KING: Have you had the cattle plague here before?

FROMME: Oh, yes!

KING: Just use plenty of rock salt and you won’t have the cattle plague again.

FROMME: Yes, Your Majesty, I use that, too; but table salt works almost as well.

KING: I don’t believe that! You mustn’t grind the rock salt, but hang it up so the cattle can lick it.

FROMME: Certainly, it shall be done!

KING: Are there other improvements to make here?

FROMME: Oh yes, Your Majesty. Right here are the Kremmen lakes. If they were canalized, Your Majesty would gain 1,800 acres of meadow where colonists could be settled, and this entire region would become navigable, which would help the town of Fehrbellin and the city of Ruppin tremendously; and many things could come from Mecklenburg to Berlin via water.

KING: That I believe! Indeed, such a thing would help you considerably, and spell ruin for many, certainly for the local landlords, would it not?

FROMME: With all due respect, Your Majesty, the lands belong to the royal forest, where there are only birch trees.

KING: Oh, if there’s nothing more than birchwood, then it should be done! However, you mustn’t make such plans without first checking with the landlord that the costs do not exceed the benefits.

FROMME: The costs will most definitely not exceed the benefits! Firstly, Your Majesty is certain to gain 1,800 acres from the lake; that would be thirty-six colonists, each with fifty acres. Then add a small, reasonable tariff: on the lumber and on the ships passing through the canal and the capital will yield good interest.

KING: Well! Take it up with my privy councilor Michaelis! The man will understand and I should advise you to turn to him on all matters, including when you know where to put the colonists. I don’t demand entire colonies right away; but if there are just two or three families, you can always arrange it with him!

FROMME: It shall be done, Your Majesty.¹⁰

Whoever has heard this conversation will also have a picture of the landscape unfurling like a gleaming, freshly laundered tablecloth. There is something extraordinarily broad and expansive in the landscape of the Mark, which comes across vividly in its endless succession of villages and settlements. Its sandy, marly soil does not lend itself to strong shapes; however, one is occasionally surprised to come across a steep precipice, or a gorge ripped into the earth. But the plain of the Mark, with its birch forests and vast acres of fields stretching to the horizon like a broad sea of gray and green, is the landscape’s most beautiful feature. It is so shy, subtle, and unobtrusive that sometimes, at sundown, on the water amid pillars of pine, you think you’re in Japan, and other times, in the limestone hills of Rüdersdorf, you imagine yourself in the desert, until the names of the villages here call you back to reality. Fontane strung some of these names together in a few light and airy lines, which we close with today.

And on this tapestry’s flourishing seam

the laughing villages prosper and teem:

Linow, Lindow,

Rhinow, Glindow,

Beetz and Gatow,

Dreetz and Flatow,

Bamme, Damme, Kriele, Krielow,

Petzow, Retzow, Ferch am Schwielow,

Zachow, Wachow and Groß Behnitz,

Marquardt-Uetz at Wublitz-Schlänitz,

Senzke, Lentzke, and Marzahne,

Lietzow, Tietzow, and Reckahne,

And lastly a garland of lively haunts:

Ketzin, Ketzür, and Vehlefanz.¹¹

“Fontanes ‘Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg,’ ” GS, 7.1, 137–45. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

The exact date of broadcast is unknown, but the text appears to belong to Benjamin’s broadcasts for Radio Berlin’s children and youth programming on the Berlin Hour, and was most likely produced in 1929 or 1930.

¹ This title was provided by the editors of the GS. Benjamin’s typescript does not have a title.

² The Mark Brandenburg is a German state surrounding Berlin. It is sometimes translated as the March or Margraviate of Brandenburg, from Markgrafschaft Brandenburg.

³ The Wandervogel (“wandering bird”) was a popular German youth movement started at the turn of the century. It promoted excursions in nature as a salutary, community-building alternative to urban life.

⁴ Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), German Romantic painter known for his desolate, haunted landscapes; Carl Blechen (1798–1840), German landscape painter.

⁵ Fontane’s Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg was originally published in five volumes from 1862 to 1889.

⁶ Fontane, Wanderungen, eds. Gotthard Erler and Rudolf Mingau, Part 1: “Die Grafschaft Ruppin” [County Ruppin] (Berlin: Aufbau, 1976), 1–3. For this passage, as well as for the subsequent references to Fontane, Benjamin’s typescript does not provide full quotations. We follow the editors of the GS, who provided the passages based on Benjamin’s notations.

⁷ Ibid., Part 3: “Havelland. Die Landschaft um Spandau, Potsdam, Brandenburg” [Havelland: The Region around Spandau, Potsdam, Brandenburg], 1977, 437–9.

⁸ Radio photography (Bildfunk) was a term used for an early form of television. It could be translated more broadly as the transmission of images.

⁹ Fontane, Wanderungen, Part 3, 335–7.

¹⁰ Ibid., Part 1, 430ff.

¹¹ Ibid., Part 3, 8.

CHAPTER 13. Witch Trials

The first time you heard about witches was in “Hansel and Gretel.” What did you take away from it? An evil and dangerous woman who lives a solitary and purposeless life in the forest and from whom you’d better steer clear. You certainly didn’t rack your brains about her being in league with the devil or with God, or about where she comes from, or what she does and doesn’t do. For centuries people thought exactly as you do about witches. Most people back then believed in witches just like little children today believe in fairy tales. But in the same way that few children, no matter how small, live their lives as if they were fairy tales, people in those centuries thought just as little about incorporating their belief in witches into their daily lives. They were content with simple tokens for protection: a horseshoe above the door, a picture of a saint or, at most, a charm worn under their shirt.

So it was in ancient days, and when Christianity arrived things didn’t change all that much, at least not for the worse, because Christianity was opposed to believing in the power of evil. Christ had defeated the devil, he had descended into hell and his followers had nothing to fear from evil powers. At least that was the old Christian belief. People back then certainly knew of disreputable women, but these were mostly priestesses and pagan goddesses and their magical powers were seldom taken seriously. Instead they were to be pitied, because the devil had fooled them into believing that they possessed supernatural powers. Over the course of a few decades, roughly around the year 1300 A.D., all of this completely yet imperceptibly changed. And no one can explain to you with any certainty how. But there is no doubt that it did indeed change: after belief in witches had coexisted alongside all other superstitions for centuries, while causing no less but no more harm than the others, around the middle of the fourteenth century people began seeing witches and sorcery left and right and soon enough they were carrying out witch-hunts everywhere. All of a sudden there was a formal doctrine on the doings of witches. Suddenly everyone wanted to know exactly what they did in their gatherings, what sort of witchcraft they were practicing, and whom they were out to get. As mentioned before, we’ll probably never fully understand how it all came about. But the little we do know is all the more astounding.

Nowadays superstition is mostly found among the simpler folk, where it takes root most firmly. The history of believing in witches shows us, however, that this was not always the case. The fourteenth century, when this belief displayed its most rigid and threatening face, was a time of great scientific progress. The Crusades had begun, which brought to Europe the latest scientific theories, above all those concerning the natural sciences, a realm in which Arabia was far ahead of other countries. Improbable as it sounds, these new natural sciences strongly promoted the belief in witchcraft, and here’s how: in the Middle Ages the purely speculative and descriptive natural sciences, which we now call theoretical science, were not yet distinct from applied sciences, such as technology. For their part, applied sciences in those days were the same as, or at least very closely associated with, magic. People knew very little about nature. Investigating and using its secret forces was considered sorcery. But sorcery was permitted, if it were not put to evil purposes; to differentiate from the Black Arts, it was simply called the White, or White Magic. Thus new discoveries about nature contributed directly, or in a roundabout way, to beliefs in sorcery, the influence of the stars, the art of making gold, and other such notions. However, alongside the proliferation and popularity of White Magic came interest in the Black.

But the study of nature was not alone among the sciences encouraging the terrifying belief in witchcraft. Belief in and the practice of Black Magic gave rise to a great number of questions for the philosophers of the time — who were all clergymen in those days — questions we no longer understand so easily today; and if we do grasp them, it makes our hair stand on end. People wanted to distinguish, in no uncertain terms, the sorcery practiced by witches from other forms of evil magic. It had long been understood that all evil sorcerers were heretics, that is, they did not believe in God, or did so in the wrong way; the popes had often preached exactly that. But now people wanted to know how to distinguish witches and warlocks from other practitioners of the Black Arts. To this end scholars deliberated at length, which would perhaps have been more absurd and curious than horrific if, 100 years later, when the witch trials had reached their high point, two men had not, in all seriousness, taken these vagaries and compiled them, compared them, and drawn conclusions from them, formulating meticulous instructions for determining precisely which acts of sorcery would be incriminated. This book is the so-called Witches’ Hammer;¹ I dare say that nothing else ever printed has brought more harm to people than these three thick volumes. So, according to these scholars, how could witches be identified? Above all, they had made a formal pact with the devil. They had renounced God and promised the devil to do his bidding. In exchange the devil promised them all things good — for their earthly life, of course — but since he is the father of lies, he almost never kept this promise, at least not in the end. There was an interminable list of witches’ deeds accomplished by the power of the devil, with explanations of how they were done and the practices they were forced to observe. Those of you who have seen the Witches’ Dance Floor and Walpurgis Hall near Thale, or have held a volume of Harz legends in your hands, will know a bit about it. But I won’t tell you now about Blocksberg, where witches allegedly assembled every May 1, or about riding on broomsticks from chimney to chimney.² Instead I want to tell you a few strange things you’ve maybe not read about, even in your books of legends. Strange for us, that is.

Three hundred years ago it went without saying that if a witch walked into a field and raised her hand to the sky, hailstones would shower down on the crops. With a glance she could bewitch a cow, so that blood instead of milk would come from her udder. She could bore into a willow tree in such a way that milk or wine would flow from its bark. She could transform herself into a cat, a wolf, or a raven. Once suspected of witchcraft, people could go about their lives as they wished, but there was nothing they could do that wouldn’t strengthen the suspicion they were under. So, at home or in the fields, in word or deed, at church or at play, there was nothing back then that malicious or stupid or crazy people couldn’t somehow link to witchcraft. And still today certain terms remind us of how the most innocent and naturally occurring things were associated with this belief: witches’ butter (frogspawn), witches’ ring (the circular formation of mushrooms), witches’ mushroom, witchweed, and so on. But if you would like to read a very short summary, a sort of guide to the life of witches, ask for the play Macbeth by Shakespeare. There you will also see how people thought of the devil as a severe master, to whom every witch had to answer, and in whose honor they committed their evil tricks and misdeeds. Even the simplest of men knew as much about witches as you will after reading Macbeth, while philosophers knew a good deal more. They advanced evidence for the existence of witches that was so illogical, a ninth-grader today would not get away with it in an essay for school. In 1660 one of them wrote: “He who denies the existence of witches also denies the existence of spirits, because witches are spirits. But he who denies the existence of spirits also denies the existence of God, because God is a spirit. Therefore, he who denies witches denies God.”

Fallacy and nonsense are bad enough. But they become very dangerous when order and logic are added to the brew. Such was the case with those who believed in witchcraft; the stubbornness of the scholars caused much greater misery than superstition had. We have already mentioned the scientists and philosophers. But there were worse culprits: the jurists. Which brings us to the witch trials — save for the plague, the most horrible scourge of its time. They spread like an epidemic, jumped from one land to the next, reached their apogee only to diminish temporarily, and seized on young and old, rich and poor, jurists and mayors, doctors and naturalists. Church elders, ministers, and clergymen were burnt at the stake alongside snake charmers and carnival actors, to say nothing of the women of all ages and social standing who suffered in even far greater numbers. We can no longer count how many people in Europe perished as witches and warlocks, but it’s certain to have been at least 100,000, perhaps many times more. I have already mentioned that frightful book, The Witches’ Hammer, published in 1487 and reprinted countless times. Written in Latin, it was a handbook for inquisitors. Inquisitors, interrogators really, were monks who had been invested, directly by the pope, with special powers to combat heresy. Since witches were always seen as heretics, they were targeted by the inquisitors. While one might think that no one would covet such a wretched task, there were still other jurisdictions burning to join in the fight against witches. There were both the regular ecclesiastical court of bishops and the regular secular court, the latter being harsher.

The burning of witches was not a part of old Church law, so for a long time, punishment for witches consisted merely of excommunication and prison. In 1532 Charles V introduced his new book of laws, the so-called Carolina, or “Procedure for The Judgment of Capital Crimes,” which called for those practicing witchcraft to be burned at the stake. But there was still the stipulation that actual harm must have occurred. Many jurists and princes found this law to be too mild and preferred to follow Saxon law, under which all wizards and witches could be burned, even if they had inflicted no harm. These multiple jurisdictions resulted in such terrible confusion that there was no longer any question of law and order. On top of all this came the notion that witches were possessed, inhabited by the devil; thus, people believed that they were contesting the superiority of the devil and that in this fight everything was allowed. Nothing was too horrible or too nonsensical for the jurists of the day to be at a loss for a Latin word to describe it: witchcraft was deemed a crimen exceptum, an exceptional crime, meaning a crime for which those accused could hardly ever defend themselves. They were treated as guilty from the very start. Even if they had counsel, there was not much the latter could do, because the suspicion was that any advocate who too eagerly defended those accused of witchcraft was probably a wizard himself. Jurists tended to see witchcraft cases purely as matters of professional expertise, which they alone possessed. The most dangerous principle they espoused was the following: in crimes of witchcraft a confession would suffice, even if no proof were found. For those who know that torture was the order of the day in witch trials, it’s plain to see how little such confessions were worth. One of the most astonishing things about this story is that over 200 years went by before it occurred to jurists that confessions given under torture have no value. Perhaps because their books were so jammed full of the most unlikely and dreadful, hairsplitting minutia, they couldn’t entertain the simplest of thoughts. And what’s more, they believed they were staying wise to the devil and his tricks. If, for example, the accused was keeping silent, because she knew that every word she said, however innocent, would get her deeper into trouble, the jurists would claim this was “Devil’s lockjaw,” meaning that the Evil One had hexed her, leaving her unable to speak. So-called witch tests, used when occasionally the proceedings needed to be shortened, were equally effective. For example, the test of tears. If someone did not cry under torture, it was considered proof that she was being aided by the devil; it would again be 200 years before doctors made the observation, or dared to utter the fact, that people suffering extreme pain do not cry.

The fight against the witch trials is one of the greatest liberation struggles in the history of man. It began in the seventeenth century and took 100 years to succeed, in some countries even longer. It began, as such things very often do, not with a realization, but out of necessity. Over the course of a few years individual princes saw their lands grow desolate as their subjects accused one another under torture. One single trial could spawn hundreds more, taking up years. Some princes started to simply forbid these trials. People gradually dared to reflect. Clergymen and philosophers discovered that belief in witches never existed in the early Church, that God would never grant the devil so much power over men. Jurists came to understand that slander and confessions provoked under torture could not be relied upon as evidence. Doctors reported that there were illnesses that made people think they were wizards or witches even when they weren’t. And finally, healthy common sense prevailed as people acknowledged the countless contradictions in the case files of individual witch trials and in the belief in witchcraft itself. Of the many books written at that time against the witch trials, only one became famous. It was written by a Jesuit named Friedrich von Spee. In his younger years he was a confessor at the deaths of condemned witches. When one day a friend asked him why he had gray hair at such a young age, he replied: “Because I’ve had to accompany so many innocent victims being burned at the stake.” His book, Cautio Criminalis, or a Book on Witch Trials, is not particularly subversive.³ Friedrich von Spee actually believed in the existence of witches. But he outright refused to believe in the horrific, erudite, elaborate, fantastical evidence used for centuries to brand just about anyone a witch or a wizard. In this one work he confronted all the ghastly Latin-German gibberish in thousands upon ten thousands of case files, letting his anger and emotion spew forth. His work and its impact proved how necessary it is to place humanity above scholarship and subtlety.

“Hexenprozesse,” GS, 7.1, 145–52. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, July 16, 1930. The Funkstunde announced for July 16, 1930, from 5:30–6:00 pm, “Youth Hour, ‘Witch Trials.’ Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin.”

¹ The Hexenhammer, or Malleus Maleficarum, by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, first published, as Benjamin mentions below, in 1487.

² The Witches’ Dance Floor [Hexenplatz], the Walpurgis Hall, and Blocksberg, situated in the Harz mountains, are legendary sites associated with witchcraft.

³ Written in Latin and first published in 1631, Friedrich Spee’s Cautio Criminalis, or a Book on Witch Trials, was a critique of contemporary legal proceedings against witches, including the use of torture.

CHAPTER 14. Robber Bands in Old Germany

If robbers had nothing else over other criminals, they would still be the most distinguished of them all because they alone have a history. The story of the robber bands is an integral part of the cultural history of Germany, and indeed of Europe as a whole. Not only do they have a history, but for a long time at least they also possessed the pride and self-assurance of a profession with ancient traditions. A history of ordinary thieves or crooks or murderers cannot be written; they are just individuals, from families where the art of thievery has been passed down only once, if at all, from father to son. With these robbers it is altogether different. Not only were there great robber families that propagated over several generations and great stretches of land, and, like royal families, forged ties between lineages; not only were there individual bands that remained intact for up to fifty years, oftentimes with more than 100 members, but they also had old customs and traditions, their own language, Rotwelsch, and their own notions of honor and rank, all of which persisted as legacies among their kind.¹

I was thinking of telling you today about some of the thoughts, customs, and convictions of the robbers. After all, it’s hard to form a clear picture of such bands from story after thrilling story about figures with names like Schinderhannes, Lips Tullian, or Damian Hessel.² However, more interesting and more important than knowing the life stories of a few robber captains is understanding how the bands arose, which principles they upheld among themselves, how they waged their battles against kaisers, princes, and commoners, and later against the police and law courts. In this vein I must reveal one of the best and most important of the robbers’ secrets, which we’ll talk about later, namely the language of the robbers and their robber script, their so-called Zinken, or secret signs. This Rotwelsch language alone tells us a quite a lot about the origin of the robbers. Next to German, Rotwelsch contains more Hebrew than anything else, evidence of the close ties the robbers had with the Jews from early on. Later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some Jews themselves became feared leaders. At first their involvement with the bands had been mainly as fences, or buyers of stolen loot. Since they had been barred from most honest trades in the Middle Ages, it’s not hard to see how this came about. After the Jews, it was the Gypsies who played the greatest role in the emergence of robber bands. It was from the Gypsies that these crooks learned their peculiar brand of artistry and cunning, along with how to commit a myriad of brash and daring misdeeds. From them they learned to turn crime into a profession, and eventually absorbed a number of their artful expressions into Rotwelsch. From both Jews and Gypsies the rogues and robbers also adopted quite a few unusual superstitions as well as hundreds of magic spells and recipes of the Black Arts.

Early in the Middle Ages, the robber bands’ main business was highway robbery. Because the princes were unable to keep the roads safe for travel, banditry, under certain conditions, became almost a proper occupation. This is indeed rather the way we view the robber bands, with whom the great merchant caravans often had to negotiate a certain sum to secure free passage through an otherwise perilous region. So it’s no wonder that very early on the robber bands developed a sort of gallant or martial disposition. I will read to you now a genuine robber oath from the seventeenth century, which goes like this:

On the head and soul of our robber captain, I swear: 1. that I will obey all of his commands; 2. that I will remain faithful to my comrades in all their undertakings and ventures; 3. that I will attend any such gathering that the captain may appoint, here or at any other location; my absence must otherwise be authorized; 4. that I will be on call and eagerly awaiting orders at all hours of the day or night; 5. that I will never leave my comrades in danger, but will stand with them until the last drop of blood; 6. that I will never flee before an equal number of adversaries, but will fight bravely to the death; 7. that we will readily offer a helping hand to anyone who may be captive or sick, or who has suffered some other misfortune; 8. that I will never leave one of my comrades, be he wounded or dead, in enemy hands if I can do otherwise; 9. that, should I be captured, I will confess nothing and, most importantly, will not reveal or betray the location or dwellings of my confederates, even should it cost me my life. And were I to break this oath, may I be beset by and succumb to the greatest of plagues, the most horrible punishments in this world or the next.³

Such chivalrous oaths are consistent with the information we have about other bands, namely, that they had their own administration of justice, the so-called Plattenrecht, or gang law — in Vienna today crooks are still called Plattenbrüder, or gang brothers. We even know of several bands that had elaborate hierarchies. There were privy councilors, senior magistrates, governing councils; some robber captains were even given titles of nobility. The leaders of one famous Dutch gang carried crowbars in their hands as a sign of prestige. The strong loyalty within a single band was in proportion to the low cunning of the tricks sometimes played by one band against another. One of the strangest was the trick the robbers Fetzer and Simon played on Langleiser and his associates, when he wouldn’t let them take part in the planned heist of a banker in Münsterland. In revenge, Fetzer and Simon and their companions committed a string of daring robberies in that area just before Langleiser’s, so that everyone was on the lookout for trouble and the planned hold-up could not be risked.

Betrayal was the worst crime of which a robber could be found guilty. The power of the robber captains was often so great that captured comrades who had only just informed against them retracted the accusations before the captains had even been confronted. In my interrogations, said a famous policeman, I witnessed the incredible power that a robber’s mere presence, his mere intake of breath exerted over others tempted to confess. Nevertheless, there were always some gang members who would betray their comrades in order to be treated more mercifully. The strangest such offer came from a famous robber, the Bohemian Hans, who promised, in exchange for his freedom, to write a compilation of crime lore that could be used to prevent crime in the future. This friendly proposal was not accepted; in those days there were already many similar books. The most famous was the Liber Vagatorum, or the Book of Vagabonds and Beggars, which was first published in 1509 and included a preface written by Luther,⁴ part of which I will read to you now.

This little book on the villainy of beggars was initially published by someone who, without giving his name, referred to himself simply as a man experienced in the art of deceit. He needn’t have told us so; the booklet bears it out. It’s a good thing that such a book should be not only printed but widely read, so that people can see and grasp how mightily the devil rules over this world, and perhaps will become wiser and learn, once and for all, to tread warily. However, the Rotwelsch language that appears in the book comes from the Jews, as it’s filled with Hebrew words; anyone who knows Hebrew will notice this.

Then Luther goes on to describe other advantages of the book: one learns that it’s better to fight beggars with charity and compassion instead of forfeiting, having fallen for their roguish tricks, five or ten times as much money as one would voluntarily give. Of course, these beggars, as they appear in the book, were not genuine beggars as we conceive of them today, but very dangerous characters who moved about in hordes and, like swarms of locusts, infested the city, often feigning illness or frailty. Not for nothing did cities in the Middle Ages appoint so-called beggar bailiffs, whose job was nothing more than to oversee the unending influx of vagrant beggars, thus minimizing any harm to the city. There were many fewer resident beggars than tramps from foreign lands, and to distinguish between them and the robbers was often as difficult as telling the difference between some tradesmen and robbers. Some pretended to be peddlers, lugging around their wares only in order to deceive people as to their true profession, thievery. As we have already said, the business of being a crook has changed over the course of time. The artful feigning of illness, a common practice in the Middle Ages, vanished over time as the influence of the Church weakened and alms grew more scarce. We can no longer fathom the number of tricks people used back then to prey on the sympathy of their fellow men. Such false afflictions had the advantage of giving the most dangerous burglars and murderers a semblance of harmlessness. There were people who attended church and, during the benediction, made themselves foam at the mouth by chewing soap, as though they were suffering convulsions. They then collapsed to the floor right before everyone’s eyes, ensuring that they would receive donations from the devout. The steps of the church were strewn with such riff-raff. You would find people there showing off arms painted with false shackle wounds: they made people believe they had been on a crusade, had fallen into the hands of heathens, and had languished for years as galley slaves. Others would shave the top of their heads, claiming they were priests on a pilgrimage and that robbers had stolen their belongings. Still others shook rattles, as lepers did in those days, so that people would not draw near but could leave them alms from a distance. To get a better sense of these wild and dangerous mobs, one can look to the secluded square where the same sort of riff-raff gathered in Paris at the time. Bleak and desolate, it was popularly known as the Court of Miracles because it was where the blind would regain their sight, the lame walk, the deaf hear and the dumb speak once more. There was no end to the list of ruses they attempted. Besides pretending to be deaf, which made it so easy for the crooks to overhear the location of things to steal, a particular favorite was acting the imbecile. For instance, if a hoodlum had the misfortune to be caught keeping lookout, he simply played the idiot and acted like he didn’t know how he got there or why.

But now, back for a moment to what Luther wrote in his preface to the Book of Vagabonds and Beggars. He says that the book shows how the devil rules the world, and this is to be taken much more literally than we would take it today. In the Middle Ages people were quick to assume that the most skilled and courageous robber captains had made a pact with the devil. This awful and, for them, almost always fatal misconception was strengthened by all sorts of supposed evidence, as well as by the fabulous superstitions prevalent among the robbers themselves. Everyone with an unsteady profession dependent on thousands of contingencies tends toward superstition, and doubly so if the profession is a dangerous one. Robbers were convinced they possessed hundreds of charms to make themselves invisible during a break-in, to lull people to sleep in the house they wanted to burgle, to ward off pursuers’ bullets, to find especially lavish treasures where they were targeting a heist. This was greatly enhanced by the misunderstood fragments of Hebrew the robbers had picked up from the Jews, and further still by the so-called demon seals, small squiggles, and dashes painted on parchment to ensure the blessing of evil spirits while committing crimes. After all, their cunning and bravery aside, most of these robbers were poor and ignorant, mostly of peasant origin. Only very few could read and write; but if the mysterious magic symbols in letters from Schinderhannes are any indication, even those who could read and write were not exempt from superstition. Many, however, knew as little about their religion as about math. There is a poignant utterance by a poor imprisoned robber who sought guidance from the divine, but received no answer: “We are told that our dear Lord and Holy Mother will provide such great assistance and intervention; but they never help us find where the money is in a farmhouse, tavern, or town hall.” There may even have been robbers who believed themselves to be wizards, in league with the devil. But bear in mind that in those days torture was still practiced, forcing the poor fellows to confess to all sorts of things they had never heard of before.

When torture was abolished in the eighteenth century, by and by people emerged who attempted to treat the captured robbers more humanely, not only trying to rehabilitate them with edifying principles and threats of hell, but also trying to understand them. One of them left us an elaborate account of the so-called Vogelsberg and Wetterau bands, in which he precisely depicts each one of these robbers. Should we think that the man whom he describes with the following words is a dangerous gang leader? “He is sincere, truth-loving, valiant, frivolous, passionate, easily excitable but stands firm behind a decision. Gracious, effervescent, vengeful, blessed with a lively imagination, a good memory and generally good humor. Of clear mind, naïve, witty at times, somewhat vain and even musical.” Those who have read The Robbers by Schiller will perhaps remember this description of Karl Moor. So there really were noble robbers. Of course, people made this discovery only when the robbers began to die out altogether. Or did they perhaps begin to die out as a result of this discovery? The ruthlessness with which they were pursued and punished up until that point, oftentimes by execution for mere theft, prevented a robber from easily returning to the life of a peaceful citizen. The cruelty of the old criminal law played just as big a role in the emergence of professional crime as the more humane law did in its disappearance.

“Räuberbanden im alten Deutschland,” GS, 7.1, 152–9. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt on September 23, 1930, and on Radio Berlin on October 2, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript, “Frankfurt and Berlin Radio, September, October, 1930.” The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung [Southwest German Radio Times], the Frankfurt station’s program guide, announced the broadcast for September 23, 1930, from 3:25–3:50 pm; the Funkstunde advertised it for October 2, 1930, from 5:30–5:50 pm.

¹ Rotwelsch is the thieves’ cant or argot in Southern Germany and Switzerland that developed as early as the thirteenth century. A “secret language,” it functioned both to protect criminals and to identify them to each other.

² Schinderhannes (nickname of Johannes Bückler, c. 1778–1803), Lips Tullian (c. 1675–1715), and Damian Hessel (1774–1810) were legendary German bandits.

³ See Friedrich Christian Benedict Avé-Lallemant, Das Deutsche Gaunerthum in seiner sozial-politischen, literarischen und linguistischen Ausbildung zu seinem heutigen Bestande [German Thiefdom: Its Socio-Political, Literary and Linguistic Development into its Current State] (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1858), 91.

⁴ The Liber Vagatorum, which discusses the varieties of beggars’ tricks and dodges as well as their language, was published anonymously c. 1509. Luther’s edition and preface first appeared in 1528.

CHAPTER 15. The Gypsies

You’ve probably never had the courage to climb the wheel spokes of a Gypsy wagon and look inside. But I’m sure you’ve all been tempted to; I know I have, whenever I see one creeping down a country road from afar. By the way, do you know where in Germany you’re most likely to come across one of these wagons? In East Prussia. Why? Because the region is sparsely populated and it’s much too far for people to go to the cities for distraction. The traveler folk know this, and that’s why you run into them so often in these areas. Of course these travelers are not all Gypsies, but there are quite a few who are; these days, however, we only encounter Gypsies in small groups of tightrope walkers, fire-eaters, or bear tamers. It was a good 500 years ago, during the rule of Emperor Sigismund, that they invaded Germany in large mobs almost like an armed tribe; since then, even as they held fast to their language and customs, their cohesion has grown ever weaker. Now there are hardly any more large bands of Gypsies, but mostly just large individual families.

These families are large because Gypsies have lots of children. They do not, thank goodness, rely on stealing small children from strangers. Over centuries, of course, this sort of thing has happened now and again. But one can rightfully accuse the Gypsies of enough dirty tricks that there is no need to denounce them for things of which they’re innocent. All the same, they’ve earned their bad reputation. When they crossed the German border in large hordes in 1417 they were initially received quite well. Emperor Sigismund granted them a letter of protection, which was occasionally given to foreigners in those days. Perhaps you know that now and again the Jews also received such letters of protection from the German Emperor. Whether these always helped is another matter. In any case, such letters provided their bearers with a number of important rights: they could not be deported, they were answerable directly to the Emperor and they had their own jurisdiction. And so it was for the Gypsies. Their kings, or voivodes as they were called, administered justice over their people and enjoyed safe passage. Just think of the tall tales they had to invent to obtain this. As for their origins, they said they hailed from Little Egypt. Not a word of it is true. But people believed them for hundreds of years, until the nineteenth century, when a great linguist — a friend of the brothers Grimm, a name familiar to you — spent many years studying the Gypsy language. He figured out that they came from Hindustan, in the highlands of West Asia. They must have suffered terribly in ancient times, for not a trace of this history remains in their lore. To this day they have — and this is rather puzzling — an immense pride in their national character, yet virtually none of their historical memory has been preserved, not even in legends. And why did they say they came from Little Egypt? The answer is very simple: in those days Europeans generally believed that Egypt was the birthplace of magic. And from the beginning it was magic that the Gypsies used to gain respect. It must be remembered that despite outward appearances they were a weak and unwarlike people; they needed some other way to assert themselves besides the threat of violence. Thus, deception through magic was not only a way to make a living, but also a recourse to their instinct for self-preservation. The centuries-long campaign against the Gypsies by the German police would not have been so drawn-out, and largely so futile, if not for the patronage of uneducated people, especially peasants. A house where a Gypsy child was born was alleged to be safe from fire; if a horse became so ill that it could no longer work, a Gypsy’s help was sought; if a peasant heard talk of treasures buried in a field, a nearby wood, or the ruins of a castle, he was likely to consult a Gypsy, for they were known as highly skilled at unearthing hidden treasure. This of course gave them opportunities for many lucrative schemes. Upon arriving in a new region, a favorite trick was to make a horse or ox artificially sick, and then to promise the desperate peasants an immediate cure in return for a good reward. And because they knew the cause of the illness they could cure the animal in no time at all, thereby further establishing their reputation for magical powers.

However, when it came to dealing with important people concerning the affairs of their tribe, they used altogether different methods. They cited letters stating they had originally lived in Egypt as Christians but had turned apostate, upon which the pope forced them to roam the world for seven years as penitence. Thus they were forbidden to settle in one place. Some contrived even more elaborate tales: because their forefathers had refused to harbor Mary when she fled to Egypt with the baby Jesus, they are forced to wander the Earth without peace. You may be wondering about the Gypsies and their Christian beliefs. They were just an invention to stir sympathy or, as in the story of King Herod, dread among Westerners.¹ Although doubtless the Gypsies once had a religion, its features are difficult to glean from their dark practices and even harder to ascertain from their folk legends, for, while their customs have remained fairly undiluted, their legends are a ragbag of their own fables and those invented by others. The greatest proof that they no longer have a religion is the ease with which they conform to others’ customs when expected to do so. For instance they attach very little significance to being married by a preacher, and even allow him to baptize their children. Old police circulars recall that baptisms of Gypsy children required close monitoring, as Gypsies would often have their children baptized multiple times to receive more of the gifts handed out on such occasions.

The letter of protection the Gypsies received from the Emperor did not remain valid for long. They became a burden, and in 1497 an expulsion decree was issued that called for all Gypsies to leave Germany by a certain date; any Gypsy who stayed was declared an outlaw and could be punished by anyone with impunity. Such orders were issued frequently over the years, sometimes for all of Germany and sometimes just for particular regions. As recently as March 31, 1909, the German parliament discussed how best to deal with the Gypsies. The public threats and bans had proved ineffective. Policemen, missionaries, and teachers considered the possibility of attaining better results with milder and more humane methods. Their idea was to move family groups of Gypsies into permanent settlements that lay far from one another. This plan began well, but when the first Gypsy schools were established, it was next to impossible to get the adult Gypsies to return home after walking their children to school. They were intent on remaining in class and learning along with the children. It also proved futile to get them to settle in one place. If they were given a hut, they would abandon it straightaway for a tent right next to it, provided the weather was not bitter cold. They stubbornly clung to this freedom of movement. They’re not lazy; in a pinch they can earn their living as tinkers, cobblers, sieve makers, and wire workers. But under no circumstances will they be persuaded to farm. Emperor Joseph II of Austria came to understand this as well. He was the first to attempt to improve life for the Gypsies in a more humane way. It was the 1760s, in Hungary, during a time of frightful persecution of the Gypsies. The rumor had arisen that secretly the Gypsies were cannibals. Many of them had been captured and executed before Joseph II intervened. But he wanted to do more: with the hope of encouraging them to become more sedentary, and above all to work the land, he forbade the Gypsies from performing magic or street entertainment anywhere in the empire, except in bad weather when the fields could not be farmed. But this didn’t help at all. The Gypsies stuck to their ways and continued to roam. The government tolerated them all the less for having acted as spies for invading troops. Their feel for the terrain and their extraordinary knowledge of the land often proved helpful for generals of enemy armies; Wallenstein had used their services during the Thirty Years’ War. So everything remained as before; even in winter, the Gypsies opted for any sort of shelter other than a house. Mostly they lived in earthen caves, shielding themselves from the elements with planks or large cloths carefully arranged to ensure that no fresh air would enter their abodes. In the middle there was a fire; around it lounged a group of half-naked figures. The talk was not of washing, cleaning, or mending; at most there was a flat cake cooking in the ashes, not in a pan, of course. Their only activities were cooking, roasting, eating, smoking tobacco, chatting, and sleeping. Or so claims a schoolmaster from Langensalza, who in 1835 wrote a very unfriendly book about the Gypsies to encourage the authorities to crack down on them more harshly.² But not all that he wrote should be taken as fact. No one could understand less about the Gypsies than this old breed of schoolmaster. And he’s certainly wrong about their idleness.

I don’t know whether Gypsies have ever offered you one of those funny wire-mesh contraptions they piece together in the quiet of their winter caves. You don’t see them very often any more, but they are little works of wonder. With a flick of the wrist a fruit bowl is transformed into a bird cage, the bird cage into a lampshade, the lampshade into a bread basket, then the bread basket again becomes a fruit bowl. But their main craft, their national art, is music. One might say that they’ve conquered entire countries with their fiddle. It’s impossible, especially in Russia, to imagine a large banquet or wedding without Gypsy music, and it just so happens that Gypsy women, through marriage with the Boyars, have ascended to the highest circles of court society. Every Gypsy is a born violinist, but in most cases can’t read a note. Their musical instinct makes up for everything; people say that no one plays the fiery Hungarian melodies like they do. Gypsies are never more proud than when they are holding their violins. There’s a story of a Gypsy who appeared in the council chambers at the castle of a Hungarian duke, and asked the assembled company if they would like to hear him play. Although it was a difficult matter they were discussing, the Gypsy’s offer was so proud and so irresistible that they couldn’t turn him away. The chronicler of this story claims that it was only while the Gypsy was playing his music that the duke arrived at the solution to the problem that had previously vexed him and his councilmen.

Gypsy music is rather melancholy. They are generally a melancholy people. Their language has no word for joy or exuberance. Perhaps this melancholy comes not only from having suffered in so many different places, but also from the dark superstitions that pervade their everyday lives. Have you ever watched a Gypsy woman cross the street? Have you noticed how tightly she gathers her skirts around her body? She does this because, according to the Gypsies, anything that comes into contact with a woman’s clothing can no longer be used. This is why cooking utensils in Gypsy wagons are not placed on tables or shelves, but are hung from the ceiling where they won’t accidentally be brushed by a piece of women’s clothing. Similar superstitions surround the Gypsy’s silver cup, his most prized possession. Imbued with magical powers, this cup must never fall to the ground, because the Earth is sacred. If the cup touches the ground even once, it is cursed by the Earth and can never be used again. But the strangest manifestation of the Gypsies’ inherent melancholy is found in their expressions of love: the silent, eloquent, and serious signs they use to communicate important feelings to each other. For example, if a couple has separated and the man wants to make up, upon seeing her he throws a card, or just a piece of paper, up into the air. Her reaching out to catch it signals that they’re reconciled. If she doesn’t move her hand, however, everything is over between them. And there would be many more such customs to tell. When Goethe was studying in Strasbourg as a young man, he took a passionate and solicitous interest in the most foreign and uncouth of tribes, including the Gypsies. He spoke about them in Götz von Berlichingen. At the same time he was writing the eerie, sad, and rather savage “Gypsy Song,” which you will find among his poems.³ Look it up sometime; reading it aloud would sound so scary that I will refrain from doing so now. But it will remind you of much that I’ve told you today.

“Die Zigeuner,” GS, 7.1, 159–65. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, October 23, 1930. The Funkstunde announced for October 23, 1930, from 5:30–5:50 pm, “Youth Hour, ‘The Gypsies.’ Speaker: Dr. W. Benjamin.”

¹ Benjamin refers here to a version of the previously mentioned legend whereby the Gypsies, having tried to prevent Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus gaining refuge from King Herod in Egypt, were punished with eternal homelessness by God.

² See Theodor Christian Tetzner, Geschichte der Zigeuner: ihre Herkunft, Natur und Art [History of the Gypsies: Their Origins, Nature and Ways] (Weimar and Ilmenau: B. F. Voigt, 1835), 93.

³ Goethe’s early drama, Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand: ein Schauspiel [Gottfried von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand: A Play] (1773), contained, in a previous version, the “Zigeunerlied,” or “Gypsy Song” [in Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, dramatisiert, or the “Urgötz,” 1771, published posthumously]. See Goethe, Nachgelassene Werke (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1833), 173.

CHAPTER 16. The Bastille, the Old French State Prison

On the French calendar, July 14 is marked in red. It’s the national holiday. On this day, for almost 150 years, they have celebrated the storming of the Bastille, which took place on July 14, 1789, and was the first great visible act of revolutionary destruction. The building was seized without much of a struggle. Yet it was a strong fortress; built over the course of fourteen years, from 1369 to 1383, it was protected by massive towers and surrounded by a moat. We still have many images of it. Gloomy and squat, it stood on the edge of the giant city. Its walls were over 400 years old when they fell. Though poorly armed, an enormous mob succeeded in forcing the commandant to surrender it in no time at all. When they stormed through the wide corridors, ransacking the fortress from its cellar vaults up to its rafters, many may have been surprised to find only sixteen poor prisoners inside this house of terror. And this was in proportion to the military presence in the Bastille at the moment of the assault, when the governor had no more than forty Swiss Guards and eighty old soldiers at his disposal. How can we comprehend the immense hatred the people of Paris had for this building, a hatred so savage that the revolutionaries who had granted the governor safe passage could not prevent him from being slain by the people? This is something I hope you’ll understand in a half hour.

First and foremost, the Bastille was no ordinary prison. Only people accused of violating the security of the state were sent there. Some were prisoners of the state, while others were prisoners of the police. Prisoners of the state were those convicted of alleged or actual crimes, conspiracies, treason or the like; the many more prisoners of the police were writers, booksellers, engravers, and even bookbinders who were in some way involved, allegedly or in actuality, with books unpopular with the king and his minions. The Bastille was indeed an unusual prison. On holidays, especially when the weather was good, carefree Parisians could be seen strolling on its embankments and behind the battlements of its towers. Elegant carriages bearing guests of the governor rolled across the drawbridges; musicians arrived to play at gala dinners given by the governor, that is, the director of the prison. Meanwhile, however, the picture inside its mighty towers and dark cellars was quite different. Those outside were as little aware of those inside as those inside were aware of their fellow citizens who were free. Narrow window guards, which are still found in many penitentiaries today, ensured that most prisoners saw no more than just a small corner of sky. Not to mention the dungeons, where a ray of light shone through one tiny slit in the wall, illuminating the cockroaches with which the prisoners had to share their cells. In Paris there were only rumors concerning who was actually held inside the Bastille. No one could prepare for his own arrest. Officers would suddenly appear and pack the captive into a carriage, which was just an ordinary cab, so as not to draw attention. When it arrived in the courtyard of the Bastille and the detainees were let out, the guards held their hats in front of their faces, for no one besides the governor was allowed to know who the prisoners were. Within the Bastille, of course, news traveled fast. Outside, though, not a soul knew who was there, and in a moment I’ll tell you the story of the man in the iron mask, whose identity remains a mystery to this day.

The arrests happened so quickly that people used to say it was fortunate to be arrested during the day, for at night one was hardly given time to dress. So quickly that we know of a servant who, when his master disappeared into one of these cabs, unsuspectingly jumped in after him and had to spend the next two years in the Bastille for the sole reason that his release would have been a nuisance. The warrant for the arrests were so-called sealed letters—lettres de cachet in French — which bore no marks except the name of the person to be arrested. The prisoner was often not informed of the reason for the arrest until weeks later, sometimes months, sometimes never. When I tell you that some cronies of the king obtained letters of arrest of this kind on which the name of the detainee was not filled in, so that they could add one at their discretion, you will guess that abuse became the rule. How things were generally done in the Bastille can best be learned from the story of the man in the iron mask, which I’ll read to you now.

Thursday, September 18, 1698, at three o’clock in the afternoon, M. de Saint-Mars, governor of the Bastille, arrived here for the first time from Sainte-Marguerite Island (home to another large prison). In his sedan he brought with him a prisoner whose name was kept secret and who was always masked. He was initially placed in the Bazinière tower — all the towers of the Bastille have special names; at nine o’clock, once it was dark, I was ordered to take him to the third room of one of the other towers, which I had carefully furnished with all conceivable necessities.¹

That is all we have in writing to attest to the man in the iron mask until the news of his death, which we find entered in the diary of the same lieutenant five years later, on Monday, November 19, 1703: “The unknown prisoner, always veiled in a black velvet mask, whom the governor brought with him on coming from Sainte-Marguerite Island, felt a bit unwell yesterday after Mass and then died today, at around ten o’clock at night, without ever having been seriously ill …”² He was buried the very next day; the lieutenant dutifully recorded in his diary that the interment cost forty francs. It is also known that the body was buried without its head, which, upon being cut off, was chopped into several pieces, ensuring that it was fully unrecognizable, and then buried in a number of different locations. In sum, the king and the governor of the Bastille feared that, even after his death, the identity of the man in the iron mask might still be discovered. They went so far as to order that every last thing he might have used be burned: underwear, clothes, mattresses, bedding, et cetera; the walls of his room were to be carefully scraped and whitewashed. Precautions included even loosening and removing all the stones in the walls one after the other, lest he had hidden a note somewhere or left some other sign by which he could be identified. His mask was not made of iron, though that is how he got his name, but of black velvet reinforced with fish bones. It was fastened at the back of his head with a sealed lock and constructed such that it was impossible for him to remove; indeed, no one could free him without the key to the lock. However, he could eat with it on with relative ease — the order was to kill him immediately were he ever to make his identity known. He was given everything he requested.

Judging by the respect he was shown, as well as by his fondness for fine linens, his expensive clothes, his skill at playing the zither, and many other indications, it was clear he was a nobleman. His table was always supplied with the most exquisite dishes; the governor only seldom ventured to sit in his presence. An old doctor in the Bastille, who occasionally would see and examine this remarkable man, later stated that he never saw his face. The man in the iron mask was very attractive physically, displayed good comportment, and captivated everyone with the mere sound of his voice. For all his apparent humility and subjection, however, it is believed that he was able to send a message to the outside world. The story goes that one day he threw out the window a wooden plate on which he had carved the name Macmouth. This tale has played a large role in the many attempts to discover the truth behind this mysterious man. Since the beginning, researchers have agreed that this prisoner of the state could only have been a scion of one of the noblest houses, indeed, in all probability a royal house. At the time, King James II ruled England and a son of Charles II rose up against him as anti-king. This anti-king was the duke of Monmouth. He was defeated and apparently executed on July 15, 1685. Almost at once, however, rumors arose that the executed man was an officer of the duke of Monmouth, who saved his master’s life by being executed in his place. The actual duke escaped to France, where he was arrested by Louis XIV. The man in the iron mask was alleged to have been this duke. I wanted to tell you this, but you should know that a great many explanations, hardly less plausible than this one, have emerged over the centuries. To this day, none of the many historians researching the case has found any conclusive evidence.

I told you how everyone released from this prison had to sign an oath never to speak a single word of what he had seen and heard in there. If today not all regulations are as strict as they’re made to seem, this was even more true back then, for we know a lot about the Bastille. And from whom should we have learned it, but from the prisoners themselves? The guards certainly had no interest in relating for posterity all the cruelty and harassment of which they were guilty. Of the many aristocratic or educated people who had been incarcerated in the Bastille, a good number published memoirs much later, or at least recollections of their years in the prison. But not in France, of course. Manuscripts in those days had to be smuggled to a foreign country, usually Holland, or if they were printed in France, the place of publication was given as Holland, usually The Hague. I will now read you a page from one of these memoirs, written by Constantin de Renneville, who was jailed in the Bastille under Louis XIV. The passage shows just how diverse the means of communications actually were among the prisoners, among whom all interactions were forbidden.

I was always eager to converse with someone. Man is born to be social; and this natural urge was sharpened even more by the solitude in which I lived. While the prisoners below me never answered me, those above finally did so by way of signals; but it was impossible, or at least very dangerous, to bore a hole in the ceiling through which to pass a note. It was very white and smooth; the slightest nick would easily have been noticed by the guard. After much contemplation, however, I found a way of communicating my thoughts to those above. It was admittedly slow and demanded much attention, but as such it occupied us longer and shielded us from the boredom of our insomnia. I contrived an alphabet in my head, which I performed by striking the wall with a stick and the chair. For A I tapped once, for B twice, C three times, and so on. A short pause indicated the transition from one letter to the next, a longer one the end of a word. After much repetition, those above me grasped it, and I was happily surprised when, in the same manner, they asked me who I was, why I was there, and so forth. When I was later privileged to be given a cellmate, I gave up this tiresome way of communicating. For five years I heard nothing more of it, and I was more than a little surprised when I later heard other prisoners speaking in the same manner with great fluency. My invention had been perfected; it came to be called “the art of speaking with the cane.” By necessity, others invented even stranger systems. There was an officer who was not acknowledged as the nobleman he truly was. In an attempt to validate his claim, he falsified a document that had been lost. Now he sat in the Bastille and to converse with his fellow prisoners, he took a piece of coal and drew very large, single words on the table in his room. He then dragged this table to the window and tipped it on end so that the table top appeared in the opening of the window. The words were written so large that one could discern them from the distant windows of opposing towers, and other prisoners answered him in like fashion. — For a while, one of the governors kept a dog, which often ran around the courtyard of the Bastille. The prisoners passed the time by teaching the dog to fetch; they would throw a wad of paper into the courtyard and the dog would pick it up and bring it back. When they had finally trained him to the point that he would drop the ball of paper in front of specific cells, they began to write messages on the paper before crumpling it up and throwing it. Messages were thus conveyed from one prisoner to the next by the retrieving dog. One day, however, the governor caught on and had the windows barred so narrowly that no one could throw anything out of them.³

As harshly as the prisoners were treated, nobody wished to see an inmate die in the Bastille. It was very seldom that people incarcerated there had been condemned to death at their trial, and if this were the case, they were transferred to an ordinary prison shortly beforehand. For the Bastille was held to be a house of the king, in which there should be no scandal. Therefore, in the famous discharge book, which I have already mentioned, even those who had been executed were recorded as having died of some disease. However, if one of the inmates actually became sick, unless he were an especially noble prisoner he was taken to the barber for bloodletting; only if he grew much worse was a doctor called. The doctor never hurried to the Bastille, as he lived very far away, and furthermore, wasn’t paid for the visit — he merely received a general stipend for his duties at the prison. If, however, the prisoner eventually became so sick that his life was in danger, he was either set free or taken elsewhere. As I said before, the ministry did not like to see well-known people die in the Bastille. There was much to consider. Everyone knew that many of the prisoners confined to the Bastille were innocent, sent there, for example, because they were owed money by an aristocrat who wanted them out of the way. But sometimes an enemy was so powerful that locking him in the Bastille was not enough; one day he might be released. So there were prisoners in the Bastille who lived in constant fear for their lives, not knowing whether their enemy might one day bribe a kitchen boy to mix some lethal powder into their food. The ministry was sufficiently aware of this potential crime that it ordered a sentry to be posted in the kitchen, to prevent anyone from coming too close to the kitchen boys and the pots.

One of the most astounding things for us today is how the prison meals depended on the prisoner’s class. Fifty francs a day were allotted for a prince — then the sums became drastically smaller: twenty-six francs were budgeted for the meal of a French marshal; for a judge or a priest, ten francs; the food for the common people — workers, servants, peddlers, etc. — cost no more than three francs. If I were to read you the whole list, you would see how the Bastille was equipped for visitors of all classes. As with other matters, however, here too the differences were often greater on paper than in reality. But there was one way in which all prisoners of the Bastille were equal: from the governor down to the lowliest prison guard, everyone wanted to make money off of them. There was never a chance that the money paid by the king for the nourishment of his prisoners would actually be used for its intended purpose. And it was no secret. Everyone knew exactly how much could be earned from administering the Bastille, and that the sums one governor had to pay to another to assume his post or to be named by him as his successor could be raised only by rich people.

The injustice committed during the arrests and interrogations of the prisoners of the Bastille was not alone in embittering the people to the point that the destruction of this fortress became the slogan of the first day of the Revolution. Even more galling was the singular brazenness with which, behind the walls of the Bastille, rampant excess stood side by side with the deepest misery. The chief of the Paris police conducted an inspection of the prison two or three times a year to be sure that everything was in order. In reality, however, this inspection consisted of a grand formal dinner, hosted by the governor of the Bastille for the chief of police. Only once all the finest wines, coffee, and the best liqueurs had been washed down, and enough time had been spent at the banquet table, did the chief get up from his chair and amble leisurely over to the towers and along the cells, peeking into one here and there; before long he was back in the governor’s reception rooms.

All of these things show how much the Bastille was a tool of power and how little a means of justice. Even cruelty and hardship can be tolerated if people feel that there’s an idea behind it, that the severity is not merely a matter of the rulers’ convenience. The storming of the Bastille is a turning point not only in the history of the French state, but also in the history of life under the law. People have not always been of one mind about inflicting punishment upon their fellow human beings. The oldest view, from the Middle Ages, was that every wrong should be expiated, not for the sake of human beings but to establish divine justice. The idea of reforming the guilty through punishment had caught on among bright minds long before the French Revolution. Later, in the nineteenth century, this doctrine competed with the so-called doctrine of deterrence, according to which punishments should above all serve a preventive purpose: punishments exist to dissuade those with bad intentions from carrying them out. The people in charge of the Bastille did not trouble themselves with such questions. Whether they were right or wrong was of no consequence to them, and for this reason they were swept aside by the French Revolution.

“Die Bastille, das alte französische Staatsgefängnis,” GS, 7.1, 165–73. Translated by Diana K. Reese.

Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, April 29, 1931. The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung announced for April 29, 1931, from 3:20–3:50 pm, “Youth Hour, ‘The Bastille, the Old French State Prison,’ presented by Dr. Walter Benjamin, Berlin (for children ten years old and above).”

¹ See Frantz Funck-Brentano, La Bastille et ses secrets (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1979), 126.

² Ibid., 127.

³ See Constantin de Renneville, L’inquisition françoise ou L’histoire de la Bastille (Amsterdam: Étienne Roger, 1715), 120–2, 131–3.

CHAPTER 17. Kaspar Hauser

Today, for a change, I’m simply going to tell you a story. But before we start there are three things you should know. First, every word of it is true. Second, it’s just as exciting for adults as it is for children, and children will understand it just as well as adults. Third, although it concludes with the death of the main character, this story has no real ending, so it has the advantage that it continues on, and that perhaps someday we’ll learn its ending.

Once I begin the story, try not to think: but it starts like some kind of story for adolescents, with pictures. I’m not the one starting the story in such a roundabout and slow-paced way, after all; it’s the chief court of appeals judge Anselm von Feuerbach, who, God knows, did not write for adolescents; he intended his book about Kaspar Hauser to be for adults. It was read all over Europe, and just as people breathlessly followed this tale for five years, from 1828 to 1833, you will listen to this story for twenty minutes, or so I hope. It begins:

The second day of Pentecost is one of Nuremberg’s most festive holidays. The greater part of its residents retreat to the countryside and neighboring villages, particularly in fine Spring weather, leaving the city, already sparsely populated for its considerable size, so quiet and free of people that it looks more like an enchanted city in the Sahara than the bustling center of commerce and trade that it is. On such a day, especially in those areas just outside the center of town, secret things can happen right out in the open while remaining secret nevertheless. And so it occurred on the second day of Pentecost, the 26th of May, 1828, between four and five in the evening: a townsman, who lived along Unschlitt Square, was lingering for a moment in front of his house before heading to the so-called New Gate when he turned around and caught sight of a young man nearby. He was dressed like a farmhand, and with a most awkward posture, not unlike a drunkard, he struggled to move forward, unable to stand upright and lacking proper control of his feet. The townsman approached the stranger, who reached out to him with a letter bearing the address: “To the noble cavalry captain of the 4th Squadron of the 6th Regiment of Chevaux-Légers Nuremberg.”¹

I must interrupt the story here, not only to explain that a Chevaux-Légers regiment is what we call a cavalry regiment today, but also to tell you that this French word was written entirely wrong, as if it were spelled just as it sounds. This is important because you will have to imagine the spelling in the letter that Kaspar Hauser had with him and that I will read to you in a bit. Once you have heard this letter, you will have no problem imagining why the cavalry captain didn’t tarry with the boy, but tried to be rid of him the quickest way possible, which was to call the police. You know that the first thing that happens when something is brought to the attention of the police is that they open a file. And on that day, when the cavalry captain, not knowing what he should do with Kaspar Hauser, turned him over to the police, the first file was created of what would become the massive collection of “Kaspar Hauser” files, which are preserved today in forty-nine volumes in the state archives in Munich.

This first file clearly states that Kaspar Hauser came to Nuremberg as a savage idiot, whose vocabulary consisted of no more than fifty words, who understood nothing that was said to him, and had only two answers to all the questions he was asked: “Wanna be a rider” and “Dunno.” But how did he come to have the name Kaspar Hauser? That’s a strange story in itself. When he was brought to the police station by the cavalry captain, most of the policemen were divided over whether he should be considered an imbecile or a half-savage. However, they all agreed that this young fellow might be concealing a sophisticated fraud. The following circumstance at first lent a certain credibility to this suspicion. The police came up with the idea of seeing whether or not he could write, so they gave him a quill with ink, laid a sheet of paper in front of him, and told him to write. He grew very excited, adeptly placed the quill between his fingers and, to the astonishment of all who were present, in firm, legible letters wrote the name: Kaspar Hauser. He was then asked to write the name of where he came from, upon which he did nothing but garble his “Wanna be a rider” and “Dunno.”

What these good policemen never succeeded in doing, and no one else has managed to do to this day, was to learn where Kaspar Hauser came from. But what people in the police station first whispered to themselves back then — that perhaps this fellow was a very skilled impostor — continues today as a rumor, or even a firmly held belief. Later on you will hear quite a few curious things that lend credence to this claim. All the same, I, the storyteller, won’t keep from you that I hold this to be untrue. The deceit that triggers this story is not to be found in the young man himself, but somewhere else entirely, which brings us to the letter Kaspar Hauser carried to Nuremberg.

“Noble Herr Cavalry Captain! I send you a young man who seeks loyal service to his king,” the letter begins.

This young man was given to me — let’s say foisted on me, secretly passed to me — in 1812, the 7th of October, and being a poor laborer myself, and having ten children on top of it all, I got enough to do just to take care of my own, and I couldn’t ask his mother. And I did not tell the court that the boy was foisted on me the way he was; I just figured I had to take him on as my own son. I raised him Christian and never let him take a step out of the house since 1812, so no one knows where he was raised; not even he knows what my house is called, or even what village it’s in. You can go ahead and ask him but he can’t tell you. Dear Herr Cavalry Captain, badger him all you like but he doesn’t know the place where I’m at. I took him away in the middle of the night and he doesn’t know his home any more. And he has not got any money on him because I got none myself. If you don’t keep him, you ought just strike him dead or hang him from the chimney.²

Accompanying this letter was a small note written not in German script, like the letter, but in Latin script instead. The note was also on different paper and appeared to be in completely different handwriting. It was supposed to be the letter left by the mother upon abandoning the small child sixteen years before. It explained that she was a poor girl. She couldn’t support the child. The father was in the Nuremberg Regiment of Chevaux-Légers, and the child, upon reaching his seventeenth year, should be sent along to join him. But here in the handwriting we encounter the first bit of deception to play a part in this mysterious affair: a chemical analysis revealed that both letters, the one from 1828 written by the laborer and the one from 1812 allegedly from the mother, were written with the same ink. You’re probably thinking that immediately upon this discovery, neither one of the letters would be trusted, and that no one would believe in the existence of the supposed laborer or the supposed poor girl.

Although Kaspar Hauser was initially put in the Nuremberg municipal jail, he was there less as a prisoner than as an object of interest, becoming one of the attractions for visitors to see in the city. Among the many genteel people whose interest in this extraordinary case led them to Nuremberg was the chief court of appeals judge Anselm von Feuerbach, who met Kaspar Hauser and several years later wrote a book about him, the beginning of which I just read to you. With Feuerbach the story took its decisive turn, for he was the first to not only marvel at Kaspar Hauser, but also study him with genuine interest. He very quickly noticed that the helplessness, idiocy, and ignorance of the boy stood in glaring contrast to his exceptional gifts and noble disposition. His particular nature and exquisite talents, as well as certain superficial details like the presence of vaccination marks at a time when only the finest families had their children vaccinated — all this led Feuerbach to the conclusion that the enigmatic foundling must be the child of a very well-off family whose relatives disposed of him to eliminate an heir. The family of the Grand Duke of Baden came to Feuerbach’s mind. Veiled references to the same suspicions even appeared in newspapers back then, increasing public interest in the boy. It’s easy to see how much all this must have upset those who had thought Kaspar Hauser would be discreetly banished to some Nuremberg poor-house or hospice. But this was not to be. Feuerbach, who as a high state official had something to say in the matter, saw to it that the boy was placed in an environment that would satisfy his now immense thirst for knowledge.

Kaspar Hauser became like a son in the family of a Nuremberg professor named Daumer, a good and noble man, but a rather odd bird.³ Daumer left us with not only a large book on Kaspar Hauser, but also an entire library full of curious works on oriental wisdom, secrets of nature, miracle cures, and magnetism. He conducted experiments of this kind on Kaspar Hauser, though in a very gentle and humane way. According to descriptions he gave, Kaspar Hauser seems to have been a creature who displayed great tenderness, clarity of thought, sober-mindedness, and purity during his stay in the Daumer household. In any case, he made enormous progress and soon came so far as to undertake to tell the story of his own life.⁴ It is through this endeavor that we have learned what we know today about the time before his appearance in Nuremberg. He seems to have spent many years in an underground cell where there was no light and no other living soul. Two little wooden horses and a wooden dog were his only companions, water and bread his only nourishment. Shortly before he was led out of the dungeon, an unknown man made contact with him, entered his dungeon and, standing behind Kaspar Hauser so he couldn’t be seen, took the boy’s hand in his and taught him to write. There’s no need to explain why these stories, written in awkward German to boot, created much cause for doubt. But here things get strange again: the fact is, during his first months in Nuremberg, Kaspar Hauser took only bread and water; he couldn’t digest anything else, not even milk. Furthermore he could see in the dark. The newspapers didn’t pass up the opportunity to report that Kaspar Hauser had begun to work on his life story, and it nearly spelled his doom. Shortly after it became known, he was found unconscious in the Daumers’ cellar, his forehead bleeding. He claimed that an unknown man hit him from above with a hatchet while he was beneath the stairs. The unknown man was never discovered. But around four days after the incident, an elegant gentleman was said to have conversed with a townswoman before the city gates, pressing her for news on the life or death of the wounded Hauser. He then walked with the woman up to the gate, where a police notice had been posted concerning the attack on Hauser. After reading this, he very suspiciously went on his way without entering the city.

If we had enough time — which I and hopefully you as well would appreciate — I could introduce you to another strange personage who appeared at this point in Hauser’s life, the distinguished gentleman who adopted him. We cannot explore this man’s role in the story just now, but suffice it to say that people were concerned for Kaspar Hauser’s safety and he was taken from Nuremberg to Ansbach, where Anselm von Feuerbach himself held the post of presiding judge. That was in 1831. Kaspar Hauser would live for two more years, until he was murdered in 1833. How, I will tell you now in closing. In the meantime he had undergone a striking transformation. After some time, as quickly as his mental faculties had developed in Nuremberg and his finer talents likewise, his development suddenly came to a halt, his character dimmed and ultimately, at the end of his life — he was no older than thirty-one — he had become an average, even mediocre person, who made an honest living as a court clerk and with paper crafts, at which he was very skilled. But apart from this, he displayed neither industriousness nor any great love of the truth.

It happened on a December morning in the year 1833. A man came up to him in the street with the words: “I bear greetings from the court gardener, who inquires as to whether this afternoon you might not like to be shown the artesian well in the park, at such-and-such a time.” Around four o’clock Kaspar Hauser showed up at the court gardens. Not seeing anyone at the artesian well, he continued on another hundred steps. A man then emerged from the bushes and gestured to him with a violet bag, saying: “I give you this bag as a gift!” Kaspar Hauser had hardly touched it when he felt a stab, the man disappeared, Kaspar let the bag fall to the ground and then dragged himself home. But the wound was fatal. He died three days later, but not before being questioned. Whether this unknown man was the same that had tried to kill him in Nuremberg four years earlier remained as murky as everything else. There were even people who claimed the stab wound was inflicted by Kaspar Hauser on himself. But the bag was found, and with it something quite extraordinary. It contained only a folded note, with a message written in mirror script: “Hauser will be able to reveal to you exactly what I look like and whence I come. To spare Hauser the trouble, I will tell you myself where I am from. I come from the Bavarian frontier. I will even tell you my name.” But what followed were just three capital letters: M L O.

I’ve already told you that there are forty-nine volumes of files in the Munich State Archives. King Ludwig I, who took great interest in the affair, is said to have examined them all. And many scholars have since followed suit. The dispute over whether or not Kaspar Hauser was a Baden prince is still unsettled. Every year there’s some new book claiming to solve the riddle at last. We can wager a hundred to one that when you’re all grown up, there will still be people unable to tear themselves away from this story. If such a book falls into your hands, perhaps you’ll read it, to see whether it holds the resolution that the radio station still owes you.

“Caspar Hauser,” GS, 7.1, 174–80. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, November 22, 1930, and on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, December 17, 1930. The broadcast was announced in the Funkstunde for November 22, 1930, from 3:20–3:40 pm, and in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung for December 17, 1930, from 3:25–3:50 pm.

¹ Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, Kaspar Hauser: Beispiel eines Verbrechens am Seelenleben des Menschen [Kaspar Hauser: A Case of a Crime against the Soul of a Human Being] (Ansbach: Dollfuss, 1932), 1–2. Feuerbach’s book was greatly influential in making Kaspar Hauser and his case famous throughout Europe and beyond.

² Feuerbach, Kaspar Hauser, 12–14.

³ Georg Friedrich Daumer (1800–1875) played host and teacher to Kaspar Hauser and wrote several books about him.

⁴ For Kaspar Hauser’s autobiography, see Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 187–95.

CHAPTER 18. Dr. Faust

As a boy I learned history from the Neubauer, which is still used in many schools, I believe, but perhaps now looks different than it did in those days.¹ Back then what especially struck me about the book was that most of its pages were divided into large and small print. The parts in large print covered princes, wars, peace treaties, alliances, dates, etc., which we had to learn, though I did not enjoy doing so. The parts in small print dealt with so-called cultural history, including the habits and customs of people in earlier times, their convictions, their art, their knowledge, their buildings, and so on. Learning these things wasn’t required. We only had to read them over, and this I enjoyed greatly. As far I was concerned, there could have been even more of it, no matter how small the print. There wasn’t much discussion of it during class. Our German teacher would say: “We’ll hear about that in history class,” and our history teacher: “We’ve already heard about that in German class.” In the end, we heard almost nothing about it.

About Faust, for instance, maybe they told us that Goethe’s great drama is based on more than 200 years of lore concerning the arch-magician Johann Faust and his eternal pact with the devil; they told us that his life is depicted in ten or twenty books, which all trace back to two in particular, the first published in 1587 and the second in 1599;² and perhaps they even told us that Dr. Johann Faust had indeed been a real person. But that was the extent of it. We didn’t hear what the first books said of the many magic stories, journeys, and adventures that filled his life, although not only are they important in order to understand Goethe’s Faust, they’re also fun.

To plunge right into it, I’ll tell you one of the most savage magic stories there is, which bears no resemblance to anything I’ve found in other books of legends. Admittedly, it’s not the only tale in which a magician knocks off someone’s head and then miraculously puts it back on. Now let’s hear the story:

Once when Faust was being fêted in a tavern by a few spirited fellows, they requested that he perform the magical decapitation of a man and the reattachment of his head. The houseboy offered himself as the subject of this endeavor and Faust proceeded to knock his head off. But when he wanted to place it back on, it wouldn’t go, leading Faust to conclude that one of the guests was interfering with magic of his own. Faust admonished the guests and, since the guilty party would not lift his spell, he made a lily sprout up from the table and cut off its blossom with the knife. At once, the head of the guest who had obstructed Faust’s magic fell from the trunk of his body. Faust then restored the houseboy’s head to his torso and went on his merry way.³

In those days such performances were referred to by the scholarly term magia innaturalis, meaning unnatural magic, as opposed to magia naturalis, or natural magic, which was what we today call physics and chemistry and technology. The Faust we hear of in the first Faust book dealt more in the first type of magic — blatant, shameless magic that he exploited to obtain bags of money, good meals, expensive wine, trips to faraway lands on a magic coat, and other such things. However, the Faust from the theater, and also from the puppet play you will hear a little of later, as well as in Goethe’s drama, is not a rogue, but simply a man who consecrates himself to the devil in order to partake in the secrets of nature, and thus in natural magic. Indeed, the puppet play starts right off with the devil conversing in hell with his minister Charon, telling him how dull it’s getting being surrounded by all the miserable wretches that land in hell. I’d like, he says, to get just one great man down here. The devil Mephistopheles then seeks out Faust in order to seduce him.⁴

To summarize, this Faust was born in southern Germany probably around 1490. He would later scrape by as a student, giving lectures and teaching school, as was common at that time. In Heidelberg on January 15, 1509, as we know from the university register, he received his doctorate. After this he began the gay life of the adventurer. In 1513 he came to Erfurt, where he called himself “Faust, the Heidelberg Demigod.” His path then most likely led him to Krakow, and finally to Paris, where he served King Francis I of France. He was also in Wittenberg. A passage in Luther’s Table Talk even makes reference to Faust.⁵ But he had to flee Wittenberg when his magic caught up with him, and finally, as we know from the Zimmern Chronicle, he died in 1539 in a village in Württemberg.⁶

This chronicle from Count Christof of Zimmern, the same from which we have the only notice of Faust’s death, contains something else of great interest. It is written in the chronicle that Faust left behind a library, which came into the possession of the Count of Staufen, on whose territory Faust died. Apparently people often came to the Count of Staufen to buy books from Faust’s estate for a hefty price. Indeed, we know from a seventeenth-century necromancer that he paid 8,000 guilders for a so-called Höllenzwang.

Now, what is a Höllenzwang? It is a collection of the incantations and magic symbols used to supposedly summon the devil or other spirits, both good and evil. I don’t know how to describe them to you. These symbols are neither letters nor numbers; at best they resemble sometimes Arabic, sometimes Hebrew, and sometimes convoluted mathematical figures. They make absolutely no sense except as a way for a master sorcerer to explain to his students why their incantations failed: they simply didn’t draw the figures precisely. This must have often been the case, because they are so convoluted that they can really only be traced. And the words in a Höllenzwang, a gobbledygook of Latin, Hebrew, and German, sound very bombastic and also make no sense.

You can imagine that people back then had a different opinion on the matter. Indeed, the Höllenzwang was considered so dangerous that the Frankfurt typographer Johann Spieß, who in 1587 printed the first book about Faust and wrote the foreword to it, remarked that after much deliberation he left out everything that could have caused offense, that is to say the incantations that would have been found in the magic library. You should think of this magic library, of which there were actually quite a few in the Middle Ages, less as a collection of books, for they were not even printed, and more as a pile of handwritten notebooks, almost like chemistry or math notebooks. People were not altogether wrong if they saw possession of such books as dangerous; it was, though not because the devil would come into their houses through the chimney, but because the Inquisition, were they to get wind of it, imprisoned those possessing magic books and accused them of sorcery. History attests to cases in which just owning the book of folk tales about Dr. Faust had dire consequences. Indeed, all sorts of things could have the most dreadful consequences. When later you read Goethe’s Faust, you will learn how Faust takes in a stray dog he finds while on an Easter stroll by the city gate. Afterwards, while he is studying in his room, the poodle disturbs him with its noisy antics, prompting Goethe’s Faust to say:

If you wish to share this cell with me,

poodle, stop your yowling;

bark no more.

A nuisance such as you

I cannot suffer in my presence.

One of us must leave this room;

I now reluctantly suspend

the law of hospitality.

The door is open, you are free to go.

But what is this?

Is this a natural occurrence?

Is it shadow or reality?

How broad and long my poodle waxes!

He rises up with mighty strength;

this is no dog’s anatomy!

What a specter did I bring into my house!

Now he’s very like a river horse

with glowing eyes and vicious teeth.

Oh! I am sure of you!

For such a half-satanic brood

the key of Solomon will do.⁷

This poodle is a shape-shifting demon. The magic books refer to him as Praestigiar, which can be roughly translated as magical deceiver. The old books state that on Faust’s command, this poodle could turn white, brown, or red, and that upon his death Faust bequeathed him to an abbot in Halberstadt, who was none too pleased to own the poodle; in fact, his life would end very soon thereafter. Just how firm was the popular belief in such nonsensical ghost stories can be seen in the fact that a great scholar — Agrippa von Nettesheim was his name — had to be defended by one of his students expressly against accusations of sorcery, based in part on the fact that Agrippa was always seen in the company of a black poodle.

There were passages in the first Faust stories that people accepted, as we do today, as strange, sometimes spooky, sometimes amusing ghost stories that they didn’t fret about too much. But there were also other passages, and other readers. As shown by the use of the term “natural magic” for physics and chemistry, these sciences were not thought to be as distinct from magic as they are for us today. For example, when in several stories Faust shows curious princes or students images of the ancient Greeks, Homer, Achilles, Helen of Troy, etc., it was considered magic, and even if some of the readers of such stories had already seen or heard of the laterna magica, such knowledge confirmed rather than refuted the magic of Dr. Faust. As far as these people were concerned, the ability to use the camera obscura, upon which the principle of the laterna magica is based, counted as magic, hence the name laterna magica, or magic lantern; similarly, the difference between the first attempts at flying, which were undertaken using air balloons, and Faust’s flights on his magic coat was not as clear-cut as it is for us today. What’s more, many medicinal prescriptions, which we may now consider natural and sensible, were seen as magical.

In those days there was a fine line between being considered a sorcerer or a scholar. The sorcerer was abhorred for being in league with the devil, while the scholar was revered as a higher being; this later became of great importance for Goethe’s Faust. The puppet play conveyed the same message in its own way: even the least sophisticated spectators could recognize what an unusual man this Faust was when they were presented with Hanswurst as a foil, who also had a pact with the devil; he remains as silly and foolish as before yet eventually manages to break loose from the devil.⁸ The best passage in the puppet play is at the end of Faust’s life, when the poor, haunted Faust meets the dull, boring Hanswurst. The devil has long since lost interest in Hanswurst, but plans to fetch Faust in two hours. Let me read it to you:

FAUST: Nowhere do I find rest and repose, everywhere it follows me, the vision of hell. Oh why was I not steadfast in my scheme, why did I let myself be swayed? The evil spirit knew to grasp me at my weakest point; I have irrevocably slid into hell. Even Mephistopheles has abandoned me, just now at my unhappiest hour, when I am most in need of diversion. Mephistopheles, Mephistopheles, where are you?

Mephistopheles appears as the devil.

MEPHISTOPHELES: Faust, how do you like me now?

FAUST: What’s gotten into you? Have you forgotten that you are obliged to appear to me in human form?

MEPHISTOPHELES: No, not anymore, because your time has expired. Three more hours and then you’re mine.

FAUST: Eh? What is that you say, Mephistopheles? My time has expired? You must be lying. Only twelve years have elapsed. Therefore twelve years remain that you must serve me.

MEPHISTOPHELES: I’ve served you for twenty-four years.

FAUST: But how is that possible? You changed the calendar?

MEPHISTOPHELES: No, that I can’t do. But listen to me carefully. You are demanding twelve more years.

FAUST: Indeed I am — our contract says four-and-twenty years.

MEPHISTOPHELES: Indeed it does, but we didn’t account for me serving you day and night. And you harried me day and night, so, add on the nights and you’ll see that our contract is coming to an end.

FAUST: Father of all lies! You’ve betrayed me.

MEPHISTOPHELES: No, you have betrayed yourself.

FAUST: Let me live just one more year.

MEPHISTOPHELES: Not even a day.

FAUST: Just one more month.

MEPHISTOPHELES: Not an hour longer.

FAUST: Just one more day, so I can take leave of my good friends.⁹

But Mephistopheles has nothing more to say on the matter. He has served long enough: “We meet again at twelve o’clock.” And with these words he takes leave of Faust.

You can imagine the excitement and suspense when the audience suddenly sees Hanswurst enter the puppet stage, slow and steady as a night watchman, leisurely calling out the top of each hour. Three times.

“Listen all and count alike, now the clock doth ten times strike,” and so on: the old German night watchman song.

Thus Faust has two more hours to live, two hours until twelve. In his final quarter of an hour he meets Hanswurst. So that, for all his mistakes, we don’t feel sorry for Faust when the devil finally comes for him, and so that we may palpably feel his utter desperation, the writer of the old puppet play has Faust try to save himself by means of a pathetic scam, which fails. Let’s hear how:

Hanswurst catches sight of Faust and says: “Well, good evening, my dear Sir Faust, good evening. Still out on the street?”

FAUST: Why yes, my servant, I haven’t a moment’s peace, on the street or at home.

HANSWURST: And rightly so. You see, I’m having a rough go of it myself at the moment — and you still owe me last month’s pay. Be so kind as to give it to me now — I really need it.

FAUST: Alas, my servant, I have nothing — the devil has made me so poor, I don’t even own myself anymore. (Aside.) I must try to use this fool to wrest myself free from the devil. (To outwit Hanswurst.) Yes, my dear servant, although I have no money, I’d hate to leave this world without first paying you. Here’s what I propose: take off your clothes and put on mine. That way you get your payment and I lose my debt.

HANSWURST (shaking his head): Oh no, then the devil would be likely to nab the wrong guy. No, before any great mistake occurs, I’d prefer just to forget the money. And in exchange, you can do me a favor.

FAUST: Gladly, what is it?

HANSWURST: Say hello to my grandmother. She’s in hell number eleven, just to the right when you walk in.

Hanswurst hurries off. We hear him singing from behind the stage:

Listen all and count alike,

now the clock doth twelve times strike.

Guard the fire and guard the coal

The devil comes for Dr. Faust’s soul.¹⁰

The clock strikes twelve, and with thunder, brimstone, and lightning, an entire company of devils emerges from hell to fetch Faust.

Goethe saw this puppet play as a young boy. He began composing Faust before he was thirty years old, and he was eighty when he finished writing it. His Faust similarly made a pact with the devil, and the devil also comes to fetch him at the end. But in the 250 years between the appearance of the first Faust book and the completion of Goethe’s Faust, mankind had changed. More and more, it was understood that what had previously drawn people to magic was often not greed, depravity, or sloth, but rather thirst for knowledge and elevation of mind. Goethe demonstrated this in his Faust, forcing the devil to retreat at last before a legion of angels filling the entire stage.

“Dr. Faust,” GS, 7.1, 180–8. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin on January 30, 1931, and on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt on March 28, 1931. The Funkstunde announced the Berlin broadcast for January 30, 1931 from 5:30–5:50 pm. In Frankfurt, the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung advertised it for March 28, 1931, from 3:20–3:50 pm, under a variant title: “Youth Hour: ‘Der Zauberkünstler Dr. Faust’ [The Conjurer Dr. Faust] by Walter Benjamin, Berlin (for children ten years old and above).”

¹ Friedrich Neubauer was the author of the history textbook, Lehrbuch der Geschichte für höhere Lehranstalten [History Textbook for Higher Learning], (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1897).

² The first “Faust Book,” Historia von D. Johann Fausten, was compiled anonymously and published in 1587 in Frankfurt by Johann Spieß. Many subsequent retellings were to follow. The date of 1599 suggests the Hamburg edition by Georg Rudolf Widmann.

³ For a similar passage, see Das Volksbuch vom Doktor Faust. Nach der ersten Ausgabe, 1587 [The first Faust Book, based on the edition of 1587], ed. Robert Petsch (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1911), 144–5.

⁴ Modified by Benjamin from Das Puppenspiel vom Doktor Faust (Leipzig: Höfer, 1914), 5–6.

⁵ See Luther, Tischreden (1566), in Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Tischreden, vol. 1 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1912), no. 1059, 534–5.

⁶ The Zimmern Chronicle, quoted in Johann Scheible, Das Kloster, vol. 5: Die Sage vom Faust (Stuttgart: J. Scheible, 1847).

⁷ This translation is from Goethe, Faust I, trans. Peter Salm (New York: Bantam, 1985), lines 1238–48, 77–9.

⁸ Hanswurst, a traditional jester character in German-speaking comedy and a predecessor figure for Kasper (see “Berlin Puppet Theater”), appears in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German puppet plays based on the story of Dr. Faust.

⁹ See Das Puppenspiel vom Doktor Faust, 60–1.

¹⁰ Ibid., 65–6.

CHAPTER 19. Cagliostro

Today I want to tell you about a great swindler. By great I mean not only that the man was hugely unconventional and brazen in his swindling, but also that he carried it out flawlessly. His prowess for fraud made him famous across all of Europe; he was revered by tens of thousands, almost as a saint; during the years 1760 to 1780, his portrait could be found everywhere — on engravings, paintings, busts. He performed his séances, miracle cures, alchemies, and rejuvenation treatments in the so-called Age of Enlightenment. This was an epoch when, as you know, people were particularly skeptical of all forms of irrational tradition, claimed to want to follow only their own free minds, and, in short, should have been especially well protected from men such as this Cagliostro. At the end of the broadcast we’ll say a few words about how he managed to be so successful in spite of this, or rather because of it.

To this day no one knows exactly where Cagliostro came from, but one thing is certain: he did not come from where he claimed he did, namely Medina, or, for that matter, anywhere in the Orient; most likely he hailed from Italy, or perhaps Portugal. Of Cagliostro’s youth, one thing is clear: he was first trained as a pharmacist while, on the side, he taught himself all sorts of useless skills such as grave digging, counterfeit handwriting, panhandling, and the like. He never lingered anywhere for too long. He ended his life just as he began it: as a wanderer. Of all his stops, none was more important than London, where he arrived for the first time around 1750. It was there that he learned of the Freemasons and was most likely admitted to the order. His experiences in London, the strange and mystical tests to which he was subjected — some of you are perhaps familiar with the “Magic Flute,” with its fire trial and water trial, two masonic rituals — left a lasting impression on his fantasy worlds and his works of imagination. Cagliostro’s life goal was to do something extraordinary with Freemasonry. The actual Freemasons were a society that had nothing at all to do with magic, instead pursuing goals that were part humanitarian and part political. These were closely related, as their political activities were directed against the vicious tyranny of many European rulers of the time, as well as, of course, against the pope. But these comparatively prosaic ambitions could not satisfy Cagliostro. He wanted to found a new Freemasonry, a so-called Egyptian Freemasonry, a sort of magic society whose laws he plucked out of thin air. Yet his goals were more ambitious. As opposed to the hostile approach of the real Freemasons, Egyptian Freemasonry was meant to treat the pope in a friendlier manner. Cagliostro wanted to reconcile the Freemasons with the pope, and thereby acquire, as the arbiter of these two forces, the highest power in Europe.

As successful as this extraordinary man was all over Europe with his various schemes — which these days couldn’t get him from Magdeburg to Berlin — he occasionally ran into people who were not so easily fooled. And I don’t mean the physicians, who, wherever he showed up, would vigorously hound him, not so much because they knew he was a fake, but out of professional jealousy. Cagliostro operated according to an old charlatan’s trick; that is, wherever he settled for a while, he made sure it was known that he would treat the poor for free. And he kept his promise without fail. But on the sly he let on to the many genteel people who also sought his medical help just how impoverished he was by his selfless philanthropy: the prosperous and the high-born were positively honored when he accepted their gifts. When I speak of people who could see through him, I don’t mean just the doctors or the countless esteemed scientists and philosophers he encountered in his life who saw through his tricks. No, in order to speak frankly of Cagliostro, and wholly without reservation, it took a very pragmatic man, and it’s surely no accident that one of the most hostile, but also sharpest and most insightful portraits that we have of Cagliostro’s appearance and demeanor comes from a well-traveled salesman:

I’ve never seen such a shameless, pushy, self-important charlatan. He’s a short, plump, extremely broad-shouldered, round-headed fellow with black hair, a neck that’s fat and stiff, a thick forehead, bold and finely curved eyebrows, black, glowing, milky and constantly rolling eyes, a somewhat bent, finely curved and broad nose, round, thick, disjointed lips, a strong, round, protruding chin, a round, steely jaw: an auburn-skinned thoroughbred with a forceful and resounding voice. He is the miracle man, the spirit conjurer, the humanitarian doctor and helper who has lived lavishly in these parts for many years without anyone ever knowing where he gets his money. One cannot help but wish that all the transfixed adulators who surround him could witness a man take the trouble to adopt the same shameless character with him and to treat him as despicably as he does others; they would soon perceive what a miserable creature the empty braggart really is, as he has neither the natural gifts nor the education to hold his own against such a man for even a few minutes. And of course the man would have to be physically strong, in case it should be necessary to suspend the monstrous knave out the window with one hand and hear his final confession before he plummets to the ground.¹

You see that this honest salesman does not mince his words. But he’s taking it a bit too far; for it’s no accident that during the first forty years of his life Cagliostro never met his match. There has been a great deal of speculation as to the cause of this superiority. Many believe it was the power of his gaze; no one he looked at could resist it. And there’s also the fact that people back then were fundamentally hungry for such experiences. The more they distanced themselves from the Church, the clergy and all the rest, the more interested they were in any form of natural magic power, which in those days was thought to derive from a so-called magnetism found in people, and even more in animals. And what Cagliostro lacked in knowledge and education, he made up for with an exceptional knack for the theatrical. Hearing a description of just one of his lectures, delivered in all the cities he visited, is enough to make us understand the huge audiences he attracted.

In an almost pitch-black hall with walls covered in black velvet, he stood on a type of throne under a brocade canopy, wearing a black robe and a black hat with an enormous brim. Before stepping onto the dais, however, he strode through the so-called Street of Steel, a corridor created by two rows of his most distinguished followers, crossing their raised swords over the central aisle. The candles, which only dimly lit the room, stood on candelabras in groups of seven or nine — numbers to which Cagliostro attached particular significance. Then there was the smell of incense wafting from copper vessels, and the play of lights in a large water-filled carafe from which Cagliostro himself foretold the future, or where he delivered prophecies through a child. The lectures themselves began with him producing an esoteric parchment roll from which he read off a hodgepodge of incantations, ways of turning coarse cloths into silk, methods for transforming small gems into jewels the size of a hen’s egg, and so forth.

You might be wondering, what did Cagliostro want from all this? It is unlikely that someone who merely wanted to live the good life, to eat and drink well, would be able to muster the power and imagination to captivate Europe for twenty years with his fabulous inventions. Cagliostro attached at least as much importance to the imaginary eminence of the Freemasons and to power as he did to money. But that’s not all. No man can live for decades under the spell of fantastical ideas, holding forth about eternal life, the philosopher’s stone, the seventh book of Moses, and other kindred secrets that he claimed to have discovered, without believing them at least to some degree himself. Or, better put: Cagliostro certainly didn’t believe what he told people, but you can be sure that he believed that his power to make his fantastical lies seem credible was in reality worth as much as the philosopher’s stone, eternal life, and the seventh book of Moses put together. And that’s the crux at which his lies contain a kernel of truth. Cagliostro’s enormous strength actually derived from his belief in himself, his belief in his powers of persuasion, his imagination, his knowledge of human nature. This faith in himself must have grown so strong that it became something like a secret religion, quite different from the one he taught his students.

This is precisely what Goethe found so very interesting about the man; as you have learned in school or soon will, he wrote a play about him, Der Großkophta [The Grand Cophta]. But what you probably haven’t heard is that Goethe himself once played the role of Cagliostro, and not for the public, but for Cagliostro’s family. In his Italian Journey he recounts how he was sitting in a tavern in Palermo when the conversation turned to Cagliostro and his poor relatives; how he, Goethe, expressed his wish to meet the family of this extraordinary man; how this proved difficult and, indeed, only possible if Goethe pretended to have seen Cagliostro himself and to be carrying greetings from him to his loved ones; how this encounter awakened great hope in the family, causing Goethe to reproach himself for his little game; and how finally, to alleviate his bad conscience, after returning to Weimar, he sent a large sum of money to the poor family, which everyone believed to have been a gift from Cagliostro.²

You will notice that I have not told you much about Cagliostro’s actual life. And this is how I’d like it to remain, because every single one of his stops involves so many entanglements that telling his life story would take a great tome. In any case, his life ended like the jug of the story, which went to the well so often that it broke. After thirty years Cagliostro had reached the point that wherever he went, old and very unpleasant stories lay dormant, waiting only for his arrival to be reawakened on people’s lips. His stops grew shorter and shorter, and by the end he was constantly on the run. A respected newspaper, The European Courier, played an important and curious role in this decline, as I will now relate in closing.³ Among the multifarious medicinal and chemical absurdities that Cagliostro sought to promote was the story of the pig. He wrote somewhere that in Medina, where famously he claimed to be from, the people got rid of the lions, tigers, and leopards by fattening up pigs with arsenic and then shooing them into the woods where they were devoured by the wild animals, who died from the poison. Morande, the publisher of The European Courier, took up the matter and ridiculed it. This infuriated Cagliostro, who then presented Morande with a peculiar challenge. On September 3, 1786, he printed a leaflet inviting Morande to a feast on November 9, where together they would eat a piglet fed as they were in Medina, while betting 5,000 guilders that Morande would die from it, but he himself would remain healthy. Now, it’s quite a lot to propose to someone that he will die and on top of that lose 5,000 guilders on a bet. As you can imagine, Morande had no interest in taking up the offer. Instead he compiled a collection of disparaging facts and rumors about Cagliostro and published it in his European Courier. In the end Cagliostro fled to Rome, although because of his connection to the Freemasons, he couldn’t have chosen a place where he would have felt less safe. His friends were quick to inform him of the Inquisition’s intention to jail him, but Cagliostro was tired and stayed put. In 1789, Pope Pius VI had him arrested and imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo while he was tried by the Inquisition. Most of what we know today about Cagliostro derives from this trial, which seems to be have been conducted with great accuracy but also with astounding leniency. Nevertheless, it concluded unsurprisingly with a death sentence for heresy. In 1791, however, the pope reprieved Cagliostro and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. A few years later, although it’s unclear exactly when, he died in the San Leo prison in Urbino.

There’s much to learn from this story if you are so inclined. You could take the easy way out and simply say: there’s a fool born every minute. But on closer examination, the essence of Cagliostro’s story holds a more important truth.

At the beginning I spoke of the Enlightenment, an age in which people were very critical of the traditions of government, religion, and the Church, and indeed, we can be thankful for the great strides made during this period in terms of freedom and culture. It was precisely during this free and critical Age of Enlightenment that Cagliostro was able to turn his artistry to such advantage. How was this possible? Answer: precisely because people were so firmly convinced that the supernatural world did not exist, they never took the trouble to reflect upon it seriously and thus fell victim to Cagliostro, who led them to believe in the supernatural with a magician’s finesse. Had their convictions been weaker and their powers of observation stronger, they wouldn’t have succumbed. This is another lesson from the story: in many cases, powers of observation and knowledge of human nature are even more valuable than a firm and correct point of view.

“Cagliostro,” GS, 7.1, 188–94. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt on February 14, 1931. The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung announced the broadcast, with a variant title, for February 14, 1931, from 3:20–3:50 pm: “Youth Hour, ‘Der Erzzauberer Cagliostro [The Arch-Magician Cagliostro].’ Talk by Walter Benjamin.”

¹ From “Der Pseudo-Graf Cagliostro (Aus dem Tagebuch eines Reisenden, Straßburg, 1783)” [The Pseudo-Count Cagliostro (From the Diary of a Traveler, Strasbourg, 1783)], Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (December 1784), 536–9. See also: Der Erzzauberer Cagliostro: Die Dokumente über ihn nebst zwölf Bildbeigaben, ed. Johannes von Guenther (Munich: G. Müller, 1919), 185–7.

² For Goethe’s account of Cagliostro and meeting his family, see Italienische Reise, in Goethes Werke, vol. 10 (Gera: C. B. Griesbach, 1897), entry for 13 and 14 April, 1787, 312f (Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer [London: Penguin, 1992], 247f). Goethe’s play Der Großkoptha [The Grand Cophta], a satire on Cagliostro’s life and his involvement in the so-called Affair of the Diamond Necklace, was completed in 1791.

³ Le Courier de l’Europe was a bilingual political bi-weekly published in London and Paris between the years 1776–1792. From 1784–1791, it was edited by Charles Théveneau de Morande (1741–1805), who famously engaged in an exchange of accusations and counteraccusations with Cagliostro.

CHAPTER 20. Postage Stamp Swindles

Today I’d like to speak about something that even the most learned and clever postage stamp experts have not been able to keep up with: fraud. Postage stamp fraud. In 1840 Rowland Hill, a mere schoolteacher at the time, invented the postage stamp, for which the British government would later appoint him postmaster general of England, knight him, and award him a gift of 400,000 marks. Since his invention millions upon millions have been earned with these little scraps of paper, and many individuals have made their fortunes with them as well. From your Senff, Michel, or Kohl catalogs you certainly know how much a single one of them can sometimes be worth.¹ The most valuable of them all is not, as most believe, the twopenny “Post Office” from Mauritius, but rather a one-cent stamp from British Guiana, a provisional stamp from the year 1856, of which, evidently, only one specimen remains. It was printed at the local newspaper with the same crude printing plate used for shipping company advertisements. This single remaining specimen was discovered years ago by a young Guianese collector among some old family documents. It then found its way into the La Renotière collection in Paris, which was the largest stamp collection in the world. No one knows how much its owner paid for this stamp, but its catalog price is now 100,000 marks. Already by 1913 the collection it joined comprised over 120,000 stamps, and was estimated to be worth well over 10 million. Of course, only a millionaire could afford to amuse himself compiling such a collection. Whether or not it had been his intent, he earned millions more from his collection. Its beginnings go back to the year 1878.² However, the beginnings of stamp collecting itself date back another fifteen years. In those days collecting was easier than it is today, not only because there were many fewer stamps; not only because things that are prohibitively expensive now were much easier to come by back then; and not only because one could much more easily collect them all, but also because there were no forgeries in those days, or at least, none perpetrated in order to deceive collectors. Those of you that read stamp journals surely know that new forgeries are written about as something quite ordinary, even expected. And how could it be otherwise? Stamps can be so lucrative and the world of stamps has become so vast that no one can keep track of it all. In 1914, before the countless war and occupation stamps appeared, there were no less than 64,268 different stamps.

So, forgery. You know that whenever anything is collected it will be forged, without exception. While forgeries intended to fool the more dim-witted can be rather coarse and haphazard, others are too intricate even for the greatest experts to spot, and still others are so well executed that it takes decades to reveal them as forgeries, if they’re ever uncovered at all. Many collectors, especially beginners, think they’re safe from forgery if they concern themselves only with used stamps. This is because a number of states, particularly the Papal States, Sardinia, Hamburg, Hanover, Heligoland, and Bergedorf, reprinted rare sets of stamps that were no longer in use, and delivered them directly to collectors. These reprints, or, if you will, forgeries are all characterized by the fact that they’re not postmarked. But this is a special case that does not hold true across the board. There is nothing more preposterous than to say, “This stamp is counterfeit, because it’s not postmarked.” It would be much more accurate to say: this stamp is postmarked because it’s counterfeit. For there are in fact many fewer counterfeit stamps that are not postmarked: for the most part, only those where the forger, if we can use this word, is the state. The private forger who dares to counterfeit an intricately designed stamp can surely replicate a simple postmark as well. And when he has finished his forgery, he looks it over once more, very closely, searching for any irregularity that he can then obscure by covering it with a postmark. In short, collecting only postmarked stamps would protect you from some reprints but not from the great majority of counterfeit stamps. Very few collectors know which country enjoys the greatest reputation among stamp forgers, in other words, where the most successful counterfeits are made. That would be Belgium. Not only do Belgians counterfeit their own postage stamps — most famously the Belgian five-franc stamp — but they’re equally willing to forge foreign stamps, such as the one-peseta German Morocco.

To offload their goods, the forgers have found a great trick that both earns them more revenue and ensures they don’t get caught. They explicitly advertise their products as what they are: fakes. In marketing the counterfeit stamps as non-genuine, they of course forgo the huge profits of other forgers. But because their buyers, for the most part, intend to do just the opposite with these newly acquired stamps, that is, to sell them on as real, the fabricators can ask considerable prices for their wares, which they state are not counterfeits but rather stamps reproduced for scholarly purposes. They send their offerings to small stamp dealers along with literature boasting of the flawless replication of their out-of-circulation stamps, their admirable execution of a brand-new technique, the stamps’ painstakingly faithful imagery, overprints, colors, paper, watermarks, perforations, and — let’s not forget — postmarks. To guard against such goods, large stamp dealers have proposed a sort of guaranty, or mark of authenticity, that clearly indicates which respectable firm has vouched that a given stamp is genuine. Yet others have quite reasonably objected, asking why the image on an original stamp should be disfigured with a company’s seal, no matter how small. Instead, valuable stamps discovered to be counterfeits should be marked with a seal of forgery, or branded, in other words. Furthermore, not everything sold as a “replica” is necessarily intended as forgery. The famous 1864 Penny Black from England, for example, was reproduced a couple of times by the state printing office for the collections of a few English princes. Those of you who remain stamp collectors later on will have your own problems related to forgery, which will teach you more than I’ve told you today, and you will gradually find means to help you in the struggle against counterfeits. Today I’ll mention the title of a single but very important book, the Handbuch der Fälschungen [Handbook of Forgeries] by Paul Ohrt.³

There are many cases of collector fraud, including the private and state exploitation of stamp collectors, that do not involve forgery. Above all there are the countries that, so to speak, live off the postage stamp trade. In earlier times especially, quite a few smaller states relied on the deep pockets of stamp collectors to improve their finances. The discovery of this peculiar source of income can be credited to an inventive resident of the Cook Islands. Not long ago the 10,000 to 12,000 inhabitants of this island were cannibals. Along with the first objects and tokens of civilization to reach these people came postage stamps ordered from New Zealand. They were very simple stamps, made of gummed paper outlined in block letters. Nevertheless, the big stamp dealers in America and Europe took great interest in these editions and paid handsomely for them. No one was more surprised than the people of the Cook Islands when such an easy and lucrative source of income suddenly presented itself. They immediately printed new sheets of stamps in Australia, which were different from the first ones in design and color. There are similar stories from many South American countries, especially Paraguay, and even from the little Indian principalities of Faridkot, Bengal, and Bamra. Even shrewder than the sovereigns who profited in this way were private individuals, like the engineer who delivered two million new stamps to Guatemala for free, in return asking only for all the series of old stamps that could still be found in the state printing office. It’s not hard to imagine how much money he would later make from selling them. When things were going badly for Germany at the end of the war, even the German Reichspost followed the example set by these exotic kingdoms and principalities, and quickly sold their supplies of colonial stamps to private collectors.

Shall I now tell you an entirely different sort of swindle story, not directly related to stamp collecting? It’s one of the cleverest you could ever imagine. And it centers around a stamp collection, so maybe I’ll chance it. The story takes place in Wilhelmshaven in 1912. A well-to-do resident of the city sold his beautiful stamp collection, compiled over years of hard work, to a gentleman in Berlin for 17,000 marks and sent it cash-on-delivery. In the meantime the buyer had sent a crate, allegedly filled with books, to the man in Wilhelmshaven. Shortly afterwards he telegraphed to have this crate sent back to Berlin. Both crates arrived safely at the Berlin freight office. The swindler then succeeded in claiming the crate holding the stamp collection, without paying the cash due, by passing it off as the crate he himself had sent. The crate allegedly filled with books contained only scraps of paper, and the Berliner disappeared without a trace.

So much for postage stamp fraud insofar as the stamp collector is concerned. There is another, much greater entity with a vested interest in postage stamp fraud, and especially in counterfeit stamps: the post office. Each year the postal service sells roughly 6 billion stamps, that is, 6,000 million; worldwide, the total is 30 billion. This works out as people in Germany annually spending around 5 billion marks on stamps. Therefore, each year the postal service makes and sells 5,000 million marks worth of small paper money, if you will. Postage stamps can be thought of as small bank notes, as they’re used not only to send letters, but often for payments up to a certain amount. In fact, stamps differ from paper money in one single way: printing counterfeit ten-mark or 100-mark notes requires tremendous knowledge and skill, as well as expensive and complicated equipment; whereas reprinting postage stamps is extraordinarily simple, and the rougher the original print, the more difficult it is to distinguish it from a forgery. A few years ago it so happened that several German ten-pfennig stamps were declared counterfeit by some very experienced stamp collectors, while the Reichspost was of the opinion that they were genuine. The frequency of this kind of stamp forgery — why not call it “banknote counterfeiting,” as the law punishes it just as harshly — is hard to determine, because the postal service keeps an annual tally of the millions of marks it earns selling stamps, but doesn’t record the values of the many millions of stamps it postmarks each year. There are people who claim that the postal authorities lose hundreds of millions of marks annually through fraud. As mentioned, this can’t be confirmed, but if one considers that the post office can be bilked even more easily than through counterfeit stamps, that is, by cleanly removing a stamp’s postmark, there’s no reason to doubt this claim. Some even maintain that there is a predilection for certain types of swindle depending on the region. For example, large-scale printing forgery seems most prevalent in Southern Europe, while washing and cleaning stamps on a smaller scale is more popular in the North. I’m telling you all this because what these people are driving at concerns all stamp collectors. They want to abolish stamps and replace them with simple postmarks. You’ve probably all noticed that postmarks, not postage stamps, are already in use for bulk mail. Enemies of the postage stamp think this procedure should also be used for private mail, which would require the automation of mailboxes. There would be five-, eight-, fifteen-, and twenty-five-pfennig mailboxes and so on, a different box for each amount of postage demanded for a letter. For the mail slot to open, the sender would first need to insert the corresponding amount in coins. But this idea is still fresh and quite a few obstacles remain, especially the fact that the Universal Postal Union acknowledges only stamps, not postmarks. However, the age of mechanization and technology will most probably spell the end of the postage stamp. Those of you eager to prepare for this eventuality would be wise to think about how to put together a postmark collection. We can already see how postmarks are becoming more and more diverse and intricate, even showing advertisements with words and pictures, and to win over stamp collectors, the enemies of the postage stamp have promised that postmarks will be adorned with historical images, coats of arms, etc., just like before with stamps.

“Briefmarkenschwindel,” GS, 7.1, 195–200. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

The precise date of broadcast for this text has not been determined. It was most likely written during the second half of 1930. A catalog, found in the Benjamin archive, of an exhibition entitled “Die Alt-Berliner Post” [The Mail in Old Berlin], which took place between May 23 and August 3, 1930, suggests the end of May as the earliest “Postage Stamp Swindles” could have been created.

Schiller-Lerg speculates that “Postage Stamp Swindles” might have been broadcast from Berlin on January 16, 1931, a date for which the Funkstunde announced an untitled broadcast by Benjamin (Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 165).

¹ Benjamin refers to three stamp catalogs and reference works of the period: Senfs Illustriertes Briefmarken Journal, Michel Briefmarken Katalog, and Paul Kohls Briefmarken Handbuch.

² The German mistakenly gives 1778 as the date here. The La Renotière collection, owned by Philipp Ferrari de la Renotière (1850–1917), was bolstered by his 1878 purchase of the one-cent stamp, “Black on Magenta” of British Guiana. This stamp was valued in 2014 at $20 million.

³ A work with this title by Paul Ohrt has not been found. Ohrt is the author of Handbuch aller bekannten Neudrucke [Handbook of All Known Reprints] (1906–1938).

CHAPTER 21. The Bootleggers

Bootleggers — we’ll hear a bit later about the literal meaning of this word. The radio gazette was right to add “or the American alcohol smugglers” to its program announcement, otherwise you would have had to ask your parents.¹ They know what sort of people bootleggers are; they’ve recently read a lot about the infamous Jacques Diamond, the rich bootlegger who fled to Europe to escape his enemies, but was arrested in Cologne and shipped back to America. Perhaps the few adults who have wandered into this show for children are interested in such people, these smooth customers who are always on the run. And maybe they’re interested in something else, too, such as the question: Should children even hear these kinds of stories? Stories of swindlers and miscreants who break the law trying to make a pile of dough, and often succeed? It’s a legitimate question. It would weigh on my conscience if I were to sit here and fire off one tale of villainy after another without first saying a few words about the laws and grand intentions that create the backdrop for the stories in which alcohol smugglers are heroes.

I’m not sure if you’ve heard about the alcohol debate. But you’ve all seen a drunk person before, and just one look at such a creature is all it takes to understand why men came to ask themselves whether the state should prohibit the selling of alcohol. People in the United States did just that in 1920, by adding an amendment to the constitution. Ever since, what they call Prohibition has been in force, which means it’s illegal to provide alcohol without a medical purpose. How did this law come about? There are lots of reasons, and if you were to look into them, you would learn all sorts of important things about the Americans. On a December day 300 years ago the first European settlers, the ancestors of the white Americans, landed their small ship, the Mayflower, on the rocky shores of what is now called the state of Massachusetts, where the town of Plymouth lies. Today they are called the 100-percenters, referring to their unwavering convictions, their austerity, and the imperturbability of their religious and moral principles.² These first immigrants belonged to the Puritan sect. Their effects are still clearly noticeable in America today. One of the traces of Christian Puritanism is Prohibition. The Americans call it the noble experiment. For many of them Prohibition is not only a matter of health and economy, but something downright religious. They call America “God’s Homeland” and say that the country is obligated to have this law. One of the law’s greatest proponents is Ford, the automobile king, but not because he would have been a Puritan. He explains: Prohibition allows me to sell my cars more cheaply. Why? The average worker used to spend a good part of his weekly wage in bars. Now that he can no longer drink his money away, he has to save. And, according to Ford, once the worker has begun to save, he will soon have enough for a car. Prohibition has multiplied my car sales, he says. And many American manufacturers think the way he does, not only because big American companies sell more as a result of Prohibition, but because the alcohol ban makes manufacturing cheaper as well. A worker who doesn’t drink is of course much more productive than one who does so regularly, even if he doesn’t drink much. Thus, over the same time period the same manpower produces more than before, even if this increase is very small: for a country’s economy, this tiny bit of improved efficiency among individuals is multiplied by the total number of workers and all their work hours over the course of ten years.

Enough, you’re thinking. Now you know what Prohibition is, now you know why it became law. Now let’s hear about the bootleggers. The term “bootlegger” harks back to the gold rush in Klondike, where every man stuck a bottle of booze in his bootleg. If I tell you a few of the many tricks people use to sneak alcohol in, you mustn’t conclude it’s all that easy to find wine, beer, or any other kind of liquor. American law punishes not only alcohol sellers, but consumers as well. The punishment for the former, however, is certainly more severe. In fact, the cruelty of these punishments is one of the reasons why opponents of Prohibition are turning against this law. It has fomented a certain type of elite among the unscrupulous, as only the most intrepid and audacious become bootleggers. Let’s first track them on the sea, where their operations begin. The law specifies that no ship carrying alcohol may come closer than fourteen miles to the American coast. This is where America’s so-called territorial waters begin; at this demarcation, even ordinary passenger liners coming from Europe must seal off their supplies of alcohol. The big export companies wanting to sell their liquor in America don’t even consider facing the perils of smuggling. They order their freighters to drop anchor just outside the territorial waters, where American customs ships can see them but can do nothing to them. But more importantly, the bootleggers can see them; day and night their little smuggling boats zip across “Rum Row,” the name given to this border in honor of rum smuggling. The challenge is to transport the cargo to a secret unloading point on the mainland while evading the attention of customs ships and exploiting every advantage to do so: fog, moonless nights, bribes to customs officials, and, above all, stormy seas, which make pursuit more difficult. Police and smugglers must constantly try to outwit one another with their cunning.

Here are two little tales in which first the smugglers and then the customs wardens got the upper hand, using a similar ruse. One day a Coast Guard cutter was pursuing a petroleum boat whose cargo seemed suspicious. When the cutter had almost reached the boat, whose engines were not so powerful, the smugglers came up with a novel idea: they threw one of their own into the water. While the cutter slowed down to rescue the man, the boat disappeared in a flash, leaving behind a terrific wake.³ As I said, however, the customs authorities do not always lose out. There’s the story of a steamer, the Frederic B. from Southampton, which had been loaded with 100,000 cases of liquor and champagne worth 180 million francs. This ship, whose mysterious captain went by the name of Jimmy, was the cause of many a sleepless night for customs officials. The American government promised a great reward to whoever captured Jimmy. A very young man, first name Paddy, took on the adventure, and off he sailed with a few dollars and a handshake on behalf of the entire customs authority of the United States. A few days later a very large cargo steamer, the same Frederic B. of Southampton, which would often hang around Rum Row not far from the Bahamas, collided with a fishing boat. The steamboat naturally took on board the castaways, four men and a cabin boy named Paddy. The four fishermen were taken ashore as they requested, but the cabin boy asked to stay on board and work, and his wish was granted. Before the second night had barely passed, the cabin boy lowered a rope overboard, and four brawny men grabbed it and climbed on deck. Revolvers in hand, they seized the rudder, then the telephone, and the game was won. The men in the engine room believed they were following orders from Captain Jimmy, and the Frederic B. of Southampton pulled into Miami Harbor, where it was greeted by the customs authorities, who proceeded to pour the 180 million francs of cargo into the sea.⁴

Rum Row, permanently policed by around 400 coastal vessels, is just one of the fronts on which the battle between alcohol bandits and the state unfolds. In the American interior, at the border between Canada and the United States, are the Great Lakes. Here, events typically play out in the following manner. The customs authorities have, let’s say, three ships. The smugglers then employ twelve. In the best case, the three can hold in check, or pursue, four or five boats. When things become dangerous, the boats being followed turn around halfway and peacefully head back to Canada, whereas the seven or eight others dock unmolested somewhere on the shores of the State of Illinois. “OK. Then why don’t the customs authorities use twelve cutters as well?” I asked the American friend who told me this story. He looked at me, smiling, and explained: “Then the smugglers would use thirty-six.” In other words, they earn so much, there’s no expense they would spare. Even so, don’t think their position is such an easy one. Sure, if the customs authorities were their only adversaries, they would have it made. But I’ve yet to mention their truly feared enemies: hijackers, the name for the type of bandits who get their alcohol supplies not off of ships like the bootleggers do, but off of the bootleggers themselves. Only they don’t pay for them, they steal them. For years the conflict of interests between smugglers and robbers — because that’s fundamentally what it’s about — has governed the infamous and storied underworld of Chicago. Most murders on the open streets are handled as private affairs between these two kinds of gentleman. Chicago is also the scene of an interesting story told by an American journalist, a certain Arthur Moss. He was just walking into his club when he noticed a crew of respectable-looking fishermen unloading an entire shipment of small sharks from a truck smelling like sea salt. Although shark fins are a popular delicacy, they’re hardly common, and Mr. Moss wondered to himself since when had sharks been in such high demand. While he was pondering this, it struck him how gingerly each of the little sharks was being rolled from the truck down a ramp and then lifted and carried with careful hands. Then a seemingly mild, unassuming man approached the truck and, despite the rather discourteous, even ornery reaction of the seamen, insisted on prodding one of these delicately handled fish. It turned out that the man was with the police, and inside each fish was a bottle of whiskey.⁵

The tricks bootleggers have devised to deliver their booze defy the imagination. Dressed as policemen, they cross the border with whiskey stowed in their helmets. They organize funeral processions, just to get coffins packed with liquor over the border. They wear rubber underwear filled with alcohol. They hire people to sell restaurant-goers dolls or fans with bottles of liquor inside. Almost any object, no matter how harmless — an umbrella, camera, or boot tree — can make the customs police suspect that there may be whiskey inside. The police, and ultimately the Americans as well. There’s a wonderful story of a train station near New Orleans. Little Negro children⁶ walk along the train that stops there, hiding under their clothing variously shaped containers with large labels that read “Iced Tea.” One passenger gives a nod and for the price of a suit buys the container, which he then cleverly conceals. Then another one, then ten, twenty, fifty. “Whatever you do, ladies and gentlemen,” implore the Negro children, “drink the tea only once the train is under way.” Everyone winks knowingly … The whistle blows, the train drives off, and right away the passengers put the containers to their lips. And then their expressions turn to disbelief, as what they are drinking is actually real tea.⁷

When American elections to the House of Representatives occurred a few weeks ago, Prohibition played a role. The elections revealed that it has many opponents. These opponents are not only, as you might think, those who want to get drunk, but also very intelligent, sober, thoughtful people, who are against laws that are broken by half the residents of a country, laws that make adults act like naughty children, who do something only because it’s forbidden, laws whose enforcement costs the state a tremendous amount of money, and whose violation costs many people their lives. Wholeheartedly for the retaining of these laws are the bootleggers, who have become rich as a result of them. But viewing this matter from afar, we Europeans will wonder whether Swedes, Norwegians, or Belgians, who have fought alcohol consumption less radically and with much milder laws, haven’t made more progress than the Americans with their violence and fanaticism.

“Die Bootleggers,” GS, 7.1, 201–6. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, November 8, 1930, and on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, December 31, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Radio Berlin, November 8, 1930,” and the Funkstunde announced the broadcast for this date from 3:20–3:40 pm. For December 31, 1930, the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung announced its Youth Hour, from 3:00–3:25 pm, as “ ‘Die Bootleggers oder die amerikanischen Alkoholschmuggler’ [The Bootleggers, or the American Alcohol Smugglers], read by Dr. Walter Benjamin.”

¹ The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung advertised Benjamin’s broadcast ahead of time as “Youth Hour: ‘The Bootleggers, or the American Alcohol Smugglers,’ read by Dr. Walter Benjamin.”

² During the 1920s, the “100 percent Americanism” movement promoted a nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-communist, traditionalist ideology.

³ See Pierre Mac Orlan’s fictionalized account in Les pirates de “l’avenue du rhum”: reportage [The Pirates of “Rum Row”] (Paris: Sagittaire, 1925); Alkoholschmuggler, trans. Paul Cohen-Portheim (Berlin: Die Schmiede, 1927), 26ff.

⁴ Mac Orlan, Alkoholschmuggler, 29ff.

⁵ Ibid., 28ff.

⁶ Benjamin uses the German “kleine Negerlein.” “Negerlein” is the diminutive form of “Neger,” an offensive term with connotations between “Negro” and “Nigger.”

⁷ Mac Orlan, Alkoholschmuggler, 26.

CHAPTER 22. Naples

When someone says Naples, what first comes to mind? I would say, Vesuvius. Will you be very disappointed if you hear nothing at all from me about Vesuvius? If I were granted my greatest wish — an ugly wish, but I had it all the same — it would be to experience an eruption of Vesuvius. That would really be something. I was in the region for eight months, and I waited and waited.¹ I even climbed Vesuvius, and looked into its crater. But the only exciting thing I got to see in Naples was a fiery red glow that occasionally flashed in the night sky as I sat in a tavern garden beside the city’s highest point, the Castel Sant’Elmo. And by day? You think there’s lots of time in Naples to look around and admire Vesuvius? You’re happy if you emerge unscathed from the hustle of the cars, cabs, and motorbikes, or if your nerves are still intact from the din of all the barkers, car horns, rattling sounds of electric trams, and the shrill, drawn-out cries of the paperboys. It’s not so easy to get around. When I arrived in Naples for the first time, the subway had just opened. I thought to myself: great, with my luggage I can ride straight from the train to the neighborhood where my hotel was located. But I didn’t know Naples so well yet. As the subway train pulled into the station, hanging on all the windows and doors, and sitting and standing on all of the seats, were Neapolitan street urchins. It was fun for them that the subway had just opened two or three days before. They didn’t care whether it was meant for them or the serious adults going about their workdays. They saved up a few soldi and then were happy just to zip back and forth between stations. If it hadn’t been for the fact that these new trains were so overrun with people, anyone in a hurry might actually have reached their destination.

Neapolitans can’t imagine existence without swarms of people. Here’s an example: when old German artists painted the Adoration of the Magi, they had Melchior, Caspar, and Balthasar, and sometimes their entourage, approaching the Baby Jesus with gifts. The Neapolitans, however, depict the Adoration with giant mobs of people. I mention this because these images are famous throughout the world, like the Neapolitan manger scenes, which are more beautiful than any others. January 6, Three Kings Day, has always been the occasion for an enormous procession through the streets, where each manger scene outdoes the next in size and in the true-to-life quality of its figures. However, you mustn’t imagine seeing the ancient Jews: the Neapolitans are much more interested in the faithful and vibrant depiction of what they see in front of them every day. So, in terms of the costumes and goings-on of the common folk, these manger scenes are more an animated portrayal of the city of Naples than of the Orient. Sure enough, there are water vendors, peddlers, and jugglers. But the macaroni dealers, mussel sellers, and fishermen that accompany the manger scenes are true Neapolitan characters. You’re thinking to yourselves, why should such a throng of people be made up only of angels or good role models? But if you want to know what the really dangerous people look like in Naples, don’t imagine wild, black-bearded bandits, or Rinaldo Rinaldinis.² No, the worst Neapolitan villains come across as honest middle-class folks, and often have a rather harmless trade. They are not outright criminals, but rather members of a secret society that comprises only a few active thieves and murderers and whose other affiliates have nothing to do but protect the true criminals from the police, shelter them, warn them when there’s danger, and let them know of opportunities for new reprehensible deeds. In exchange they receive a share of the spoils. This wide-ranging criminal association is called the Camorra.

While we’re discussing the Neapolitans’ faults, let’s see how they fare against other Italians. There’s an old list of the seven deadly sins, where each sin matches up with one of the seven most important cities in Italy. Have you ever heard of the seven deadly sins? You’re about to hear what they are, for the Italians have spread them over all of Italy. Each large city has its share: pride is said to live in Genoa, greed in Florence, lust in Venice, anger in Bologna, gluttony in Milan, envy in Rome, and in Naples, sloth. The laziness in this city is indeed manifest in strange ways. It’s not just that the poor people, who have nothing to do, lie in the sun and sleep and, when they wake up, head to the harbor or tourist areas to beg for a few centimes. Sometimes a poor devil even gets work. And what does the Neapolitan do then? He spends two thirds of his earnings to hire someone else to do the work for him, as he would prefer to lie in the sun for five lire than to earn fifteen. Perhaps laziness also explains the passion for lotto in Naples, which is greater here than almost anywhere else. And by lotto, I don’t mean picture lotto: in Italy, lotto is what we call lottery in Germany. At four o’clock every Saturday people gather outside the house where the numbers are drawn.³ Time and again they try their luck, and repeatedly fail, despite all the fortune tellers’ prophecies and their superstitions about lucky numbers.

Maybe it’s not just the climate that makes the Neapolitans lazy. After all, it’s only physical work they find so unappealing. When they’re bargaining, however, or transacting business, they’re very much in their element. The Neapolitans are great tradesmen, and the Bank of Naples is over 500 years old, making it one of the oldest in Europe. But what I wanted to say was this: the Neapolitans shy away from physical labor not only because the weather allows them to get along fine without a roof over their heads for part of the year, and not only because there’s always something to be made of the overabundance of fruits and sea creatures found on the street, but also because the work, at least in the factories, is particularly hard. Industry in Naples is very much behind the times, especially now, although the city must have almost one million residents. Don’t picture Naples with the new, clean, light factory buildings found in lots of big German cities. Take a look at the desolate shacks in Portici, Torre Annunziata, Biscragnano, and Nocera, in short, in any of Naples’s countless suburbs, or walk in the blazing sun down the endless dusty streets where they’re located, or try just to navigate your way through one of them, and you’ll understand why many Neapolitans prefer even the most miserable idleness to industrial labor in such conditions.

Food is the main product of Naples. Most importantly, the Neapolitans process and can the many fruits that ripen on the slopes of Vesuvius, along with tomatoes. They also produce macaroni in all shapes and sizes. These goods go mainly to India and America, because the other countries on the Mediterranean produce and sell similar foods. And then there are the big textile mills, but they manufacture only the cheapest fabrics. These mills were created not by Neapolitans, but by foreigners. After just a day in Naples, however, one thing stands out as made locally, because it’s everywhere in the streets, and that’s furniture, beds in particular. The other merchandise is grouped by specialty in certain streets, where there are ten or twenty stores selling the same thing. It might seem that it would hurt the traders to be so close to one another, but it clearly doesn’t, because this is also the case in other cities. There are streets where nearly all the shops sell leather goods, others where every third shop sells old books, and then some with one proprietor after the next, each making watches.

The goods from all these stores overflow onto the streets: books lie in little crates in front of bookstores; beds and tables stand halfway on the pavement; hosiery and clothing hang in doorways and on the exterior walls of shops. But a good portion of Neapolitan business is transacted without premises, making do just with the street. I remember a man who stood at a street corner on an unhitched carriage. Crowds swarmed around him. The carriage box had been swung open and the hawker pulled something out of the box while extoling the item in one continuous sales pitch. I couldn’t make out what it actually was, because before you could see it, it disappeared into a small piece of pink or green paper. He then held the thing high over his head and instantly it was bought for a few soldi. I asked myself whether there were perhaps prizes in the paper, or little cakes with coins hidden inside, or fortunes from soothsayers. The mysterious expression on the man’s face was like that of a peddler from 1001 Nights. But the most mysterious thing was not, as I would soon find out, what was for sale, but rather the artistry of the seller, who sold it so quickly. What was in the colorful paper? What was he twisting into it? Just toothpaste. Another time, when I was up very early, I saw a street peddler unpacking his things from a suitcase. But how he did this was true theater. Umbrellas, shirt fabrics, shawls, each piece he presented individually to his audience, and warily, as he first had to examine each of the goods himself. Then, seemingly out of wonder and surprise at how beautiful his things were, he began to heat up, spread out a scarf, and asked for 500 lire — which would be about eighty marks. Then all of a sudden he folded up the scarf, lowering the price with each successive fold, and finally, once it had become just a small bundle in his arm, he delivered his final price: fifty lire.⁴

If this is the scene on just any corner in Naples, you can imagine what a market must look like. And the fish market is the strangest of them all. Starfish, crabs, polyps, snails, squid, and all sorts of other slithery things — just one look at them will give you goose bumps — are gobbled up like treats. I must say, it wasn’t easy for me to scoop that first squid out of the red, peppered broth in which it swam. I’ve always thought that in foreign countries, one should do more than just look around and, when possible, speak the language; one should go further and adapt to the customs of the country, as in the way people live, sleep, and eat. After a while, even squid tastes wonderful. And why shouldn’t it? The Neapolitans are great culinary experts. Only in Germany’s finest restaurants do diners get to see the meat, fish, etc., before it’s prepared. In Naples, this happens even in the most humble eateries; the few provisions a tavern has bought for the day are displayed in the window. Every September 7, Naples is host to great gluttonous feasts: the Piedigrotta, an old Roman fertility festival still celebrated by the Neapolitans. And how do the poor make sure they and their families have something good to eat on this day? All year long, week after week, they pay the shopkeeper twenty or thirty soldi more than they owe. During the days of Piedigrotta, this extra money is added up and then the people have their joint of roast goat, their cheese, and their wine. Thus, in Naples, people insure themselves for the national feast the way we insure ourselves against old age and accidents.

In other respects, what happens during Piedigrotta defies description. Imagine that in a city with one million residents, all the boys and girls have conspired to make the most outlandish and infernal commotion, up and down the street, in front doors, on public squares, under bridges and arches, starting at nightfall and not letting up until dawn. Then imagine that most of them have bought one of the wretched, garish horns on offer at every street corner for five centimes. And that they run around in mobs with no other purpose than to assail innocent people, blocking their way, surrounding them on all sides and blasting into their ears until their victims either collapse half dead in the street or somehow manage to escape. To make up for this, elsewhere in the city there is something sweet and agreeable for the ears: on this day a competition for songwriters is held in Naples. Most of the songs heard every day in the streets on accordions and small pianos have their debut during the Piedigrotta festival, and judges award prizes to the best. Naples showers renown on a gifted singer nearly as much as America does on a talented boxer.

But the great holidays are just part of it. Almost every day there’s something happening in this city. Each neighborhood has its own guardian saint, and on the saint’s name day, the festivities get under way early. In fact, they begin a few days beforehand, when posts are erected to which green, blue, or red light bulbs are attached, and when paper garlands are strung from one side of the street to the other. Paper of all colors plays an essential role in these street scenes; its radiance, its mobility, and how quickly it wears out perfectly reflect the lively and temperamental character of the Neapolitans. Red, black, yellow, and white fly-whisks, altars made of bright, shiny paper abutting the city walls, green paper rosettes on the raw and bloody cuts of meat: such sights are everywhere to be seen. The traveler folk — they’re everywhere here in the streets — quickly scout out which neighborhood is hosting festivities and head over there at once. And what characters I came across! The fire-eater, calmly surrounding himself with bowls of fire on a wide sidewalk, and then gobbling up the flames from one bowl after another; and the silhouette-cutter, perched in the shade of a city gate, placing his models in the glaring sun and, for one lira, cutting a strikingly accurate profile in shiny black paper. I won’t speak of the soothsayers and athletes, as we see these sorts at fairs here in Germany. But I would like to tell you about a type of painter I’ve never observed anywhere but in Naples. At first I didn’t see him, the painter, at all, only a crowd encircling what seemed to be an empty space. I moved closer. And there, kneeling in the middle of this cluster of people was a small, nondescript fellow drawing a Christ-figure on the cobblestones with colored chalk, and under it the head of the Madonna. He takes his time. He is obviously working with great precision, contemplating where to apply the chalk in strokes of green, yellow, or brown. After a long while he gets to his feet and waits beside his work. Fifteen minutes pass, maybe a half hour, until gradually the limbs, head, and torso of his drawing are covered with copper coins, two or three each thrown from every one of his admirers. He then gathers up his money and soon the drawing disappears under people’s footsteps.

Every festival is capped off with fireworks over the sea. Or I should rather say was, at least back in 1924 when I was first there. Then the government thought better of the great sums of money flying into the night sky year after year, and ordered the fireworks to be scaled back. But in the early evenings back then, from July to September there was one single trail of fire running along the coast between Naples and Salerno. Sometimes over Sorrento, sometimes over Minori and Praiano, but always over Naples, fireballs filled the sky. Every parish sought to trump the festival of its neighbors with new kinds of light shows.

I’ve told you a bit about everyday life in Naples, and a bit about the festival days, but what’s remarkable is how the two blend into each other, how every day the streets have something festive, full of music and idlers, and laundry flapping in the wind like flags; and how even Sunday has something of a workday feel to it, because every little storekeeper can keep his shop open into the night. To really get to know the city, you would probably have to transform yourself into a Neapolitan postman for a year; you would become acquainted with more cellars, attics, backstreets, and recesses than there are in many other cities combined. But even the postmen never really get to know Naples, with so many tens of thousands of people living there who don’t receive one single letter in a year, who don’t even have a place to live. There’s great misery in the city, in the whole region, which explains why most Italian emigrants hail from there. As steerage passengers aboard American steamers, tens of thousands have cast their last glance on their hometown, so beautiful in parting, lying there with its countless flights of staggered stairs, its nestled courtyards, its churches disappearing amid a sea of buildings. We leave you today with this vision of the city.

“Neapel,” GS, 7.1, 206–14. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on May 9, 1931. The broadcast was listed in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung for May 9, 1931, from 10:30–10:50 am: “Schulfunk: ‘Von einer Italienreise: Neapel’ [School radio: On an Italian Journey: Naples]. Talk by Dr. Walter Benjamin.”

¹ In a letter to Scholem, Benjamin refers to having visited Pompeii, as well as Naples, during his stay on Capri in 1924 (letter of September 16, 1924, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 250).

² A reference to the once popular main character and emblem of the “noble robber” in Christian August Vulpius, Rinaldo Rinaldini: der Räuberhauptmann [Rinaldo Rinaldini: Robber Captain] (Leipzig: Gräff, 1799).

³ Here, Benjamin borrows from his previously published essay, “Naples,” cowritten with Asja Lacis, with whom he had spent time in Capri during the visit in 1924. See “Naples,” in SW, 1, 418; “Neapel,” GS, 4.1, 312–13, first published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, August 19, 1925.

⁴ For a similar account, see Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples,” 419; “Neapel,” 313.

CHAPTER 23. The Fall of Herculaneum and Pompeii

Have you ever heard of the Minotaur? He was the hideous monster that dwelt in a labyrinth in Thebes. Every year a virgin was sacrificed by being thrown into this labyrinth, whose hundreds of meandering, branching, and crisscrossing paths made it impossible for her to find her way out, so she was eventually eaten by the monster; that is, until Theseus was given a ball of thread by the Theban king’s daughter.¹ Theseus fastened one end of the thread at the entrance, so he was sure to find his way out, and then slew the Minotaur. The Theban king’s daughter was named Ariadne. People visiting modern-day Pompeii could certainly use one of Ariadne’s threads: it’s the largest labyrinth, the largest maze on Earth. Wherever the eye wanders, it finds nothing but walls and sky. Even 1,800 years ago — before Pompeii was buried alive — it mustn’t have been easy to find one’s way; for old Pompeii, like Karlsruhe for us, was composed of a complex network of perpendicular streets. But the landmarks that helped people orient themselves in those days — shops and tavern signs, raised temples and buildings — have all disappeared. Where stairs and walls once lent order to buildings, gaps everywhere now create paths through the ruins. How often it happened that, while walking through the dead city with one of my friends from Naples or Capri, I turned to him, pointing out a faded painting on a wall or a mosaic underfoot, only to find myself suddenly alone; then anxious minutes would pass as we called out each other’s name before finding each other again. You mustn’t think that you can stroll through this defunct Pompeii as if it were a museum of antiquities. No, there in the mugginess that often fills the air, in the wide, monotonous, shadeless streets, where the ear encounters not a sound and the eye only dull colors, the visitor soon enters a strange state. The simple sound of footsteps startles him, as does the unexpected appearance of another solitary walker. And the uniformed guards with their villainous Neapolitan faces make the whole experience even less pleasant. Ancient Greek and Roman houses almost never had windows; light and air entered through an atrium, an opening in the roof with a basin beneath into which rainwater fell. The windowless walls were always rather austere, but became even more so once their color disappeared, making the streets doubly severe. But Vesuvius, with its forests at the base and its vineyards above, never looks prettier or more charming than when it appears here over the city’s stark walls or through the opening of one of Pompeii’s three or four gates that still stand today.

For centuries the volcano appeared simply beautiful, and not at all ominous to the Pompeians whose city it would one day destroy. There was an ancient tradition according to which the entrance to the underworld could be found here in Campania, the region where Pompeii and Herculaneum lie. Yet, since the beginning of written history there had been no account of an eruption by Vesuvius. For many centuries Vesuvius lay dormant; shepherds grazed their livestock in its green crater, and the slave leader Spartacus hid his entire army under its rim. There were always earthquakes in Campania, but people had grown accustomed to them. For some time they seemed to have been weak, and limited to a narrow area. This centuries-long peace that the Earth seemed to have made with men — among one another, men were as far removed from peace in those days as they are today — was disrupted for the first time by a horrific earthquake in the sixty-fourth year after the birth of Christ. Pompeii was thus in large part already destroyed. So, sixteen years later, when the city disappeared from the face of the Earth for several hundred years, it was not an ordinary city. At the time Vesuvius erupted, Pompeii was in the midst of a complete renovation and transformation, because it never happens that people rebuild a destroyed city as it was before. They always want to turn their misfortune into at least some kind of gain by rebuilding the old, only better, more secure, and more beautiful. And so it happened in Pompeii. In those days it was a medium-sized rural city of about 20,000 residents. The Samnites, a small Italian tribe, lived there completely on their own until shortly before the birth of Christ. When the Romans subjugated the region, 150 years before the city’s demise, Pompeii did not suffer all that much. It was not conquered, and was only occupied by a few Roman subjects with whom the Samnites had to share their fields. These Romans soon settled into the city and began adapting it to their own customs and habits. Since they were already in the process of modifying and rebuilding, they were well positioned to take advantage of the earthquake. In short, not much remained of the Samnites when Pompeii was destroyed, and there are scholars who would have preferred that there hadn’t been an earthquake, so that the old Samnite city would have been buried by Vesuvius and as much of it would have been preserved as remains today of Roman Pompeii. While we know quite a bit about Roman cities, we know nothing at all about those of the Samnites.

It can be said that as much is known about the fall of Pompeii as if it had happened in our time, thanks to two letters written to the Roman historian Tacitus by an eyewitness of the Vesuvius eruption. These letters may be the most celebrated in the world. They tell us not only about the events that transpired, but also about how they were understood. They were written by Pliny the Younger, a great naturalist who, when the disaster happened, was eighteen years old and living with his uncle in Misenum, just next to Naples. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, commander of the Roman fleet, was killed in the eruption. I will now read to you from one of the letters:

By now it was dawn, but the light was still dim and faint. The buildings round us were already tottering, and the open space we were in was too small for us not to be in real and imminent danger if the house collapsed. This finally decided us to leave the town. We were followed by a panic-stricken mob of people wanting to act on someone else’s decision in preference to their own (a point in which fear looks like prudence), who hurried us on our way by pressing hard behind in a dense crowd. Once beyond the buildings we stopped, and there we had some extraordinary experiences which thoroughly alarmed us. The carriages we had ordered to be brought out began to run in different directions though the ground was quite level, and would not remain stationary even when wedged with stones. We also saw the sea sucked away and apparently forced back by the earthquake: at any rate it receded from the shore so that quantities of sea creatures were left stranded on dry sand. On the landward side a fearful black cloud was rent by forked and quivering bursts of flame, and parted to reveal great tongues of fire, like flashes of lightning magnified in size.²

So writes Pliny, from whom you’ll hear more in a moment. But as I said, he watched the event from afar. The fiery cloud he describes was over Vesuvius; it didn’t directly affect Pompeii. Pompeii did not perish as the island of Martinique did at the beginning of our century, when it was devoured by a glowing cloud.³ Fire did not engulf Pompeii. Not even lava flows, which had proved so devastating in previous eruptions of Vesuvius, reached the city. No, Pompeii was actually buried by rain. But it was a strange rain. In another part of his letter, Pliny tells how the cloud over Vesuvius looked sometimes black, sometimes light gray. The excavation of Pompeii has shown us the cause of this spectacle: the volcano ejected by turns black ash and massive amounts of gray pumice stone. These layers are clearly discernible in Pompeii, to particular effect. To the layers of ash we owe something never to be found again on Earth: the perfectly clear and lifelike forms of people who lived 2,000 years ago. It happened as follows. While people were literally battered to death by the falling pumice, even as they tried desperately to protect themselves with towels and pillows, they were suffocated by showers of ash. The corpses covered in pumice rotted, and upon excavation, only skeletons remained. But in the layers of ash, something entirely different was discovered. Whether because the ash from inside the crater was wet, as many have suspected, or because cloudbursts after the eruption dampened the ash — whatever the reason, ash managed to insinuate itself into every wrinkle of clothing, every whorl of the ear, and everywhere between people’s fingers, hair, and lips. The ash then congealed much faster than the corpses decomposed, bequeathing us a series of lifelike human casts: of those who had just fallen to the ground and were struggling against death, and others such as a young girl, who lay down peacefully, with her arms cradled under her head, waiting for the end to come. Of Pompeii’s 20,000 residents, just over ten percent were killed in the catastrophe.

We see that for many, the primary concern was saving their possessions, leaving them too little time to save themselves. They locked themselves in cellars with their gold and silver treasures, and by the time the eruption came to an end, they were buried alive; there was no way to open the door and they starved to death. Others burdened themselves with sacks of jewelry and silverware and collapsed under their weight. Many, such as the uncle of Pliny — more of whose letter I shall presently read — opted not to flee inland, but rather to wait on the shore for the first opportunity to row out to sea. But the water was still too turbulent from the earthquake, and these would-be escapees were entombed on the beach. “Soon afterwards,” writes Pliny,

the cloud sank down to earth and covered the sea; it had already blotted out Capri along with the mountains on the mainland. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. “Let us leave the road while we can still see,” I said, “or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind.” We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room. You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore. A gleam of light returned, but we took this to be a warning of the approaching flames rather than daylight. However, the flames remained some distance off; then darkness came on once more and ashes began to fall again, this time in heavy showers. We rose from time to time and shook them off, otherwise we should have been buried and crushed beneath their weight. I could boast that not a groan or cry of fear escaped me in these perils, had I not derived some poor consolation in my mortal lot from the belief that the whole world was dying with me and I with it.⁴

From this letter we can see that during the disaster, no one guessed its cause. Many thought the sun was about to fall to Earth, others that the Earth was flying off into the heavens. Some even believed, as a later historian would tell us, that they saw giants among the fiery clouds and thought that the ancient gods were rebelling against the reigning ones. Ash from the monstrous eruption reached as far as Rome, Egypt, and Syria, while accounts of the natural phenomenon took much longer to arrive. The survivors returned, not to reestablish their lives there — with ash between fifteen and thirty meters deep, this would have been impossible — but on the offchance of digging for and finding their belongings. Many more would lose their lives in the process, as they were buried alive under avalanches of debris. Over hundreds of years the city vanished from memory. In the last century, however, as the city reemerged from the Earth with its shops, taverns, theaters, wrestling schools, temples, and baths, the Vesuvius eruption of 79 A.D., which destroyed the city two millennia ago, appeared in a whole new light: what for its contemporaries meant the destruction of a flourishing city, for us today means its preservation. A preservation so precise and so detailed that we can read the hundreds of small inscriptions that covered Pompeii’s public walls the same way leaflets and posters cover ours, affording us a look into their day-to-day life: their city council disputes, their animal fights, their spats with superiors, their trades, and their taverns. Of these hundreds of inscriptions, we will conclude with one, which we can well imagine was the last; as the menacing, fiery glow fell over Pompeii, a Christian or Jew well versed in such matters must have scrawled this final and uncanny inscription: “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Untergang von Herculanum und Pompeji,” GS, 7.1, 214–20. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, September 18, 1931. The broadcast was announced in the Funkstunde (issue dated September 11, 1931) with an accompanying image of the excavation of Pompeii.

¹ The Minotaur and the palace in which he lived were not in Thebes, but rather in Crete, in the Palace of King Minos of Knossos. The Athenians annually had to send seven virgins and seven young boys as a tribute.

² This translation is from The Letters of the Younger Pliny, ed. and trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin Books, 1963), Book Six, Letter 20, 171.

³ On May 7, 1902, Martinique’s Mount Pelée erupted, burying the city of Saint-Pierre and killing over 30,000 people.

⁴ Letters of the Younger Pliny, 171–2. Benjamin has slightly altered the first part of the passage.

CHAPTER 24. The Lisbon Earthquake

Have you ever had to wait at the pharmacy and noticed how the pharmacist fills a prescription? On a scale with very delicate weights, ounce by ounce, dram by dram, he weighs all the substances and specks that make up the final powder. That is how I feel when I tell you something over the radio. My weights are the minutes; very carefully I must weigh how much of this, how much of that, so the mixture is just right. You’re probably saying, But why? If you want to tell us about the Lisbon Earthquake, just start at the beginning. Then go ahead and tell us what happened next. But I don’t think that would be much fun for you. House after house collapses, family after family is killed; the terror of the spreading fire, the terror of the water, the darkness and the looting, the wailing of the injured, and the cries of the people searching for loved ones — no one wants to hear just this and nothing more, and besides, these things are more or less the same in every natural catastrophe.

But the earthquake that destroyed Lisbon on November 1, 1755, was not a disaster like thousands of others. In many ways it was singular and strange, and this is what I’d like to talk to you about. To begin with, it was one of the greatest and most devastating earthquakes of all time. But it was not only for this reason that it moved and preoccupied the entire world in that century as few other things did. At the time, the destruction of Lisbon was comparable to the destruction of Chicago or London today. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Portugal was still at the height of its colonial power. Lisbon was one of the wealthiest commercial cities on Earth; at the mouth of the Tagus river, its harbor, full of ships year in and year out, was lined with trading houses belonging to merchants from England, France, and Germany, and above all from Hamburg. The city had 30,000 dwellings and well over 250,000 inhabitants, roughly a quarter of whom died in the earthquake. The royal court was famed for both its austerity and its splendor. The many accounts of Lisbon published before the earthquake reveal the strangest details of the court’s rigid formalities, how, for instance, on summer evenings courtiers and their families would rendezvous in the main square, the Rucio, where they chatted for a short spell without ever leaving their carriages. People had such an elevated notion of the king of Portugal that one of the many leaflets conveying detailed descriptions of the calamity all across Europe could not fathom that such a great king could also have been affected by it. “Just as the extent of a catastrophe can only be grasped once it has been overcome,” writes this particular chronicler, “the dire ramifications of this frightful case can only be felt once one considers that the king and his wife, altogether abandoned, spent an entire day in a carriage under the most wretched conditions.” Leaflets featuring such passages functioned as newspapers do for us today. Those with the capacity to do so collected detailed eyewitness accounts and had them printed and sold. Later on I will read to you from another such report, one based on the experiences of an Englishman residing in Lisbon at the time.

Yet there’s another, special reason that this event affected people so strongly, that it inspired countless leaflets to be passed from hand to hand, and that almost 100 years later new accounts of the catastrophe were still being printed: the impact of this earthquake was greater than any ever heard of before. It was felt all over Europe and as far away as Africa, a colossal area calculated at two and a half million square kilometers if one includes the farthest reaches where it was detectable. The strongest tremors ranged from the coast of Morocco on one side to the coasts of Andalusia and France on the other. The cities of Cadiz, Jerez, and Algeciras were almost completely destroyed. According to one eyewitness, the cathedral towers in Seville trembled like reeds in the wind. But the most violent tremors traveled through the water. Massive groundswells were felt from Finland to the Dutch East Indies; it was calculated that ocean convulsions progressed from the Portuguese coast to the mouth of the Elbe with tremendous speed, in only a quarter of an hour. But so much for what occurred at the moment of the calamity. The weeks leading up to it saw a series of strange natural phenomena that, after the fact and perhaps not wholly without reason, people looked back on as omens of the impending calamity. For example, in Locarno, in southern Switzerland, two weeks before the catastrophic day, vapor suddenly began rising from the ground. In two hours it had changed into a red mist, which around evening precipitated as purple rain. From then on frightful hurricanes, combined with cloudbursts and floods, were reported across western Europe. Eight days before the quake, the ground around Cadiz was covered with masses of worms emerging from the earth.

No one was more preoccupied with these strange events than Kant, the great German philosopher whose name some of you may already have heard. When the earthquake occurred he was a man of twenty-four, and neither before nor after did he ever venture beyond his hometown of Königsberg; yet he collected all the accounts of this earthquake he could find, with tremendous enthusiasm. The short works he published on the phenomenon constituted the beginnings of scientific geography in Germany.¹ The beginnings of seismology, at any rate. I’d like to tell you something about the path this discipline took from that portrayal of the 1755 earthquake up until today. But I must be careful that our Englishman, whose account of his experiences during the earthquake I would still like you to hear, does not get lost in the shuffle. He has been waiting impatiently; after 150 years of being ignored, he’d like once more to have his say, and has allowed me to share only a few words concerning what we now know about earthquakes. But one thing first: they are not what you think. If I could pause for a moment and ask how you would explain earthquakes, I bet the first thing you’d think of is volcanoes. It’s true that volcanic eruptions are often linked to earthquakes, or at least heralded by them. So, for 2,000 years, from the ancient Greeks through to Kant and on until about 1870, people believed that earthquakes were caused by fiery gases, steam from the Earth’s interior and suchlike. But once people began to use measuring instruments and to make calculations, whose subtlety and precision surpass anything you might imagine — and that goes for me as well — in short, once people could verify the matter, they found something altogether different, at least for large earthquakes like the one in Lisbon. They do not originate from the deepest recesses of the Earth — which we still think of as liquid, or more exactly muddy, like molten sludge — but rather from events in the Earth’s crust. The Earth’s crust is a layer roughly 3,000 kilometers thick. This layer is in perpetual upheaval; the masses within it are constantly shifting in an ongoing attempt to find equilibrium. We know some of the factors that disturb this equilibrium, and ceaseless research is being conducted to discover others.

This much is certain: the most significant shifting is a result of the continuous cooling of the Earth. This subjects the masses of rock to enormous tension, ultimately causing them to break apart and then to seek a new equilibrium by rearranging themselves, which we experience as an earthquake. Other shifting results from the erosion of mountains, which become lighter, and from alluvial deposits on the ocean floor, which becomes heavier. Storms, whirling about the Earth, especially in autumn, do their bit to rattle the planet’s surface; and finally, it remains to be determined just how the pull of celestial bodies exerts force on the Earth’s surface. But you might be thinking: if this is true, then the Earth’s crust is actually never at rest, so there must be earthquakes all the time. And you’d be right, there are. The incredible precision of the earthquake-monitoring instruments available today — in Germany alone we have thirteen seismological stations in various cities — is such that they are never completely still, which means that the Earth is always quaking, only most of the time we don’t feel it.

When, out of a clear blue sky, this quaking suddenly becomes noticeable, it’s even worse. And literally out of a clear blue sky. “Because,” writes our Englishman, who now finally gets his say,

the sun was shining in full splendor. The sky was impeccably clear, giving not the slightest sign of any natural phenomenon to come, when, between nine and ten in the morning, I was sitting at my desk and the table began to move, which was rather surprising as there was no reason at all that it should have. While I was still pondering the cause of what had just happened, the house started to shake from top to bottom. From beneath the ground came a shuddering boom, as if a storm were raging in the distance. I quickly set down my pen and jumped to my feet. The danger was great but there was still hope that it would all pass without harm; the next moment, however, would erase any uncertainty. A horrible crackling noise was heard, as if all the buildings in the city were falling down at once. My building was so jolted that the upper floors caved in, and the rooms in which I resided swayed so much that everything was turned upside down. I expected to be struck dead at any moment; the walls were crumbling, large stones fell from their cracks and the roof beams appeared to hover in midair. But at this time the sky became so dark that people couldn’t make out what was in front of them. Pitch-dark prevailed, either as a result of the immense amount of dust caused by the collapsing houses, or because of the volumes of sulfurous vapor escaping from the earth. Finally the night brightened again, the violence of the shocks relented; I collected myself as best I could and had a look around. It became clear to me that I owed my survival thus far to a small bit of luck; that is, had I been dressed I most certainly would have fled to the street and been struck dead by collapsing buildings. I quickly threw on some shoes and a coat, rushed outside and headed to St. Paul’s cemetery, where I thought I would be safest given that it sits on a hill. People no longer recognized their own streets; most could not say what had happened; everything was destroyed and no one knew what had become of their loved ones and all that they owned. From the hill of the cemetery I was then witness to a horrific spectacle: on the ocean, as far as the eye could see, countless ships surged with the waves, crashing into one another as if a massive storm were raging. All of a sudden the huge seaside pier sank, along with all the people who believed they would be safe there. The boats and vehicles so many people used to seek rescue fell equal prey to the sea.²

As we know from other accounts, it was about an hour after the second and most devastating seismic shock that the massive swell, twenty meters high, which the Englishman saw from afar, came tumbling over the city. When the tidal wave receded, the Tagus riverbed suddenly appeared completely dry; its recoil was so powerful that it took all the river’s water with it. “When evening lowered over the desolated city,” the Englishman concludes, “it looked like a sea of fire: the light was so bright, you could read a letter by it. The flames soared from at least a hundred different points and raged for six days, consuming whatever the earthquake had spared. Petrified in anguish, thousands stood mesmerized before the city, as wives and children beseeched all saints and angels for help. All the while the earth continued to quake with greater or lesser force, often for a quarter of an hour without cease.”

So much for this fatal day, November 1, 1755. The disaster it brought is one of the very few before which mankind is as powerless today as it was 170 years ago. Here, too, technology will find a way out, albeit an indirect one: through prediction. For the time being, however, it seems that the sensory organs of some animals are still superior to our finest instruments. Dogs in particular will exhibit unmistakable agitation for days before the onset of earthquakes, which is why they are deployed to provide assistance to earthquake stations in vulnerable regions. And with that, my twenty minutes are up; I hope they didn’t go by too slowly for you.

“Erdbeben von Lissabon,” GS, 7.1, 220–6. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, October 31, 1931, and on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on January 6, 1932. The Funkstunde announced the broadcast for October 31, 1931, from 3:20–3:40 pm (see Schiller-Lerg, Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 173). The Frankfurt broadcast was advertised in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung as taking place on January 6, 1932, with a variant title: “ ‘Das Erdbeben von Lissabon 1755’ [The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755], read by Dr. Walter Benjamin, Berlin.” The talk was the second of two broadcasts on the Youth Hour, from 3:15–4:00 pm.

¹ In 1756, Kant wrote three essays on the subject of the earthquake, emphasizing the nature of its physical dynamics rather than theological justifications: “Von den Ursachen der Erderschütterungen bei Gelegenheit des Unglücks, welches die westliche Länder von Europa gegen das Ende des vorigen Jahres betroffen hat” (“On the Causes of Earthquakes, on the Occasion of the Calamity that Befell the Western Countries of Europe toward the End of Last Year”); “Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwürdigsten Vorfälle des Erdbebens, welches an dem Ende des 1755sten Jahres einen großen Teil der Erde erschüttert hat” (“History and Natural Description of the Most Noteworthy Occurrences of the Earthquake that Struck a Large Part of the Earth at the End of the Year 1755”); “Fortgesetzte Betrachtung der seit einiger Zeit wahrgenommenen Erderschütterungen” (“Continued Observations of the Terrestrial Convulsions that have been Perceived for Some Time”). See translations by Olaf Reinhardt in Kant, Naturai Science, ed. Eric Watkins, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

² Benjamin borrows from an account of the earthquake by Rev. Charles Davy. For Davy’s text, see “The Earthquake at Lisbon,” in The Worlds Story: A History of the World in Story, Song and Art, ed. Eva March Tappan, vol. 5 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 618–28.

CHAPTER 25. Theater Fire in Canton

I have told you about the eruption of Vesuvius, which buried old Pompeii, and last time I told you about the earthquake that destroyed the capital of Portugal in the eighteenth century. Today I would like to talk about an event that took place in China almost 100 years ago. If I had simply wanted to tell you about any old catastrophe set in China, I could have — as you know all too well — chosen other, more recent incidents than this theater fire in Canton. You need only think about the battles that now fill the newspapers day after day or about last year’s floods of the Yangtze, about which we have far more detailed reports, naturally, than about this long-ago theater fire.¹ But what matters to me is to speak about a subject through which you can really get to know the Chinese a little, and for that there’s nowhere better than a theater, perhaps. I don’t mean the plays that are performed, or the actors — them, too, but that will come later — but chiefly the audience and the space itself: the Chinese theater, which bears no resemblance to anything we imagine when we think of a theater. When a stranger draws near, he would believe himself to be anywhere but in front of a theater. He hears a formless din of drums, cymbals, and squeaking stringed instruments. Only after he has seen such a theater or heard one of the gramophone recordings of Chinese theater music does the European believe he knows what caterwauling is. If he then steps into the theater, he will feel like someone who enters a restaurant and first has to walk through a dirty kitchen: he will stumble upon a sort of laundry room in which four or five men stand bent over steaming tubs, washing hand towels. These towels play the biggest role in Chinese theater. People wipe off their face and hands with them before and after every cup of tea, every bowl of rice; servants are constantly taking the used towels out and carrying fresh ones in, often flinging them skillfully over the heads of the theater audience. Eating and drinking is rife during the performance, and that makes up for the lack of everything that provides us with comfort and a ceremonious atmosphere in a theater. The Chinese do not demand comfort, because they have none at home either. They come from their unheated apartments into the unheated theater, sit on wooden benches with their feet on flagstones, and it does not concern them in the slightest. Nor do they give a hoot about ceremony. That’s because they are much too great theater authorities not to demand the freedom to make their opinion of the performance known at any time. If they were to express it solely at the premiere — as we do here — then they would wait a long time, because there are plays in China that are presented over and over again for four or five hundred years, and even the newest are mostly versions of stories that everyone knows and has half-memorized in the form of novels, poems, or other plays. So ceremoniousness does not exist in the Chinese theater, and suspense doesn’t exist either, at least not with regard to the denouement of a plot.

Instead there is another sort of suspense, which we can best compare to what we feel when we see circus acrobats swinging on a trapeze, or jugglers balancing a whole stack of plates on a stick they perch on their nose. Actually, every Chinese actor must simultaneously be an acrobat and juggler and on top of that a dancer, singer, and fencer. You will understand why when I tell you that there are no sets in the Chinese theater. The actor not only has to play his role, but he must also act out the set. How does he do that? I will explain it to you. If he has to cross a threshold, for example, going through a door that is not there, he will lift his feet a little above the floor as though stepping over something. In contrast, slow steps while lifting his feet high, for example, indicate that he is going up a flight of stairs. Or if a general has to ascend a hill to observe a battle, then the actor who portrays him will climb on a chair. One can recognize a rider by the whip the actor holds in his hand. A mandarin being carried in a sedan-chair is portrayed by an actor who walks across the stage surrounded by four other actors, who walk with their backs bent, as if they were carrying a sedan chair. But if they suddenly make a jerky movement, it means that the mandarin has gotten down. Naturally, actors who have to be able to do so much have a long apprenticeship, usually almost seven years. During this time they learn not only singing, acrobatics, and all the rest but also the roles for about fifty plays, which they are expected to be able to perform at any time. This is necessary because it is rarely enough to perform just a single play. Instead, one scene is taken from one play, another from another, and they are all put together in a varied sequence, so that on a single evening there are often more than a dozen plays performed. On the other hand, a single play, if one wanted to perform it in its entirety, would often take two or three days, that’s how long they are. There are, however, some that are very short in which only one man performs, and I will now read you one of these. It is called “The Dream.” The speaker is an old man.

I would like to tell you a beautiful story. It is regrettable how unfair the sky is; it lets rain and snow fall down but no silver bars. Yesterday evening I was lying on my hearthside bed of clay; I tossed and turned and could not fall asleep. I lay awake from the first night-watch to the second and then again from the second until the third was sounded. As the third night-watch sounded, I had a dream. I dreamed of a treasure to the south of the village. So I took a spade and a hoe and went out into the field to dig up the treasure. I was really lucky; after a few strokes with the spade and hoe, I dug it up. I dug up a whole cellar of silver shoes; it was covered by a big mat of rushes. I lifted it up and looked under it. Oh, I had to laugh: there was a coral branch fifteen meters high, real red carnelian and white agate. Then I took seven to eight sacks of diamonds, six big baskets full of cat’s eye agates, thirty-three chiming clocks, sixty-four women’s watches, beautiful boots and caps, beautiful jackets and cloaks, beautiful new-fangled little bags, seventy-two gold bars and 33,333 silver shoes in addition. I had so much gold and silver, I didn’t know where I should put it. Should I buy land and build something to house it? But I was afraid of droughts and floods. Or should I open up a grain business? Then the mice could eat everything. Should I lend money and charge interest? There were no guarantors. Should I open up a pawn shop? I was afraid I would have to shell out money; what if the manager runs off with the money, where would I look for him? All those thousands of difficulties made me so irritated, I woke up from the irritation: it was only a dream! I had groped around the hearthside bed with both hands; while doing so I had touched the lighter — that was the silver shoes! Then I had touched the brass pipe: that was the gold bars! After groping here and there for quite a while, I came across a big scorpion with a green head, and it stung me so that I howled loudly.²

Of course, it is only the most superb actors who appear alone in front of the audience in such small plays. The reputation of such actors is immense. Wherever they appear, they are received with the greatest honor. Wealthy businessmen or officials frequently invite them with their troupe to perform in their houses. And yet probably no European artist would want to trade places with them. So great is the ambition and passion of Chinese actors that the acknowledged masters among them live in continual fear of the attacks that jealous rivals plan against them. It’s impossible to tempt an actor or an actress to ingest the smallest morsel outside of their apartment. They are convinced that the slightest inattentiveness could turn them into the victim of a poisoning. The tea they drink during the performance is purchased secretly and in a different store every time. The water it is boiled with is brought in their own teakettle from home, and only one of their entourage is allowed to make it. The great stars would never think of performing if their own bandmaster was not conducting, because they are afraid of the malice of their rivals, who could set traps for them during the performance by faulty conducting or misleading movements. The audience pays hellishly close attention, and dishes out scorn and mockery at the smallest gaffe. And they are not above throwing teacups at the artists if they are not satisfied with their achievements.

Now, the fire that I want to tell you about on this occasion was the biggest theater fire of all time. It happened in Canton on May 25, 1845. The theater was built, as was common, of bamboo posts interwoven with mats. It had been built for the special celebratory performance in honor of the war god Guan Yu. The performance was supposed to last two days. The theater stood in the middle of a great square among hundreds of similar but much smaller stalls. It held 3,000 people. On the afternoon of the second day, when everything was overcrowded, the stage was supposed to represent a temple of the war god. But because, as I have already explained, there are no sets in China, this was only identifiable because of a sacrificial fire that flickered in the middle of the stage. Then an actor left one of the two doors in the background open as he exited, and a strong gust of wind swept inside the theater, causing a pair of mats lying near the fire on stage to ignite. In the blink of an eye, the whole stage was in flames, and a few minutes later the fire had engulfed the entire structure. Now, the terrible thing was that in the whole theater there was only one single exit. Whoever just happened to be near it could save themselves; whoever sat closer to the front was lost. Hardly had a few hundred people reached the open air when the door began to burn. In vain they tried to douse it with hoses and water buckets. After a quarter of an hour had passed, it was impossible to get near the center of the fire because of the heat, and thus more than 2,000 people perished.

The European who hears about such things naturally thinks with pride and satisfaction about his own great stone theaters, which are under the strict supervision of the building control departments, in which there are firemen present at every performance, and where everything is done for the safety of the spectators. If there was ever a disaster at some point, it would hardly take the same terrible form, even if only because our theaters hold far fewer spectators. But that’s just it: in China all big events, whether work or celebrations, are tailored for enormous masses of people. And the feeling of being one of the masses is much stronger in the Chinese than it can ever be in the European people. Hence the humility, unimaginable to us, that is the main virtue of the Chinese and in no way implies low self-esteem; rather it is simply the constant awareness of the enormous size of the mass of people they belong to. This humility has a strong foundation in the rules for living and educational books of their great wise men Confucius and Lao Tzu, where it is cloaked in very particular codes of conduct that everyone can learn and understand. And at the same time, these great teachers of the Chinese, by instructing their fellow citizens in this humility, have taught them to act in such a way that they make the life of the great mass they belong to easier; they have instilled in them enormous respect for the state and especially for civil servants, whom we must not imagine to be like European civil servants. The exams that the Chinese civil servants take require not only specialized knowledge, such as our exams require, but also close familiarity with the whole corpus of poetry and literature, and especially the wise men’s instructions I spoke about. One might go so far as to say that it is these convictions of the Chinese that make their theaters so shabby and such fire hazards. At least that is what a Chinese man with whom I once discussed these matters told me:

“In China we are convinced that the most long-lasting and impressive house in every city must be the government building. After that come the temples. But places of amusement should not draw attention to themselves, because then one would think that in such a city order and work are only a minor matter.” And now, as you know, in many cities in China they really are a minor matter. But we must hope that the theater of blood, in the face of which they have retreated, will soon come to an end.³

“Theaterbrand von Kanton,” GS, 7.1, 226–31. Translated by Lisa Harries Schumann.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, November 5, 1931, and on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on February 3, 1932. Benjamin inscribed on the typescript: “Berlin and Frankfurt.” The Frankfurt broadcast was announced in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung for February 3, 1932, as the second of two broadcasts on the Youth Hour, which was scheduled to air from 3:15–4:00 pm.

¹ In 1931, the Yangtze River valley flooded in a catastrophe that killed millions and that has been called the worst natural disaster of the twentieth century.

² See “Der Traum” [The Dream], in Chinesische Schattenspiele, compiled and trans. Wilhelm Grube and Emil Krebs, ed. Berthold Laufer (Leipzig: O. Harrassowitz, 1915), in Abhandlungen der Königlich Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophische-Philologische und Historische Klass, vol. 28 (Munich, 1917), 440.

³ Given the dates of the broadcasts (November 1931 and February 1932), Benjamin is most likely referring to the Sino-Japanese conflicts surrounding the Mukden incident of September 1931—during which Japan almost certainly staged an attack on its own railway lines in Mukden, in Northern China, and used the explosion as a pretext for occupying Manchuria — followed by the Battle of Shanghai in early 1932.

CHAPTER 26. The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay

When, at the beginning of the last century, iron foundries began their first trials with the steam engine, it was something altogether different than when modern technicians and scientists work on a new airplane, a space rocket, even, or some other such machine. Today we know what technology is. These scientists and engineers have the whole world’s attention. Newspapers report on their work. Large businesses give them money for their research. But when at the turn of the last century men were creating the inventions that transformed the face of the entire world — the mechanical loom, gas lighting, the iron foundry, the steam engine — no one really knew what these great technicians and engineers were making. Indeed, even they didn’t know the import of their work. It’s hard to call one of these inventions more significant than any other. People today can hardly conceive of them as separate from their use. Nevertheless, it can be said that the most conspicuous changes to the globe over the course of the last century were all more or less related to the rail-road. Today I’ll be telling you about a railroad catastrophe, but not only because it’s a horrible and frightening story. I also want to place it within the history of technology, specifically of railroad construction. The story is of a bridge. This bridge collapsed. It was certainly terrible for the 200 people who lost their lives, for their loved ones, and for many others. Even so, I want to present this accident as only one minor incident in a great struggle, a struggle in which humans have been victorious and will remain victorious if they do not once more destroy the fruits of their own labor.

When I was considering what to talk to you about today, I returned to one of my favorite books. Published around 1840, it’s a thick book containing pictures and, really, just a collection of silly stories and pranks. But what people considered jokes back then makes for curious reading today. In a nutshell, it’s about the adventures of a fantastical little goblin finding his way around outer space. As he’s nearing the planets, he comes across a long cast-iron bridge connecting the myriad celestial bodies:

A bridge so long that you cannot see both ends of it at once, whose supports rest on planets, and which conveys wonderfully smooth asphalt from one globe to the next. The three hundred and thirty-three thousandth support touches Saturn. There our goblin sees that Saturn’s famous ring is nothing but a balcony running all around the planet, on which its inhabitants catch a little fresh air come evening.¹

Now you see what I meant when I said that people back then didn’t really know what to make of technology. For them there was still something amusing about it. Now that things were to be built only using molds and calculations, as was particularly true with iron construction, people found it very funny. Thus there was a playful element to the first constructions of this kind. Iron construction began with winter gardens and arcades, that is, with luxury buildings. But very quickly it found a more appropriate, technological field of application, enabling entirely new constructions to emerge that were, until then, without precedent. Not only did they rely on this new technology, they also catered to entirely new needs. It was then that the first exhibition palaces were built, the first covered markets, and above all, the first railway stations. At that time they were still called “iron railway stations,” and people associated them with the most outlandish ideas. Around the middle of the century one particularly bold Belgian painter, Antoine Wiertz, even petitioned to be able to paint the walls of these first train stations with large ceremonial images.²

Now, before we look at the Firth of Tay, the great 3,000-meter-wide estuary of the River Tay in central Scotland, let’s first take a look back. In 1814 Stephenson built his first locomotive;³ but only in 1820, once the rails could be effectively rolled, was the rail-road possible. Do not think, however, that everything went according to some systematic plan. No indeed: right away a quarrel broke out over the rails. Under no circumstances, so people thought, would it ever be possible to scrape together enough iron for the English rail network — and back then, of course, people were only imagining a tiny one. Many experts honestly believed that the “steam carts” should be run on granite tracks. In 1825 the first railroad line was opened, and “Locomotive No. 1” is still on display today at one of its terminals. You can be sure that if you’re ever there, at first glance it will look more like a steamroller for flattening pavements than like a real locomotive. In Europe, on the Continent, only very short routes were laid out, which could have just as easily been traveled by post coach or even on foot. Perhaps you’ve heard that Nuremberg and Fürth were the first two German cities connected by the railroad; then came Berlin, Potsdam, etc. For the most part, people saw it as a curiosity. And when the medical professors at the University of Erlangen were asked for their expert opinion of the Nuremberg railroad, they concluded that on no account should the service be permitted: the rapid motion would scramble people’s brains; indeed, the mere sight of these speeding trains was enough to cause people to faint. At a minimum, three-meter-high wooden barriers were required on either side of the tracks. When the second German railroad started running from Leipzig to Dresden, a miller filed a lawsuit claiming it obstructed his wind, and when a tunnel was required, the doctors again weighed in against the railroad: older people might suffer from the shock of the sudden change in air pressure. How people initially thought of the railroad is perhaps most clearly seen in what a great English scholar, who in other matters was no fool, had to say about railroad travel: he didn’t regard it as traveling at all; it was like “being sent somewhere, and very little different from becoming a parcel.”⁴

Alongside these battles over the benefits or ills of the railroad were those related to its construction. It is difficult for us today to imagine the perseverance of those first railroad engineers, the enormous amount of time they had to devote to their work. When work began in 1858 on the twelve-kilometer-long tunnel through Mont Cenis, it was expected to take seven years to complete. And it was no different with the bridge over the Tay. But here there was an additional hurdle. The engineers had to consider not only the load that this bridge would have to sustain, but also the terrible storms that raged along the Scottish coast, especially in autumn and spring. During construction of the bridge, which lasted from 1872 to 1878, there were months when the hurricanes hardly let up, preventing the men from working more than five or six days over the course of four weeks. In 1877, when the bridge was nearly finished, a gale of unimaginable force tore two forty-five-meter-long iron girders from their stone piles, destroying years of work in an instant. Thus all the more triumph when, in May 1878, the bridge was inaugurated with great fanfare. There was but a single voice of warning, albeit that of J. Towler, one of England’s greatest bridge-construction engineers.⁵ He believed that it wouldn’t withstand severe storms for long, and that only too soon would the world hear once more of the bridge over the Tay.

A year and a half later, on December 28, 1879, at four in the afternoon, a crowded passenger train left Edinburgh on schedule for Dundee. It was Sunday; the train’s six cars held 200 passengers. It was another one of those stormy Scottish days. The train was due to arrive in Dundee at 7:15 in the evening; it was already 7:14 when the watchman in the south tower of the bridge signaled the train. To recount the final moments of the train after this final signal, I will turn to the words of Theodor Fontane, in a passage from a poem called “The Bridge on the Tay.”⁶

There! The train! At the south tower

Gasping on despite the storm’s power.

And Johnny speaks: “The bridge is due!”

But so it is, we press on through.

A rugged boiler, twice the steam,

Victors they with such a team,

It races, churns, does not relent,

Yet will succumb: the element.

Our bridge: our pride. I laugh and sigh

As I ponder times gone by,

All the sorrow, grief; emote!

That miserable old ferry boat!

Many a precious Christmas night

Spied I would our window light

While lingering in the ferry shack

Wishing I would soon be back.

The bridgehouse waits, north of the mouth,

With all its windows facing south,

The bridgemen pacing to and fro’

All southward staring, full of woe;

The wind grew furied, high but high.

And now, like fire from the sky,

It plummets, glory glowing bright,

Into the Tay. Again, it’s night.

There were no eyewitnesses to what happened that night. Not one passenger was saved. To this day it is not known whether the storm had already torn away the middle of the bridge before the convoy reached it, leaving the train to simply hurl itself into the void. Be that as it may, the storm is said to have made such an awful commotion that it drowned out all other sounds. However, other engineers at the time, especially those who had built the bridge, maintained that the storm must have blown the train off its tracks, causing it to hurtle against the guard rail. They insist that the train broke through the parapet and the bridge itself must have collapsed only much later. Thus the first indication of the disaster was not the crash of the tumbling train, but rather a fiery glow noticed at the time by three fishermen, who didn’t suspect it was caused by the plummeting locomotive. When these men alerted the south bridge terminal and communication was then attempted with the north terminal, no contact could be made. The wires had been ruptured. The Tay stationmaster was informed, who immediately set out in a locomotive. In a quarter of an hour he was on the scene. Carefully he drove out onto the bridge. But after roughly a kilometer, upon reaching the first middle support, the engine driver braked so suddenly that the locomotive almost jumped off the tracks. In the moonlight he had detected a gaping hole. The middle portion of the bridge was gone.

When you open the Funkstunde [Radio Times], you’ll see a picture of the collapsed bridge published around that time in the Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung.⁷ Even in its iron construction, it bears similarities to a wooden bridge. Iron construction was still in its infancy and had yet to gain confidence in itself. But you all must know, at least from pictures, the structure in which iron first proudly declared its self-assurance, the structure that also stands as a monument to the calculations of the engineer: the tower completed by Eiffel for the Paris World’s Fair, just ten years after the collapse of the Tay Bridge. The Eiffel Tower, when it was built, had no function whatsoever; it was just a landmark, a wonder of the world, as they say. But then came the invention of radiotelegraphy. All of a sudden the soaring structure had found a purpose. Today the Eiffel Tower is the radio transmitter for Paris. Eiffel and his engineers built the tower in seventeen months. Every rivet hole was prepared in workshops with tenth-of-a-millimeter precision. Each of the 12,000 metal parts was specified in advance, down to the millimeter, along with every one of the two and a half million rivets. Not a chisel could be heard in the workshops. Even at the site, as in the draftsman’s studio, thought prevailed over physical strength, which was transmitted to sturdy scaffolds and cranes.⁸

“Die Eisenbahnkatastrophe vom Firth of Tay,” GS, 7.1, 232–7. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, February 4, 1932, and on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on March 30, 1932. The Berlin broadcast was announced in the Funkstunde for February 4, 1932, from 5:30–5:50 pm; the Frankfurt broadcast was announced in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung as taking place March 30, 1932, as the first of two broadcasts on the Youth Hour, which was scheduled to air from 3:15–4:00 pm.

¹ J. J. Grandville, Un autre monde (Paris: H. Fournier, 1844), 138–9. For further references by Benjamin to the image of Saturn in Grandville, see The Arcades Project, 8, 18, 64–5 [B1a, 2], 151 [F1, 7]; and “The Ring of Saturn, or Some Remarks on Iron Construction,” also in The Arcades Project, 885–7, where Benjamin mentions the railway catastrophe at the Firth of Tay, and which might be an early draft of what eventually became the radio broadcast; Das Passagen Werk, in GS, 5.1, 51, 66, 112–13 [B1a, 2], 212 [F1, 7], and GS, 5.2, 1060–3.

² Antoine Joseph Wiertz (1806–1865), Belgian painter and sculptor.

³ George Stephenson (1781–1848), the English engineer known as the “Father of the Railways,” is credited with building the first public railroad line powered by steam locomotive.

⁴ See John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3 [1856], in The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), vol. 5, 370.

⁵ This is almost certainly a reference to Sir John Fowler (1817–1898), an English engineer who devoted his career to railway construction in Britain and abroad. After the collapse of the Tay Bridge, which had been designed by Victorian engineer Sir Thomas Bouch, Fowler was one of the engineers appointed to review and redesign Bouch’s plan for another bridge in Scotland, the Forth Rail Bridge.

⁶ See Theodor Fontane, “Die Brück’ am Tay” [1880], in Werke, Schriften und Briefe, eds. Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger, vol. 6 (Munich: Hanser, 1978), 286.

⁷ The Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig), Germany’s first illustrated newspaper, was a popular weekly published from 1843 to 1944. This image was featured in the Funkstunde’s announcement of Benjamin’s broadcast. See Funkstunde 5 (January 29, 1932), 106.

⁸ For the last three sentences, see Alfred Gotthold Meyer, Eisenbauten: Ihre Geschichte und Ästhetik (Esslingen: P. Neff, 1907), 93. For this passage elsewhere in Benjamin, see The Arcades Project, 160–1 [F4a, 2]), 887; Das Passagen-Werk, GS, 5.1, 223 [F4a, 2] and GS, 5.2, 1063.

CHAPTER 27. The Mississippi Flood of 1927

When you open a map of middle America and look at the Mississippi — that giant-sized 5,000-kilometer-long current — you’ll see a somewhat sinuous and meandering line, with frequent bends but still clearly heading from north to south, a line on which you might think you could rely, just as you would on a boulevard, or on a railroad line. The people, however, who live on the banks of this current — the farmers, the fishermen, and even the city folk — know this appearance is deceptive. The Mississippi is continuously moving: not only its waters, flowing from source to mouth, but also its banks, which are forever changing. Within ten to fifty miles of the present-day watercourse lie countless lakes, lagoons, swamps, and ditches whose forms reveal themselves to be nothing other than segments of the former riverbed that has since shifted to the west or to the east. As long as the river flows through solid rock, roughly until the southern tip of the state of Illinois, its path is pretty straight. Further down, however, it enters into the flood plains and in this loose ground its restlessness and unreliability are revealed. Never is it satisfied with the bed it has made for itself. And on top of all this, every spring, great volumes of water from the lower Mississippi’s swollen tributaries, such as the Arkansas, the Red River, and the Ouachita, descend upon the flanks of the glutted Mississippi and their waters not only force out those of the main river but also create, so to speak, a barrier that congests the Mississippi, further contributing to the flooding of its adjacent states. And so it was that every year, for centuries, all the land within hundreds of miles was flooded. The plantations, fields, settlements, primeval forests, and gardens rested under a meter of water such that the area surrounding the river resembled an ocean whose islands were the summits of trees. At the beginning of the last century people began to secure individual segments of the shore against the annual mood changes of the river.

In those days levees were paid for by the owners of the riverfront where they were built. These embankments, of course, protected the land that lay behind them, but only at the expense of other neighbors who stood to suffer even more. It was in this way that most of the lower-lying plantations protected themselves over time. In order to lighten the burden of the planters, the American Congress gave them the marshland behind their fields as compensation. Now, imagine what it must have meant to these planters, who owned nothing but their land, when one day they were ordered to tear down the embankments with their own hands and expose their plantations to the destructive violence of the water. But this is precisely what happened, which brings me to the most appalling and miserable episode of the great flood of 1927.

At the mouth of the Mississippi lies, as perhaps you know, the big and important trading city of New Orleans. In less than two weeks the water had climbed so high that this critical port appeared poised for destruction. If New Orleans were to be saved, people would have to take every last and desperate measure: the protective levees upriver from the city would have to be torn open to give the water an outlet onto the fields. This set off a series of bitter civil wars that only increased the horrors of the natural catastrophe. The farmers whose land was to be sacrificed to save the metropolis were among the poorest in the country. To prevent the levees from being blown up, they formed armed militias under the direction of one of America’s many sect leaders. Thousands of farmers resolved to fight rather than pay for saving the city with the destruction of their own fields. As a last resort, the government appointed a general to act as dictator of the flood regions and declared a state of siege. As for the farmers, they armed themselves with machine guns in order to resist the military. There was an assassination attempt against today’s president of the United States, Hoover, who, as a government secretary at the time, was visiting the flood regions.¹ But the government would not allow itself to be intimidated, and proceeded with the detonations. New Orleans was saved but 100,000 square miles of land were underwater. The number of those made homeless in the region reached a half million.

The flood walls that were blown up — provided the current hadn’t already swept them away — rank among the largest public projects in American history. These levees stretch for 2,500 kilometres on both sides of the river leading to the Gulf of Mexico. They often measure fifty meters in width and are ten meters high. Thousands upon thousands of workers have to toil year after year to build new levees while maintaining the old ones. An electrical monitoring network connects all stations with one another. The levees are inspected each week, and millions are spent annually on their upkeep. For more than ten years these constructions had provided complete reassurance to those living in the area, until the high waters came in the spring of 1927.

On April 16 the telegraph reported for the first time that the river had overrun its banks. These first reports sounded fairly innocuous, and Washington hoped that the minor disturbances would amount to little else. This proved ill-founded, however. Two days later, parts of seven states were entirely flooded. Large parts of Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas were underwater. Water seven to eight meters deep flowed over the fields. Dozens of cities and hundreds of small towns had to be evacuated, and woe to those who hesitated or failed to heed the warnings. And so we come to the story of three brothers, small farmers from the area around Natchez. They thought they had time to save their cattle; while others abandoned everything and ran for their lives, the brothers were making their way to the stalls. Before they knew it a powerful surge of water had blocked their path: they were cut off and would remain so. Only one of the three would escape with his life, and from him we have the hair-raising description of the hours spent on the peak of their roof, staring into the rising waters with ever-dwindling hope. Here’s a bit of the story from the survivor:

The water had left us with only a small strip of the pitched roof. One of the chimneys had already been ripped away. Around us there was nothing left to see of the destroyed town. Only from the church tower soaring heavenwards undamaged, could we hear the ringing voices of the rescued. From far off we could hear the rushing of the water. The sound of collapsing houses had ceased. It was like a shipwreck in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from the shore. “We’re drifting,” murmured John, clinging to the roof tiles with all his might. It actually felt as if the roof had transformed itself into a raft carried along by the current. But when we looked over at the steeple just standing there, unmoving, we saw that it had only been our imagination. We were still at the very same spot amid the roaring swells.

Now the real battle began. At first the river followed the street but now the rubble blocked its way and drove it back. It was a downright assault. The current gathered every beam or tree trunk in its way and fired it like a missile against the house. And even then the current wouldn’t let it go, sweeping it up again and firing it off anew. The walls were shaking under these unrelenting and steady attacks. Before long we were bombarded in this way by ten or twelve beams. The churning water masses raged and roared and the foam splashed round our feet. From the house beneath us we heard what sounded like a dull moan; we heard its joints creak. Sometimes when a beam would strike with frightful force, we thought it was over and the walls would give in, delivering us to the wild river. Sometimes when we saw a bundle of hay or an empty barrel drift by, we would wave our handkerchiefs excitedly until we realized our mistake and sank back into our silent fear. “Hey, look over there,” cried John suddenly, “a big boat!” With outstretched arm he pointed to a dark spot in the distance. I couldn’t see anything, neither could Bill, but he carried on. And it really was a boat. It rowed closer and closer until we could finally make it out. It glided slowly forward, seeming to encircle us but not coming any closer. I can only say that at this point we were like mad men. We flailed our arms about, yelling at the top of our lungs. We hurled insults at the boat, calling it a coward as it drifted by, silent and sinister. Was it really a boat? I still don’t know to this day. When we finally saw it disappear, our last hopes went with it.

From that point on we expected the house to cave in at any moment and to swallow us whole. It seemed that the house must already have been completely undermined save for one especially strong wall, and if that gave way everything else would go down with it. I trembled at the thought that the roof would no longer carry our weight. The house might have lasted the whole night, but the roof began to give way under the constant barrage of beams. We had fled to the left side of the roof, where the rafters were still more or less intact. But then they, too, began to sway and it was plain to see that they would not hold much longer if all three of us stayed huddled together in the same spot.

My brother Bill had, very mechanically, placed his pipe back in his mouth. Grumbling to himself, he curled his moustache and furrowed his brow. The rising danger he saw before him, against which all his courage amounted to nothing, began to make him impatient. He spat a few times into the water with angry disdain. Then, as the timber beneath him continued to give out, he made his decision and climbed from the roof.

“Bill, Bill,” I called. I sensed, with horror, what he was doing. He turned himself around and said, peacefully: “Farewell, Louis … You see, it’s taking too long. I want to make room for you two.”

First he threw his pipe and then himself into the flood. “Farewell,” he said again, “I’ve had enough.” He never resurfaced. He was a bad swimmer and he probably didn’t even try to save himself. He didn’t want to survive our ruin and the death of our loved ones.

And so it ends, the tale of the third brother, the only member of this family to be rescued by one of the boats combing the water.

More than 50,000 ships, motorboats, and steamers had been mobilized. The government even requisitioned luxury boats for the rescue operations. Entire aircraft squadrons were deployed day and night, as they were last year when, under the command of Charles Lindbergh, food and medical supplies were brought to the Chinese in the Yangtze River valley after they had been completely cut off from all other forms of contact. And on the banks of the Mississippi hundreds of thousands of refugees camped under the open sky, lacking shelter and warm clothing, exposed to hunger, rain, and the horrific tornadoes that further devastated the flood regions at that time.

So much for the raging elements of the Mississippi. On some other occasion we’ll return to its banks during times when the river flowed peacefully in its bed, but there was little peace to be found on its shores. For a long time now I’ve planned to tell you the story of America’s greatest and most dangerous secret society, next to which all bands of whiskey smugglers and criminal gangs are child’s play: the Ku Klux Klan. Once again we’ll find ourselves on the banks of the Mississippi, but this time facing the raging elements of human cruelty and violence. The dams that the law has built to contain them have held up no better than the actual ones made from earth and stone. And so, stay tuned for the Ku Klux Klan and Judge Lynch and the other unsavory characters that have populated the human wilderness of the Mississippi, and still populate it today.

“Die Mississippi-Überschwemmung 1927,” GS, 7.1, 237–43. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin on March 23, 1932. The Funkstunde announced the broadcast under the title “Die Überschwemmung des Mississippi” [The Mississippi Flood] for March 23, 1932, from 5:30–5:50 pm.

¹ Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, was appointed by President Coolidge to lead the federal, state, and private flood relief efforts. He called for the appointment of state flood commissions, to be headed by a single “dictator” in each of the affected states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

CHAPTER 28. True Dog Stories

You probably think you know dogs. By this I mean, when I read you a famous description of dogs, you will have the same feeling I did when I first read it. I said to myself: if the word “dog” had not appeared in the description, I wouldn’t have guessed which animal it was about; things look so new and special when a great scientist looks at them, as if they had never before been seen. The name of this scientist is Linnaeus, the very same Linnaeus you all know from botany and the man responsible for the system we still use today to classify plants. Here’s what he has to say about dogs:

Feeds on meat, carcasses, farinaceous grains, but not leaves; digests bones, vomits up grass; defecates onto stone: Greek white, exceedingly acidic. Drinks by lapping; urinates to the side, up to one hundred times in good company, sniffs at its neighbor’s anus; moist nose, excellent sense of smell; runs on a diagonal, walks on toes; perspires very little, lets tongue hang out in the heat; circles its sleeping area before retiring; hears rather well while sleeping, dreams. The female is vicious with jealous suitors; fornicates with many partners when in heat; bites them; intimately bound during copulation; gestation is nine weeks, four to eight compose a litter, males resemble the father, females the mother. Loyal above all else; house companion for humans; wags its tail upon master’s approach, defends him; runs ahead on a walk, waits at crossings; teachable, hunts for missing things, makes the rounds at night, warns of those approaching, keeps watch over goods, drives livestock from fields, herds reindeer, guards cattle and sheep from wild animals, holds lions in check, rustles up game, locates ducks, lies in wait before pouncing on the net, retrieves a hunter’s kill without partaking of it, rotates a skewer in France, pulls carts in Siberia. Begs for scraps at the table; after stealing it timidly hides its tail; feeds greedily. Lords it over its home; is the enemy of beggars, attacks strangers without being provoked. Heals wounds, gout and cancers with tongue. Howls to music, bites stones thrown its way; depressed and foul-smelling before a storm. Afflicted by tapeworm. Spreads rabies. Eventually goes blind and gnaws at itself.¹

That was Linnaeus. After a description like that, most of the stories frequently told about dogs seem rather boring and run-of-the-mill. In any case, they can’t rival this passage in terms of peculiarity or flair, even those told by people out to prove how clever dogs are. Is it not an insult to dogs that the only stories about them are told in order to prove something? As if they’re only interesting as a species? Doesn’t each individual dog have its own special character?

No single dog is physically or temperamentally like another. Each has its own good and bad tendencies, which are often in stark contradiction, giving dog owners precious conversation material. Everyone’s dog is cleverer than his neighbor’s! When an owner recounts his dog’s silly tricks, he is illuminating its character, and when the dog experiences some remarkable fate, it becomes something greater, part of a life story. It is special even in its death.²

Now let’s hear about some of these peculiarities. It must also be true of other animals that they possess many unique qualities that are not found in the species as a whole. But humans make this observation so readily and definitively only with dogs, with whom they have a closer bond than with any other animal, except perhaps horses. It all began thousands of years ago with man’s great victory over the dog, or more precisely, over the wolf and the jackal; yielding to man, allowing themselves to be tamed, these wild animals became dogs. However, the most ancient dogs, which first appeared around the end of the Stone Age, were far removed from our pets and hunting dogs of today. They were more similar to the half-wild dogs of Eskimos, which have to fend for themselves for months at a time and resemble the Arctic wolf in every respect, as well as the fearful, treacherous, and currish dogs of Kamchatka, which, according to one traveler’s account, haven’t the slightest love for or loyalty to their master — in fact, they constantly try to kill him. The domesticated dog must have arisen from such a beast. It is truly regrettable that later on, some dogs, especially mastiffs, returned to their old savagery as a consequence of breeding, becoming even more dreadful and bloodthirsty than they had been in their primitive state. Here is the story of the most famous of all bloodhounds, named Bezerillo, whom the Spaniards of Fernando Cortez came upon while conquering Mexico, and then trained most hideously.

In earlier times the Mexican bulldog was used in the nastiest way. It was trained to catch people, tackle them to the ground, and even kill them. During the conquest of Mexico, the Spaniards deployed such dogs against the Indians and one of them, by the name of Bezerillo, became famous, or rather, infamous. It can no longer be said whether or not he was an actual Cuban mastiff, which is considered to be a mongrel of a bulldog and a bloodhound. He is described as medium-sized, red in color, but black around the nose and up to the eyes. His audacity and intelligence were equally extraordinary. He enjoyed the highest status among the dogs and received twice as much food as the others. When on the attack he would hurl himself against swarms of Indians while taking care to lock onto an arm so he could drag away a captive. If they complied, the dog would inflict no further harm; if they refused to accompany him, in a flash he would pin them to the ground and strangle them. He could tell exactly which Indians had capitulated and let them be, focusing instead on the resisters. Although so cruel and so fierce, he sometimes showed himself to be much more humane than his masters. One morning, so the story goes, Captain Jago de Senadza wanted to have a little barbarous fun by letting Bezerillo rip to shreds an old captive Indian woman. He gave her a letter and ordered her to deliver it to the governor of the island; the letter instructed that the dog be let loose on the old woman to rip her apart. When the poor, defenseless Indian woman saw the ferocious dog storming after her, she fell to the ground in fear, desperately begging him for mercy. She showed him the letter, explaining that she had brought it to the commander on orders. The ferocious dog hesitated at these words, and, after a moment’s contemplation, approached the old woman tenderly. This incident astounded the Spaniards, appearing to them as something mystical, or supernatural, which is probably why the governor set the old Indian free. Bezerillo met his end in a skirmish with Caribs, who felled him with a poison dart. It’s easy to see how the unfortunate Indians saw such dogs as four-legged abettors of the two-legged devil.³

The following story tells of a breed of wild mastiff that roams in packs about Madagascar:

On the island of Madagascar, large hordes of dogs roam wild. Their bitterest enemy is the caiman, which would frequently devour them as they swam from one riverbank to the next. Over the years of struggle against the beast, the dogs have invented a trick that enables them to stay clear of the caiman’s jaws. Before diving into the water, they gather in a large group by the shore and bark as loudly as they can. Drawn to the noise, all the alligators in the vicinity raise their giant heads out of the water just below the spot on the bank where the pack is waiting. At this point the dogs gallop along the bank and then swim across the water unmolested, as the ungainly alligators are not able to keep up. It is also interesting to observe that dogs brought to the island by new settlers fall victim to the caiman, while their offspring later save themselves from certain death by employing the trick invented by the indigenous dogs.⁴

We have seen that dogs know how to help one another. Now let’s see how helpful they’ve been to humans. I’m thinking of age-old human activities such as the hunt, the night watch, trekking, war, in all of which dogs have cooperated with humans, spanning various epochs of world history and the most remote corners of the Earth. Some ancient peoples, like those from Colophon, waged wars using great packs of dogs, who would attack first in all their battles. But I’m thinking not only of dogs’ heroism throughout history, but also of their roles in society, and the assistance they give people in countless aspects of everyday life. There is no end to the number of stories, but I will tell only three very short ones, the Boot Dog, the Coach Poodle, and the Death Hound.⁵

At the Pont-Neuf in Paris there was a young bootblack who trained a poodle to dip her thick hairy paws in the water and then tread on the feet of passersby. The people would cry out, the bootblack would appear and thereby multiply his earnings. As long as he was busy shining someone’s shoes, the dog behaved, but when the footstool became free, the game would begin anew.

Brehm tells us about a poodle he knew whose intelligence brought great amusement. He was trained in all sorts of things and, in a manner of speaking, understood every word. Whatever his master sent him to fetch, he was sure to deliver what was asked. He would say: “Go fetch a carriage!” and the dog would run to the spot where the cabs wait, jump into a coach and keep barking until the carriage drove off; if the coachman took a wrong turn, the dog began barking again, and in some cases would even run along ahead of the wagon until they reached his master’s home.

An English newspaper reports: In Campbelltown in the province of Argyllshire, every funeral procession, with very few exceptions, makes its way from the church to the cemetery accompanied by a quiet mourner in the form of a huge, black dog. He always takes his place beside those immediately following the casket and escorts the funeral cortege to the grave. Once there, he lingers until the final words of the eulogy have come and gone. With much gravitas he then turns around and exits the graveyard at a solemn pace. This remarkable dog seems instinctively to know when and where a funeral will occur, as he always shows up just at the right moment. Because he has been shouldering this freely chosen obligation for years, his presence has become more or less expected, such that his failure to appear would be conspicuous. At first the dog was always chased from the open grave, his preferred spot to sit, but he would always return to accompany the mourners at the earliest opportunity. Eventually people gave up chasing away the quiet sympathy-bearer, and he has since had an official role in every funeral procession. However, the most remarkable thing was when a chartered steamer pulled into the harbor, carrying a recently deceased man and his attendant mourners: the dog waited right where the ship would dock and then accompanied the funeral procession to the cemetery in his usual way.

Incidentally, did you know there’s an encyclopedia of famous dogs? It was made by a man who busied himself with all sorts of obscure things. For instance, he compiled a lexicon of famous shoemakers, and wrote a whole book titled Soup, as well as other, similarly esoteric works. The dog book is very handy. Every dog known to man is in it, including some that the writer has conceived of himself. It was in this book that I found the wonderful and true story of Medor the dog, who took part in the Paris Revolution of 1831 and the storming of the Louvre, but lost his master there. I’ll tell it to you now in closing, just as its author Ludwig Börne wrote it.⁶

I left Napoleon’s coronation for another spectacle that was more after my own heart. I visited the noble Medor. If virtue were rewarded with a title on this Earth, Medor would be the emperor of all dogs. Consider his story. After the storming of the Louvre in July, those who died in the battle were buried in the square in front of the palace, on the side where the delightful columns stand. When the bodies were laid onto carts to carry them to the grave, a dog jumped with heartrending sorrow onto one of the wagons, and from there into the large pit into which the dead were thrown. Great efforts were made to pull him out; he would have been scorched by the scattered lime even before being buried under the dirt. That was the dog people would later call Medor. During battle he always stood beside his master. He was wounded himself. Since his master’s death he never left the graves, moaning day and night before the door to the narrow cemetery, or howling while running back and forth in front of the Louvre.

No one paid much attention to Medor, because no one knew him or could guess his pain. His master must have been one of the many foreigners that came to Paris in those days, fought unnoticed for the freedom of his homeland, bled there, died there, and was buried anonymously. Only after several weeks did people begin to take notice of Medor. He was emaciated about the ribs and covered in festering wounds. People gave him food, but for a long time he refused it. Finally the persistent compassion of a good townswoman succeeded in alleviating Medor’s grief. She took him in, bandaged and healed his wounds, and made him strong again. Medor was more content, but his heart lay in his master’s grave, where his caretaker took him after his recovery and where he would stay for the next seven months. A few times greedy people sold him to rich curiosity seekers; once he was taken thirty hours from Paris, but he always found his way back. Medor is often seen unearthing a small piece of fabric; he becomes excited upon finding it and then sadly reburies it. It’s probably a piece of his master’s shirt. If he’s given a piece of bread or cake, he buries it in the ground, as if wanting to feed his friend in the grave, and then retrieves it, repeating this process several times a day. For the first few months the national guardsman at the Louvre would invite Medor into the guardhouse every night. Later on the guard saw to it that a hut was built for Medor beside the grave.

Medor quickly found his Plutarch, his rhapsodists, his painters. When I visited the square in front of the Louvre, peddlers offered me Medor’s life story, songs of his exploits, his portrait. For ten sous I purchased Medor’s immortality. The little graveyard was surrounded by a thick wall of people, all poor folks from the street. Here lies buried their pride and joy. This is their opera, their ballroom, their court, their church. They’re thrilled to get close enough to pet Medor. I too managed to edge my way through the crowd. Medor is a large, white poodle. I bent down to pet him, but he took no notice of me; my jacket was too fine. But when approached and stroked by a man in rough clothes, or a ragged woman, he responded warmly. Medor knows very well where to find the true friends of his master. A young girl, all in tatters, came to him. He jumped up to greet her, clung to her and wouldn’t let go. He was so happy, so at ease with her. To ask something of the poor girl, he didn’t need to first bend before her and touch the hem of her skirt as with a groomed and genteel lady. Wherever he bit at her dress was a rag that fit snug in his mouth. The child was very proud of Medor’s familiarity with her. I crept away, ashamed of my tears.⁷

And with this we are through with dogs for the day.

“Wahre Geschichten von Hunden,” GS, 7.1, 243–9. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, September 27, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Berlin Radio, September 27, 1930. “The Funkstunde announced the broadcast for this date from 3:20–3:40 pm.

¹ Linnaeus as quoted in A. E. Brehm, Die Haushunde: mit einem Anhang: Zur Stammesgeschichte der Haushunde [Household Dogs: With an Addendum on the Phylogeny of Household Dogs] (Leipzig: Reclams Universal Bibliothek, 1923), 33ff. For this passage as well as those that follow from Brehm and Czibulka, Benjamin’s typescript refers to the text he wanted to cite by title but does not give the full quotation, which was supplied by the editors of the GS, who also note that Benjamin was unlikely to have had time in the twenty-minute broadcast to read these passages in full (GS, 7.2, 584).

² Brehm, Die Haushunde, 43.

³ Ibid., 96–8.

⁴ Alfons von Czibulka, Der Hundespiegel: Eine Auswahl [Reflections on Dogs: A Selection] (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1923), 299.

⁵ See Czibulka, Der Hundespiegel, 302ff.

⁶ Karl Ludwig Börne (1786–1837) was a German-Jewish writer, journalist, and satirist.

⁷ See Czibulka, Der Hundespiegel, 225–7, and Ludwig Börne, Briefe aus Paris 1830–1831, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1832), 138ff.

CHAPTER 29. A Crazy Mixed-Up Day: Thirty Brainteasers

Perhaps you know a long poem that begins like this:

Dark it is, the moon shines bright,

a car creeps by at the speed of light

and slowly rounds the round corner.

People standing sit inside,

immersed they are in silent chatter,

while a shot-dead hare

skates by on a sandbank there.

Everyone can see that this poem doesn’t add up. In the story you’ll hear today, quite a few things don’t add up either, but I doubt that everyone will notice. Or rather, each of you will find a few mistakes — and when you find one, you can make a dash on a piece of paper with your pencil. And here’s a hint: if you mark all the mistakes in the story, you’ll have a total of fifteen dashes. But if you find only five or six, that’s perfectly alright as well.

But that’s only one facet of the story you’ll hear today. Besides these fifteen mistakes, it also contains fifteen questions. And while the mistakes creep up on you, quiet as a mouse, so no one notices them, the questions, on the other hand, will be announced with a loud gong. Each correct answer to a question gives you two points, because many of the questions are more difficult to answer than the mistakes are to find. So, with a total of fifteen questions, if you know the answers to all of them, you’ll have thirty dashes. Added to the fifteen dashes for mistakes, that makes a total of forty-five possible dashes. None of you will get all forty-five, but that’s not necessary. Even ten points would be a respectable score.

You can mark your points yourselves. During the next Youth Hour, the radio will announce the mistakes along with the answers to the questions, so you can see whether your thoughts were on target, for above all, this story requires thinking. There are no questions and no mistakes that can’t be managed with a little reflection.

One last bit of advice: don’t focus on just the questions. To the contrary, keep a lookout for the mistakes above all; the questions will all be repeated at the end of the story. It goes without saying that the questions don’t contain any mistakes; there, everything is as it should be. Now pay attention. Here’s Heinz with his story.

What a day! It all started early this morning — I had hardly slept a wink, because I couldn’t stop thinking about a riddle — anyway, the doorbell rang early. I opened the door and there was my friend Anton’s deaf housekeeper. She handed me a letter from Anton.

“Dear Heinz,” writes Anton, “yesterday, while I was at your house, I left my hat hanging by the door. Please give it to my housekeeper. Best regards, Anton.” But the letter continues. Below he writes: “I just now found the hat. Forgive the disturbance. Many thanks for your trouble.”

That’s Anton for you, the absent-minded professor type. By the same token, he’s also a great fan and solver of riddles. And when I looked at the letter, it occurred to me: I could use Anton today. Perhaps he knows the solution to my riddle; I made a bet that I would figure out the riddle by this morning. The riddle goes like this (Gong):

The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all. What is it?

Yes, that’s it, I thought to myself, I have to ask Anton. I was hoping to ask his housekeeper whether he was already at school — Anton is a teacher — but she had already left.

I thought to myself, Anton must be at school. I put on my hat and just as I was heading down the stairs, it occurred to me that summer daylight saving time began today, so everything starts an hour earlier. I pulled out my watch and set it back one hour. When I reached the street, I realized that I had forgotten to shave. Just around the corner to the left I saw a barbershop. In three minutes I was there. In the window hung a large enamel sign: “A shave today ten pfennigs, a shave tomorrow free.” (Gong): A shave today ten pfennigs, a shave tomorrow free. The sign struck me as odd. I wish I knew why. I went in, took a seat and got a shave, all the while looking in the large mirror hanging before me. Suddenly the barber nicked me, on my right cheek. And sure enough, blood appeared on the right side of my mirror image. The shave cost me ten pfennigs. I paid with a twenty-mark note and got back nineteen marks in five-mark coins, along with five groschen and twenty five-pfennig coins. Then the barber, a jolly young man, held open the door and said to me as I went out: “Say hello to Richard if you see him.” Richard is his twin brother who has a pharmacy on the main square.

Now I’m thinking: the best thing is to go straight to Anton’s school and see if I can’t track him down. On my way there, walking down a street, I saw a large crowd of people standing around a carnival magician performing his tricks. With chalk he drew a tiny circle on the sidewalk. He then said: “Using the same center point, I will draw another circle whose circumference is five centimeters greater than the first.” After doing so he stood up, looked around with a mysterious smile and said (Gong): “If I now draw a gigantic circle, let’s say as big as the circumference of the Earth, and then I draw a second one whose circumference is five centimeters greater than that of the giant circle, which ring is wider: the one that lies between the tiny circle and the one five centimeters larger, or the ring between the giant circle and the one five centimeters larger?” Yes, I would like to know this, too.

I’d finally managed to push my way through the crowd, when I noticed that my cheek still hadn’t stopped bleeding, and as I was on the main square, I went into the pharmacy to buy a bandage. “Greetings from your twin brother, the barber,” I said to the pharmacist. He’s old as the hills and a bit of an odd bird to boot. And more than anything, he’s terribly anxious. Whenever he leaves his ground-floor shop, not only does he double-lock the door, he also walks around the whole building, and if he sees he’s left a window open somewhere, he reaches inside to close it. But the most interesting thing about him is his collection of curiosities, which he’ll show to anyone who comes into his shop. Today was no exception and, before long, I was left to admire everything at my leisure. There was a skull of an African Negro when he was six years old, and next to it a skull of the same man when he was sixty. The second was much larger, of course. Then there was a photograph of Frederick the Great, playing with his two greyhounds at Sanssouci. Next to it lay a bladeless antique knife that was missing its handle. He also had a stuffed flying fish. And hanging on the wall was a large pendulum clock. As I paid for my bandage, the pharmacist asked (Gong): “If the pendulum on my clock swings ten times to the right and ten times to the left, how often does it pass through the middle?” This, too, I wanted to know. So, that was the pharmacist.

Now I needed to hurry if I wanted to make it to the school before lessons were over. I jumped onto the next streetcar and just managed to get a corner seat. A fat man was seated to my right and on my left was a small woman talking to the man across from her about her uncle (Gong): “My uncle,” she said, “has just turned one hundred years old, but has only had twenty-five birthdays. How can that be?” This, too, I wanted to know, but we had already reached the school. I went through all the classrooms looking for Anton. The teachers were very annoyed at being disturbed.

And they asked the oddest questions. For example, I walked into a math class where the teacher was getting cross with a young boy. He had not been paying attention and the teacher was going to punish him. He said to the boy (Gong): “Add up all the numbers from one to a thousand.” The teacher was more than a little surprised when, after a minute, the boy stood up and gave the right answer: 501,000. How was he able to calculate so fast? This I also wanted to know. First I tried it with just the numbers one through ten. Once I came upon the quickest way to do this, I had figured out the boy’s trick.

Another class was geography. (Gong): The teacher drew a square on the blackboard. In the middle of this square he drew a smaller square. He then drew four lines, each connecting one corner of the small square with the nearest corner of the large square. This resulted in five shapes: one in the middle, this was the small square, and four other shapes surrounding the small square. Every boy had to draw this diagram in his notebook. The diagram represented five countries. Now the teacher wanted to know how many different colors were needed so that each country was a different color than the three, or four, countries that it bordered. I thought to myself, five countries need five colors. But I was wrong, the answer was smaller than five. Why? This, too, I wanted to know.

I then entered another class, where students were learning to spell. The teacher was asking very strange things, for example (Gong): “How do you spell dry grass with three letters?” And (Gong): “How can you write one hundred using only four nines?” And (Gong): “In your ABC’s, which is the middlemost letter?” To conclude the lesson he told the children a fairy tale (Gong):

“An evil sorcerer transformed three princesses into three flowers, perfectly identical and planted in a field. Once a month, one of them was allowed to return to her house for the night as a human. On one of these occasions, one of the princesses said to her husband just as dawn broke and she had to return to her two friends in the field and become a flower again: ‘If you come to me this morning and pluck me, I will be redeemed and can stay with you for evermore.’ This came to pass. Now the question is, how did her husband recognize her, since the flowers looked identical?” This, too, I wanted to know, but it was high time for me to get hold of Anton, and because he wasn’t at school, I headed to his home.

Anton lived not far away, on the sixth floor of a building on Kramgasse. I climbed the stairs and rang the bell. His housekeeper, who had been at my house in the morning, answered right away and let me in. But she was alone in the apartment: “Herr Anton is not here,” she said. This irritated me. I thought the smartest thing to do was to wait for him, so I went into his room. He had a gorgeous view onto the street. The only hindrance was a two-story building across the way, which obstructed the view. But you could clearly see the faces of passersby, and on looking up, you could see birds fluttering about in the trees. Looming nearby was the large train station clock tower. The clock read exactly 14:00. I pulled out my pocket watch for comparison and sure enough, it was 4 pm on the nose. I had waited for three hours when, out of boredom, I started browsing the books in Anton’s room. (Gong) Unfortunately a bookworm had gotten into his library. Every day it ate through one volume. It was now on the first page of the first volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I thought to myself, how long will it need to reach the last page of the second volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales? I wasn’t concerned about the covers, just the pages. Yes, this is something I wanted to know. I heard voices outside in the hallway.

The housekeeper was standing there with an errand boy, who had been sent by the tailor to collect money for a suit. (Gong) Because the errand boy knew the housekeeper was deaf, he had handed her a piece of paper with one word written on it in large capital letters: MONEY [GELD]. But the housekeeper had no money with her, so to convey her request that he be patient, she drew just two more letters on the piece of paper. What were these two letters?

I had had enough of waiting. I headed out to find a little something to eat after such a tedious day. As I reached the street the moon was already in the sky. There had been a new moon a few days prior, and by now it had waxed to a narrow crescent that looked like the beginning of a capital German “Z” hovering over the rooftops. In front of me was a small pastry shop. I went in and ordered an apple cake with whipped cream. (Gong): When the apple cake with whipped cream arrived, it didn’t appeal to me. I told the waiter I would prefer a Moor’s Head.¹ He brought me the Moor’s Head, which was delicious. I stood up to go. As I was just on my way out, the waiter ran after me, shouting: You didn’t pay for your Moor’s Head! — But I gave you the apple cake in exchange, I told him. — But you didn’t pay for that either, the waiter said. — Sure, but I didn’t eat it either! I retorted, and left. Was I right? This, too, I’d like to know.

As I arrived home, imagine my astonishment at seeing Anton, who had been waiting there for five hours. He wanted to apologize for the silly letter he had sent to me early this morning via his housekeeper. I said that it didn’t matter all that much, and then told Anton my whole day as I’ve just told it to you now. He couldn’t stop shaking his head. When my story was over he was so astounded that he was speechless. He then left, still shaking his head. As he disappeared around the corner, I suddenly realized: this time he really has forgotten his hat. And I — of course I had forgotten something as well: to ask him the answer to my riddle (Gong): The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all.

But perhaps you’ve found the answer by now. And with this, I say goodbye.

Repetition of the fifteen questions:

1. The first question is an old German folk riddle: The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all. What is it?

2. What’s fishy about a barber who hangs an enamel sign in his window reading, “A shave today ten pfennigs, a shave tomorrow free”?

3. If I have a small circle and then around its center point I draw a circle whose circumference is five centimeters greater than that of the original, this creates a ring between the two circles. If I then take a giant circle, one as big as the circumference of the Earth, and around the same center point I draw another one, whose circumference is five centimeters greater than that of the first giant one, there is then a ring between those two circles. Which of the two rings is wider, the first or the second?

4. If the clock pendulum swings ten times to the right and ten times to the left, how often does it pass through the middle?

5. How can a man who is 100 years old have had only twenty-five birthdays?

6. What is the quickest way to add up all the numbers from one to 1,000? Try it first with the numbers from one to ten.

7. A country is surrounded by four other countries, each of which borders the middle country and two of the others. What is the fewest number of colors needed so that each country has a different color than its neighbors?

8. How do you spell dry grass with three letters?

9. How can you write 100 using only four nines?

10. In your ABC’s, which is the middlemost letter?

11. There are three identical flowers in a field. In the morning, how can you tell which of them has not been there overnight?

12. If each day a bookworm eats through one volume in a series of books, how long will it take for it to eat its way from the first page of one volume to the last page of the next, provided he eats in the same direction in which the series of books is arranged?

13. You have a piece of paper with the word “money” [Geld] written on it. Which two letters can you add to convey a request for patience [Geduld]?

14. What’s wrong with the logic of a man who orders a piece of cake, exchanges it for another once it arrives, and then won’t pay for the new piece because he claims he traded the old piece for it?

15. The old riddle once more, whose solution is worth four points because it has now appeared twice: The peasant sees it often, the king only seldom, and God never at all.

Answers to the fifteen questions:

1. His equal.

2. If the barber were serious about his offer, he wouldn’t have made a permanent sign out of enamel, because “tomorrow,” when shaves are free, will never come.

3. The two rings are of equal width.

4. The pendulum passes through the middle twenty times.

5. The man was born on February 29.

6. Calculate: 999 + 1 = 1,000; 998 + 2 = 1,000; 997 + 3 = 1,000; there are 500 such pairs. Then all that’s left is 1,000 at the high end, and 0 at the low end; so adding 1,000 to 500,000 gives a total of 501,000. Using the same method, the numbers from 1 to 10 add up to 60.²

7. Three colors are needed: one for the country in the middle, one for the two countries above and below the one in the middle, and a third color for the two countries to the left and the right of the one in the middle.

8. Hay.

9. 99 9/9.

10. B.

11. The flower that was not there overnight is the one with no dew on it.

12. The bookworm needs only a moment to get from the first page of the first book to the last page of the second, because in a properly arranged library, the first page of the first book is right up against the last page of the second.

13. Inserting the letters “du” into the middle of the German word for “money” [Geld] spells the German word for “patience” [Geduld].

14. The first piece of cake, which he did not pay for, does not belong to him, so he should neither eat it nor exchange it for the second piece.

15. His equal.

List of the fifteen mistakes:

1. Heinz realizes that summer daylight saving has just begun and sets his watch back one hour. He should set it one hour forward.

2. If the barbershop is just around the corner and it would take him as long as three minutes to get there, it would be impossible for him to see it.

3. If Heinz is cut on his right side, the wound will be on the left side of his reflection.

4. Nineteen marks cannot be disbursed in five-mark notes.

5. Five groschen and twenty five-pfennig coins equals 1.50 marks. Heinz should have received only ninety pfennig in addition to the nineteen marks, because he gave the barber twenty marks for a shave that cost ten pfennig.³

6. If the barber, the pharmacist’s twin brother, is a young man, then the pharmacist cannot be an old man.

7. A window cannot be closed from the outside.

8. Even if he is dead, a man has only one skull, not two.

9. One could not yet take photographs in the time of Frederick the Great.

10. A bladeless knife missing its handle is simply not there.

11. Someone with a corner seat cannot have neighbors to the right and the left.

12. If Anton’s housekeeper is deaf and alone in the apartment, she wouldn’t know to open the door after Heinz rings the bell.

13. If someone lives on the sixth floor, a two-story building cannot block his view and he cannot see the faces of passersby.

14. If the train station clock reads 14:00, it’s 2 pm, not 4 pm.

15. The crescent of a waxing moon looks like the start of a German uppercase “A,” not “Z.”

“Ein verrückter Tag, Dreißig Knacknüsse,” GS, 7.1, 306–15. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, probably on July 6, 1932. The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung announced for the Youth Hour on July 6, 1932, at 3:15 pm, “ ‘Denksport’ [Mental Exercise], by Dr. Walter Benjamin (for children ten years and older).” “A Crazy Mixed-Up Day” was most likely the text Benjamin prepared for this broadcast.

¹ “Moor’s Head,” a direct translation of Benjamin’s Mohrenkopf, is rarer in English as a name for this chocolate-coated marshmallow pastry. The English term for this dessert is usually “mallomar,” and the modern-day German is Schokokuss, “Chocolate Kiss.”

² Benjamin has made a mistake here. There are only 499 number pairs adding up to 1,000, giving a subtotal of 499,000. Adding the two remaining numbers, 1,000 and 500, gives a correct total of 500,500. Correspondingly, the sum of the numbers between 1 and 10 is 55. Benjamin’s mistake was first corrected in the GS, 7.2, 649–50.

³ There were ten pfennig in one groschen, and 100 pfennig in one mark.