Radio Benjamin

CHAPTER 32. Children’s Literature

Dear invisible ones!

Surely you have often heard it said: “God! We didn’t have it this good when I was young. We were still terrified about our grades then; we weren’t yet allowed to walk barefoot on the beach.” But have you ever heard someone say: God! We didn’t play this nicely, either, when I was young. Or: When I was little there weren’t such beautiful storybooks. No. Whatever one reads or plays during one’s childhood is remembered not only as the most beautiful and the best, but often, and quite incorrectly, as unique. And it is completely commonplace to hear adults bemoan the vanishing of toys that they could actually buy in the nearest store. In thinking about these objects, everyone becomes a laudator temporis acti, a reactionary. That’s why they must have a special significance. Although we won’t speak about that for the moment, we do not want to forget during the following that children may find, as they do in all things, something very different in books than an adult does.

There is a great deal — to begin with the primer — that one could draw out of the relationship of the child to the alphabet. From the earliest stages, when every character in the alphabet is a yoke through which hand and tongue have to slip, humiliated, on through the later stages, when the child handles the sounds playfully and founds his first secret society deep in the thicket of the “Robber” and “Peas” languages.¹ Surely no story of seafarers or ghosts gets as deep under a growing boy’s skin as the primer did when he was little. The first German primers still approached children with naïve pedagogical skill. These “little voice books” were set up onomatopoetically. The “O” rings out from the mouth of a wagoner who is driving his horses in the picture, the “Sh” comes from a woman who is shooing hens on another page, the “R” is the growling of a dog, and the “S” is put into the hissing throat of a snake. But soon this auditory emphasis receded, and ever since the Counter-Reformation we have had primers in which the grandeur of the characters appear to the startled child’s eye in clouds of flowery phrases and flourishes. That was followed by the compartments and boxes system of the eighteenth century, in which the little reading words were pressed into military cadres that stood joylessly close together, and the letters were the drill sergeants who, as capital letters, gave orders to their nouns. Some primers that date from this time have title pages that promise the abecedarian 248 illustrations. On closer inspection, the whole thing is eight pages long and the illustrations are placed one next to the other in tiny frames. Admittedly, no primer can be so eccentric that the child doesn’t take from it what he or she needs in the end, as Jean Paul shows so beautifully in his description of the one by Schoolmaster Wuz: “Cheerfully and undisturbed, he copied the ABC in beautiful official handwriting. Between all the black letters, he stuck in red ones to grab everyone’s attention; thus most children in Germany remember the pleasure with which they fished out the boiled red ones from the black ones and enjoyed them like cooked crabs.”²

The schoolmasters, of course, quickly found out that not only does the child have the most difficulty with the primer, but, of all books, the primer has the most difficulty with the child. The most obvious thing to do was to emancipate the visualization as much as possible from the word, not to mention the letter. The first attempt along these lines was the Orbis pictus by Amos Comenius, printed in 1658.³ It depicts the objects of daily life, as well as of supersensory life, in simple, crude representations shown on several hundred tables the size of map sheets. The text was limited to a German-Latin table of contents. This work was one of the great and rare successes in the realm of pedagogical children’s books, and if one really thinks about it, it appears to be the beginning of a very momentous development, which has, even today after two and a half centuries, still not come to a close. Yes — today less than ever. The extraordinary timeliness that all attempts to develop instruction based on visualization possess stems from the fact that a new, standardized, and wordless system of symbols seems to be arising in very different areas of life — in traffic, art, statistics. Here, a pedagogical problem touches upon a wide-sweeping cultural one, which could be expressed with the slogan: For the symbol, against the word! Perhaps there will soon be instructive picture books that introduce the child to the new language of symbols for traffic or even statistics.

As far as the old picture books are concerned, the milestones in their development are marked by Comenius’s Orbis pictus, Basedow’s Elementary Work, and finally Bertuch’s Picture Book for Children.⁴ This last is composed of twelve volumes, each with one hundred colored copperplates, and was published in Weimar between 1792 and 1847 under Bertuch’s direction. Its careful execution exhibits the great dedication with which work for children was done at the time.⁵ To infuse the instructive picture book with text — to structure the text in an elementary way without allowing it to become a primer — that is admittedly a difficult, almost insoluble task. It has rarely been achieved. Thus Wich’s ingenious, instructive book Hobby Horse and Doll, published in Nördlingen in 1843, seems all the more remarkable. The following verse is taken from it:

In front of the little city sits a little dwarf,

Behind the little dwarf is a little mountain,

Out of the little mountain flows a little brook,

On the little brook swims a little roof,

Under the little roof is a little room,

In the little room sits a little boy,

Behind the little boy stands a little bench,

On the little bench rests a little cupboard

In the little cupboard is a little chest,

In the little chest is a little nest,

In front of the little nest sits a little cat,

I want to remember that little place.⁶

If there is any field in the world where specialization must invariably fail, it is in the creation of works for children. And the beginning of the misery in children’s literature can be described with one word: it happened at the moment when it fell into the hands of specialists. The misery of children’s literature is admittedly not at all the misery of the children’s book. Because it was great good fortune that for a long time pedagogues paid little attention to the illustrated part of the books, or at least could not grab a hold of it with their standards. And so something was preserved here that became increasingly rare in the literature: the pure seriousness of mastery and the dilettante’s pure playful joy, both of which create for children without knowing it. Rochow’s Kinderfreund [The Child’s Friend] from 1772, the first reader, is also the beginning of actual “youth literature.”⁷ One has to distinguish between two epochs here: the moral, edifying epoch of the Enlightenment, which met the child head-on, and the sentimental epoch of the last century, which insinuated itself into him. The first was certainly not always as boring and the second not always as dishonest as today’s parvenu pedagogics would like to believe, but both are characterized by an average of wretched mediocrity. A beautiful and above all linguistically highly unsuccessful example, on the watershed between these two genres, follows here:

After she returned home, Emma got right back to work, because she had promised Auguste she would embroider the letters A. v. T. on six handkerchiefs … Auguste and Wilhelmine sat down on either side of her; Charlotte and Sophie, who had brought their work with them, sat down, too. It was a pleasant sight to see the four young girls occupied so industriously, each eager to outdo the others.

While they were working, Auguste wanted to use the time for additional instruction. So she asked Emma:

“What day is it today?”

“I think it is Tuesday.”

“You are wrong, child! Yesterday was Sunday.”

“Then today is Monday.”

“Right, Monday. How many days are there in a week?”

Seven.

“But how many in a month? — Do you know?”

“How many? — I seem to recall you told me numerous times already that in regard to the days the months are not all the same.”

“I did tell you that. Four months have thirty days, seven thirty-one, and one alone has twenty-eight and sometimes twenty-nine.”

“Thirty days. That’s very long.”

“Can you count that far?”

“No!”

“How many fingers do you have?”

“Ten.”

“Count those fingers three times and then you will have thirty, the same amount as four months of the year have days.”

“That is a saeculum.”

“A saeculum? — Where did you pick that word up. — Do you know what a saeculum is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“And you use a word that you don’t understand? — That smacks of showing off! You want to be thought smarter than you are. A saeculum consists of one hundred years, a year of twelve months, a month consists, as I’ve already told you, of sometimes thirty, sometimes thirty-one days, with the exception of one every year. A day consists of twenty-four hours. The hours are divided into minutes and these again into seconds. The number of the latter amount to sixty in an hour.”

“It’s true, isn’t it? A second is something very negligible?”

“A second flies away like lightning, it’s a blink of an eye.”

“So a person’s life consists of an endless number of seconds?”

“And still it races away very quickly. In its fleetingness, we should never forget the passage to another world, which is to say we should never forget to try to fulfill our duties to God, to our fellow human beings, and to ourselves so that when the Creator and Ruler of the Universe decides in his all-knowing wisdom to call us we will be deemed worthy to enter Heaven, where our reward is awaiting us if we have behaved devoutly and honestly on Earth.”

“But what will happen to the little girls who behave badly?”

“They go to hell.”

“Are they unhappy there?”

“Oh, certainly! They feel the agonies of remorse for their offenses for all eternity.”

“For all eternity? — Oh, I will take great care never to behave badly.”

Auguste saw that Emma could not understand this as clearly as she could, as she had read about it in her catechism and had it thoroughly explained to her. She would have acted more wisely if she had frightened her little pupil not with hell but with the cane or Knecht Ruprecht.⁸

There can hardly be anything more bizarre than this, but there is better. Despite Johanna Spyri’s beautiful, justly famous Stories for Children and Those Who Love Children,⁹ it is characteristic that the later direction of children’s literature produced no masterwork. But we do possess a masterpiece from the moral-edifying literature that is also a masterpiece of the German language: Hebel’s The Treasure Chest.¹⁰ It is not, as we know, writing for young people in the strictest sense. After all, it emerged wholly from the philanthropic interest in the broad mass of readers, particularly rural readers.¹¹ If one is even permitted to attempt to describe this incomparable prose writer, in whom the wide range of the epic poet merged with the In German folklore, Knecht Ruprecht is the companion of Saint Nikolaus, who children are told comes to the house on December 6 leaving sweets, nuts, and small gifts for good children. Knecht Ruprecht is Saint Nikolaus’s alter-ego, usually depicted wearing dark fur or straw on a brown, hooded cloak and carrying a switch and a sack, sometimes filled with coal or ash, sometimes to pop an errant child into it. While Saint Nikolaus consults a book in which the good and bad deeds of a child are listed, Knecht Ruprecht waits to hear of bad deeds and draws closer to a child every time one is mentioned. Knecht Ruprecht still appears in processions, particularly in Southern Germany. In his German Mythology, Jacob Grimm associated Knecht Ruprecht with pre-Christian house spirits. [Trans.] conciseness of the lawmaker to form an almost unfathomable whole, then it is imperative to recognize how the Enlightenment’s abstract morals are overcome with the political-theological in Hebel. Just as in Hebel, this never proceeds in any other manner than the casuistic, from one case to the next, so it is also hardly possible to present a concept of it in any way other than very concretely. In an image. When he tells his stories, it is as if a watchmaker were showing us a clockwork and explaining and elucidating each of the springs and little gears. Suddenly (his moral is always sudden) he turns it around, and we see how late it is. And in this, too, these stories are like a clock in that they awaken in us our earliest, childlike amazement and do not stop accompanying us all our lives.

A few years ago, as tends to happen from time to time, a literary magazine had the idea to ask a number of well-known people about their favorite childhood book. There were certainly some books written for children among the responses. But it was curious that the great majority named works such as The Leatherstocking Tales, Gulliver, Treasure Island, The Adventures of Baron Münchausen, the 1001 Nights, Andersen, Grimm, Karl May, Wörishöffer; and some works that were long forgotten and whose author they could no longer name. If one tries to bring some order to the multifarious responses, then the following is revealed: almost never mentioned are books that were written for children or young people. Again and again it is the great works of world literature, books of colportage, fairy tales that are mentioned. Among those who responded to this survey is Charlie Chaplin, with David Copperfield.,¹² And here is a great case from which we can study what a children’s book can mean, that is to say, a book that a child resolves to read. David Copperfield prepared the space for this man’s great intuition. A French critic drew a parallel, with great insight, between the art of Dickens and that of Chaplin. And Chaplin “himself has said how he first had the idea to set the character of the man with the bowler hat, the little, choppy steps, the small, closely cropped mustache, and the bamboo cane out into the world when he saw the lesser employees of the London Strand district.” But how close the other characters in his films are to the dark London of Oliver Twist or David Copperfield: “the young, shy, winning girl, the burly lout, who is always just on the verge of lashing out with his fists and who flees when he sees that one is not afraid of him, and the pretentious gentleman, recognizable by his top hat.”¹³

However, one should not think that an adolescent can only receive substantial, hearty nourishment from the masterpieces of Cervantes or Dickens, Swift or Defoe. It can be found just as well in certain — admittedly not all — works of colportage or pulp fiction, which appeared simultaneously with the upswing in technical civilization and that leveling out of culture, which was not without a connection to it. The dismantling of the old, spherically tiered order of life had been completed by that time. In the process some of the finest, noblest substances often ended up at the bottom. Thus, the person who sees more deeply will find the elements he is searching for precisely in the depths of written and illustrated works instead of in the acknowledged cultural documents, where he has searched for them in vain. With thoughts such as these, Ernst Bloch attempted to rescue the panned Karl May in a beautiful essay written recently.¹⁴ And one could name so many books here, books one borrowed from the school library on library day or even books one dared to ask for in a newspaper store with quiet shame: The Regulators in Arkansas, Beneath the Equator, Nena Sahib.¹⁵ And if it was precisely these books that reached beyond the horizon of their young readers in some spots, then that only made them more impressive and full of life. For with their expressions and concepts they seemed to hold the talisman that would guide one over the threshold of youth into the promised land of manhood. And that is why they have been devoured ever since.

To devour books. A strange metaphor. It makes one think. Indeed, no other artistic form is carried away, broken apart, and destroyed as it is being enjoyed to the extent that narrative prose is. Perhaps one really can compare reading and consumption. When thinking about it, one must above all bear in mind that the reasons why we need to nourish ourselves and why we eat are not exactly identical. Thus, the older theory of nourishment is so instructive because it derives from eating. It says: we nourish ourselves through the incorporation of the spirits of things eaten. Now we don’t nourish ourselves this way, but we eat for the sake of an incorporation that is more than a need for the bare necessities of life. And we read because of such an incorporation. Not to further our knowledge, the treasuries of our memory and our experience. Such psychological substitution theories are the theories of nourishment that assert that our blood comes from the blood that we consume, animal bones become our bones, and so on. It’s not that simple. We read to augment not our experiences but ourselves. But it is especially and always children who read in this way: incorporating, not feeling their way in. Their reading has an intimate relationship, much less to their education and knowledge of the world, than to their growth and their power. That is why it is something as great as any genius that is contained in the books they resolve to read. And that is the special significance of the children’s book.

“Kinderliteratur,” GS, 7.1, 250–7. Translated by Lisa Harries Schumann.

Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, August 15, 1929. The broadcast was announced in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung for August 15, 1929, from 7:05–7:25 pm, as “ ‘Children’s Literature,’ Talk by Dr. Walter Benjamin.”

¹ The “Robber” and “Peas” languages are something like pig Latin, additional syllables put into words to create a language that is impossible for the uninitiated, particularly adults, to decipher. [Trans.]

² Jean Paul Richter’s “Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wutz in Auenthal: Eine Art Idylle” [Life of the Cheerful Little Schoolmistress Maria Wutz in Auenthal: A Kind of Idyll] appeared in 1793. For the passage quoted by Benjamin above, see Jean Paul’s Leben Fibels, Werke., vol. 6, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1975), 428. Benjamin appears to have quoted the slightly modified passage from Karl Hobrecker’s Alte vergessene Kinderbücher [Old Forgotten Children’s Books] (Berlin, 1824), 14.

³ Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus, often referred to as the first picture book for children.

⁴ See Johann Bernard Basedow, Elementarwerk, illustrated by Daniel Chodowiecki (1774), and Friedrich Justin Bertuch, Bilderbuch für Kinder, 12 vols. (1792–1830).

⁵ For a similar comment on these texts by Comenius, Basedow, and Bertuch, see Benjamin’s discussion of Hobrecker (above) in “Old Forgotten Children’s Books,” in SW, 1, 408 (“Alte vergessene Kinderbücher,” GS, 3, 16).

⁶ Johann Paul Wich, “Wie das Kind ein Plätzlein sich merkt,” Steckenpferd und Puppe (Nördlingen, 1843), 57. See also Benjamin’s “A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books,” SW, 1, 436 (“Aussicht ins Kinderbuch” [1926], GS, 4, 610) where Benjamin cites the same verse.

⁷ See Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow, Der Kinderfreund. Ein Lesebuch zum Gebrauch in Landschulen (Frankfurt, 1776); see also Rochow’s Versuch eines Schulbuches für Kinder der Landleute (Berlin, 1772).

⁸ See Wie Auguste und Wilhelmine ihre Puppe erzogen: Von einer Kinderfreundin (Berlin, 1837), 81–5; the passage was expanded by the editors of the GS based on Benjamin’s notations.

⁹ See Johanna Spyri, Geschichten für Kinder und solche die Kinder liebhaben, 16 vols. (Gotha: F. A. Perthes, 1879–1895).

¹⁰ Johann Peter Hebel, Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes (Tübingen: Cotta, 1811).

¹¹ In the 1770s, German educational reformers began the “philanthropist” movement, which sought to replace rote, Latin-based education with a more practical, experience-based curriculum. In 1774, Johann Basedow, mentioned by Benjamin above, established the Philanthropinum school in Dessau, which became the model for similar educational institutions of the period.

¹² See “Der größte Eindruck meiner Kindheit,” in Die literarische Welt (December 3, 1926), 2.

¹³ See Philippe Soupault, “Charlie Chaplin,” in Europe, vol. 18 (November 1938), 395; for this passage, see also Benjamin’s 1929 review, “Rückblick auf Chaplin,” GS, 2, 158–9 (“Chaplin in Retrospect,” SW, 2, 223).

¹⁴ See Ernst Bloch, “Rettung Wagners durch Karl May” [Rescuing Wagner through Karl May] in Anbruch 11 (January 1929), 4–10, and Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Susan Plaice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

¹⁵ Die Regulatoren in Arkansas [The Regulators in Arkansas] (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1846) and Unter dem Äquator [Beneath the Equator] (Leipzig, 1861) were both written by the German traveler and adventure novelist Friedrich Gerstäcker. Nena Sahib oder Die Empörung in Indien: Historisch-politischer Roman aus der Gegenwart [Nena Sahib or The Outrage in India: Historical-political Novel of the Present], 3 vols. (Berlin, 1858/59), was written by Sir John Retcliffe, pseudonym of Hermann Ottomar Friedrich Goedsche.

CHAPTER 33. “Sketched in Mobile Dust”

A Novella¹

There he sat. He always sat there in those days, but not like this. Normally he would sit with his gaze fixed on something afar, but today the motionless man just glanced idly around. And yet it appeared to be in vain; he was looking but he did not see. The mahogany cane with the silver grip lay not beside him, leaning on the edge of the bench as was usually the case; he was holding it, steering it. It glided over the sand: O, and I thought of fruit; L, I hesitated; Y, and I was embarrassed, as if I were caught spying. For I saw that he was writing the thing like someone who doesn’t want to be read: each character looped into the next, as if each wanted to merge with the other; in almost the same spot followed M PI A, the first letter already beginning to vanish as the most recent ones emerged. I approached. Even that didn’t make him look up — or shall I say wake? — so familiar to him was my presence. “Reckoning again, are you?” I asked, not letting on that I had seen. I knew that his musings were focused wholly on the imaginary expenses of distant journeys, to Samarkand, or to Iceland, voyages that he would never take. Has he ever left the country? Except for this secret journey, of course, the one he made to flee the memory of a wild and, as they always say, worthless and shameful young love: Olympia, whose name he had just now absentmindedly conjured before him.

“I’m thinking of my street. Or of you, rather; they’re one and the same. The street where a word from you became so alive, like none I had heard before or since. It’s what you once told me in Travemünde: in the end, every adventure worth telling is wound around a woman, or at least a woman’s name. For you said it provides the grip on the thread necessary for a story to be passed from one teller to the next. You were right, but when I ascended that hot street, I could not yet fathom how strange it was, and why, that for a few seconds my own steps in the deserted, reverberating alley seemed to me to be calling out as if with a voice. The houses around me had little in common with those for which this little southern Italian town was famous. Not old enough to be weathered and not new enough to be inviting, it was a gathering of whims from the limbo of architecture. Closed shutters underscored the obduracy of the gray facades and the glory of the South seemed to have withdrawn into the shadows, which became more frequent among the earthquake supports and arches of side streets. Every step I took carried me farther from everything for which I had come; pinacoteca and cathedral remained behind, and I would hardly have found the power to change direction, even if the sight of red wooden arms, candlesticks of a sort, had not instilled in me new material for reverie. It occurred to me only now that these grew in regular intervals from the walls on both sides of the street. Reverie, I say, precisely because I could not fathom, and did not even attempt to explain, how the remains of such archaic forms of lighting in the poor but nevertheless irrigated and electrified mountain village had managed to survive. So it seemed to me perfectly reasonable, a few steps farther, to come across shawls, curtains, scarves, and floor mats that people here seemed just to have washed. A few crumpled paper lanterns in front of the murky window panes completed the picture of pathetic and shabby housekeeping. I would have liked to ask one of the residents how I might get back to town by a different route. I had had enough of the street, not least because it was so devoid of people, which is why I had to abandon my purpose and, nearly humbled, almost tamed, walked back the way I had come. Determined to make up for lost time, and to atone for what seemed to me as a defeat, I forewent lunch and, even more bitterly, my noonday rest, and after a short climb up the steep stairs, I was standing on Cathedral Square.

“If before the oppressive dearth of people had seemed confining, now it was liberating solitude. My mood thus changed in an instant. Nothing would have pleased me less than to be spoken to, or even observed. All at once I was returned to the destiny of my voyage, my solitary adventure, and again the moment arrived as when, while riven with pain, it first came to me above Marina Grande, not far from Ravello. Again I was surrounded by mountains, but instead of the stony cliffs with which Ravello descends to the sea, it was the marble flanks of the cathedral, and over its snowy slope, countless stone saints seemed to be descending in pilgrimage to us humans. As I followed the procession with my gaze, a deep fissure became apparent in the building’s foundation: a passageway had been excavated, which, after several sharp, even steps into the earth, led to a bronze door that was slightly ajar. I don’t know why I crept through this secluded underground entrance; perhaps it was only the fear that often engulfs us when we ourselves enter a place we’ve heard described thousands of times before, a fear that had dictated my roundabout route. But if I had believed that I would be entering the darkness of a crypt, I was duly punished for my snobbery. Not only was this room the vestry, whitewashed and bathed in bright light from its upper windows, but it was also filled with a tourist group, before which the sexton was about to share, for the hundredth or thousandth time, one of those stories in which the words echo the ringing of the copper coins he raked in each of the hundred or thousand times he told it. There he stood, pompous and corpulent, beside the pedestal upon which the attention of his listeners was fixed. Attached to it with iron clamps was an early Gothic capital, by all appearances ancient yet extraordinarily well preserved. In his hands the speaker held a handkerchief. One would have thought that it was because of the heat; indeed, sweat was streaming from his forehead. But far from using it to dry himself, he only absentmindedly dabbed it on the stone block from time to time, like a maid who, trapped in an embarrassing conversation with her master, occasionally glides her duster over shelves and tables out of habit. My inclination toward self-torment, which anyone who travels alone has surely experienced, again gained the upper hand and I let his declarations rattle my ears.

“ ‘Two years ago’—this was the content, if not the wording of his dragging speech—‘we still had a man here among the townspeople who, through the most ridiculous fit of blasphemy and crazed love, made this town the topic of everyone’s conversation for quite some time, only to try for the rest of his life to make amends for his false step, and even to atone for it, well after the offended party himself, God, had probably already forgiven him. He was a stonemason. After spending ten years as part of a team restoring the cathedral, through his abilities he rose to become head of the entire restoration. He was a man in the prime of his life, a domineering sort, with no family or attachments, when he fell into the web of the most beautiful and shameless cocotte ever seen in the demimonde of the neighboring seaside resort. She was taken with the gentle and stubborn nature of this man; no one suspected that her affection lay with someone else. Yet no one could have guessed at what price. And it would have never come to light, if the structural inspection team had not come from Rome for a closer look at the renowned renovation. Among the group was a young, impertinent yet knowledgeable archaeologist, who specialized in the study of Trecento capitals. He was in the process of improving his forthcoming, monumental publication by adding a treatise entitled “A Pulpit Capital in the Cathedral of V …” and had announced his visit to the director of the Opera del Duomo, who, more than ten years past his prime, was living in seclusion; his time to shine and be bold had come and gone.

“ ‘What the young scholar took home from this meeting was anything but instruction in art history. It was a conspiracy, which did not remain private and ultimately resulted in the following being reported to the authorities: the love that the cocotte had yielded to her suitor had proved no obstacle to her, but rather an impetus to charge a satanic price for her affections. She wanted to see her nom de guerre — the kind of name that women of her trade have traditionally assumed — chiseled in stone in the cathedral, as close as possible to where the Blessed Sacrament is delivered. Her lover resisted, but his power had limits and one day, in the presence of the whore herself, he began work on this early Gothic capital, which he disguised as older and more weathered, and deliberately misrepresented until it landed as corpus delicti on the desk of the ecclesiastical judges. Several years passed until all the formalities had been acquitted and all the documents were in place, at which point it proved to be too late. A broken, feebleminded old man stood before his work; no one suspected foul play when his once-imposing head, with furrowed brow, craned over the chaos of arabesques and tried in vain to read the name he had hidden there countless years before.’

“I was surprised to notice that I — why I don’t know — had been creeping closer; but before being near enough to touch the stone, I felt the hand of the sexton on my shoulder. Well-meaning but puzzled, he tried to ascertain the reason for my interest. In my insecurity and fatigue, I stammered the most senseless thing possible: ‘Collector,’ and promptly headed home.

“If sleep, as many maintain, is not only a physical need of the organism, but also a compulsion from the unconscious that acts on consciousness — causing it to leave the scene to make room for drives and images — then perhaps the weariness that overtook me had more to say than it normally would in a southern Italian mountain town at noon. Be that as it may, I dreamt, I know I dreamt the name. But not as it had stood before me yesterday, undiscovered in the stone; it had been abducted into a different realm — elevated, disenchanted, and elucidated all at once — and amid the intertwining grasses, foliage, and flowers, the letters, which in those days made my heart beat most painfully, swayed and quivered their way over to me. When I awoke it was after eight. It was time to eat dinner and broach the question of how the rest of the evening should be spent. My hours of napping forbade me from finishing the day early, and a lack of money and inclination prohibited me from seeking out adventures. After a few hundred indecisive steps, I came upon an open piazza, the Campo. It was getting dark. Children were still playing around the fountains. This piazza, forbidden to vehicles, was no longer a meeting place, only a marketplace; it had found its purpose as the great stone bathing area and playground for children. Which is why it was also a favorite location for carts selling sweets, peanuts, and melon, two or three of which were still gathered on the piazza and starting to light their torches. A blinking light escaped from the circle of idlers and children who had gathered around the one nearest me. Upon approach, I could make out brass instruments. I am an observant stroller. What will or what hidden wish had forbidden me to notice what could not have eluded the attention of even the most distracted? In this street, at whose entrance I now found myself again, without having expected it, something was afoot. The silk mats hanging from the windows were not drying laundry, after all, and how could I have thought that the old style of lighting would survive here and yet nowhere else in the country? The music got under way, penetrating into the street, which quickly filled with people. It now became apparent that wealth, where it brushes up against the poor, makes it even more difficult for them to enjoy what is theirs: the torches and candlelight clashed with the yellow circles of light cast by the arc lamps across the pavement and exterior walls of the houses. I was the last to join the throng. All these preparations had been made to receive the procession before a church. Paper lanterns and light bulbs stood intimately side by side, and the dense band of the faithful detached from the celebrating masses in their wake, disappearing through the curtain folds that shrouded the open portal.

“I had paused a distance from the heart of this red and green glow. The people now packing the streets were hardly a colorless mass. It was the clearly defined, closely related population of the local neighborhood; because it was a petit-bourgeois community, there was no one from the upper classes present, let alone any foreigners. As I stood by the wall, I should surely have been conspicuous due to my clothing and general appearance. But strangely, no one paid me any heed. Did no one notice me, or did the man who was lost within this scorching and singing street, the man I more and more became, appear to them as one of their own? This thought filled me with pride; I was overcome with delight. I didn’t enter the church; content merely to enjoy the profane part of the festivities, I was heading back with the first satiated participants, long before the overtired children would do the same, when I caught sight of some marble plaques, the kind with which the poor towns of this region put the rest of the world’s street signs to shame. They were drenched in torchlight, appearing to be on fire themselves. However, crisp and glowing letters emanated from their centers, newly forming the name, which, mutating from stone into flowers, from flowers into fire, grabbed at me with increasing, all-consuming intensity. Firmly determined to get home, I set forth and was happy to find a little alley that promised to shorten my route considerably. Signs of life had already subsided. The main street, where my hotel was located and which was still so lively just a short while before, seemed not only quieter, but narrower as well. While I was still musing on the laws that dictate such couplings of phonetic and optical images, a distant and powerful music struck my ears. Upon hearing the first notes, suddenly I was struck: here it comes! That is why so few people, so few of the bourgeoisie, were in the street. This is the great evening concert of V…, for which the local residents gather every Saturday. All at once, a new expanded city, indeed a richer and more animated city history, stood before my eyes. I quickened my pace, turned a corner and stopped, paralyzed with astonishment. Once again I stood in that street that had snatched me up as if with a lasso. It was already pitch dark, and the music band was offering its last forgotten melody to this tardy and solitary listener.”

Here my friend broke off. His story seemed suddenly to desert him. His lips alone, which had just now spoken, offered a long smile in farewell. I looked reflectively upon the signs blurred in the dust at our feet. And the imperishable verse marched through the arch of this story as if through a gate.

“Dem Staub, dem beweglichen, eingezeichnet, Novelle,” GS, 4.2, 780–7. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, December 16, 1929. The broadcast was announced in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung for December 16, 1929, from 6:35–7:00 pm.

¹ Benjamin borrows the title from Goethe’s poem, “Nicht mehr auf Seidenblatt” [No longer on a leaf of silk], a verse posthumously added to the West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan), “Book of Suleika.” Benjamin refers to this verse in “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” where he calls it “perhaps the most powerful poem in the Divan” (SW, 1, 329; GS, 1.1, 167).

CHAPTER 34. E. T. A. Hoffmann and Oskar Panizza

I would be delighted if the series “Parallels,” whose announcement you will have read and which I am hereby inaugurating, has aroused suspicion in a few of you.¹ It is precisely because of this suspicion, I would like to suppose, that I have a chance of being understood in my attempt to keep this endeavor free of misinterpretation. You all know of the suspect eagerness with which an earlier contemplation of literature often concealed its bafflement at certain works, its inability to penetrate their structure and their meaning, how it hid behind research into so-called influences, into parallels between subject matter or form. Nothing of the sort will be dealt with here. Yet a pointless hunt for analogies would be even worse. To point out some affinities between the creations of various writers, from various epochs, may at most satisfy a pedantic anxiety to improve one’s mind, but it leads nowhere and would not be sufficiently accredited — even if in such instances now and then a younger, misjudged writer is rehabilitated by the name of a great and intellectually compatible predecessor. We do not wish to deny that such a rehabilitation of Oskar Panizza, as unknown as he is discredited, is a secondary aim of these observations. But here, at the beginning not only of these observations but of an entire series, we shall deal primarily with identifying its main intention, and to this end we must allow ourselves a little digression.

One likes to speak of the eternity of works of art; one strives to grant the greatest among them endurance and authority for centuries, without realizing how one thus runs the risk of letting them ossify into museum-like copies of themselves. Because, to say it in a word, the so-called eternity of works of art is by no means identical to their vital endurance. And what reason there truthfully is for this endurance is most prominently to be seen in their confrontation with similar creations from our own epoch. Then it becomes clear that only certain unformed tendencies or vague dispositions can be called eternal, and that the work that has a fully-formed, vital endurance, is instead the product of that tenacious, sly force with which not only the eternal moments assert themselves into the current moments, but the current ones assert themselves in the eternal. Yes, the work of art is much less the product than the setting of such a movement. And while its so-called eternity is at best a rigid, exterior continuation, its endurance is a vital, interior process. That is why, as we look at these parallels, we are dealing not with analogies, nor dependencies of individual works on one another, nor studies of the writers, but rather with the primal tendencies of literature itself, and how they assert themselves from epoch to epoch in an inwardly transformed sense.

The fantastic tale, which we want to discuss today, is one of those primal tendencies. It is as old as the epic itself. It would be a mistake to think that the magical tales, the fables, the transformations, and ghostly deeds contained in humanity’s oldest stories are nothing more than traces left by the oldest religious ideas. Certainly the Odyssey and the Iliad and the 1001 Nights are material that was merely told; but it is equally true to say that the material of this Iliad, this Odyssey, this 1001 Nights was only woven together in the telling. The tale took no more from humanity’s oldest legends than it gave back. To tell a story using other words — with the fabulation and playfulness, the fantastical, all unfettered by responsibility — is, however, never merely invention but a transmitted, modifiable conservation within the medium of fantasy. This medium of fantasy is certainly of a very different concentration during, on the one hand, the first bloom of Homeric or of Oriental epic and, on the other, during the latest flowering of European Romanticism. But true storytelling always retained its conservative character, in the best sense of the word, and we cannot imagine any of the great storytellers as detached from humanity’s oldest body of thought.

The reason for the seemingly arbitrary permeation of eternal and current moments in a story emerges perhaps all the more sharply the more fantastic it is. This is palpable in Hoffmann as well as in Panizza. Palpable, too, is the tension between the two writers, stretched over the arc between the beginning and the end of the Romantic intellectual movement in Germany during the past century. The inexpressibly convoluted fates in which E. T. A. Hoffmann mires his characters — Kreisler in Tomcat Murr, Anselmus from The Golden Pot, Princess Brambilla, much maligned in Germany, much loved in France, and finally Master Flea²—these fates are not only directed or influenced by supernatural powers, they have been created primarily in order to preserve the figures, arabesques, and ornaments in which the old spirits and natural demons seek to cast their endeavors in the bright daylight of the new century as inconspicuously as possible. Hoffmann believed in effective connections to the most distant, primal times, and as his favorite characters’ figures of fate are basically musical, he particularly established this connection through the aural: the fine singing of the little snakes who appear to Anselmus, the heartbreaking songs of Antonie the daughter of Krespel, the legendary tones he thought he heard on the Courland Spit, the devil’s voice on Ceylon, and the like. Music was to him the canon through which the spirit world manifested itself in daily life. At least insofar as we are dealing with the manifestations of benevolent spirits.

The greatest magic of the people Hoffmann described, however, rests precisely in the way that in even the most noble and exalted characters, with the exception of some of his girl figures, there is something satanic going on. 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.³ Hoffmann’s uncommon observational ability, coupled with his character’s satanic elements, enabled something like a short circuit between moral judgment and physiognomic views to emerge. The ordinary person, who had always been the object of his entire hatred, seemed to him more and more to be, in his virtues as well as in his beauties, the product of a heinous artificial mechanism, whose innermost parts are ruled by Satan. He equates the satanic with the automatic, and this ingenious schema, which underlies his tales, allows him to claim life entirely for the pure and genuine side of the spirits so as to glorify it in figures such as Julia, Serpentina, and Antonie. With this moral conflict between life and appearance, Hoffmann has articulated, unless I am very much mistaken, the primal motif of the fantastic story. Whether we speak of Hoffmann, Poe, Kubin, or Panizza, to name only the greatest, the work is always based on the most definitive religious dualism; one might call it Manichean. And for Hoffmann this duality did not stop at what he considered most holy; it did not stop at music. Could one not produce the primal tones of which we spoke, this last and most certain message from the spirit world, by mechanical means? Were not the Aeolian harp and the clavichord successful first steps on this path? It was then that it became possible to ape our deepest, holiest yearning with mechanical art works; it was then that every love that spoke to us in tones from home became a phantom. These questions constantly move Hoffmann’s writing. And we will find them again, unchanged, although in a thoroughly transformed, thoroughly alienating atmosphere, when we now turn to Panizza.

At the present time, Panizza’s name and work are in exactly the same state as were Hoffmann’s from the middle of the last century through the turn of this one. He is as unknown as he is discredited. But although the memory of Hoffmann, extinguished in Germany, had never ceased to be celebrated in France, it is not to be expected that similar amends will be made to Panizza. There are unimaginable obstacles in Germany today to compiling his writings with anything approaching completeness. Although a Panizza Society was established last year, it has not yet found the ways and means to reprint his most important works. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is that one of these writings would today be forfeited to the district attorney, just as it was thirty-five years ago. In fact, Panizza’s brief fame can be tied to a few scandalous trials. In 1893, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s appointment as a bishop, his The Immaculate Conception of the Popes appeared, with the apocryphal comment: “Translated from the Spanish by Oskar Panizza.”⁴ Two years later, it was followed by The Love Council: A Heavenly Tragedy in Five Acts, for the publication of which he spent a year in the Amberg prison.⁵ After serving his sentence, he left Germany, and when, forced by the confiscation of his property, he returned in 1901, he spent six weeks in investigative custody in a psychiatric clinic, after which he was declared certifiably insane and released. The cause of this last custody was Parisjana, German Verses from Paris, pervaded by fierce attacks against Emperor Wilhelm II.⁶ Besides these reasons for the condemnation of his name and the disappearance of his writings, every feature of a certain characteristic, more closely examined, will add a few more. For this characteristic we can discard mental illness, to which one might be tempted to make a connection. There is no doubt of its reality: it was paranoia. If, however, the paranoid systems already exhibit theological tendencies, then one can say that this illness, insofar as it had any influence on his creative work other than to impede it, in no way contradicted the fundamental nature of the man. Panizza was — and here his radical attacks against the Church and the papacy cannot deceive us — a theologian. Admittedly, a theologian who stood in irreconcilable opposition to professional theologians, just as E. T. A. Hoffmann stood, as an artist, in opposition to the art-loving circles of Berlin society, upon which he heaped all his scorn and ire. Panizza was a theologian, and, from his own point of view, Otto Julius Bierbaum saw quite rightly when he wrote after the publication of The Love Council, which in its devastating sarcasm left all other anticlerical writings far behind, that the author had not seen far enough. “What is rebelling,” says Bierbaum, “is actually the Lutheran in him, not the whole, free person.”⁷ And it certainly is also a paradox — although a paradox of righteousness — that one of Panizza’s most loyal friends, the man who stayed close to him throughout his long illness and who saw to his estate, admittedly not without incident, was a Jesuit, the now eighty-six-year-old Deacon Lippert.⁸

So, Panizza was a theologian. But he was one in the same sense in that E. T. A. Hoffmann was a musician. Hoffmann understood music no less than Panizza did theology. But what remains from him are not musical compositions, but the literary work in which he plays with music as the spirit home of mankind. And it is precisely this spirit home of mankind that is dogma for Panizza. The transformation from the beginning to the end of German Romanticism is reflected in this relationship. Panizza was no longer, as Hoffmann was, carried on that broad wave of enthusiasm for primal times, for poetry, folk traditions, and the Middle Ages; his intellectual affinities are with the European decadents. And among those, the closest to him was Huysmans, whose novels so unwaveringly play on medieval Catholicism and especially its complement, the black masses, the beings of witches and devils. But that is why it would be so wrong to imagine Panizza as an “artist,” a man of l’art pour l’art, as Huysmans was. To first state the negative: there is no one who writes worse. His German is dissolute in a way that is unprecedented. When he begins some of his tales, almost all told in the first person, with a description of his state, how he marches along some icy rural road in Lower Franconia as a tired, ragged journeyman — everything that follows could truly be taken for the notes of a traveling journeyman, due to the sloppy language in which it is written. Admittedly, there is no contradiction here: despite everything, and at all costs, it must be taken for that of a great storyteller. The storyteller is less a writer than a weaver. Storytelling — and here we refer back to our opening remarks — is, in contrast to novel writing, for example, not a matter of education but of the folk. And Oskar Panizza’s art is rooted in folk. One should read his genial Church of Zinsblech or The Inn of the Trinity to understand what a rooted-in-the-soil decadent is.⁹

Let us stay for a moment with this last novella — even if only to get to know one aspect of Panizza, who appears like a student, or perhaps one should say trustee, of E. T. A. Hoffmann in Christian dogma, through his cast of characters. The tired wanderer Panizza finally stops at an inn, slightly off the road and not marked on any map, where he soon abandons the attempt to explain the place’s strange inhabitants. It is enough to mention here that an old, irascible Jew and his unworldly, hectic son, immersed in his theological studies, are housed there together with a Jewess, Maria, who is described as the boy’s mother. The narrator partakes of a gloomy, silent evening meal among this disconcerting group, then goes to his room on the second floor and sneaks back down at night in order to peek into the forbidden chamber, which he had passed in the evening but was not allowed to enter. He opens the door, the moon fills it, and between the half-opened shutters he sees how a dove, fearfully beating its wings, is trying to escape into the open. And now comes the actual Hoffmannian inspiration in all of this. In a shed adjoining the house, a creature is kept, a person with horse’s hooves, who continually bangs against his enclosure with an iron force, making the walls tremble, and now and again, at certain turns, as if on cue, bursts into repellent laughter.

Here is the dualist metaphysics that Panizza so completely shares with Hoffmann and that, following the inner necessity of which we have spoken, takes the form of a contrast between life and automaton. It has given him the story of the “People Factory,” where people are manufactured with clothes already grown on.¹⁰ It takes a still unmistakably theological turn in the following passage of The Immaculate Conception of the Popes: “The pope pulled … a glass-like, idiotic-looking doll out of the mouth of every person as soon as he died. The doll was transparent, and a balance sheet of all the deeds — both good and evil — of the person in question were contained in it. This doll, which was a small person, had two wings of starched fabric glued to its back and was let walk or fly. It was directed by that new realm created by the pope outside the world. There, the doll would be immediately received and laid in a big, shiny, clean brass scale, which had two equal scale pans. The doll’s good deeds weighed heavily, the bad ones lightly. On the other scale pan sat an equalsized normal doll, in whom good and bad deeds were exactly equally balanced. If the new arrival was only one grain lighter than the normal doll on the other side, it meant that the bad deeds outweighed the good.” It was sent to hell. However, “The dolls who were heavy enough were mercifully allowed to climb down from the scale and run into heaven, coelum, about which more anon.”¹¹

This art would be an anachronism if, as many assumed, it only amounted to invectives against the papacy. But it is anachronistic in no different a sense than the Bavarian painters around Murnau and Kochelsee, who, up until a few years ago, painted their holy images on mirrors. A heretical painter of holy images: that is the shortest formula for Oskar Panizza. His image-fanaticism was not even extinguished at the heights of theological speculation. And it was combined with a keen, satirical insight, just as Hoffmann practiced it on the holy canon of the philistines. Both heresies are related. In both of them, however, satire is only a reflex of poetic fantasy, which safeguards its ancient rights.

“E. T. A. Hoffmann und Oskar Panizza,” GS, 2.2, 641–8. Translated by Lisa Harries Schumann.

Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on March 26, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Frankfurt Radio, 26 March 1930,” and for this date the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung listed, from 6:05–6:35 pm, “Parallels I: E.Th. Hoffmann and Oskar Panizza. Lecture by Dr. Walter Benjamin,” as the first in a series called “Parallels.”

¹ For Wednesday, March 26, 1930, the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung announced the opening of a series entitled “Parallels” with the listing, “Parallels I: E. Th. Hoffmann and Oskar Panizza. Lecture by Dr. Walter Benjamin.”

² See Hoffmann, Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern [The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr] (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1820–1822); Der goldne Topf: Ein Märchen aus der neuen Zeit [The Golden Pot: A Modern Fairy Tale] (Bamberg: Kunz, 1814); Prinzessin Brambilla: Ein Capriccio nach Jakob Callot [Princess Brambilla: A Capriccio after Jacques Caillot] (Breslau: Max, 1821); Meister Floh: Ein Märchen in sieben Abentheuern zweier Freunde [Master Flea: A Fairy-Tale in Seven Adventures of Two Friends] (Frankfurt: F. Wilmans, 1822).

³ For this description, see also “Demonic Berlin” (26).

⁴ In 1893, Panizza published his controversial parody of the doctrine of Immaculate Conception, Die unbefieckte Empfängnis der Päpste: Von Bruder Martin O.S.B; Aus dem Spanischen von Oskar Panizza [The Immaculate Conception of the Popes: By Brother Martin O.S.B; Translated from the Spanish by Oskar Panizza] (Zurich: J. Schabelitz, 1893).

⁵ See Panizza’s Das Liebeskonzil: eine Himmels-Tragödie in fünf Aufzügen (Zurich: J. Schabelitz, 1895), for which he was charged and convicted of blasphemy.

⁶ Panizza, Parisjana, deutsche Verse aus Paris (Zurich: Zürcher Diskußionen, 1899).

⁷ Panizza, Visonen der Dämmerung [Visions of Gloaming] (Munich: G. Müller, 1914), xiii.

⁸ See the account of Panizza’s life by Deacon Friedrich Lippert, In memoriam Oskar Panizza (Munich: Horst Stobbe, 1926).

⁹ See “Die Kirche von Zinsblech” [The Church of Zinsblech] and “Das Wirtshaus zur Dreifaltigkeit” [The Inn of the Trinity] in Panizza, Visionen: Skizzen und Erzählungen (Leipzig: W. Friedrich, 1893).

¹⁰ Panizza, “Menschenfabrik” [The People Factory], in Dämmrungsstücke: Vier Erzählungen (Leipzig: W. Friedrich, 1890).

¹¹ Panizza, Die unbefleckte Empfängnis der Päpste, 7ff.

CHAPTER 35. Prescriptions for Comedy Writers

A Conversation between Wilhelm Speyer and Walter Benjamin¹

BENJAMIN: Did you hear, Stefan Großmann is suing Fehling!

SPEYER: You could at least say “Good day.”

BENJAMIN: Good day.

SPEYER: Good day. Now why is he suing?

BENJAMIN: You must know that Fehling staged Großmann’s play Apollo, Brunnenstraße in Berlin.² If I’m not mistaken, you were even at the premiere. The long and short of it is, he’s suing him because he feels artistically compromised by their collaboration.

SPEYER: I’m very sympathetic to Großmann’s cause, suing his colleague. You see, we too have joined forces for some collaborative work. You, the critic, and I, the playwright. It was probably a mistake. Earlier on, at least, I was always of the opinion: massacre the critics. But now you’ve got me saying “good day” to you, shaking your hand, and allowing you to jam my signals with every one of your critical aperçus as I write.

BENJAMIN: I’m deeply saddened, dear Speyer, to see that you have once again reverted to erroneous thinking. So we’ve met here today by coincidence, just like that? What’s the matter all of a sudden?

SPEYER: I have a little problem, my dear critic. In the third act.

BENJAMIN: And in just such a situation you want to chase away so useful a demon as the critic? Did the critic not speculate with you in great detail about the world and people and especially about the state of social drama today, before one day deciding to put these musings to the test? Let me remind you that at that time we were in agreement on the main point: that the writer, especially the playwright, and particularly the author of social comedies, is currently in a very exposed position. Because what does today’s society give him? Does it give him a firm measure of the important questions in life — that is, in terms of marriage or fortune or status — or a clear notion of state or civic virtue or the like? Not a chance! Sometimes society swears by the itinerant preacher, other times by the snob, and each week it’s something new. So, that’s what it gives the playwright: nothing. And what does it demand from the playwright? Everything! When society doesn’t know where to turn, he is expected to furnish the answer. When standards are lacking, he is expected to provide them. When it is deluding itself, he is to point the way, and because he is a comedy writer, everything has to be enjoyable, delivered gently and cajolingly. In short, everything should serve to entertain.

SPEYER: I have the feeling that lurking in what you just said is a small attack on the writer. Of course, you are yet again of the opinion that the critic can intervene with a healing effect on the comedy writer’s difficult situation … Once again you fancy yourself the doctor of poetry, like most of your colleagues.

BENJAMIN: Doctor is a well-chosen word. For a doctor has other tasks besides curing an illness, namely, diagnosing it.

SPEYER: I would be grateful if you could provide a good diagnosis of the ailments currently besetting me, which cause me to be apprehensive and, thankfully, allow me to see the value in collaboration, which — if I may speak earnestly — I have often tried in the past. At the moment, perhaps the most appropriate thing is to abide by the words of Nietzsche: “Go not to the people, stay in the desert.” In other words: a friend of mine has a cabin in the mountains of Upper Bavaria. I will go there to reflect on the problem in my third act.

BENJAMIN: As always, your escape plans will end, as far as I can tell, in a shared car ride, and I am hereby ready to take part.

SPEYER: I would like to remind you that your dramaturgical theories are the most expensive ones around. The last time you shared your constructive ideas about our social comedy, during a particularly riveting aperçu I drove straight into the guardrail on the road from St. Moritz to Tarasp. This aperçu cost my car insurance company three hundred marks.

BENJAMIN: Of course, you say nothing of what it earned you.

SPEYER: A play that lacks a final act, dear Dr. Benjamin, earns absolutely nothing. I have no intention of giving German literature a new Robert Guiscard. So let’s try to cure the disease! Are you honestly of the opinion that I should not go to my cabin?

BENJAMIN: I’m happy to share my thoughts on your literary housing schemes. For one thing: enough of this going-it-alone business! For the writer of dramas of any kind, collaboration is practically the rule. If not in his study, then later in stage rehearsals.

SPEYER: But there is a fundamental difference between those two things.

BENJAMIN: I grant you. That’s what I was getting at. But let’s first agree on one thing: the drama is a collaboration to a much higher degree than any other literary work.

SPEYER: But is collaboration today anything like it was fifty years ago, with Sardou and Scribe?³

BENJAMIN: Not in the least. You have to adhere to the most modern tendencies of the theater, where the collective itself writes the plays.

SPEYER: This does seem to be your inclination.

BENJAMIN: Indeed! But I’m not interested in what has come from these experiments that, for the most part, remain wholly unsatisfactory. Here’s what does interest me: how do such efforts come about? It’s very simple: precisely because our concept of society is shattered and in flux, the theater, and the playwright, need correctives and control measures so as not to lose the ground under their feet. Fifty years ago it was very different; collaboration could be a mere act of improvisation, of whim, of mutual enjoyment. Hopefully this is also true for us from time to time. But behind it lies an imperative about which, I believe, we both are clear.

SPEYER: But in using such methods there’s always the risk of the central literary idea getting completely lost. Everything becomes just a montage.

BENJAMIN: But that’s just it: the central idea should not be sheltered, so to speak, in a literary finishing school, protected from the harsh winds of reality. It should develop in this harsh reality amid the objections of the critic, the dramaturge, etc., etc.

SPEYER: I relinquish my literary solitude to you, because something has become very clear to me in the last few days: I need to be challenged by you, my dear Dr. Benjamin, to take a stand.

BENJAMIN: What do you mean, “take a stand”?

SPEYER: I’ll explain in a moment, and in so doing, we will have arrived at the difficulties concerning my third act. Writing my last act is not so much a technical problem as a moral one.

BENJAMIN: You’ll have to address this moral problem in dialogue on stage. As in life, a problem is best conceptualized through conversation, for which I stand at the ready.

SPEYER: Once again I’ve seen that nothing is easier than writing the opening acts. The hand just flies over the paper, as it’s all about creating expectations. And creating expectations that you cannot later fulfill? That has a name: literary swindle. You know, the whole problem with drama comes down to an issue of credit. In the first two acts you can write out an almost unlimited number of promissory notes.

BENJAMIN: Until, in the third act, the audience comes to cash them in.

SPEYER: Mark Twain illustrated this very nicely. He began one of his stories with the most outrageous characters and events. At breakneck speed, twists are piled on twists, leaving the impression that the author cannot possibly extricate himself from his own ideas. The reader’s heart races in anticipation of how all these tensions will be resolved, how this tangled web will ever be unraveled. But then, right in the thick of it, Mark Twain suddenly breaks off: “I’ve lost my way in this story of mine,” and leaves the reader adrift with the characters.

BENJAMIN: Hmm. That’s an example and at the same time no example at all. For the imbroglio in the last act is perhaps not so much about resolving the plot as, in doing so, showing the author’s true colors. With a writer of tragedy, after a few scenes it will usually be clear what he thinks of his hero and the other characters. For the author of today’s social comedies, it’s an altogether different matter. He can, and perhaps must, maintain a certain air of neutrality. He should not throw himself at his heroes. He should let them quietly be. But at the end the audience will certainly demand that the man — that is, the author — make his own opinion known while refraining, as far as possible, from putting the words directly in the mouth of one of his characters.

SPEYER: This is precisely my difficulty. You get the picture. We have a man and two women, the famous triangle in the social comedy. This man marries the girl he loves. But he can’t break away from his previous lover: whether due to sensual attachment, sympathy, or human solidarity. His wife accepts this lover as part and parcel of the marriage, as she believes that there can be no moral obstacle for three people if the people involved are of strictly noble convictions, and we are certainly dealing here with three fair and levelheaded people.

BENJAMIN: But that is precisely the crux of your social comedy, to see how far modern people get with their vaunted sporting fairness.

SPEYER: Of course. We have two ladies and one gentleman, in the best sense of these words. But it emerges: in such a situation ordinary people would say, “My dear man, you have just married; you must give up the lover from your bachelor years.” But that’s not brave enough or fair enough for our people. It turns out, of course, that marriage is not a sport and that fairness has no place in the human proto-relationship. In fact, instead of simplifying things, it complicates them to a degree that was previously unimaginable for our three people. As time goes on, one of the women obviously has to go. The casualty is of course the lover.

BENJAMIN: That would still be much too easy. Now, to show myself as a critic of a somewhat more pleasant nature, I would like to draw your attention to something beautiful and important in your play, something that is worth considering: you say that the man married the woman he loves. As is proper. But the reason he hangs onto the other woman, with whom he had been together for years, has absolutely nothing to do with devotion. He loves this other one too. Only he loves her with a vague and somewhat extravagant love that conforms to his concepts of chivalry and fairness. Our hero is actually a man living in two eras: sometimes as troubadour and knight, and other times as a citizen of today’s Berlin.

SPEYER: Now we’re left to come to the right decision for the last act: how to proceed with the third woman. There are many possible resolutions. Even Goethe once allowed himself to coolly juxtapose two final scenarios in examining a very similar subject, with his Stella.⁴ In the first and lovelier version the hero pulls to his chest both his beloveds: his spouse and his mistress.

STELLA (embracing him): May I?—

CECELIA: Are you grateful that I kept you from fleeing?

STELLA (embracing her): Oh you!—

FERNANDO (embracing both): Mine! Mine!

STELLA (seizing his hand, dialogue1 on him): I am yours!

CECELIA (seizing his hand, embracing him): We are yours!

In the second version, Fernando shoots himself and Stella takes poison.

BENJAMIN: And you’ve managed to squeeze as many as three different resolutions out of me:

The elegiac, in which Marie — our Stella is called Marie — departs, waving;

The cynical, as in “Let’s try it all again and somehow it will work”;

The heroic, as in the first Stella version.

SPEYER: You don’t yet know my fourth, which I came up with last night. I’m a little anxious about what you’ll say, because in this case I’ve disregarded our underlying plan. You were never in agreement that we should simply find a second man for our poor Marie to fall in love with.

BENJAMIN: That doesn’t worry me too much. The underlying plan is there so that it can be breached at times.

SPEYER: But I didn’t go about it so lightly. As a matter of fact, last night I made a peculiar discovery. I’d like to apply to poetry Bismarck’s principle of occasional candor in diplomacy. You know of the immense impact Bismarck sometimes achieved in ruthlessly deploying Machiavellian plans when his interests required it. In my case, the spectators have gone into the intermission after the second act thinking: “How will the author get himself out of these difficulties?” So I will show them. I will transpose the difficulties, which plague me in my work, into my work itself.

BENJAMIN: So your heroes are to become drama writers of a sort?

SPEYER: That’s right. I’m making them into colleagues, as I can’t seem to manage with just you.

BENJAMIN: I will most likely find these colleagues more pleasant than my previous one.

SPEYER: I hope I have done all I could to make them pleasing to you. Here’s my draft from last night:

Sitting together we have our two women, Luisa and Marie, along with their man, Golo, who is loved by them both, and finally the new man, the fourth, whom you will meet here for the first time, a man by the name of Walter. Marie says:…

[Here, the manuscript breaks off.]⁵

BENJAMIN: So, you have made a moral decision, but I don’t know whether you will be satisfied with my interpretation. Do you know why you were able to bring in a new man in the last act?

SPEYER: Hmm.

BENJAMIN: If it were an important character, this fourth one, it would be a flagrant technical violation to introduce him at the last minute. But do you want to hear what he actually is? He’s nothing at all. He’s the first available man. And perhaps that will be your moral position, that our friend Marie consoles herself with the first available man. That marriage today is frequently not all that important, at least relatively speaking; but that the things that tend to rattle, complicate, or call it into question are not more important than the marriage itself.

SPEYER: I have nothing against the interpretation, for it reflects the Berlin of a certain social class today. You know, it’s not so easy for me to show how these three people of noble convictions carry their death sentence around in their pockets, the man in the pocket of his dinner jacket and the two women in their evening bags.

BENJAMIN: Or better yet: each the death sentence of the other.

SPEYER: It’s not so easy to be in love with a certain social class, as I am, and to point the finger at it, saying: you are despicable, you are lost. And how difficult these occasional hints are in comedies when one tries to avoid the perils of becoming obtrusive.

BENJAMIN: But do you not experience the consolation, the great consolation of the comedy writer: that the audience takes its castigation as entertainment?

SPEYER: Of course! And the comedy of today, in contrast to the relentless and cruel comedies of Molière — think of Georges Dandin—is a mirror, but in a silver frame. No matter how much it reflects the misshapen and murky nature of today’s society, it’s still enclosed in a finely wrought metal, and he whose gaze falls upon it takes it not as a mirror, but as a painting.

BENJAMIN: Right you are. But it’s a good thing no one heard us.

“Rezepte für Komödienschreiber, Gespräch zwischen Wilhelm Speyer und Walter Benjamin,” GS, 7.2, 610–16. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt on May 9, 1930. The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung announced the broadcast for this date from 6:05–6:35 pm.

¹ Wilhelm Speyer (1887–1952) was a writer, former classmate, and friend of Benjamin’s with whom he collaborated on several projects. In addition to “Prescriptions for Comedy Writers,” Benjamin consulted on Speyer’s novel Gaby, weshalb denn nicht? [Gaby, Why Not?] (Berlin, 1930), and his plays Jeder einmal in Berlin [When in Berlin] (Berlin, 1930), Es geht. Aber es ist auch danach [It Works. And How!] (Munich, 1929), and Der große Advokat [The Great Advocate] (1932). According to a written agreement between them, Speyer promised to pay Benjamin “ ‘10 % (ten)’ of the ‘box-office takings’ or max. RM. 5,000 (five thousand) as payment for his advice” (quoted in Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers, ed. Martina Derviş [London: Verso, 1996], 198, 298 n.84; on their collaborations and the remuneration Benjamin received, see also GS, 6, 794, and GS, 7.2, 609).

² Stefan Großmann’s play, Apollo, Brunnenstraße, written with Franz Hessel, debuted on January 9, 1930 at Berlin’s Volksbühne, directed by Jürgen Fehling.

³ Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), and Eugène Scribe (1791–1861), French dramatists best known for their pursuit of the “well-made play,” a term associated with formulaic, commercially motivated theater.

⁴ In the first version of Goethe’s play Stella (1776), the play ends with the three protagonists vowing to live together under the motto, “One apartment, one bed, one grave.” In the second version (1806), Fernando and his lover Stella commit suicide, he by pistol and she by poison, while the wife, Cecilia, lives on. For the quotation that follows, see Goethe, Stella: Ein Schauspiel für Liebende in fünf Akten [Stella: A Play for Lovers in Five Acts] (Berlin: August Mylius, 1776), 115.

⁵ In place of the implied line by Marie, Benjamin’s typescript provides a reference: “see pp. 68–69 of the manuscript … Welt [world].” The manuscript of Speyer’s play containing this quotation was not available to the editors of the GS, who indicate that the published edition (Wilhelm Speyer, Es geht. Aber es ist auch danach! [Munich and Berlin: Drei Masken, 1929]) contains a significantly different version, in which the character of Walter does not appear.

CHAPTER 36. Carousel of Jobs

Put yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, in the position of a fourteen-year-old who has just left primary school and is now faced with choosing a job. Think about the largely vague, sketchy images of jobs that float in his mind, about how impossible it is to attain a more exact insight into them without paying for a costly experience, about the many considerations that must influence a well-deliberated decision and of which he can only act upon a few: the economic situation of each line of business, the demands on or dangers to one’s health, the special nature of professional colleagues, the possibilities for advancement, etc. Does not the image of a carousel seem particularly apt — a carousel of jobs that whirls at such a speed past the candidate, who stands there ready to leap on, that it is impossible for him to study the individual spots that it offers? And, furthermore, you know how grave and oppressive all questions of career choice have recently become, because of unemployment in Europe. Where previously the question of aptitude — the expectation of producing one’s top performance in this or that profession — could direct a young person, now what predominates is the task of snatching a spot where the risk of slipping back down — the danger of being driven out of the production process, never perhaps to gain access to it again — seems as low as possible. The simple slogan “The right man in the right place”¹—still often heard these days — actually comes from a more idyllic era of professional life; in fact, it comes, at least in its official recognition, from the time of demobilization. At that point, it was about directing the fifteen- to seventeen-year-old apprentices who had earned eighty to ninety marks a week in the munitions factories toward a regular job. For this reason, the commissioner for demobilization promoted career counseling. But the slogan that circulated then has a very different meaning today. Today, the right place is the place where there’s a chance of holding on.

In this sense, the position of the skilled worker has also changed. In very many cases, he can no longer count on keeping his job. But the prospects of quickly adapting to a new job are much greater for him than for an unskilled worker. We have just mentioned the term “career counseling.” Qualified authorities, so I hear, have just informed you about this topic in numerous reports on Southwest German Radio. Many of you will have gained insight into the great system of tests and manifold methods of evaluation, into the powerful laboratory that has so rapidly generated a new science, the science of work, particularly in Germany. However, today we will scarcely touch upon the concept that will be most familiar to you: the concept of the performance test. Just as we will merely glance at career counseling. The science of work has two sides: on the one hand, it studies the individual, to determine for which job he is particularly suited; on the other, it approaches the job itself and enquires: What hidden, and therefore strongest, drives in a person are best suited to individual jobs? Above all: how does the job develop and change — not just the task itself, but the milieu in which it occurs, the transference of job habits to life at home, and the character of colleagues — and how does that all change and develop a person?

How does the job impact the individual, and through what? This is the question to which I would not only like to call your attention today, but for which I would also like to ask for your assistance. Hopefully, the following explanations will make the purpose of our request, which the radio station has asked me to direct to you, completely clear. The request: to send to the station communications of any kind in which you describe the influence of your own job on your mood, your views, your relationship to your colleagues, what strikes you when you think about the person you were when you took the job compared to the person you became in the job. It is possible that you would rather, or more easily, make these observations about colleagues than about yourself. Such communications are equally welcome. The material you provide will be reviewed in a second report, and presented along with the conclusions that can be drawn.²

How does the job impact the individual, and through what? You know, this question was effectively resolved at one time, centuries ago. It happened in the guilds; their members’ entire lives, down to the most private matters, were consciously subordinated to the necessities and forms of the work process. Since the last remnants of the guild system disappeared in the nineteenth century, these questions, which are of such importance to the life of every individual, were disregarded for a long time. Lately that has changed, because of the decisive advances made in the science of work, newly subjecting the unilluminated, unscrutinized course of everyday work life to the control of human cultural will. There have been three advancements in the science of work: the first in sociology, in the form of research into the social structure of the professions; the second in psychology, in the form of research into the so-called work environment; and finally, the new American movement of behaviorism. This last, disconcerting concept demands explanation. “To behave”³ means sich verhalten. The foremost proponent of this new science of Sichverhalten,⁴ Watson — some of whose works have been translated and published by Deutscher Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart — declares that people’s habitual behavior is the foundation upon which all of anthropology rests.⁵ It is clear why this approach places the science of work and jobs on a new, much broader basis. In what other environment are habits formed more easily, where else are they more ingrained, where do they include whole groups more intensely, than in the workplace? This behaviorism inherently contrasts with the psychology of the individual, which attempts to understand the behavior of the individual essentially through his nature. To the contrary, nature is important to behaviorism only in its malleability. Behaviorism is interested in the profoundly transformative, profoundly invasive effects of the work process on character.

We have just received a book that is a significant and gratifying indication that the science of business is recognized everywhere. It is German Occupational Studies, published by the Bibliographic Institute in Leipzig.⁶ You can get an idea of the scope of the work, on which a number of specialists collaborated, when you consider that it surveys all German jobs in their incalculable specializations. Its vibrancy can best be illustrated with an example. I will not pick one out at random. What the newest efforts in this field have in common is that they capture the attitude represented in each job in terms of gesture, affinity, and ability, independent of and detached from the material of work. Thus, in a way, they put the example to the test by describing personality types, for which certain jobs would have to be invented if they did not yet exist. Thus I present to you, from German Occupational Studies, the description of a cobbler who is actually a journalist type. The author of the following pages is Peter Suhrkamp.

The particular nature of the journalistic person can be discovered in places where this person can still live without contact with newspapers. One can still find such people today in villages where no newspapers are published. In my hometown there was a shoemaker; but the last thing one could ask from him was that he make shoes. He could not stay in his workshop. Instead, he was on the go and worked wherever an opportunity beckoned, whatever it might be. He cleaned and repaired clocks. And when one of the cattle or a child was sick on a farm, he turned up. If a threshing machine was out of order at a farm, there he was. You didn’t go fetch him (because no one counted on him) but he was everywhere where anything happened, where “something was going on,” as if he could sense it. He came as if by coincidence, stood around for a while and chatted, and then he got to work. And if help was needed with anything, there was nothing that he could not fix. Things he could have no knowledge of — the mowing machines, for example, were then completely new — he adjusted; after a short time looking at a machine, he would have a better understanding of it than the blacksmith. When I saw him for the last time, just before the war, an airplane flew over the village. He shook his head and said, “That thing is not right. Something’s not right with the motor, anyone can see that.” He tried to explain to me then that there are birds that can’t fly, that fly wrong, sparrows, for example. In the village he was considered a drinker, although he was never drunk, because one could meet him in any one of the village’s three pubs; one could find him there late at night disputing with the teacher or with a traveler. I will never forget one rainy day when we waited together, pressed into a haystack, for the weather to clear up, and he developed for me, the young boy, his theory of starry space; it was as beautiful as a fairy tale.

It was said that he visited the pastor and argued with him. His reputation was not good. He had his celebratory days, certainly! If he was successful at doing something the experts had failed to do (and, by the way, he never accepted payment for his work, and so lived, as one can imagine, in poverty), then he made a celebration of it and as many people as possible had to participate; he sat in a circle then and told stories tirelessly. But in general he was not respected. He was described to us children as a wastrel. (Our parents were people with Bismarck’s morals.) But when the cobbler came, people were friendly; they were afraid of him because of his witty, barbed remarks and because of the little ditties he made up about the villagers, which persisted among the people as if they were carved in stone. On the evening of an election day, he surprised the village with a caricature of Friedrich Naumann; it was stretched over a wooden box, and in the box a carbide lamp burned.⁷ This poster was the first illuminated advertisement to appear in a village (it was not long after 1900).

This cobbler was the finest person and the cleverest mind in the village — although he would never be influential, as he could never fill a certain spot in the village — and he was the poorest and therefore weakest man in the village. But that was all due to himself. When he was alone, he did not live. Inside, in his workshop, he was full of agitation and quite incapable; one had to stay with him so that he would finish anything at all. Shoes! Were shoes anything worthy of work! And did objects even deserve the labor of making them! He had to be where things were happening, even if the events were negligible! He had to have faces and conversations around him! If he ever wrote anything down, then it was surely not a chronicle of the place but rather his views on machines and people, preferably observations about the great events of the time — which for the most part only penetrated the village as rumors — stories, anecdotes, and projects (such as how the meadows in the Hunte valley should be irrigated). He was a journalist without a newspaper. All that was missing were newspapers: and then this person would have begun to write and become great. And all that was missing was a certain tendency toward the practical in order for the newspaper to have emerged.⁸

This description epitomizes the modern attempts to illustrate the attitude, the language of gestures, the lifestyle, the views of a professional class in depth, and not merely on the surface by describing the object; rather it is done, either, as with this cobbler-journalist, without connection to the actual object (in this case the newspaper), or — and this will be the rule here — by presenting a very precise examination of all the elements that make up daily professional life. In Suhrkamp’s characterization of a journalist, one can observe exactly how he starts from an assumption at one point about the material of work — that is, the word — and at another point about the “feeling for work”—namely the will to get published — then again about the workplace — namely the editorial office or the hustle and bustle of an external news agency — or about the perception of one’s standing in society — the journalist as the expression of public opinion. Again and again it all depends on describing the constitutive, formative, restructuring influence of these external circumstances on the existence of the members of a profession, and with such clarity that what we previously described as the paramount task of career counseling is achieved: for the biologically meaningful unity of the private person with the professional person to emerge in the member of or aspirant to a profession.

Now, one might think that it would be an easy matter to prove such things as they apply to members of the so-called intellectual professions; but that all these behaviorist attempts to describe habit, the everyday, as decisive not only for the job as means of life but also for the job as purpose of life must find their limits when applied to the common, as one says, the uncomplicated jobs. There is no better way to counter this opinion than to single out a job that is counted among the most primitive, not to say most brutal, which would seem at first glance unlikely to exert a formative or even positive influence on its practictioners. We are speaking of the job of slaughterer. Such an analysis, however, cannot be made in the abstract; in order for us to be truly introduced to the essence of such a job, a variety of circumstances must come together in a stroke of fortune. We have just such a fortunate case here.

I mentioned previously that the “Basic Principles of the Career Counselor” were written by Hellmuth Bogen, head of the Berlin Office for Professional Aptitude Tests, and I was able to discuss with him at some length the matters I am reporting to you today.⁹ This highly unusual man was born into a poor background in Berlin, and as an eleven-year-old he was already earning pocket money behind his parents’ backs by driving the animals intended for slaughter at the central abattoir. He naturally gained, therefore, detailed knowledge of the professional classes that earn their living there, especially cattle traders and slaughterers, and could later combine that with very unusual knowledge of the various professional atmospheres, social relations, class concepts, and so forth. Before I begin to tell you about this truly classic representation — because why should there only be classic representations of individual life stories, and not whole professional classes — before I begin to tell you about it, I would stress that such a diffusion of practical and theoretical experience, knowledge such as is evident here, is the alpha and omega of the science of work. Thus in Russia, for example, career counseling specialists must be active for a certain period of time each year in the practice of those jobs for which they head a department at the counseling office. Among the career counselors there are miners as well as mechanics, locomotive engineers, bakers, etc. The interest in this new science is especially lively in Russia. Gastajeff opened the first Institute for the science of work in 1919, and in 1933 the Sixth International Conference on Psychotechnics will take place in Moscow.¹⁰

We do not want to lose sight of the following: that the short extract I will now convey to you from this masterly characterization of the slaughterer’s job should be understood, not as a description of special dispositions or tendencies that the slaughterer carries with him from the outset, but as a formative power that is inherent in his job.

The main feature of his being is the awareness of bodily power and vitality with which he overcomes the resistance to work in his job, and which also endow him with the necessary resistance to adverse temperatures, the influences of dampness, and the occasionally irregular shifts. From his contacts with animals, he accrues a quietness and certainty of movement; from the type of work operations, his movements gain their heavy stolidity, often amplified by corpulence. The cleanliness that is developed in respect to the work product is also pronounced in personal life. Although they very often have to engage in dirtying work, dirty slaughterers are rare. Slaughterhouse, apartment, clothing, all display the same character of cleanliness. The slaughterers are business people with an artisan’s tendency to produce exceptional quality … Advantageous financial rewards lend them a satisfaction with their lives that they are glad to share with others. All of this results in a sense of self that allows the slaughterer to observe his fellow man without envy, with respect, and, if he steps against him as an opponent, to quickly and roughly hold him at arm’s length. Good-naturedness, joviality, and robustness are thus allied. Out of the entire situation and the awareness of the job’s meaning, a healthy pride grows that finds it unnecessary to assert itself in any way on the outside.¹¹

You all know of graphologists, palmists, phrenologists, and the like who claim to glean deep insights into people from particulars of physique, posture, etc. Regardless of how one mistrusts them, there remains much that is interesting and true in their observations. They assume that there is an indissoluble correlation between the inner and the outer. In their opinion, size, physique, and genetic material determine fate, just as fate, in their opinion, effects changes to the lines of the hand, the gaze, the facial features, etc. But what fate would more consistently call forth such effects, both inner and outer, than the job? And where would such determinations be easier to make than at the job, where thousands of people are subjected to the same fate day in and day out? The question — which we previously urged you to assist us with, and in closing will urge you again to assist by sending us communications — is not only a question of the science of work and jobs, it is a question of the knowledge of human nature and the gift of observation, and that can leave no one who has ever considered it uninterested. To prompt you — many more of you — to consider it was the purpose of these words.

“Karussell der Berufe,” GS, 2.2, 667–76. Translated by Lisa Harries Schumann.

Broadcast on December 29, 1930, on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt. The talk was broadcast from 6:05–6:30 pm. It was part of a series on the theme, “Young People in Crisis” [Jugend in Not] (see Schiller-Lerg, Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 332–4).

¹ In English in the original. [Trans.]

² About this request to the audience for their participation and input, Schiller-Lerg notes that no further information or related materials have been found (see Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 333–4).

³ “To behave” is in English in the original. [Trans.]

⁴ Sichverhalten: Benjamin creates a compound word. [Trans.]

⁵ John Broadus Watson (1878–1958) was an American psychologist known for his contributions to behaviorism.

⁶ Deutsche Berufskunde: Ein Querschnitt durch die Berufe und Arbeitskreise der Gegenwart [German Occupational Studies: A Cross-Section of Contemporary Professions and Working Circles], eds. Ottoheinz von der Galblentz, Carl Mennicke (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1930).

⁷ Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919), German liberal politician.

⁸ Peter Suhrkamp, “Der Journalist,” in Deutsche Berufskunde, 382–3. The passage was provided by the editors of the GS based on their reading of notes in Benjamin’s typescript. For their comments on the challenges of editing this manuscript, and the appearance of this passage in particular, see GS, 2.3, 1457–8. Peter Suhrkamp would later found the publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag, which became the major publisher of Benjamin’s works.

⁹ Hellmuth Bogen was the author of numerous books on career counseling and psychology, including Psychologische Grundlegung der praktischen Berufsberatung: ein Lehr- und Handbuch [The Psychological Foundation of Practical Career Counseling: A Textbook/Handbook] (Langensalza: J. Beltz, 1927). Bogen was head of vocational psychology at the regional employment office in Berlin. The title Benjamin gives, “Leitsätze des Berufsberaters,” has not been found.

¹⁰ The Sixth International Conference on Psychotechnics took place in Barcelona in 1930. The Seventh International Conference would take place in Moscow in September 1931. “Psychotechnics,” a term coined by the German psychologist William Stern, broadly designated a branch of applied psychology focused on creating a scientific study of labor management, i.e., the testing and reengineering of human labor to increase productivity, improve working conditions, overcome postwar labor shortages, optimize specialization, etc. The discipline spawned debates over the politics, ethics, and limits of such interventions and their relationship to capital and other interests. (For instance, at the Seventh Conference, the Soviet delegation attacked bourgeois industrial psychology.) Benjamin’s reference to Gastajeff suggests Aleksei Gastev, director of Moscow’s Central Institute of Labor, known for its dedication to Taylorism.

¹¹ See Fritz Giese, Psychotechnik der Organisation in Fertigung: (Büro-)Verwaltung, Werbung. Handbuch der Arbeitswissenschaft [Psychotechnics in the Organization of Manufacturing: (Office) Administration and Recruitment. Handbook of Occupational Science] (Halle: Carl Marhold, 1928), 92.

CHAPTER 37. “A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea!”

By Walter Benjamin and Wolf Zucker¹

THE SPEAKER: Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to call your attention to one of your colleagues, Herr Max Frisch. If you work in an office, a shop or a business, you’re sure to know him. He’s the one who’s invariably on top, always a big success. He knows just how to assert himself and he gets exactly what he wants. We have invited Herr Frisch here today to let us in on his secrets, to explain to us just how he manages to remain on everyone’s good side and still make a living in times like these. How does he keep his cool? What makes him so pleasant to work with? If you want to learn how he does it, just listen up! Herr Frisch is one of you, he’s someone who shares your hardships and your sorrows. Very often, however, he knows how to deal with them better than you do. Still, we would not have you think that Herr Frisch is just an exception, a darling of fortune! Herr Frisch is not here to arouse your envy; he’s here to tell you how he manages to be so lucky.

THE SKEPTIC: Please forgive the interruption, but are you suggesting that a single, lousy individual has the power, all on his own, to transform his life into a better one? Do you really believe that?

THE SPEAKER: Yes, nearly one hundred percent, absolutely.

THE SKEPTIC: But what if he has no money? What if he’s had to make do for years on a small salary that’s never really enough? What then?

THE SPEAKER: Perhaps he should ask his boss for a pay raise?

THE SKEPTIC (sarcastic laughter): Well, I guess you aren’t all that familiar with bosses. A pay raise in times like these? You must be joking!

THE SPEAKER: Certainly not. And Herr Frisch is here to show you how. He wants to tell you what to do from a practical standpoint.

THE SKEPTIC: Your Herr Frisch can tell us all he wants. I’ve been in the business world for years and I know what happens nowadays when a fellow wants a raise. He’ll be glad if he keeps his old salary and doesn’t get himself fired.

THE SPEAKER: Then he’s not so clever, it would seem to me.

THE SKEPTIC: It doesn’t matter how clever you are. Just come by my office sometime and I’ll show you how things play out.

THE SPEAKER: Sounds good to me. Perhaps we’ll even get to the real reason most people have no luck.

THE SKEPTIC: Allow me then. I introduce to you one Herr Zauderer.² Herr Zauderer is in exactly the situation we want to illustrate. For several years now he’s had a salary of 250 marks. In order to get by, he has to earn at least fifty marks more. If he goes to his boss now, I bet he gets nothing.

THE SPEAKER: Sure, it’s possible. Or maybe he has only himself to blame. Could it not be his own fault?

THE SKEPTIC: Fault? Nonsense. The boss won’t budge. End of story.

THE SPEAKER: Let’s have a listen. Maybe we’ll uncover his mistake!

A faint knock.

THE BOSS (grumpy): Come in!

More knocking.

THE BOSS (grumpy): I said come in! How many more times do I have to shout?

ZAUDERER (rushed and nervous): Oh, excuse me, Director, Sir, I didn’t mean to disturb you … if you have a second…

THE BOSS: It’s good that you’re here. I’ve been wanting to talk to you. I can’t go on like this. My entire desk is covered with complaints, some from Leipzig, some from Erlangen, and these from Elburg. And even some from Magdeburg, our best customer. I can’t go on like this. All day long, nothing but headaches and complaints. To one customer you send too much, to another you send too little, and Magdeburg gets invoiced for a shipment they paid for three months ago. So, what do you say to that, Zauderer?

ZAUDERER (more and more confused): Um, well, I don’t know, I did see a few things in the mail a while back. But I couldn’t explain what the problem is.

THE BOSS: I’m sorry, but that doesn’t cut it. What good are you to me if things don’t run smoothly?

ZAUDERER: Um, well, I don’t know, Herr Director. The new bookkeeper makes one mistake after another. You know I sit here entire nights working on the receipts. You can’t accuse me of not caring.

THE BOSS (annoyed but not impatient): My dear Herr Zauderer, let me tell you something. Have a seat. Look, I know you’re a reasonable person, and I also know that you aren’t cheating me. This is why I’ve kept you around so long at the firm. But do try to put yourself in my place for once: all day long, whenever the mail arrives, I get nothing but trouble. And what do you have to say for yourself? It’s not your fault, the bookkeeper makes mistakes, you don’t know what’s going on. And I’m supposed to be satisfied with that? You tell me.

ZAUDERER: Okay, so I don’t have an answer. But I’m doing my best to improve. A person can’t ask for more!

THE BOSS: I’m not so sure about that. In any case, it’s up to you. For all I care, you can come for two hours a day. But things have to work. You have to realize that!

ZAUDERER: Yes sir. — But, — but — (He hesitates.) I wanted to…

THE BOSS (somewhat astounded): Yes? You’ve something to add?

ZAUDERER: Not to that, Herr Director. But…

THE BOSS: Well, that’s the most important thing to me. Nothing else matters.

ZAUDERER: I wanted … I wanted to ask for a raise!

THE BOSS: What?! After all that? Now I’ve heard it all. I’ve had to be on your case for weeks now, and you want a raise?

ZAUDERER: Yes, Herr Director. I really didn’t want to bother you, sir, but I can’t get by on my salary. I was just trying to ask for more money.

THE BOSS: It confounds me how you could have imagined any such thing. A raise? Now? In these times? And you of all people! Incomprehensible!

ZAUDERER: Herr Director, I thought … well … I just wanted to ask whether, perhaps … but please try to understand that on this salary I can’t make ends meet.

THE BOSS: My dear Herr Zauderer, let me tell you something: a pay raise is completely out of the question. First of all, now is simply not the time; secondly, I’m thoroughly unsatisfied with your performance of late; and thirdly, I should tell you that it is only out of special consideration for you that I have refrained from letting you go.

ZAUDERER (slightly insulted): Well, then I should probably move on. I had hoped that you, Herr Director, would understand me a bit better. If how hard I work is not good enough for you, I guess I’ll just have to give up my post here at your company.

THE BOSS (placatingly): Don’t talk nonsense, Zauderer. I told you I have nothing against you personally. But don’t be foolish, why would you not want to stay here with me? You’re certainly not going to find a job anywhere else these days.

ZAUDERER (plaintively): Yes, Herr Director, please forgive me, but since I’ve been here I’ve been treated unjustly. Herr Meier, who joined the firm at the same time I did, already earns seventy marks more.

THE BOSS: And so? Salary adjustments are my concern. My dear fellow, a word of advice. Do your job with Herr Meier’s accuracy and reliability, and you won’t feel like you are being treated unjustly.

ZAUDERER: Yes, but I do…

THE BOSS (interrupting): On that note, I think we can bring an end to this conversation. Good morning!

ZAUDERER (deflated): Good morning.

A door slams.

THE SKEPTIC (sarcastic laughter): Well, what did I tell you? That’s the way it goes when you ask for a raise these days. Has this scene sufficiently convinced you, sir?

THE SPEAKER: No. We’ve just heard a textbook case of virtually all the mistakes an employee can make in a conversation with his boss.

THE SKEPTIC: What mistakes? The boss refused and that was the end of it.

THE SPEAKER: No. The conversation lasted four minutes. Do you know how many mistakes Herr Zauderer made? At least seven!

THE SKEPTIC: Such as?

THE SPEAKER: First off, the dumbest thing you can do is to ask for something when the boss already has reason to be miffed. Second, if you notice that the boss is in a bad mood, don’t keep harping on the salary issue. Third, when speaking with the boss, you can’t be perpetually shy, fearful, and submissive. Never be impolite or arrogant. One must maintain one’s dignity. But stay on point and speak your mind. Fourth: Herr Zauderer responded to the criticism from his boss by passing the blame onto a colleague. This is unfair and makes a poor impression. Fifth: Herr Zauderer addresses the question of the pay raise in terms of his needs alone. The boss is interested in his business, not in the private life of his employees. Sixth: a very stupid maneuver: Herr Zauderer threatens to quit when he sees he’s lost the cause. The boss knows, of course, that there is no chance Herr Zauderer can seriously consider walking away. It is most inept of Herr Zauderer to insist on playing the injured party. It never works. And finally, seventh: the word unjust is never appropriate. A boss does not let himself be told to which employee he will give more or less pay. That is his concern. It is inappropriate for Herr Zauderer to speak to him about other employees’ salaries. So, that’s what I would say about the scene you have just shown me.

THE SKEPTIC (a bit unsettled): Very well, I’m willing to admit that Herr Zauderer did not conduct himself with much finesse. But how could it be done any better?

THE SPEAKER: Perhaps Herr Frisch can show us. He is, after all, the man who accomplishes everything he sets out to do. He’ll look for ways to avoid mistakes and maybe he’ll even play a few aces, those special trump cards every employee holds in his deck. Let’s visit him in his office. Could this be Herr Frisch? Good day, Herr Frisch.

FRISCH: Good day.

THE SPEAKER: Would you like to show us, Herr Frisch, how you would go about getting a raise?

FRISCH: I’ll give it a shot. Whether it’ll work out or not, who knows. But there’s no harm in trying.

THE SKEPTIC: Now I’m curious. How much do you earn, Herr Frisch?

FRISCH: Three hundred and fifty marks, forty of which go to taxes and insurance.

THE SKEPTIC: And you think you can get even more? What do you do for a living?

FRISCH: Head of accounting at a wholesale knitwear company.

THE SKEPTIC: And what is the salary you want to make?

FRISCH: Four hundred and fifty marks, which would mean I’d net around 400.

THE SKEPTIC: So that’s a thirty percent raise!

FRISCH: That’s right. No harm in trying. Quiet now, I’m going in to see the boss.

A knock.

THE BOSS: Come in.

FRISCH: Good morning, Herr Director.

THE BOSS: Morning. What’s the good word, my dear Frisch?

FRISCH: May I trouble you for a moment?

THE BOSS: What is it then, nothing unpleasant I hope? Have you uncovered more irregularities?

FRISCH: May I be seated? Thank you. — No, the new account entries have gone through without a hitch. Every order from the warehouse now gets its own entry and must be signed by the manager. No shipment is authorized unless I have a copy.

THE BOSS: So, you think this will prevent us from being cheated again?

FRISCH: Absolutely. The entire bookkeeping department would have to be made up of swindlers.

THE BOSS (with satisfaction): Well, we certainly don’t need to worry about that, thank goodness.

FRISCH: Indeed we don’t.

THE BOSS: But doesn’t the new bookkeeping system entail increased delays? You know, it’s even more important now that our deliveries move as fast as possible.

FRISCH: Quite the opposite, Herr Director. I’ve just spoken with shipping. It’s now going faster than before. With my method, confirmations are no longer necessary.

THE BOSS: Let’s hope so. In any case it was very sensible of you to take care of the shipping.

FRISCH: Yes, and I’ll continue to.

THE BOSS: Excellent. Is that all that you wanted to tell me?

FRISCH: No, if you wouldn’t mind, there’s a personal matter I’d like to discuss.

THE BOSS: What? Does it have to be now? As you can see, my desk is covered with mail. I still haven’t had a chance to open it.

FRISCH: I’m sorry about that. I won’t keep you. Anyway, the men from the new factory in Zwickau are coming soon and there isn’t time. We’ll have to do some in-depth negotiating with them so I’ve left my evening free.

THE BOSS: Yes indeed, very important. I’ve got a lot riding on this deal. We must get it done.

FRISCH: You can count on me, Herr Director.

THE BOSS: Great, so what’s on your mind?

FRISCH: Right. I’d like to ask for a raise.

THE BOSS: Well, excuse me, now you’re bringing this up? How very curious.

FRISCH: I’m sorry to surprise you, but I think my work is worth more than you’ve been paying me.

THE BOSS: I don’t get you. You know very well that we are constantly letting people go, that we employ twenty-five percent more personnel that we can actually afford, and now you’re telling me you want a raise?

FRISCH: Herr Director, there’s no reason we can’t discuss this calmly. Let me tell you why I need more money, and why I believe the firm can pay it. If you disagree, I only ask that you try to explain your reasons.

THE BOSS: Reasons, oh, please. The money I pay my employees is my concern. You know I have a perfectly good sense of what my people want, so don’t annoy me with that.

FRISCH: But why, Herr Director? You have always trusted me, and we did handle the last round of negotiations together. All I want is for you to allow me to trust you enough to talk about my concerns. Is that unreasonable?

THE BOSS: Alright then, fine, go ahead. I can hardly blame you. I too would like very much to make more money. Who wouldn’t? Everyone does.

FRISCH: Yes sir, I couldn’t agree more. For starters, I need to make more than I do now.

THE BOSS: How much do you make?

FRISCH: 350 pre-tax.

THE BOSS: Well, that’s a big chunk of money!

FRISCH: I don’t think it’s enough for the head bookkeeper in a firm like ours to keep up appearances.

THE BOSS: Why? Who cares how you look?

FRISCH: Don’t say that. If the people from Zwickau come today, they’ll have a very good look at every one of us. They notice everything: this is an employee the firm respects, who earns enough not to worry about every single penny, who dresses well, eats enough — you understand what I mean.

THE BOSS: To hear you talk, one would think I ran a fashion house and you were my model.

FRISCH (laughing): Herr Director, you’re not entirely wrong. All of your employees are models of a sort — models for the firm. It is based on them that people draw their conclusions about the productivity, reliability, and security of our whole operation. Believe me, every well-dressed, well-groomed employee is good promotion for the company at large. So then, about this raise you want to grant me, what do you say we put it on the books as a general advertising expense? Sound good?

THE BOSS: Hold on! Hold on! We’re not there yet, my dear Frisch! What you’re saying sounds well and good, but what am I supposed to do when our current business plan effectively allows no new costs whatsoever! As head bookkeeper, you of all people should know this.

FRISCH: Sure enough, Herr Director, I do know our present situation better than anyone, but I would like to draw your attention to something else. You know that last year we celebrated our fiftieth anniversary, and every one of us employees received, along with a special bonus, an anniversary publication written personally by you. I read through this booklet with much interest.

THE BOSS: What does that have to do with your raise?

FRISCH: Just a second, now. What you write there is very interesting: about how, in the chaos that ensued after the Founding Years,³ your esteemed father had the pluck to build up his new business and to position it on a solid footing; about how he spared no sacrifice to produce only first-class goods; about how he spent great sums on new mechanical equipment because he trusted that the investment would pay off; about how he paid his employees more than the competition did because he wanted them to be committed to his firm. Is it not true, Herr Director? Do you see what I mean?

THE BOSS (sympathetically): Well now, you really studied that little booklet. But these are different times, my good fellow. Oh Lord, how simple things were back then!

FRISCH (firmly): Yes, perhaps these are different times, but our firm has, I think, remained very much the same. You have continued to operate in the same spirit as your dear father. And do you not believe that in these difficult times it is all the more important to enlist help that is totally reliable, people to whom you can entrust the firm? I believe it’s even more critical today than it was back then.

THE BOSS (somewhat moved): Well, well, I suppose you’re right, my good fellow. So, now tell me: what is it you want exactly?

FRISCH (after a brief pause): Five hundred.

THE BOSS: I beg your pardon?

FRISCH (decisively): Five hundred marks.

THE BOSS: I keep hearing 500 marks.

FRISCH: Sure, that’s what I said as well.

THE BOSS: Well, banish the thought, my dear friend. I’m no millionaire, after all.

FRISCH: Hmm. I’m no millionaire either if I earn 500 marks. And I believe, Herr Director, without wanting to sound presumptuous, that my expertise saves your company more money in one week than the extra pay I’m asking for each month.

THE BOSS: Oh no, I seriously doubt that.

FRISCH: Yes, really! If you calculate the losses due to theft, and so forth, in the most recent closing, you’ll see I’m right.

THE BOSS: I don’t want to argue with you. But please, you must consider our current circumstances. We’re not going to make even sixty percent of what we made last year.

FRISCH: Yes, yes, we must keep at it. We’ve got to make an effort, and I for one shall do my part to get revenue back up again.

THE BOSS: That’s what I would expect from you. So let’s talk this over sensibly. Are you satisfied with 400 marks?

FRISCH: No. That’s only fifty more than I earned before. Please don’t be offended, Herr Director, but I was expecting more.

THE BOSS: Very well. I appreciate your value to the company. I would not have you think me petty. Let’s agree on 450.

FRISCH (after a pause): Alright then, considering our current circumstances, 450 marks. I will do my utmost to ensure that the next time I ask for a raise, you will no longer have this excuse as a reason to object.

THE BOSS (laughing): That’s just fine by me. If our revenue goes up, you won’t be the last to benefit. — But you know, you really are quite an odd fellow. And come to think of it, sometimes it seems to me that you’re the boss and I’m the employee. It’s very strange.

FRISCH (earnestly): Yes, of course! If I may, allow me to explain: at your firm, I don’t feel like an employee who does his duty for eight hours and then goes home. If you’ll forgive my saying so, sometimes I actually feel like I am the boss, at least as far the headaches are concerned.

THE BOSS: That truly gives me pleasure. As you well know, I only team up with independent, responsible people.

FRISCH (with a touch of irony): Well, perhaps this, too, will be reflected come payday.

THE BOSS (laughing): Are you on with that again? Enough is enough. I think you can be quite satisfied for today.

FRISCH: That I am — for today. And I thank you very much.

THE BOSS: Alright — but please get busy on this Zwickau matter right away.

FRISCH: Consider it done. Good morning.

THE BOSS: Good morning. (To himself.) Crafty fellow, that Frisch.

A door closes.

THE SPEAKER: Now, there you are. Herr Frisch got exactly what he wanted. A pay raise of 100 marks. And did he not go about it most sensibly?

THE SKEPTIC: Hmm. I can’t deny you that. Your Herr Frisch is indeed a master of subtlety.

THE SPEAKER: Quite so. And I dare say the boss had the same idea. He was thinking: if Frisch was so clever at roping me in, imagine what he could do when negotiating with our clients! I need a man like that. I can’t let that kind of talent go.

THE SKEPTIC: Yep, I’ll grant you that. Still, your Herr Frisch is just an isolated case.

THE SPEAKER: Of course he’s an isolated case. Every person is an isolated case. Nevertheless, there will always be certain situations in which the same rules apply to everyone.

THE SKEPTIC: True. And your Herr Frisch was a smooth operator. He avoided precisely those mistakes Herr Zauderer made only a moment ago. But isn’t there more to success than avoiding mistakes?

THE SPEAKER: Yes, you’re absolutely right. I agree. Something else is necessary.

THE SKEPTIC: And what would that be?

THE SPEAKER: A fundamental attitude, a state of mind.

THE SKEPTIC: Meaning?

THE SPEAKER: Meaning an inner bearing, the basic values Herr Frisch displays at work, with the boss, and in his entire life. He is clear, determined, and courageous. He knows what he wants and therefore he can remain both calm and polite at all times. He understands how to attune himself to his opponent’s state of mind without sacrificing his dignity in the slightest.

THE SKEPTIC: Well then, how very fortunate for him. To be blessed with such a fine disposition is lucky indeed. But what if everything hadn’t gone his way? If for some reason the boss had not been persuaded?

THE SPEAKER: Herr Frisch anticipates such an eventuality. Herr Frisch is always prepared. Even in failure, he is composed. He is not easily discouraged. Herr Frisch considers his struggles to be a kind of sport, and he approaches them as he would a game. He contends with life’s difficulties in a relaxed and pleasant manner. He keeps a clear head even when things go wrong. And please believe me when I tell you: successful people are never sore losers; they’re the ones who don’t whine and give up after every failure. Indeed, they are the ones who keep their chins up, weather life’s misfortunes, and live to fight another day. Who will be first to fail the test? The timid and the faint of heart. The whingers, the complainers. He who goes to the exam cool and calm is already halfway there. Such people are in great demand today. That is, I believe, the secret of success.

“ ‘Gehaltserhöhung?! Wo denken Sie hin!’ ” GS, 4.2, 629–40. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Listening model (Hörmodell) broadcast on Radio Berlin, February 8, 1931, under the title, “How Do I Deal with My Boss?” (“Wie nehme ich meinen Chef?”), and on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on March 26, 1931 as “A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea!” (“Gehaltserhöhung?! Wo denken Sie hin!”).

As early as 1929, Benjamin had outlined a series of such listening models. See “Listening Models” (373). See also Benjamin’s 1929 essay, “Conversation with Ernst Schoen,” in which Benjamin discusses Schoen’s plans for Radio Frankfurt to “develop a series of models and counter-models of techniques of negotiation—’How do I deal with my boss?’ and the like.”⁴ According to his collaborator Wolf Zucker, Benjamin saw these listening models as a way to “use the new medium of radio to teach the listener certain practical techniques for typical conflict situations of modern life.” The possible superficiality and problematic simplicity of giving such advice was, of course, hardly lost on Benjamin, who, Zucker writes, “warned [Zucker] not to think that his ideas had anything to do with real solutions to real problems. Rather, the listening models should be like the example of Emily Post [Freiherr von Knigge], instructions for dealing with people, i.e. instructions for the operation of a very complex system, whose internal structure the user does not in the least understand.”⁵

The Berlin broadcast, directed by Edlef Koeppen, aired on the morning of Sunday, February 8, 1931, from 11:20–12 noon, as part of the station’s experimental series “Studio.” Directed by Ernst Schoen, the Frankfurt broadcast on March 26, 1931, aired during the evening, from 8:30–10:00 pm, and featured a discussion following the play. It was listed in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung as: “Listening Model I: A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea! By Walter Benjamin and Wolf Zucker. Performance followed by discussion.” The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung’s “Weekly Program” added that during the discussion, “Labor representatives will voice their opinions of the listening models. Coauthor Dr. Benjamin will also take part in the discussion.”⁶

¹ Wolfgang M. Zucker (1905–?), Benjamin’s collaborator on the Hörmodelle, or listening models, was a critic who wrote for periodicals including Die Weltbühne, where he reviewed Benjamin and Franz Hessel’s translation of Proust (Die Weltbühne 14 [April 5, 1927], 556–8). After emigrating to the US, he became a professor of Philosophy at Upsala College. He discusses his radio collaborations with Benjamin in Wolfgang M. Zucker, “So entstanden die Hörmodelle” [Creating the Listening Models], Die Zeit 47 (Nov. 24, 1972). According to Zucker’s recollections, he and Benjamin wrote “five or six” listening models together, the first of which was “A Pay Raise?!”

² We have chosen to leave “Zauderer,” a common enough surname, untranslated. It could be rendered as something like Waverer or Procrastinator. Similarly, the name “Frisch” given to the smarter employee might be translated as Cool, Hip, or the more literal Fresh.

³ The Founding Years refers to the period just after the unification of Germany in 1871, used here to refer to the economic boom period from 1871–1873, which was followed by a crash.

⁴ Benjamin, “Conversation with Ernst Schoen,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, in The Work of

⁵ Zucker, “So entstanden die Hörmodelle.” Friedherr von Knigge was the author of Über den Umgang mit Menschen [On Human Relations] (1788), a practical guide to decorum.

⁶ Schiller-Lerg, Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 196, 208–13.

CHAPTER 38. What the Germans Were Reading While Their Classical Authors Were Writing

Dramatis Personae

THE ANNOUNCER

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE PUBLISHER JOHANN FRIEDRICH UNGER

THE AUTHOR KARL PHILIPP MORITZ

THE ACTOR IFFLAND

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS (identical with the Voice of the Enlightenment)

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS (identical with the Voice of Romanticism)

PASTOR GRUNELIUS

BOOKSELLER HEINZMANN

WAITER, AUCTIONEER, CRIER, DIRECTOR, TWO ACTORS

Director’s Address

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Ordinarily it is the task of the Announcer to make the kind of introductory remarks I will now deliver. You will soon recognize, however, that the Announcer is, on this occasion, entangled in such a peculiar form of conversation with spirits that we must release him from so profane a task as a mere announcement. You will also soon have detected from his conversation that perhaps he lacks the necessary calm and objectivity of an announcer. It is a somewhat irritable, agitated tone that you will notice in him. The Enlightenment, with whom he deals first, doesn’t seem to sit well with him. Romanticism, who will interrupt him during his second outburst, has absolutely no credit with him, and the nineteenth century, whom he runs up against at the end, is forced to flee from his critical objections to the sheltering protection of Goethe.

Aside from this, you will not have to endure the society of this rather unpleasant person for too long. He will only appear at the thresholds of our play. That is to say: at the beginning, the end and the middle when, during his dispute with Romanticism, we make our way from a Berlin coffee house — into which we are first led — to the basement of the Leipzig bookseller, Breitkopf, where we listen to several people who have gathered for the book fair.¹ It will do no harm if, at the same time, you think of this trip between Berlin and Leipzig as a trip through a lustrum — a span of five years. In any case, we will remain in both locations in the decade between 1790 and 1800. Our guide will be the publisher, Johann Friedrich Unger, just as he played guide to no small number of writers at the time.² We find at his side two nameless, stereotypical figures, two men of letters, the first of whom has assumed the Voice of the Enlightenment, and the second that of Romanticism. Other historical figures besides Unger are the author Karl Philipp Moritz and the actor and playwright, Iffland, figures who have, after all, stood sufficiently in the shadows of greater men as to be included in this little literature play without any injury to their rank.³ Finally, we will mention, from the first tableau, the Pastor Grunelius, whom we have invented, and from the second, the bookseller Heinzmann from Bern.⁴

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: You’re taking too long, sir. Voices are not used to waiting in the lobby.

DIRECTOR: And I am not here for the purpose of talking with voices. That is the business of the Announcer.

THE ANNOUNCER: Of the Announcer. Just as you say. Who, in turn, is not used to inconveniencing himself with voices.

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: The Enlightenment is not so touchy.

THE ANNOUNCER: Then may I be quite direct? I heard that you wished to set up your headquarters for today in a coffeehouse.

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: At Zimmermann’s on Königstraße.

THE ANNOUNCER: Your enemies — and you are aware you still have some today — will assume that you also originated in a Berlin coffeehouse.

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMEN: The enemies of Enlightenment must just be ill-informed. I originated in the Bastille, when it was stormed in ’89.

THE ANNOUNCER: And what did you bring to the people?

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: Justice and a good bargain.

THE ANNOUNCER: A bargain? You must mean that figuratively.

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: What do you mean?

THE ANNOUNCER: That your friends’ books are plenty expensive. Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years’ War, as I saw in one of Göschen’s catalogs, costs eighteen marks. For Benvenuto Cellini they’re asking twenty-four marks. And the 1790 edition of Goethe’s complete works is listed at fifty-seven marks in the catalogs.⁵

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: I regret that. But it proves not only that reading classical writers was difficult to afford, but also how much people were prepared to sacrifice for it. A classical edition was an acquisition for a lifetime — indeed a bequest to son and grandson.

THE ANNOUNCER: They sat on the shelves, but were they read? At the end of his life, Goethe, who must have known, said: The larger public has as little judgment as taste. It shows the same interest in the common as in the sublime.⁶

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: I am not only concerned with the greater public nor only with taste, I am just as concerned with the people and basic knowledge. With the “Advice Manual for Peasants,” which, when it was published in 1788, sold 30,000 copies.⁷ With Pestalozzi’s chapbooks,⁸ Eberhard von Rochow’s works for children, in short, books for children and farmers.⁹ I also wish to discuss this with my friends.

THE ANNOUNCER: So you’re going to the smoking room to meet your friends.

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: As well as my opponents. There will be a pastor there who does not wish me well.

THE ANNOUNCER: But also your friends; and who might they be?

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: The Berlin bookseller, Johann Friedrich Unger, the publisher of Wilhelm Meister and of the new writings of Goethe, of The Maid of Orleans and Schlegel’s Alarcos, not to forget the theology of Karl Philipp Moritz, whom I will also be meeting there.

THE ANNOUNCER: And in what guise, may I ask?

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: In one of a hundred. My voice is the voice of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant or of the scribbler Merckel, the voice of the Jewish doctor, Markus Herz, or that of the platitudinous and blustering Nicolai.¹⁰ Soon you’ll hear it afresh, for it is the voice of someone with a brand-new master’s degree.

We hear the prelude to the hymn that follows.

THE VOICE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT: Shhhh! Stop talking! Listen!

We hear a hymn (possibly in several voices):

From Heaven above to earth I come,

To bear good news to every home;

Glad tidings of great joy I bring

Whereof I now will say and sing.

To you, this night, is born a Child

Of Mary, chosen mother mild;

This tender Child of lowly birth,

Shall be the joy of all your earth.

‘Tis Christ our God, who far on high

Had heard your sad and bitter cry;

Himself will your salvation be,

Himself from sin will make you free.

He brings those blessings long ago

Prepared by God for all below;

That in His heavenly kingdom blest

You may with us forever rest.

Glory to God in highest Heaven,

Who unto man His Son hath given,

While angels sing, with pious mirth,

A glad New Year to all the earth.¹¹

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Yes, my dears, these children need only be heard and they immediately impart the Christmas spirit even to so worldly a place as this, into which today — as an exception, as you well know — I have set foot … Well, you can hardly take your eyes off the window, Deputy Headmaster.¹²

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS (in a low voice): I think, Pastor, we’ll leave him alone for now. I have the impression he wants to be alone… (More loudly.) Here, then, I can tell you. I know why the Deputy Headmaster remains standing by the window.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: I don’t understand your tone. What are you saying?

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: That concerning these itinerant schoolboys’ choirs there are differing opinions, as you surely know. I can only tell you that I recently saw an educational authority expressing his views concerning these poor schoolboys’ choirs in Campe’s Braunschweig Journal.¹³ The man urges the abolition of these choirs, and I am convinced he is right. The paltry gains for such children from this free education hardly compensates, he contends, for the moral corruption and running wild that unavoidably results from being dragged to and fro around the courtyards and streets. The charities that have been created for this should simply, he proposes, be used to provide clothes and free education for poor boys. Moreover, there can be no thought of a proper education for poor schoolboys when they spend all the time they should be in school caterwauling in the street.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: These are matters, venerable sir, concerning which we shall indeed not agree. Furthermore, I will tell you quite openly that it is not at all clear to me what this has to do with Herr Moritz.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: But surely you are acquainted with Anton Reiser?

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Herr Moritz’s novel? To be quite honest, no. It must be a very sad book.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: Sad, certainly. In that it relates the story of our beloved Moritz’s childhood.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: What, this Reiser is he? In that case, I can make sense of a few things.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: And, above all, you now understand why he is standing there like that. He was once one of these choirboys.¹⁴ The last time we sat together in Kameke’s garden, he described it to me for hours on end, how in snow and rain they waited, crammed close together on the street, until a messenger brought word that in some house or another singing was required. How they then all crowded into the room and, perched one on top of the other, sang an aria or motet and expressed their happiness when someone offered them a glass of wine or coffee and cake.

Din of falling chairs, disgruntled shouting:

I beg your pardon, but the impertinence, my good man!

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Distinguished Scholar, you don’t seem very steady on your feet today.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: Maybe he’s had one too many.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Keep your insinuations to yourself, esteemed colleague. The ascent to our local river Spree Olympus is icy, as you no doubt have noticed.

MORITZ: If you mean by that that the steps to the Café Kranzler are a little slippery, then you’re right. But your speech is sufficiently florid.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: My speech is nothing in comparison with the blooming flower I bear.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS (in a low voice): I can’t find much on him that’s blossoming besides his nose.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: So then guess, gentlemen, how many books I have with me.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: Your collected poems, I suspect — I have yet to see you without them.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: That would not yet even make one.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Thirty-eight books, venerable sirs.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: You are not to be taken seriously.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Wager? For a bottle of champagne?

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: Stop talking nonsense.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Then, please, see for yourself.

We hear a progressively louder “Ah, ah, ah” from all parties. The titles can be altered at will and should be divided among the various speakers in turn:

Almanac of German Muses, Almanac for Noble Souls, Calendar of the Muses and the Graces, Genealogy of the Braunschweig-Lüneburg Electorate, Almanac for Health Fanatics, Church and Heresies Almanac, Handbook of Social Amusements, Almanac for Children and Youth, Almanac for the Promotion of Domestic Happiness.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Almanac for the Promotion of Domestic Happiness. Yes, we were lacking that. Since nine tenths of all domestic distress derives from just this damned reading of Almanacs — by way of which every wench fancies herself a Chloe or even an Aspasia.

MORITZ: Yes, that is an accursed collection you have put together. And a poor schoolteacher such as myself wonders how he could rival so much erudition. — I reproach these calendars with their rhymes, anecdotes, songs, excursions, and dances, little essays and notices, geographical maps and small copperplate engravings and costumes for diverting even the educated public from serious works.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: That’s exactly it, Deputy Headmaster. Everything is fragment, shadow, and sampler. I can see the day coming when they will even trivialize the Holy Scriptures, and fill the Old Testament with cartoons of the Patriarchs.

MORITZ: We are caught in the middle. The better public are devoted to dalliances, amorous verses, maudlin novels; and the simpler folk — insofar as they read — are in the clutches of the colporteurs who bring robber and ghost stories directly to their house by the sheet. In this you have it better, Pastor: Heaven and Hell have something to say to every class of society.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: If you think that my sermons are a match for those fashionable new tales of chivalry, then you are mistaken. One would have to be an Abraham a Santa Clara to hold people’s attention.¹⁵ And it just gets worse from one Mass to the next.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: One moment, gentlemen. That must be Unger there, sitting right behind you. He surely has the most recent catalog for the book fair, so we’ll see right away. — One moment, please, my esteemed Unger.

UNGER: Oh, it’s you, my dear man. To be honest, had I known, I would have had my coffee elsewhere. You are right to remind me. But ask all of my authors, ask Moritz, I can’t print anything until I resolve the question of the new typeset with my colleague Didot in Paris.¹⁶

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: But I beg of you, I will not press you. It’s not at all about that. Set aside your Berlin Monthly¹⁷ for a moment, reach in your pocket and pull out the new book fair catalog. — You see, my gentlemen, we’ve already got it.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Gentlemen, one moment’s peace! Listen to this! You will blush for shame. Have you ever heard of the Widtmann Press in Prague? Neither have I. And wrongly so, gentlemen, wrongly so. To this publishing house we will soon owe the masterpiece of the following title: “The Little Jewish Grandmother, or, The Terrifying Specter of the Woman in the Black Robe.”¹⁸ But Mr. Widtmann has competition in Prague. What do you say to: “The Night Watchman, or, the Ghost Encampment at Saaz in Bohemia. A Horrifying Tale from the Age of Gruesome Sorcery.”¹⁹—Or listen to this — no, you won’t believe it possible, my esteemed Deputy Headmaster. Step over here and take a look: Adelmar von Perlstein, the Knight of the Golden Key; or, The Twelve Sleeping Maidens, Protectors of the Enchanting Young Man. Knight’s Tales and Ghost Stories from the Middle Ages as Companion to Knight Edulf von Quarzfeld.,²⁰

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: Clearly, Mr. Waldner, who wrote that, need not fear any competition from our good Mr. Vulpius.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: And what dross is he coming out with this time? He will certainly not fail to weigh in.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: But, of course. Here it is: “Rinaldo Rinaldini, Robber Captain.”²¹ By the way, this Vulpius …

MORITZ: Just don’t tell me that he is the future brother-in-law of Mr. von Goethe. First of all, we’re not that far along. Second, I hold the composition of robber stories to be a thoroughly honest profession. Yes, Pastor, you will contradict me. But I must tell you, these are all completely harmless things in comparison to that worthless trash put out by this Mr. Spieß, for example, who decks his miserable products in all manner of prettifying or cloying trappings.²²

UNGER: Yes, our Spieß is edifying: in him you lost a colleague,

Though Spieß is an historical figure, his name also connotes “one who is narrow-minded, pigheaded, petit-bourgeois,” and this sense plays throughout the ensuing dialogue. [Trans.]

Pastor. Sometimes one would really sooner believe one was reading a high-minded book of meditations from 1650. But in the end there’s really only one of these tearful domestic stories behind it all. I haven’t actually read any of them. The title of his last was enough for me … What was that thing called again?

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: The Injustice of Humankind, if I’m not mistaken. The Injustice of Humankind or the Journey through Dens of Woe and Chambers of Misery.²³ In truth, a disgusting mess.

MORITZ: Allow me to return to this once more, gentlemen. What strikes me as reprehensible is the hypocrisy with which such scribblers, with their comfortable earnings, behave as though their sole concern were the enlightenment of the human race, civic-mindedness, and the promotion of propriety. Of course, these things have already penetrated into the schools. Look here, please! Less than three hours ago, during a Greek lesson, I caught a rascal with this book under the bench.

UNGER: No, really, Deputy Headmaster, let me see! I’ve never read a word of this Spieß.—Biographies—No, listen to this: Biographies of the Insane.²⁴

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: And what if I were to tell you that the man has already completed four volumes, and I believe the thing has not yet run its course.

UNGER: No, Pastor, give me that! In the debate between Mr. Moritz and his student, I would at least like to be the tertius gaudens and actually look at something the man wrote.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Read aloud, Mr. Unger! Our society is really far too refined. None of us has ever seen anything by Spieß.

UNGER: As you wish, my gentlemen, as you wish. But I think we’ll limit ourselves to the Preface.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Let’s say, a small section of it. That should suffice.

UNGER: “Can I expect thanks,” writes this Spieß:

Can I expect thanks, if I warn those who stray away from the abyss; is it my duty to caution the parched wanderer against taking a precipitous draught from that cool well through which he will meet his death? If so, then I have fulfilled it, and can ask you, dear Reader, to take the content of this little book to heart. Insanity is terrifying, but more terrifying still is how easily a man can fall prey to it. Overwrought, violent passion, deluded hope, lost perspective, and often merely fancied dangers can rob us of that precious gift of our Creator, our understanding — and what mortal can boast that he was never himself in a similar position, and, it follows, in the same danger? When I relate to you the biographies of these unfortunates, I wish not only to awaken your compassion, but also to offer you excellent proof that each was the author of his own misfortune, and that accordingly it remains in our power to avert similar misfortunes. Admittedly, I cannot hold out against the torrential current if I dare recklessly to venture into its depths, but he who convinces me of its depths through examples and warns me of the imminent danger before I have stepped from the bank deserves my thanks and praise. How richly, how sublimely, would I think myself rewarded were my stories to restrain the gullible maiden, the careless young man, from the execution of a bold plan that could someday rob them of their understanding.²⁵

MORITZ: Indeed, perfidious enough. No wonder that made it into the best houses.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: Yes, Deputy Headmaster, there you have the greatest failing of our entire current educational system. We enlighten man as to his natural virtue and original disposition, and then come these enthusiasts, pietists, genius-worshippers, Sturm und Drang-ers, to make fog and renewed agitation out of everything again.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Look here, my dear man. That should give you cause to reflect. I mean, you and your colleagues should ask yourselves why your Apostle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the preacher of nature and virtue, was such an unnatural and unvirtuous man. In short: to a positive theologian, your entire Enlightenment can’t seem much more than a man who needs a candle lit in front of his nose on a sunny day.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: No, Pastor, we don’t wish to argue in this way. It is not the right tone. I believe the Deputy Headmaster would call something of that kind argumentatio ad hominem, which is unworthy of a citizen of the academy. Come at me with Rousseau in this way, and I could come at you with Lavater, who so well understood how to connect positive religion to a hodgepodge of mysticism, genius, and enthusiasm, that over time, as you know, all serious readers were frightened off.²⁶

MORITZ: Worst of all, however, is that such people then believe they must follow a career educating children. I recently ran across the Ethical Primer for Country Children.²⁷ And I must confess that I believe — of course, one shouldn’t say this — but I believe nonetheless, I did it better in my Logic for Children.²⁸

WAITER: If the honorable sir would forgive me a thousand times, but if the gentleman would step to one side, because I would like to light the lamps in the store window — and then, no offense, Mr. Businessman, but there is a gentleman here who has been waiting twenty minutes for the “News” to become available. And if you would be so charming as to trade it with him for the Cotta’sche Zeitung.²⁹

UNGER: With plaisir, my friend, with plaisir. — I can only wonder, Deputy Headmaster, at how the classifieds are getting out of hand. Can you believe that a week ago I found a wedding announcement in the Journal?

MORITZ: I don’t know if you read the Leipziger Zeitung, but I have heard they publish entire pages filled with nothing but classified ads. But in England that was already customary in the newspapers fifteen years ago.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: I believe, my good gentlemen, that everything that ties the newspapers more closely to civic life, to the everyday, is to our advantage. In my opinion, newspapers should not be written only for men of state and members of Parliament, nor just for professors and scribblers. Newspapers belong in the hands of everyone.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: You would not wish in the end, esteemed sir, to see the newspapers in the hands of the uneducated public. You see, I don’t want to say that I am au courant on everything these gentlemen are discussing, but you can trust me on one thing: as a pastor, I am better placed than anyone to survey the appalling epidemic of reading to which our public has fallen prey — and the less educated they are, the more hopeless it is. People read today who would not even have thought about books twenty years ago. And in my youth, if the citizen or craftsman took up a book, then it was an honest, time-honored tome, a chronicle, an old herbal, a homily. But today? The bourgeois girl who belongs in the kitchen is reading her Schiller and Goethe in the hallway, and the uncouth country girl trades her spindle for Kotzebue’s plays.³⁰ My dear brother, the High Court preacher Reinhard, is absolutely right when he says that domestic problems — concerning which one hears so many complaints — can be directly traced to this ghastly habit of reading.³¹

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: This much is true — as I recently read at the German Museum — musketeers in the big cities are borrowing books from the lending library to take with them to the barracks.

UNGER: The lending library. Yes, there you have said it. They are the source of all our misery.

PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Forgive me, I don’t mean to interrupt, but when you speak of musketeers, I can tell you which books they are bringing to the barracks. I had the opportunity recently to cast a glance into a consignment they sent to the Grand Consistory for appraisal. I will tell you the titles, my good gentlemen, nothing but the titles: Augustea, or the Confessions of a Bride before Her Wedding; The Story of Justine, or So It Must Be to Remain a Virgin; The Peregrinations of Henriette. And for something of this kind one indicates Istanbul or Avignon as the place of publication, to thumb one’s nose at the censors.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: I certainly don’t wish to take up the defense of such books, but shall I tell you whom we have to thank for them? Those selfsame censors, esteemed sirs, who provided us with their miserable edict of July 9, 1788.³² It is the censor who robs the common man of respectable and beneficial writings, and turns his curiosity and desire to read toward the most cunning imposters. You know as well as I that it was only because of the censor that our Berlin Monthly had to move to Jena. That they suppressed the publication of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,³³ that they have forbidden Mr. von Humboldt to print two absolutely innocent lines on a garter in celebration of the marriage of the duchess of Lottum,³⁴ that they…

UNGER: Herr Magister, you see how you are upsetting our good Pastor. Let us leave these trifles aside. Let us be happy that they have not forbidden us all writings on the circumstances in France, as they have in Austria; that we, in contrast to the Viennese, may still at least read Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Bürger, and Sterne, not to mention the Iliad.

MORITZ: You don’t mean to say that the Iliad is forbidden in Austria!

UNGER: The Iliad has been forbidden in Austria, just as the Aeneid is still forbidden today in Bavaria. — But I did not wish to speak of that. Only of something about which no honest, thinking human being can remain silent, that is, the answer they gave to the petition presented by the Berlin book trade last year: “We will not hear any objections contending that the book trade would suffer. For evil must be controlled, even if it means the book trade goes under.”³⁵

MORITZ: What do you expect? The censors have to live too. I’m telling you, it’s not an easy living. For one pamphlet the poor wretch only makes two cents. I’ve been told, though, that it’s more for poetry. Presumably because rhymed wickedness is harder to detect.

UNGER: Listen, this is not the right approach. You were just speaking, in passing, of your Logic for Children. That is a book that accomplishes ten times more for education and Enlightenment than a hundred censors, be they the most excellent and best intentioned, which I absolutely refuse to believe of them all. And if you could write me a second volume, it would arrive just in time. Quite aside from the fact that it would be the best way to introduce young readers to my new typeset.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: Finally, Deputy Headmaster! I have always wanted to tell you that I study your book with my small circle — all children from respectable families. And would you like to know what I most esteem? The incomparable passage in which you acquaint the children with the gods. I had them learn it by heart:

The real world exists in the ideas of human beings, but the world of ideas differs in that, beyond the ideas of human beings, it is simply not there. All stories of witches and ghosts are fairy tales; all of mythology and the doctrine of the gods likewise pertain to this world of ideas, which, since the most ancient times, has populated the world with countless new beings, none of which exist anywhere beyond the boundaries of human imagination. Including: Apollo, Mars, Minerva, Jupiter, and all the gods and goddesses of Olympus.³⁶

PASTOR GRUNELIUS (clearing his throat): I believe it’s time for me to go, my good gentlemen. At seven we have a meeting in the consistory. My respects to all.

Murmurs of leave-taking.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: He won’t have taken that the wrong way, will he, old Grunelius?

UNGER: Whatever are you thinking? He’s the most good-natured man in the world.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Beautiful and true, what you say here to our little ones about Olympus. Yet there is also another way to free children from superstition and whim, and I know of someone who steers clear of the old gods and heroes even more unabashedly. It is Doctor Kortum from Mülheim.³⁷ And if it were up to me, and I had a Prize for Enlightenment to award, he and no other would have to have it.

FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: But you cannot possibly be serious. You would present this Jobsiade, which is nothing but one long run of boorishness, as a model to the Enlighteners?

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Because it has what all of you lack, namely, humor. And in the long run, knowledge without humor leads back to obscurantism, dogmatism, and despotism. That’s what is so good about this Kortum, that he also has no respect for the Enlightenment. He groups everything together, gods, heroes and professors, pastors and courtly ladies, lords of the manor and candidates. Just like his friend Death. You know, the one who closes the first book of the Jobsiade:

Inasmuch as friend Death makes not the smallest

Distinction between the lowest and tallest,

But cuts down all both low and high,

With the strictest impartiality.

And, as he ever slyly watches,

The cavalier and the clown he catches,

The beggar and also the great Sultán,

The tailor and also the Tartar Khan.

And with his scythe his rounds he goeth

And honorables and lackeys moweth,

The herdsmaid and the titled dame,

Without distinction of place or name.

He listens to no compromises;

Both crowns and bag-wigs he despises,

Doctor’s hats and the stag’s horns

And whatever else men’s heads adorns.

A thousand things he has command of,

By which he us can make an end of,

And now the dagger, and now the pest,

And now a grape-stone, gives us rest.

Now a law-suit and now a splinter,

Now a bad woman and now a bad winter

Now a noose or other snare,

Of which may Heaven help us beware.

Misshapen Esop his fables tellin’,

And the Grecian beauty, world-famed Helen,

Unhappy Job and King Solomon,

Gave up the ghost and now are gone.

Not one of them found time for fleein’,

Not Nostradamus nor Superintendent Ziehen:

With doctor Faust, dreamer Swedenborg, too,

He made a clean sweep and went through.

Orpheus, the great musician,

Molière, the comedian of the Parisian nation,

And the famous painter Apellés,

Friend Death has swept away all these.

Summa Summarum, the long and the short is,

That in none of the chronicles do we find notice,

That friend Death has ever any one passed

Without coming back for him at last.

And what he has not eaten already

He will not fail to remember when he’s ready:

Alas! dear reader, also thee,

And what is worst of all, even me!³⁸

Well, what do you think of that?

MORITZ: Maybe it’s a bit quirky, but I am strangely moved to see how at the end the man turns back to himself, is at home with himself. That has always been my greatest desire. I know, gentlemen, you cannot understand. But I would like to recount a little memory from my childhood that sometimes haunts me when skies are gray. I was ten years old at the time. When the skies would darken and the horizon would narrow, I felt a kind of dread, as though the whole world was also enclosed under just such a roof as that of the room in which I lived. And when I followed my thoughts out beyond this vaulted ceiling, this world itself seemed too small, and it struck me that it too must be enclosed in another, and so on.³⁹

UNGER: I believe I understand very well what you wish to say. What good is even the most beautiful Enlightenment, if it makes human beings feel uneasy and disquieted, rather than at home with themselves?

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Kortum has also dealt successfully with this. He wrote treatises for the farmers of Hanover on beekeeping or the virtues of the new Lutheran hymnal, or how to treat infectious diseases.⁴⁰

MORITZ: That is the right approach, and so it should be. For in the entire compass of a kingdom one can only ever really live in just one city and in that whole city, in one house, and in that entire house, just one room. But man is as deceived by place as by time. He believes he is living years, and only lives moments. He thinks he inhabits a country, a city, but he only inhabits that one spot where he stands or lies, the room where he works, the chamber where he sleeps.⁴¹

The sound of a gong.

THE ANNOUNCER: “Where he sleeps.”—I, the Announcer, will take up this sentence. And with it send this small society you have just been hearing to their rest. And now, I have a few things to say about Germany, where I collected these voices for you. For whatever Deputy Headmaster Moritz might say about the Gray Cloister School, these voices are not just from Berlin but also from Germany.⁴² But they didn’t know it, because Germany slept, and the lower the class of the inhabitant, the deeper the sleep. Germans still existed almost completely under the sign of manufacture, cottage industry, and agriculture: everything or almost everything they needed was produced locally. This gave rise to narrowness of horizon, psychological insularity, and intellectual inertia, but also to a warm intimacy and noble self-sufficiency. Three-quarters of the population lived in the country; most cities were not much more than large villages, rural cities, and big cities like Paris, London, or Rome didn’t yet exist. Further, there were no machines or only machines similar to tools, and that meant no exact, abundant, and inexpensive production of commodities and no light, fast, and extensive transportation. The unreliability of transport, international commerce, and political circumstances were offset by the great reliability of small proprietors and local commerce, based on the uniformity of the area of distribution, the lack of competition, and the uniformity of the means of production and consumer base. The human being of that time was asked to spend his whole life wool-gathering and fantasizing, just as today he is prevented from doing so. From these conditions arose the Classical Era of German literature. While others sweated and hustled — England panting after bags of gold and sacks of pepper, America on the verge of transforming itself into the desolate mega-trust it is today, France laying the political groundwork for the triumph of the bourgeoisie on the European continent — Germany slept an honest, healthy, refreshing sleep.

The following Voice of Romanticism should be spoken by the actor playing the Second Man of Letters.

THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM: But what dreams it had in this sleep!

THE ANNOUNCER (after a pause): This voice is familiar to me.

THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM: I should think so. While in the dense smoke of a Berlin coffeehouse the voice of Romanticism could reach you but dimly, now it should ring out more clearly.

THE ANNOUNCER: I would be glad to know your name.

THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM: I imagine that you would be comfortable with Bernhardi, Hülsen, or Steffens, not to speak of Novalis and Ludwig Tieck.⁴³ But the voice of Romanticism has no name.

THE ANNOUNCER: The voice of Romanticism…

THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM:… comes from the enchanted horn on which Clemens Brentano⁴⁴ blew, and from the impertinence with which Friedrich Schlegel offered his deepest discoveries, from the labyrinth of thoughts Novalis traced in his notebooks, from the laughter of Tieck’s comedies that terrified the petit-bourgeois, and from the darkness in which Bonaventura⁴⁵ held his night watches. Therefore the voice of Romanticism has no name.

THE ANNOUNCER: It seems to me it just doesn’t want to spit out its name, this voice. It’s afraid to expose itself, and with good reason. I’d like to propose the name Jean Paul.⁴⁶ This darling of German readers around 1800, the most overblown, lachrymose, undisciplined, and rudderless writer who has ever written a novel.

THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM: That a poet should write pedagogy need not bespeak aimlessness.

THE ANNOUNCER: You are speaking of Levana.⁴⁷ Listen to how Jean Paul describes a young boy. You will have to admit, he doesn’t have the stuff of an educator. He’s an incorrigible dreamer, nothing more.

The following text is read by the Announcer in an especially flat and uncomprehending manner up until the sound of the gong. After the gong the Second Man of Letters takes up the reading, expressively, though in afine monotone.

He burst into a mingling flood of tears at once of joy and sorrow, and the past and the future simultaneously stirred his heart. The sun with ever-increasing swiftness dropped down the heavens, and the more swiftly did he climb the mountain, the quicker to follow its flight with his eye. And there he looked down into the village of Maienthal, that glimmered among moist shadows … Then the earth, tuned by the Creator, rang with a thousand strings…⁴⁸

The sound of a gong.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: “… the same harmony stirred the stream, divided into gold and gloom, the humming flower-cup, the peopled air, and the waving bush; the reddened east and reddened west stood stretched out like the two rose-taffeta wings of a harpsichord, and a tremulous sea gushed from the open heavens and the open earth …”⁴⁹

HEINZMANN: This can’t be the place, Mr. Unger. They are reading aloud in there.

UNGER: I know my way around Leipzig, my dear Heinzmann. That’s the basement of Breitkopf’s. You can see the signboard with the titles of new arrivals.

HEINZMANN: You will not run across Breitkopf so early in the morning.

UNGER: Could be that he is himself already out after commissions. Then we’ll wait for him. Given the voices within, we are not the first.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS (reading): “At his feet, and on this mountain …”⁵⁰

UNGER: If we’re disturbing you, I beg your pardon.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Mr. Unger, it is no surprise to see you in Leipzig, but it is a great pleasure.

UNGER: May I introduce a business friend, Mr. Heinzmann from Bern. Distinguished Scholar.

We hear the murmured exchange of greetings, compliments, etc.

UNGER: Are we disturbing you, my most esteemed sir? What were you reading?

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: What I prefer to read in the morning, an evensong.

HEINZMANN: That doesn’t look at all like a prayer book.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: It is also more than a prayer book.

HEINZMANN: More?

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Hesperus, by Jean Paul. But hear for yourself:

At his feet, and on this mountain, lay, stretched like a crowned giant, like a transplanted spring-island, an English park. This mountain toward the south and the one toward the north met and formed a cradle in which the peaceful village rested, and over which the morning and the evening sun spun and spread out their golden veil. In five gleaming ponds trembled five duskier evening heavens, and every wave that leaped up painted itself to a ruby in the hovering fire of the sun. Two brooks waded, in shifting distances, darkened by roses and willows, over the long meadow-land, and a watering fire-wheel, like a pulsating heart, forced the sunset-reddened water through all the green flower-vases. Everywhere nodded flowers, those butterflies of the vegetable world, on every moss-grown brook-stone, from every tender stalk, round every window, a flower rocked on its fragrance, and scarlet lupines traced their blue and red veins over a garden without a hedge. A transparent wood of gold-green birches climbed, in the high grass over there, the sides of the northern mountain, on whose summit five tall fir-trees, as ruins of a prostrated forest, held their eyrie.⁵¹

A brief pause, following which the Second Man of Letters continues:

I am pleased to see that you have made yourselves comfortable.

UNGER: Yes, you have found a good corner. I think we can wait for Breitkopf here in peace. If it’s alright with you, Mr. Heinzmann.

HEINZMANN: Of course. What does not sit well with me is Jean Paul.

IFFLAND: You won’t want to say anything against Jean Paul … Do you know the epigraph of Hesperus? “The Earth is the cul-de-sac in the great city of God, — the camera obscura of inverted and contracted images from a fairer world, — the coast of God’s creation, — a vaporous halo around a better sun, — the numerator to a still invisible denominator, in fact, it is almost nothing at all.”⁵²

HEINZMANN: You know that by heart?

IFFLAND: I’m not ashamed of it.

HEINZMANN: “In fact, it is almost nothing at all.” You see, it is these turns of phrase that spoil Jean Paul for me. We already have enough whimsical minds with us in Switzerland. I don’t need to tell you about Lavater.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: To utter the name of a poet and a charlatan in the same breath.

HEINZMANN: I already told you, I speak as a Swiss. We are a sober people, but we are also an old democracy. We feel how the countless small courts have duped you Germans and deprived you of your independence. Precisely in the case of Jean Paul we feel that. A stunted subaltern intellect has sucked the marrow from his characters’ bones. Even in contrast to the lowliest serf, they appear dishonorable.

IFFLAND: No, there I cannot agree with you. For I know better than anyone how little cause the author has to think differently than you concerning the bourgeoisie and the nobility. I have known his misery and I am proud that it was my friend Moritz in Berlin — my friend and classmate, I should have said — who found the publisher for Jean Paul’s first book.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Classmate, you say?

IFFLAND: Yes, and you will never have guessed that Moritz’s consuming desire when we were together in school was to become a great actor. Indeed, there was a time when we were rivals.

We hear a commotion. Voices, etc.

IFFLAND: But what is all this uproar?

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Young people from the Museum Club, who, as I heard, are holding a rehearsal.

HEINZMANN: I am sorry to be tiresome, but if we don’t use the book fair, Mr. Businessman, to speak out concerning our profession, then I don’t know when we ever will. So let me tell you that we have an excess of novels, of belles lettres, of political hot air. What are we in need of? Natural science and history, history and geography, travel diaries. But the works of natural science should not be metaphysical. Nor should they be pedantic. Enough books on minerals and insects. What we need are popular writings. They should awaken thoughts of the Creator, the order and omnipotence of the natural world, they should show us the great, the beautiful, and the sublime, and the more closely they unite that with everyday life, with practical economics and work, with mathematics and mechanics, the better.

UNGER: Your ideal, if I understand correctly, is Defoe, who besides his Robinson and 200 other books created the first fire and hail insurance companies, and the first savings bank.

HEINZMANN: And we are proud to have such a Robinson-writer in Switzerland. That is Pastor Wyss with his Swiss Family Robinson.⁵³ But I didn’t mean to speak of that. For I openly concede to you, my gentlemen, I did have an ulterior motive. I have my ideal of an author in my coat pocket and I would like very much to share it with you. It is the book of a poor and uneducated man. But just as the travel account of an itinerant journeyman is ten times more valuable than a scholarly treatise, so too something truly special emerges today when a poor, uneducated man sits down to narrate his life.

IFFLAND: You are making us exceedingly curious.

HEINZMANN: That was my intention. And now, I ask that precisely you, Mr. Iffland, read this page for us. Such prose you will have seldom have recited. With the exception of your own, I’m quite sure.

UNGER: But aren’t you going to tell us who wrote it? The folder doesn’t betray anything.

HEINZMANN: The author’s name is Bräker. The book came out with Füßli and is entitled Life Story and Real Adventures of the Poor Man of Toggenburg.

IFFLAND: Not that the shepherd’s life is all fun and games. Not a bit of it! There are hardships enough. The worst for me by far was leaving my warm little bed so early in the morning, and tramping poorly clad and barefoot out into the cold fields, especially if there’s been a really harsh hoar-frost or a thick mist hung over the mountains. When the latter lay so high that I couldn’t surmount it by climbing with my flock up the mountainside, and couldn’t reach the sunshine, then I cursed the mist and told it to go to Jericho and hurried as fast as my legs could carry me out of the gloom into a dell. If, however, I did win the field and gained sunlight and the bright sky above me, with that great sea of mist under my feet and here and there a mountain jutting up like an island — why, what joy, the glory and the gladness of it! Then I wouldn’t leave the mountains for the whole day, and my eye could never see its fill of the sun’s rays playing on this ocean, and waves of vapor in the strangest of shapes swaying about over it, until towards evening they threatened to rise over me again. Then I wished I had Jacob’s ladder, but it was no use, I had to go. I’d grow sad and everything would blend into my sadness. Lonely birds flapped around overhead, dull and sullen, and great autumn flies buzzed so dismally about my ears that I couldn’t help weeping. Then I’d freeze even worse almost than early on and feel pains in my feet, even though they were as hard as shoe-leather.

Most of the time I also had injuries or bruises somewhere or other on me; and when one wound was healed then I went and got myself another, either by landing on a sharp stone and losing a nail or a piece of flesh from a toe, or else giving my hand a gash with one of my tools. There was seldom any question of getting them bound up; and yet they were usually soon better. Added to this, the goats, as I’ve said, caused me a great deal of trouble at the outset because I didn’t know how to handle them properly.⁵⁴

An uproar of voices drowns out the final words, until the following becomes audible again:

IFFLAND: My god, has Hell been unleashed in there? To resume: “If you want to run a decent home, be sure to leave pigeons and goats alone,” writes our poor man. “So you see: the shepherd’s life also has its share of troubles. But the bad times are richly compensated by the good, when I’m sure there’s never a king so happy. In Kohl Wood stood a beech …”⁵⁵

We hear again, this time more intense, an uproar of voices.

IFFLAND: This is completely intolerable. Just a moment, we will soon have some peace. That would be even better.

The creaking of a door is heard, followed by two unknown voices.

PASTOR: It pleases me to find you in such a good mood. Once again, I have one or two favors to ask of you.

HEAD FORESTER: Of me? How so — why — how so?

PASTOR: You should be well used the fact that I’m always begging on someone’s behalf when I stop by.⁵⁶

UNGER: But my dear Iffland, that’s … those are…

IFFLAND: Yes, I can’t believe my ears.

UNGER: The Hunters.

IFFLAND: Act Two, Scene Seven. And how hard these good people are trying.

UNGER: But still they are amateurs? A small private society, perhaps?

IFFLAND: Shhh. Listen.

PASTOR: The poor old man has a sick wife, many children. It’s a horrible fate. — In his youth — a hussar, beaten almost to a cripple and no pension — discarded in his old age — he is left to wander in despair.

HEAD FORESTER: Poor fellow.

PASTOR: If we could just get him through the winter — I have taken up a small collection.

HEAD FORESTER: May God make it worth your while. I would like to make my contribution. He who gives right away, gives twice as much.

PASTOR: But no — it’s too much.

HEAD FORESTER: It’s a hard winter.

PASTOR: That is really a lot. Please, less money, but a little wood.

HEAD FORESTER: The wood belongs to the Prince — the money is mine.⁵⁷—Tonight I will sleep soundly, and, God willing, just as soundly when I must depart for good.

PASTOR: Well, God willing, we are still far from that. But yes. Why not bear it in mind. Truly, one must have lived well, and what great joy not to be disturbed by that thought. All the same, life has no less worth.

HEAD FORESTER: It always pains me to the soul when people try so hard to paint the world and life in black and white.

PASTOR: Human life contains much happiness. But we should be taught early on not to think it of it as glorious and uninterrupted. Within the circle of a well-maintained household there are a thousand joys, and tribulations well borne are also a happiness. The dignity of the father is the first and most noble I know. A philanthropist, a good citizen, a loving spouse and father, in the midst of…⁵⁸

The voice suddenly breaks off.

HEINZMANN: You could see it didn’t hold his attention. He went inside.

UNGER: The good man, now he will teach these well-behaved Leipzig children to perform The Hunters, and in the ceremonial performance they will be able to say: directed by Iffland.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: I know, Mr. Unger, that you are on good terms with Iffland. But, just between us, may I ask you, can that be endured? Can one still listen to these tirades concerning humanity and this love of man? Are you not sometimes overcome with disgust at a virtue that is nothing but instinctive goodness of heart without content? Sometimes I catch myself feeling the way I do when I read in the newspaper yet again of a murderer who was good to his dog or his horse.

HEINZMANN: You are right about one thing. The ostentation of these pieces about do-gooding pains any finer sensibility.

UNGER: You could well say that of Kotzebue. But it’s unkind of you to lump my friend Iffland together with that scribbler.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Let’s put Iffland to one side. And I’d even venture to say I am indebted to Kotzebue. Have you seen his unpalatable The Indians in England?⁵⁹ If one really wants to understand what Kant meant by the categorical imperative, with this iron “should” that annihilates every contingency, not just as a moral law, but as the inner stay of every poetic character, then one need only take a look at the mollusks with which our most celebrated playwright has populated the German stage.

UNGER: At any rate, we might sometimes wonder who we are actually working for in Germany, if it is still possible today to publish a rag such as the one Clas peddles in Berlin.

HEINZMANN: I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Unger.

UNGER: Sells for twelve groschen. You haven’t seen it? A literary magazine in which he brings Goethe and Schiller together with Kotzebue and Iffland.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Outrageous. You are right about that. But there is another side to the story that is perhaps even sadder It shows that the likes of Kotzebue have come to think of Goethe and Schiller as competitors at best, but never as real, dangerous, enemies to the death.

UNGER: You are forgetting the Xenien.⁶⁰

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: The Xenien? The Xenien? You know as well as I how they foundered. And that’s putting it mildly.

HEINZMANN: I cannot share your outrage. In the end, you must take the public as it is. You know that in the last twenty years, I haven’t missed a single book fair. You speak with all kinds of people there, and you hear things they don’t shout from the rooftops. Do you know how many subscriptions Göschen got for the Goethe edition he published between 1787 and 1790? I have the figure from the man himself: six hundred. As for the individual volumes, the sales were even worse. For Iphigenie and Egmont, 300—not to speak of Clavigo and Götz.

UNGER: My dear man, you can’t blame that on the public. You know how much we suffer from pirate editions. For every legal exemplar there are ten, twenty illegal copies.

HEINZMANN: Well then, let me tell you something else. On my return journey this time, I spent an evening in Kreuznach. The previous year, my friend Kehr made a name for himself by establishing a lending library: Schiller, Goethe, Lessing, Klopstock, Wieland, Gellert, Wagner, Kleist, Hölty, Matthisson, and more.⁶¹ Nobody wanted to read any of it. In the neat phrase of Bürger, there’s a difference between an audience and a crowd.⁶²

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: We will not be able to breathe freely until we have ended the stubborn, pretentious reign of Nicolai, Garve, Biester, Gedike, and whatever else this Berlin riffraff calls itself, and put Schlegel and Novalis in their rightful place.⁶³

HEINZMANN: You love a good joke.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: There is no victory without a fight. If Schiller and Goethe don’t want to fight, then we must place our hopes on a younger generation.

HEINZMANN: I can give you a taste of the tricks of these young people. Friedrich Schlegel considered increasing the sales of the Athenaeum by offering free spice cakes with each issue.

UNGER: A very modern idea. But in this, Schiller is even more Machiavellian. When Die Horen was failing due to poor sales, he wanted Cotta to insert an article threatening the state in the final volume, so that they would go down in glory.⁶⁴

HEINZMANN: I cannot say, my good gentlemen, that any of this sits well with us. At any rate, I can still feel my bones from the trip in the postal coach. And we cannot assume that Breitkopf will be arriving before noon. How about a short stroll to the Café Richter?

We hear a drum, a horn (or the like) accompanied by the voice of a

CRIER: All ye honorable guests of the book fair, especially our esteemed book venders, publishers, collectors of rare books, also scholars, pastors, and all other persons of high standing — we announce that the great sale of rare books organized by Mr. Haude and Mr. Spener in Berlin, collections of the King and of the Academy of Scholarly Booksellers, has begun at the Silver Bears.

UNGER: As for me, I’ll be having my breakfast at the Silver Bears.

SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: That would be the first book sale you missed, Mr. Businessman … Don’t inconvenience yourself, Mr. Heinzmann. We will meet again.

THE AUCTIONEER: Political and moral discourses on Marci Annaei Pharsalia, by Mr. Veit Ludwigs von Seckendorf, Privy Advisor and Chancellor to the Elector of Brandenburg and Councilor of the University of Halle in Saxony, presented in a special new edition in German with facing translations in Latin on each page and accompanying annotations of obscure and difficult figures of speech as well as an indispensable index, Leipzig 1695…

VOICE OF A BIDDER: Eighteen groschen.

UNGER: One would no longer dare print such a title. Here, neither publisher nor author wishes to puff himself up in the title.

The sound of the gavel.

THE AUCTIONEER: Number 211. “Mirror for the Prince, Anti-Machiavelli, or the Art of Governance,” Strasbourg 1624.

VOICE OF ANOTHER BIDDER: One thaler.

UNGER: The Latin edition of 1577 would be considered rare, but the German far more and only a few are aware of it … Two thalers.

VOICE OF THE OTHER BIDDER: Two thalers and ten groschen.

UNGER: Three thalers.

THE AUCTIONEER: Going once, going twice … Sold.

The pounding of the gavel.

THE AUCTIONEER: Sold to?

UNGER: Johann Friedrich Unger, Bookseller, Berlin.

THE AUCTIONEER: Number 212. The Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschen, 1787–1790. Unfortunately, we only have the seventh volume of this handsome edition.

UNGER: The seventh volume, distinguished scholar, but that’s … The sound of a gong.

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Faust!⁶⁵ The world legend of the German bourgeoisie, beginning on the worldly stage, ending in the proscenium of Heaven, beginning with the infernal devil of black magic, rising to the earthly devil of statecraft, beginning with appearances, ending in voices. A small puppet show opens at the annual fair to address the sufferings and humiliation of the German bourgeoisie, but also its history, and at the heart of this history the image of antiquity, Helen, and the Palace at Sparta.

THE ANNOUNCER: Silence! How dare you steal my lines?

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: I am the nineteenth century, and have already stolen the lines of many others. I anticipated the Classical authors before they had even finished writing, and was greeted by the greatest among them before he had even glimpsed a quarter of me, with such words that I have the right to be heard here.

THE ANNOUNCER: How is it, in your opinion, that he greeted you? I believe we are speaking here of Goethe?

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: I see that you are still in school. Goethe said of me:

Everything nowadays is ultra, everything perpetually transcendent in thought as in action. No one knows himself any longer, no one understands the element in which he moves and works, no one the subject which he is treating. Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires, and what everyone strives to attain. Railways, quick mails, steamships, and every possible kind of facility in the way of communication are what the educated world has in view, that it may overeducate itself, and thereby continue in a state of mediocrity. Properly speaking, this is the century for men with heads on their shoulders, for practical men of quick perceptions, who, because they possess a certain adroitness, feel their superiority to the multitude, even though they themselves may not be gifted to the highest degree. Let us, as far as possible, keep that in mind with which we came hither; we, and perhaps a few others, shall be the last of an epoch that will not so soon return again.⁶⁶

THE ANNOUNCER: You have no cause to be proud of such a greeting.

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: I lived up to it. I expanded a middling culture generally, as Goethe prophesied.

THE ANNOUNCER: A middling culture? As long as your nineteenth century lasted, the Germans didn’t open their greatest volume of poetry. And only recently did Cotta sell the last copy of the Westöstlicher Divan from the publishing house.⁶⁷

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: It was too expensive. I brought editions to the market that reached the people.

THE ANNOUNCER: People who didn’t have time to read them.

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: At the same time, my century gave the mind the means to expand itself more quickly than by reading.

THE ANNOUNCER: In other words, it founded the tyranny of the minute, the lash of which we still feel today.

We hear quite clearly the ticking of the second hand of a clock.

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Goethe himself embraced this cadence, and advised his grandson to adapt himself to it.

The following poem is read briskly to the cadence of the second hand:

Sixty are in every hour.

Fourteen-forty in a day.

Each one, son, provides some power

To achieve or flit away.⁶⁸

“Was die Deutschen lasen, wahrend ihre Klassiker schrieben,” GS, 4.2, 641–70. Translated by Diana K. Reese.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, February 16, 1932, from 9:10–10:10 pm. Announced as part of the series “1789–1815” in the Funkstunde (Schiller-Lerg, Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 233).

In September 1932, the radio magazine Rufer und Hörer published an excerpted version of the text, which differs from the above version in that the excerpt contains simplifications as well as the “germanization” of foreign words (see GS, 4.2, 1054–71). Along with the excerpt, the magazine also published Benjamin’s programmatic statement, “Two Kinds of Popularity,” which can be found in this volume (369).

¹ Benjamin refers here to the Leipzig publishing house of Breitkopf, renowned for music and scholarly works on music, founded in 1719 by Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf. The Leipzig Book Fair rose to prominence in the eighteenth century to become Germany’s leading venue for the national and international book trade.

² Johann Friedrich Unger (1753–1804), German printer, bookseller, and publisher of authors including Goethe, Schiller, and the Schlegel brothers.

³ Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793), German author of works including Versuch einer kleinen praktischen Kinderlogik [Logic for Children] (1786) and Anton Reiser (1785–1790); and August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814), German actor and dramatist.

⁴ Johann Georg Heinzmann (1757–1802), conservative Swiss bookseller, publisher, and author of Appell an meine Nation: Über die Pest der deutschen Literatur [Appeal to my Nation: Concerning the Pestilence of German Literature] (Bern, 1795).

⁵ Friedrich Schiller, Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (1791–1793); Goethe, Leben des Benvenuto Cellini, (1803). The Göschen publishing house was a leading Leipzig printer and publisher, led by Georg Joachim Göschen, known for having published the first collection of Goethe’s writings.

⁶ See Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräch mit Eckermann in den letzen Jahren seines Lebens, ed. H. H. Houben (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1910), 683.

⁷ Rudolf Zacharias Becker, Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein für Bauersleute (Gotha, 1788). Becker (1751–1822) was a proponent of the “popular Enlightenment” (Volksaufklärung), which advocated social stability through the extension of liberal Enlightenment ideals and benefits to the peasants and lower classes. His advice book was one of the great commercial successes of his time.

⁸ Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), Swiss educational reformer.

⁹ Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow, author of Der Kinderfreund (Frankfurt, 1776).

¹⁰ Possibly Garlieb Helwig Merkel (1769–1850), Baltic German writer; Markus Herz (1747–1803), German Jewish physician, philosopher, student and correspondent of Kant, friend of Mendelssohn; and Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811), polemical German writer, critic, bookseller, and publisher.

¹¹ From the Christmas hymn for children by Martin Luther, “Vom Himmel hoch,” translated by Catherine Winkworth, in Lyra Germanica: Hymns for the Sundays and Chief Festivals of the Christian Year (London: Longman, 1856), 12–14.

¹² The “Deputy Headmaster” is Karl Philipp Moritz, who worked for a time as an educator and schoolmaster in Berlin.

¹³ Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818) was a prominent pedagogue and one the editors of the Braunschweig Journal, which focused on issues related to education, individual and societal enlightenment, and reform. He was author of Robinson der Jüngere [Robinson the Younger, or the New Crusoe] (1779).

¹⁴ Moritz describes the experience of participating in a poor schoolboys’ choir in Anton Reiser.

¹⁵ Abraham a Santa Clara (1644–1709), ecclesiastical name of Johann Ulrich Megerle, Augustinian friar known for the popularity of his sermons.

¹⁶ François Ambroise Didot, along with his two sons Pierre and Firmin, led a French typography and printing company after whom the font is named. In addition to being a publisher, Unger was, along with the Didots, a typographer interested in the production of new, hybrid, and more modern typefaces. After publishing Probe einer neuen Art deutscher Lettern, erfunden und in Stahl geschritten von JF Unger (1793), on reforming the typeface Fraktur, he created the new typeface Unger-Fraktur.

¹⁷ The Berlinische Monatsscrift [Berlin Monthly], a journal known for featuring major debates of the German Enlightenment. It was published from 1783 to 1796 by Haude and Spener. Some editions of its first volume (January — June, 1783) list Unger as the publisher.

¹⁸ Das jüdische Großmütterchen oder Der schreckbare Geist der Frau im schwarzen Gewande (Prague: Widtmann, 1798).

¹⁹ Franz Antonin Pabst, Der Nachtwächter oder Das Nachtlager der Geister bei Saatz in Böheim: Eine fürchterliche Sage aus den Zeiten des grauen Zauberalters (Prague, 1798).

²⁰ Adelmar von Perlstein, der Ritter vom geldenen Schlüssel oder Die zwölf schlafenden Jungfrauen, die Beschützerinnen des bezaubernden Jünglings: Ritter- und Geistergeschichte aus dem Mittelalter als Seitenstück zu Ritter Edulf von Quarzfeld. For an illustration from this title, see Benjamin, “Dienstmädchenromane des Vorigen Jahrhunderts” and Figure 17, GS, 4.2, 620–2 (“Chambermaids’ Romances of the Past Century,” SW, 2, 226).

²¹ Christian August Vulpius, Rinaldo Rinaldini der Räuberhauptmann (Leipzig: Wienbrack, 1798). Vulpius’s sister Christiane was married to Goethe.

²² Christian Heinrich Spieß (1755–1799), popular writer primarily known for his romances, ghost stories, and robber fiction.

²³ See Christian Heinrich Spieß, Meine Reisen durch die Höhlen des Unglücks und Gemächer des Jammers (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1797).

²⁴ See Christian Heinrich Spieß, Biographien der Wahnsinnigen (Leipzig: Voss, 1795–1796), 4 vols.

²⁵ See Spieß, Preface to Biographien der Wahnsinnigen, vol. 1, 3–4.

²⁶ Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), Swiss poet, mystic, and prominent Counter-Enlightenment Protestant figure known for his interest in physiognomy and the occult.

²⁷ Johann Kaspar Lavater, Sittenbüchlein für Kinder des Landvolks (Frankfurt: Kessler, 1789).

²⁸ See Moritz, Versuch einer Kleinen praktischen Kinderlogik (Berlin: Mylius, 1786).

²⁹ The Allgemeine Zeitung, a famous newspaper established by the eminent publishing house J. G. Cotta.

³⁰ August Friedrich von Kotzebue (1761–1819), German novelist and prolific playwright. His plays were once immensely popular.

³¹ Franz Volkmar Reinhard (1753–1812), preacher at Dresden, influential German Protestant theologian.

³² On July 9, 1788, King Frederick William II, under the influence of the recently appointed Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, Johann Wöllner, enacted the “Edict Concerning Religion.” It was followed on December 19, 1788 by the “Edict of Censorship,” which forbid the publication of books that were deemed to question religious orthodoxy.

³³ Kant published the first part of what would become Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason [Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft] in the Berlinische Monatsschift in April, 1792. Forbidden by the censors to publish its continuation, the magazine shifted publication to Jena.

³⁴ See Alexander von Humboldt: eine wissenschaftliche Biographie, ed. Karl Bruhns, vol. 1 (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1872), 74; Life of Alexander Humboldt, trans. Jane and Caroline Lassell (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1873), 63.

³⁵ See King Frederick William II to Cabinet Minister Count von Finckenstein on February 4, 1792, in Friedrich Kapp, ed., Aktenstücke zur Geschichte der preußischen Censur- und Preßverhältnisse unter dem Minister Wöllner (Part 1: 1788–1793). In Archiv für Geschinchte des Buchhandels, vol. 4 (Leipzig: BÖrsenvereins des Deutschen Buchhändler, 1879), 153.

³⁶ Moritz, Kinderlogik, 82.

³⁷ Karl Arnold Kortum (1745–1825), German physician and writer, author of the satirical epic Die Jobsiade (1784).

³⁸ Translation from Kortum, The Jobsiade: A Grotesco-Comico-Heroic Poem, trans. Charles T. Brooks (Philadelphia: Frederick Leypoldt, 1863), 176–80. Benjamin has skipped several verses from the poem.

³⁹ See Moritz, Anton Reiser, ed. Ludwig Geiger (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1886), 31–2.

⁴⁰ See Die Schriften von Karl Arnold Kortum: Bienenkalender (Wesel, 1776); Grundsätze der Bienenzucht, besonders für die Westphälischen Gegenden (Wesel, 1776); Über das alte und neue Gesangbuch und die Einführung des letzteren in die lutherischen Gemeinden der Grafschaft Mark (Mark, 1785); Anweisung, wie man sich vor allen ansteckenden Krankheiten verwahren könne (Wesel, 1779).

⁴¹ See Moritz, Kinderlogik, 154.

⁴² The Gray Cloister School was the oldest gymnasium in Berlin. Moritz became its Deputy Headmaster in 1780.

⁴³ These names, some now better known than others, are all figures associated with early German Romanticism: August Ferdinand Bernhardi (1769–1820), German linguist and writer; August Ludwig Hülsen (1765–1809), philosopher and educator who, like Bernhardi, was a contributor to the Athenaeum (1798–1800), the literary journal founded by the Schlegel brothers; Henrik Steffens (1743–1845), a Norwegian-born Danish philosopher associated with Naturphilosophie and with German Romantic circles in Berlin and Jena; Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772–1801), a leading figure of German Romanticism; Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), a prolific German novelist, translator, and critic.

⁴⁴ Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), coeditor with Achim von Arnim of Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Boy’s Magic Horn] (1805–1808), a collection of German folk songs and poems.

⁴⁵ Bonaventura, pseudonym of Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann (1777–1831), German writer, thought to be the author of Romantic prose text Nachtwachen [Night Watches], anonymously published in 1804.

⁴⁶ Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), a writer whose works are often considered unclassifiable. See Benjamin’s description of Jean Paul’s imagination as one of “extreme exuberance,” in “Notes for a Study of the Beauty of Colored Illustrations in Children’s Books: Reflections on Lyser,” SW, 1, 265.

⁴⁷ Jean Paul’s Levana, oder Erziehungsiehre [Levana, or Pedagogy] (Braunschweig: F. Bieweg, 1807), a classic work on education.

⁴⁸ From Richter’s Hesperus, oder 45 Hundposttage: Eine Lebensbeschreibung (1795). Translation from Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog Post Days: A Biography, Vol. 1, trans. Charles T. Brooks (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 240.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Ibid., 240–1.

⁵² Ibid., epigraph.

⁵³ Johann David Wyss published Der Schweizerische Robinson in 1812.

⁵⁴ Ulrich Bräker, Lebensgeschichte und Natürliche Abenteuer des Armen Mannes im Tockenburg (Zurich: Fußli, 1789). Translation from Ulrich Bräker, The Life and Real Adventures of the Poor Man of Toggenburg, trans. Derek Bowman (Edinburgh: University Press of Edinburgh, 1970), 69.

⁵⁵ Bräker, The Life and Real Adventures of the Poor Man of Toggenburg, 70.

⁵⁶ See Iffland’s play, “Die Jäger” [The Hunters] (1785), II, 7, in Iffland, Dramatische Werke, vol. 3 (Leipzig, 1798), 74–5.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 75–6.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 159.

⁵⁹ Kotzebue, Die Indianer in England (Leipzig, 1790).

⁶⁰ Die Xenien (1795/1796), a collaboration between Goethe and Schiller, written in response to their critics, and motivated by the negative criticism surrounding Schiller’s journal, Die Horen.

⁶¹ In 1797, Ludwig Christian Kehr (1775–1848) opened a commercial lending library in Kreuznach. He later started a publishing house and bookshop, and published translations and pirate editions, arguing that the reprinting and wider distribution of books was a means to greater social justice.

⁶² Benjamin invokes a distinction attributed to the German poet Gottfried August Bürger (1747–1794). The phrase opposes Publikum, German for audience, with the made-up word Pöblikum, a pun on crowd or rabble.

⁶³ Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811), editor of the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek; Christian Garve (1742–1798), German translator and writer; Johann Erich Biester (1749–1816) and Friedrich Gedike (1754–1803), co-founders of the Berlinische Monatsschrift. While Nicolai and Garve are sometimes associated with a popularization of Enlightenment thought, Biester and Gedike are less easily placed in an opposition between the popular and the philosophical. Benjamin invokes a once common opposition between the Enlightenment, broadly represented by these figures, and Romanticism, associated with the poets Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Novalis (1772–1801).

⁶⁴ Schiller’s journal, Die Horen, which appeared from 1795 to 1798, was published by the Cotta publishing house.

⁶⁵ Goethe’s Faust: Ein Fragment appeared in the seventh volume of the Göschen edition (Leipzig, 1790).

⁶⁶ See Goethe’s letter to Zelter, dated June 6, 1825, abridged by Benjamin. The translation is from Goethe and Carl Friedrich Zelter, Goethes Letters to Zelter: With Extracts of those of Zelter to Goethe: trans. A.D. Coleridge (London: George Bell & Sons, 1892), Letter 183, 246–7.

⁶⁷ Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan [West-Eastern Divan], published by the Cotta publishing house in 1819.

⁶⁸ Translation from Goethe’s World View Presented in his Reflections and Maxims, ed. Frederick Ungar, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1963), 69.

CHAPTER 39. Lichtenberg

A Cross-Section

Dramatis Personae

NARRATOR

I. Moon Beings:

LABU, President of the Moon Committee for Earth Research

QUIKKO, Manager of Machinery

SOFANTI

PEKA¹

The voices of the Moon Beings reverberate, as if coming from a room in a cellar.

II. Humans:

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN OF THE ENGLISH KING

THE ACTOR DAVID GARRICK

MARIA DOROTHEA STECHARDT, Lichtenberg’s girlfriend

EBERHARD, Justice Pütter’s servant

JUSTICE PüTTER

A TOWN CRIER A SELLER OF SILHOUETTES

FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD CITIZENS OF GöTTINGEN

A PASTOR

NARRATOR: As the Narrator, I find myself in the pleasant situation of taking a position above all the parties — I mean, planets. Because the following events take place between Earth and Moon — or rather, sometimes on one, sometimes on the other — I would violate the laws of interplanetary codes of behavior if I, as Narrator, represented the position of either the Earth or the Moon. In order to adhere to the proprieties, I will inform you that the Earth seems as mysterious to the Moon, which knows everything about the Earth, as the Moon does to the Earth, which knows nothing about the Moon. You can infer that the Moon knows everything about the Earth and the Earth knows nothing about the Moon from the single fact that there is a Committee for Earth Research on the Moon. You will have no trouble following this Committee’s negotiations. But in order to enable you to easily gain an overview, please allow me to point out the following. The Lunar Committee’s negotiations are very brief; the time allotted for speaking on the Moon is greatly restricted. The Moon-dwellers obtain nourishment exclusively from the silence of their fellow citizens, which they therefore only reluctantly interrupt. It is also worth mentioning that one Earth year amounts to only a few Moon minutes. Here we are dealing with the phenomenon of temporal distortion, a phenomenon with which you are doubtlessly familiar. I hardly need to mention that photographs have always been taken on the Moon.

The Society for Earth Research’s machinery is limited to three apparatuses that are easier to use than a coffee grinder. First, we have the Spectrophone, through which everything happening on Earth is heard and seen; a Parlamonium, with the help of which human speech — often aggravating for the inhabitants of the Moon, who are spoiled by the music of the spheres — can be translated into music; and an Oneiroscope, with which the dreams of Earthlings can be observed. That is significant because of the interest in psychoanalysis that is prevalent on the Moon. You will now listen in on a meeting of this Moon Committee.

Gong.

LABU: I hereby open the 214^th Session of the Moon Committee for Earth Research. I welcome the committee members, who are all assembled: the gentlemen Sofanti, Quikko, and Peka. We are nearing the end of our work. Now that we’ve sorted out all the Earth’s essential parts, we have decided, in accordance with the many requests from Moon laymen, to conduct a few additional, short experiments concerning humans. It has been clear to the Commission from the start that the material is relatively unproductive. The samples taken over the last millennia have not yielded a single case in which a human has amounted to anything. Taking this established scientific fact as a basis for our investigations, our meetings from now on will deal solely with proving that this is a result of the unhappy human condition. Opinions differ on what is to blame for this unhappiness. Mr. Peka would like the floor.

PEKA: I would like permission to speak on a matter of the rules of procedure.

LABU: On the rules of procedure.

PEKA: I suggest that before we move on to other points on the agenda, we take note of this lunar map, which has just been published based on research done by Professors Tobias Mayer and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in Göttingen.²

QUIKKO: In my opinion, the Moon Committee for Earth Research can expect nothing from this map. I notice that not even the huge crater C.Y. 2802, where we hold our meetings, is marked on it.

LABU: The Moon map is dispatched to the archive without further debate.

SOFANTI: Excuse me, but who is Tobias Mayer?

LABU: According to the Earth Archive, Tobias Mayer was a professor of astronomy in Göttingen who died a number of years ago. Herr Lichtenberg concluded Mayer’s work.

SOFANTI: I motion that we thank Herr Lichtenberg for his interest in Moon research by making him the subject of our own investigations, for, as Mr. President has just rightly noted, our Committee’s final sessions will deal with humans.

LABU: Any objections? No objections have been raised. The Committee passes the motion.

QUIKKO: I have the privilege to present a photograph of Lichtenberg.

ALL: Let us see it, please.

PEKA: But there are twenty people in it.

QUIKKO: This is Pastor Lichtenberg from Oberamstädt near Darmstadt together with his esteemed wife and his eighteen children. The smallest one is the aforementioned moon researcher.

SOFANTI: But now he is supposed to be over thirty.

LABU: Gentlemen, the time allotted for the Committee meeting is up.

I request that Mr. Quikko tune the Spectrophone in to Göttingen.

QUIKKO: Spectrophone to Göttingen.

A series of purring and ringing signals can be heard.

QUIKKO: He’s not in Göttingen.

LABU: Then you’ll have to search for him, but without a sound. It’s our silent hour now. Pause.

QUIKKO (whispering): London. He’s in London. In the Drury Lane Theater. They’re performing Hamlet. The great actor Garrick is playing Hamlet.³

GARRICK: Rest, rest, perturbed spirit! So, gentlemen,

With all my love I do commend me to you:

And what so poor a man as Hamlet is

May do t’express his love and friending to you,

God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together;

And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite!

That ever I was born to set it right!

Nay, come, let’s go together.⁴

A burst of applause; then music.

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: It will get somewhat noisy in here during the intermission, Herr Professor. Furthermore, His Majesty has particularly asked me to give Mr. Garrick the privilege of making the acquaintance of one of Europe’s greatest scholars.

LICHTENBERG: Your courteousness, my Lord Chamberlain, goes too far. His Majesty well knows that he will be fulfilling a long-cherished wish of mine by making it possible for me to become acquainted with Garrick. His acting, I can see, is beyond compare.

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: As you will see, his manners are in no way surpassed by the art of his acting. He is equally at home in the gilded court of St. James as in Hamlet’s paper court.

LICHTENBERG: Will you show me to his dressing room?

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: We will be there directly. — Please announce us to Mr. Garrick.

LICHTENBERG: I was told that the acoustics are bad, but I understood every word.

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: The acoustics really are bad. But when Garrick acts, not a sound is lost. It is deathly quiet, and the audience sits as if they were painted on the wall.

DRESSING ROOM ATTENDANT: Mr. Garrick will see you now.

GARRICK: I am happy for this chance to greet you. The King already let me know you would be coming.

LICHTENBERG: I am far too caught up in the impression left by your acting to be able to greet you in the way I would wish.

GARRICK: The honor of seeing you here before me is greater than any greeting.

LICHTENBERG: Some of my friends warned me against seeing you. They were afraid that I would no longer have any appreciation of the German stage upon my return home.

GARRICK: I cannot take that seriously. Or do you think we have not heard of the reputation of an Iffland or an Eckhof here?⁵

LICHTENBERG: Unfortunately, they seldom have an opportunity to play Lear or Hamlet. Here, Shakespeare is not merely famous, but rather sacred. His name is intertwined with venerable ideas, songs by him and about him are sung, and so a large segment of English youth knows him earlier than they learn the ABCs or the one-times-one table.

GARRICK: Shakespeare is our “High School,” although I can’t forget what I have learned from my friends Sterne and Fielding.

LICHTENBERG: I think I could fill many pages with what your conduct in front of the ghost taught me.

LORD CHAMBERLAIN: Then you won’t forget an anecdote I was recently told about Mr. Garrick. A few weeks ago, there was an audience member sitting in the balcony who believed that the ghost in Act I was real. His neighbor told him it was an actor. “But,” responded the first, “if that’s the case, why was the man dressed in black himself so frightened by it?” The man dressed in black — that was Garrick.

LICHTENBERG: Oh, yes, the black garment! I wanted to talk about that. I have frequently heard you being reprimanded because of it, although never between the acts or on the way home or at a meal directly afterwards, but always only after the first impression has lost its force, during a cool, sober conversation. And I never quite understood this reproach.

GARRICK: Yes, I’ll admit to you that I have reasons why I dress this way. It seems to me the old costumes on the stage can easily become a masquerade. They are beautiful when they are pleasing, but the deception that then comes into play is rarely offset by the pleasure in their beauty.

LICHTENBERG: You feel the same way about actors in old costumes as I do about German books in Latin script. To me, they are always a kind of translation.

GARRICK: Allow me to speak about my combat with Laertes in the last act. My predecessors wore a helmet in that scene. I wear a hat. Why? I absolutely feel the fall of a hat during a fight; I feel the fall of a helmet far less. I don’t know how firmly a helmet should fit; but I feel every slight shift of a hat. I think you understand me.

LICHTENBERG: Perfectly. It is not the business of an actor to awaken the antiquarian in the audience.

GARRICK: I once read something by an old Spaniard who said that theater is like a map. Valladolid is only a finger’s breadth away from Toledo. One has barely seen a person who is sixteen years old when he appears again at sixty on the stage. That is true theater; one should not hamper the trade with pedantry. (A gong sounds.) Please excuse me. My scene approaches.

QUIKKO: I trust the gentlemen of the Committee will not think me high-handed for switching it off. But I think our material is complete. I am convinced that we can conclude our debate without further ado. The unhappiness of Professor Lichtenberg can no longer be a mystery to us. You have seen him in the most dazzling society and at that moment in his existence when the world seemed to open up for him. He was a marvelous guest at the English royal court; he had the privilege of speaking to the great actor Garrick about the secrets of his art; he visited England’s great observatories and got to know the wealthy nobility in their castles and seaside resorts; the Queen opened up her private gallery and Lord Calmshome opened up his wine cellar for him. And now he is supposed to go back to Göttingen and his cramped rental apartment, which his publisher has allocated him as payment for his writing. He must exchange his box at the theater for his window seat. He must struggle with the students who are sent to him for room and board by distinguished Englishmen. He, who calculates lunar eclipses and planetary conjunctions, is supposed to simultaneously calculate the pocket money of the young lords and idlers boarding with him. Don’t you see how the misery of this existence — with its intrigues at the university, the gossip of the professors, the resentment and the narrowness — must embitter him and turn him into a misanthrope before his time? His unhappiness? Do you really need to look for it? It is called Göttingen and lies in the kingdom of Hanover.

LABU: I think I speak in the name of all the citizens of the Moon and especially of our research committee for the study of the Earth when I most gratefully thank our colleague and technical director for his interesting remarks. We are dealing here with very illuminating comments, whose special beauty is that they are kept within the frame of our short speeches. However, I would like to oppose the proposal that we break off our research at this point. Because why, even if the Professor is trapped in the narrowness of his small university town, should he not rise high above it on the wings of his dreams?

SOFANTI: In the attempt to tune the Spectrophone in to Göttingen, it turned out that it is now nighttime there. There is absolutely nothing for us to investigate.

LABU: That seems to me a welcome opportunity to prove my conjecture correct and put the Oneiroscope into operation. Give the directive to headquarters.

A series of purring and ringing signals can be heard.

LABU: May I request you, Mr. Quikko, to proceed to the Oneiroscope and tell us what you perceive therein.

QUIKKO: I see Herr Professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg as he sees himself in a dream.⁶ He is floating far above the Earth across from a transfigured old man, whose appearance fills him with something greater than mere respect. When he opens his eyes and sees him, an irresistible feeling of worship and trust pervades him, and he is just at the point of prostrating himself in front of him when the old man speaks to him: “You love investigations of nature,” he says. “You shall see something here that might be useful to you.” And now he is passing him a blue-green sphere, here and there dotted with gray, which he holds between his index finger and his thumb. Its diameter is not more than a few centimeters. “Take this mineral,” continues the old man, “examine it and tell me what you have found.” Lichtenberg turns around and sees a beautiful hall with all kinds of tools. I can’t describe them to you, however. Now he takes a look at the sphere and feels it; he shakes it and listens to it; he touches it to his tongue; he tests it against steel, glass, a magnet, and determines its specific weight. But all these tests show him that it is worth little. He remembers that in his childhood he bought the same ball — or one that was not so very different — at a cost of three for a kreutzer at the Frankfurt fair. He finds some clay soil, about as much chalky soil, a lot of silica, and finally some iron and some common salt. He is very exact in his investigation because as he adds up everything that he found, it comes to exactly 100. Now the old man steps in front of him, glances at the paper, and reads it with a gentle, almost imperceptible smile.

(The following must be read so that in Quikko’s voice the two speakers — God and Lichtenberg — can clearly be distinguished from one another.)

“Do you know, mortal, what it was that you were examining?”

“No, immortal, I don’t know.”

“Then know — it was, on a smaller scale, nothing less than the entire Earth.”

“The Earth? — eternal, great God! And the oceans with all their inhabitants, where are they?”

“There they are, in your napkin. You wiped them away.”

“Oh dear, and the skies and all the splendor of solid ground!”

“The skies, they should be caught there in the cup of distilled water. And your splendor of solid ground? How can you ask? That is dust; there’s some on the sleeve of your jacket.”

“But I didn’t find a single trace of silver and gold, which make the world spin!”

“Bad enough. I see that I must help you. Know this: with your fire-steel you have smashed all of Switzerland and Savoy and the most beautiful part of Sicily, and in Africa, an entire stretch of more than a thousand square miles is totally ruined and uprooted. And there, on that glass plate — they just crashed down — the Cordilleras were lying there. And that thing that flew into your eye when you were cutting glass, that was Chimborazo.”

To my regret I must announce that the image is getting blurry. The dream seems to be nearing its end. Morning must be dawning in Göttingen.

A series of purring and ringing signals are heard.

SOFANTI: Finally! The Professor’s science laboratory.

DOROTHEA (opening a door): Oh, how stufly it is in here. And the shutters are still closed.

Sound of shutters being pushed open.

Oh, beautiful air, a beautiful morning! But what dust. He has made himself cozy here while I’ve been home for eight days. And even the dust cloth is nowhere to be found.

Brief pause.

Well, now, look lively!

She sings:

Rise up, dear little children!

The morning star with its bright light

Lets itself be seen freely like a hero

And shines over the whole world.

Be welcome, dear day!

Night does not want to stay.

Shine into our hearts

With your heavenly glow.⁷

The tinkle of shattering glass can be heard.

For heaven’s sake! (Again, even more aghast.) For heaven’s sake!

LICHTENBERG (can be heard opening the door): What happened?

Impossible! The electrification machine!

DOROTHEA is heard crying.

LICHTENBERG: Yes, that is my just punishment for sleeping late. What was it that my esteemed teacher Tobias Mayer always said: life consists of the morning hours. And that is why I have made it a rule for myself that the rising sun shall never find me lying in bed as long as I am healthy.⁸

DOROTHEA is heard crying.

LICHTENBERG: Well, then we will just have to write to Braunschweig and order a new cylinder for two Louis d’or, and we’ll just have to see how we can manage without artificial lightning for the next weeks. — Well, what is there to cry about? You can’t be crying about the damage? — I know, you’re crying about your toy box. But what more could happen to it now; I really wish you had completely different toys. You should have been with me that time in London to see Mr. Cox’s museum.⁹ You wouldn’t have been able to keep from moving among all the magical apparatuses on your tiptoes. There you would have found snakes climbing up trees; butterflies moving their wings, studded with diamonds; tulips opening and closing; waterfalls flowing from sinuous glass tubes that quickly spun on their axes; golden elephants with golden palaces on their backs; swans swimming away across mirrors; crocodiles eating golden spheres.

DOROTHEA: Will you take me to London some time?

LICHTENBERG: London! I become quite agitated when I think about London and about how it is that those popinjays, Armstale and Smeeth and Boothwell, who sit in my lectures and waste my time with their visits to the house — how it is that they deserve to live in London! And yet England remains the nation that has produced the greatest, most active people. Not those who are the greatest at promoting themselves or at book learning, but the most steadfast, the most magnanimous and bold, the most intelligent. There is nowhere that humanity is more respected than in England, and there everything is enjoyed with both body and soul, in a way in which we who live under military governments can only dream of. Dream! That reminds me, I wanted to tell you about a dream I had today. But you must keep it to yourself. It wouldn’t help my reputation if it was known that a natural scientist dreams. I think that sometimes dreams open the way for doubts that I don’t acknowledge to myself during the day. And then in the morning, when I remember them, I am not at all unhappy to see them. To doubt is human. In short, I dreamt of open space, far away from our Earth, near the Moon—

DOROTHEA: Eberhard’s coming with a letter.

LICHTENBERG: Well, it’s high time he returned, because there seems to be a thunderstorm approaching.

A knock.

LICHTENBERG: Come in!

EBERHARD: Good morning, Herr Professor. The Justice has sent me. The Justice has received a letter from Gotha for the Herr Professor.

LICHTENBERG: I thank you. Please send the Justice my respects.

EBERHARD: Good morning.

LICHTENBERG: Just let it sit. I don’t really want to open it.

DOROTHEA: Why don’t you want to open it?

LICHTENBERG: I have an apprehension.

DOROTHEA: What do you mean?

LICHTENBERG: I have an unpleasant foreboding.

DOROTHEA: But why?

LICHTENBERG: It’s my superstition again. In every object I see an omen, and I turn one hundred things a day into oracles. I don’t need to describe this to you. Every creeping of an insect serves to answer questions about my fate. Is that not strange in a professor of physics?¹⁰ (Pause.) Perhaps it is, and perhaps not. I know that the Earth turns, and yet I am not ashamed to believe it’s standing still.¹¹

DOROTHEA: But what could be written in the letter?

LICHTENBERG: I don’t know, but when I heard the glass shattering just now, it seemed to herald bad news.

DOROTHEA: You must allow me to open it.

LICHTENBERG: That wouldn’t help; you can’t read the gentlemen’s handwriting.

DOROTHEA: Gentlemen? What kind of gentlemen?

LICHTENBERG: No doubt the gentlemen from the life insurance.¹²

DOROTHEA: What is that, a life insurance?

LICHTENBERG: A company. They would have paid you something after my death.

DOROTHEA: I don’t like to hear you talk that way.

LICHTENBERG (audibly tearing a letter open): My premonitions were reliable. At least this time. The gentlemen write: “Dear, especially highly esteemed Herr Professor! In response to your letter of the 24th of this month, we regret to inform you that on the basis of the report made by our doctor, to whom we submitted the certificates and documents you provided, we are unable to offer you a life insurance policy.” That should feed my morbid thoughts.

DOROTHEA: What does the letter mean?

LICHTENBERG: The thoughts that it leads me to are much worse than the letter itself. Hypochondriacal, if you know what that means.

DOROTHEA: How would I?

LICHTENBERG: Hypochondria is fear of going blind, fear of insanity, fear of dying, fear of dreams, and fear of waking up. And when one has awakened, it means observing the first crow to see if it swoops by the tower to the right or to the left.

DOROTHEA: I didn’t imagine this morning to be like this.

LICHTENBERG: It is a quite beautiful morning, although humid. And when I look outside into the greenery, I can no longer make rhyme or reason of the odd ideas I had last night. Imagine: yesterday when I was half asleep it seemed to me suddenly that a man was like a one-times-one table, and later I awoke when I heard my own voice saying, “It must cool so splendidly,” and thought of the Principle of Contradiction, which I had visualized as if edible before me.¹³

DOROTHEA: Don’t you want to close the window? A wind is springing up.

LICHTENBERG: And a strong one it is. There will be a thunderstorm soon. At least we no longer need to mourn our cylinder, because in a few minutes we’ll have the most beautiful lightning sent directly to our laboratory for our use.

DOROTHEA: Is the lightning rod finished?

LICHTENBERG: Yes, since yesterday noon the first German lightning rod can be seen on this house, and now dear God wants to put it into operation directly.

Thunderclaps.

QUIKKO: There’s a thunderstorm in Göttingen right now.

Unfortunately, we are faced with the necessity of switching off.

SOFANTI: Perhaps I may use this intermission to announce some observations I have made relating to the subject of our discussion.

LABU: Mr. Sofanti has the floor.

SOFANTI: I’m afraid I cannot agree with our dear Mr. Quikko’s remarks regarding the German philosopher Lichtenberg. Anyone who has followed this conversation with his girlfriend must conclude that it is not the external circumstances that are ruining his life, but his own temperament. Yes, gentlemen, I won’t hesitate to describe the poor professor as sick. Please recall — a professor of physical science, a man who is used to linking the phenomena of the world to their causes and effects, and who bases his life’s happiness and his peace upon insects and crows, dreams and intimations. Whether this man was in London or Paris, Constantinople or Lisbon, the most vivid of lives and the most refined of courts would be lost on him, as he would just sit there, all hunched up and mournful, like a night owl. Such a man can certainly not amount to anything. Do we need proof of that? Gentlemen, I submit the evidence for the perusal of the academy. Photographs of the Göttinger Taschenkalender [Göttingen Pocket Almanac],¹⁴ courtesy of a resourceful operator on Neptune. Take a look at the entries written by the quill of this Herr Lichtenberg. Are these subjects worthy of a scholar? Observations about the preparation of ice cream in India and about English fashions, about first names and about samples of strange appetites, about the use of flogging by diverse peoples, about bells and about animals’ aptitude to learn, about carnival customs and about menus, about marriage—

LABU: I am reluctantly obliged to make our esteemed member Mr. Sofanti aware that not only is he, in the understandable excitement that accompanies his remarks, on the point of exceeding his time for speaking but also that, due to the well-known phenomenon of time warp between the Earth and the Moon, we have lost a year in our contact with the subject of our observations, Herr Lichtenberg. We will try to tune the Spectrophone to Göttingen again.

A series of purring and ringing signals can be heard.

QUIKKO: The Herr Professor is not in the laboratory but in the office of his present apartment in the house of his publisher, Dieterich. Using the files in our archive, we have been able to establish that Herr Dieterich lets Professor Lichtenberg live with him for free so that the Professor will write for his Göttinger Taschenkalender for free. Now Herr Lichtenberg is seated at his desk. We are adjusting precisely and are thus able to follow his hand, which holds the quill. The candle is to the right of the writer; the light conditions are quite favorable.—

My very dearest friend,

I call that true German friendship, dearest man. A thousand thanks for your thoughts of me. I have not answered right away, and heaven knows how things have been for me! You are, and must be, the first to whom I confess it. Last summer, soon after your last letter, I suffered the greatest loss of my life. What I am about to tell you, no other person can ever know. I met a girl in the year 1777, a burgher’s daughter from this town. At the time, she was just a bit older than thirteen years old. Such a model of beauty and gentleness I had never seen in my life, even though I had seen many. The first time I laid eyes on her, she was in the company of five or six others, who, as the children here do, were selling flowers to passersby on the ramparts. She offered me a bouquet, which I bought. I was accompanied by three Englishmen, who ate and lived with me. “What a charming creature she is,” said one of them. I had noticed that, too, and because I knew what a Sodom is our refuse-heap of a town, I thought seriously that I should remove this splendid creature from such trade. I finally spoke to her alone and asked her to call on me at my house. She wouldn’t go to any fellow’s quarters, she said. When she heard that I was a professor, however, she came to visit one afternoon with her mother. In a word, she gave up the flower trade and spent the entire day with me. And I found that this splendid body was inhabited by a soul such as I had long searched for but never found. I instructed her in writing and arithmetic and in other branches of knowledge that, without turning her into a bluestocking, developed her intellect ever further. My scientific apparatus, which cost me over 1,500 thaler, attracted her at first because of its gleam, but finally the use of it became her only entertainment. It was then that our acquaintance was raised to its highest point. She went away late and came back with the day, and all day long her concern was keeping my things, from necktie to air pump, in order. And all with such heavenly gentleness, which I had never before thought possible. The result was, as you will have suspected by now, that as of Easter 1780 she stayed with me completely. Her inclination toward this kind of life was so great that she didn’t even go downstairs except to attend church. She was not to be torn away from it. We were continuously together. When she was at church, I felt as if I had sent away my eyes and all my senses. In the meantime, I could not look at this angel, who had entered into such an association, without the greatest emotion. That she had sacrificed everything for me was unbearable to me. So I asked her to join at the table when friends ate with me and gave her the clothing that her situation demanded and loved her more with every passing day. It was my serious intention to also unite with her before the eyes of the world. Oh dear God! And this heavenly girl died on the 4th of August, 1782, in the evening as the sun went down. I had the best doctors. Everything in the world was done. Consider that, dearest man, and allow me to end here. It is impossible for me to continue.

G. C. Lichtenberg.¹⁵

LABU: Unfortunately, gentlemen, we are forced to recognize once again what lamentable afflictions are caused on Planet Earth by the existence of death, which is so interesting in itself, and which, as you are well aware, is unknown to us here. I believe I act in accordance with your wishes if we let music accompany the soul of the deceased little flower girl on its path into space.

A very short snatch of music follows.

LABU: To my regret, I must announce that the Spectrophone has meanwhile shifted so far that it will take us all a great deal of effort to bring Herr Lichtenberg back into focus.

A series of purring and ringing signals are heard.

QUIKKO: Indeed, there has been a shift of a millionth of a milli-degree. We are no longer in Göttingen. According to my measuring instruments, it must be Einbeck, which is not far away. — Silence!

LICHTENBERG: Herr Professor, I think—

QUIKKO: Silence! Listen to Lichtenberg’s voice. It comes from Einbeck.

LICHTENBERG: Herr Professor, we should retreat to the tavern; the noise threatens to become too distracting here.

PüTTER: Here comes the whole crowd marching behind the town crier.¹⁶

TOWN CRIER: The citizenry of the town of Einbeck, on the orders of the laudable municipal authorities of this town, are hereby informed that the infamous, unworthy, and learned apprentice of murder Heinrich Julius Rütgerodt will be sent from life to death today, the 30th of June, this afternoon at three o’clock, on the hill outside our town. The same Heinrich Julius Rütgerodt¹⁷ was a respected citizen of our town of Einbeck, who enjoyed, in addition to his food, 1,500 thaler in income. But he killed his mother because she, so he said, ate too much. He invented a machine, which, according to the opinion of exceptional professors and university technologists, is of the greatest credit to the human intellect. He placed a certain number of boards together in a barn in such a way that, as soon as his mother stepped foot on one of them, she set them all into motion, causing them to collapse on her head. He achieved his goal without a single nail and without any other injury being necessary. He beat his wife to death because one morning she didn’t make his coffee the right way. He could name no other motive at the trial. He struck his maid dead in the cellar, because he no longer wanted to feed her small child. All the professors and justices agree, however, that despite his inclination toward the greatest inhumanity, there must have been hours when his conscience tortured him. For he never could tolerate daylight; instead he sat the entire day with his shutters closed. And, incidentally, it has been certified that his senses were healthy and his mind whole, indeed he was among the most acute of men. This monster in human form will now publicly be sent from life to death, on which account his offenses will once more be held up to him and his confession taken in front of the assembled people.

PüTTER: I do reproach myself, dear Herr Lichtenberg, for encouraging you to join me on an excursion during which your ears must be assaulted by such a vulgar outcry.

LICHTENBERG: I would have asked the innkeeper to close the windows if I didn’t note in myself a certain interest in criminal cases such as these, Justice.

PüTTER: Say what you like, but I know that it’s only because of your friendship with me that you consented to join me in such a dubious adventure as this execution, such as executions are.

LICHTENBERG: I trust we won’t be witnesses of it. At least as far as concerns myself, I must…

PüTTER: Whatever are you thinking of? For me, it’s simply a matter of getting my hands on the files directly after the delinquent has been put to death.

LICHTENBERG: Don’t tell me you are working on a Pitaval¹⁸ of our kingdom of Hanover.

PüTTER: I cannot deny it, dear Professor.

LICHTENBERG: Well, then perhaps you will allow me to tell you about a short play I saw years ago at a London marionette theater.

There are loud voices outside.

PüTTER: Just allow me to close the window. The noise is beginning to get too loud after all.

LICHTENBERG: Well, there was a puppeteer who had set up his tent in the open near Covent Garden. For a few pence, one could sit there for hours. There is one piece among those in his repertoire which I have never forgotten. It was, as I said, a puppet theater. But whereas usually the puppets in such a theater represent people, in this one they truly only represented what they were: marionettes. Five, six, seven of these marionettes were dialogue1 in front of a curtain: a merchant, a soldier, a clergyman, a housewife, a judge. They swayed back and forth in the breeze and conversed. What about? You’ll never guess: it was about freedom of the will. It was a peaceful conversation, because there was really only one opinion among them all: reason, nature, and religion combined their weight in favor of free will. Only one puppet, which hung somewhat to the side — I think I forgot to mention it before — was not so resolute. I think this puppet was a philosopher, or maybe a professor of physics. But the others didn’t set great store by his opinion. All at once, a broad cardboard hand appeared from above. — This was supposed to represent a human hand. — It took away one puppet after the other. It was very clear. The marionette player was taking his puppets off their rack. As one after the other floated up into the heights, the ones that were left asked why they went away. And each one had some sort of excuse. But the hand of the puppeteer was never mentioned. And finally the philosopher or professor of physics was left alone on the empty stage.

PüTTER: I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, dear colleague.

LICHTENBERG: I don’t mean to say anything; at best I want to ask something. Whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we don’t make the same mistake as the child who hits the stool he bumps against.¹⁹

A PEDDLER: Excuse me, gentlemen, for bothering you. If I could ask the gentlemen to glance at my collection. The best assortment of silhouettes you can find anywhere. One for a silver coin. The king of Hanover, the king of Prussia, the gentlemen Danton and Robespierre, of whom so much is said, and Herr von Goethe, Assistant Legal Secretary of Weimar and author of Werther, Herr Bürger of neighboring Göttingen, the great world traveler Herr Forster, the gentlemen Iffland and Kopf, the pride of the Berlin theater, Mademoiselle Schröder of Weimar, — I can’t count them all for you. No interest! (Pause.) Well, then the gentlemen will certainly not spurn a little memento of the day. I present to you the finely cut silhouette of our local monster. Please take a look at the text by Herr Lavater on the back.

PüTTER (reading): An inveterate murderer, full of quiet evil burrowing in on itself, an assassin of women, a mother-killer, a miser such as no moralist could ever have thought up, no actor portrayed, no poet written about. He reveled in nocturnal gloom, turned midday to midnight by closing his shutters, locked his house, averse to light, averse to people, he buried his stolen treasures in the earth, deep within cellar walls, under floors and in fields. Spattered with the blood of innocence, he danced, laughing, on the wedding day of the woman whom later he struck dead at the grave she had herself unknowingly prepared at his behest and in his presence. All this can be read in his likeness: his eyes look at nothing, his smile is like the open grave, and his fearsome teeth are the gates to Hell.²⁰

PüTTER: This leaflet is worth a silver coin to me.

LICHTENBERG: And to me it’s even worth two, because there’s a story behind it.

PüTTER: What do you mean?

LICHTENBERG: I don’t mind letting you in on a little story. I indulged myself in a joke; but it has to remain between us.

PüTTER: Discretion is part of my job.

LICHTENBERG: I know. Even so, I wouldn’t dare to tell you if I didn’t know that we hold the same opinion of Lavater’s theory of physiognomy, which has become quite the rage these days.

PüTTER: What surprises me about Herr Lavater is that he, so attentive to the signs that allow character to be intuited, should have failed to notice that people who write the way he does are absolutely not to be believed. We, however, know that the manner in which a testimony is presented can sometimes be more important than the testimony itself.²¹

LICHTENBERG: All right then, listen to my story. Circumstances, which I do not wish to touch upon here, made it possible for me to send the silhouette of this monster, whom they are finishing off out there, to Lavater. And I did it in such a way that he neither knew who was portrayed, nor that I was the one who sent it. And now, listen to his response; I carry it with me. Such a leaflet is worth more than a kingdom.

PüTTER: Let’s hear it.

LICHTENBERG: This profile undoubtedly belongs to an extraordinary man who would have been great if he had a little more mental acumen and more heartfelt love. Whether I err in thinking I have discovered in him the aptitude and inclination for the establishment or dissemination of a religious sect is an open question. I can say nothing more. That is already too much.

PüTTER: I never heard a truer word. That’s a fortunate experiment you did with the physiognomist.

LICHTENBERG: If physiognomy becomes what Lavater expects it will, then children will be hanged before they have done the deeds that deserve the gallows.²²

PüTTER: But perhaps we shouldn’t speak of the gallows here, so near the gallows’ mound.

LICHTENBERG: I am glad that the noise has moved on. I still shudder when I think back to the morning when I saw, for the first and last time, someone who was awaiting the gallows. It was in front of the court of assizes in London. The poor fellow stood in front of the jury, and as they read the death sentence, the Lord Mayor of London was sitting there reading the newspaper.²³

PüTTER: I think it’s time to depart. The moon is already shining through the window.

LICHTENBERG: A waning moon, and murky as well. There is nothing I hate more than the sight of the moon when it…

QUIKKO: Gentlemen, you hear the attacks that Herr Lichtenberg is just about to make against us. It is beneath our dignity to follow this any longer. I am switching it off.

LABU: Without wishing to condone the impulsive actions of our esteemed colleague Quikko, I will now give the floor to Mr. Peka for his observations.

PEKA: Esteemed sirs, you will all have noticed that the Spectraphone’s images were clearer than ever this time, perhaps as a consequence of the thunderstorms that purified the Earth’s atmosphere. We all had time for a close look at Herr Lichtenberg, and I think I speak for all of you when I say: We can rest assured that the solution to our problem is closer than we suspected. Herr Lichtenberg is an unhappy character. Not because of the external circumstances that keep him in Göttingen, not because of his inner constitution that has turned him into a hypochondriac, but quite simply because of his appearance. It cannot have escaped you that he is a hunchback. Yes, gentlemen, it’s easy to explain why a hunchback has nothing good to say about the science of physiognomy. He has scarcely any other choice but to form his own opinion about everything, because he cannot agree with public opinion on at least one very important point, I mean as far as the hunch is concerned. We should also not be surprised to hear him speak ill of Lavater, as of enthusiasts and geniuses. Anyone whose physique invites criticism such as his does is left with no choice but to go on the defensive as a critic himself.

LABU: We thank Mr. Peka for his clear and timely explanations. But whether he is correct to say that such a hunchback is entirely incapable of enthusiasm or surges of feeling is something we should put to the test.

SOFANTI: A report has just come in from Venus about an occurrence that I consider of great interest to us. The fifty-year-old Lichtenberg, that enemy of sentimentalists, who has been loyal to reason his entire life, is about to betray it with the Muse. He is composing verse, that is to say, he is declaiming.

LABU: A welcome opportunity to deploy our Parlamonium. We will listen to the beginning of this poem and then translate it into music.

SOFANTI: Quiet, please.

The gong sounds.

LICHTENBERG (in a stately voice unlike his usual tone): What if at some point the sun did not return, I often thought, if I awoke in a dark night and was glad when I finally saw day break again. The deep stillness of early morning, the friend of reflection, combined with the feeling of increased strength and renewed health awoke in me then such a powerful trust in the order of nature and the spirit that guides it, that I believed myself as secure in the tumult of life as if my fate lay in my own hands. I thought then that this sensation, which you can neither force to come about nor feign and which grants you this indescribable feeling of well-being, is certainly the work of precisely that spirit, and it loudly tells you that now, at least, you think correctly. Oh, do not disturb with guilt this heavenly peace within, I then said to myself. How would this dawning day break for you, if this pure mirror-brightness of your being no longer reflected it into your interior? What else do you expect from the music of the spheres, if not these contemplations? What else is the chiming together of the planets but the expression of this certainty, which the spirit, at first with a storm of raptures, then gradually more and more—²⁴ The recitation has already been undercut with music and at this point it changes into the melody of a hymn, perhaps one by Haydn or Handel. After a while, this music changes into a funeral march.

FIRST CITIZEN: Quite a splendid cortege.

SECOND CITIZEN: Hush, you’re not allowed to talk here in the funeral procession. Wait until we’re there.

FIRST CITIZEN (more quietly): It’s quite a splendid cortege, is what I wanted to say. When I think back to the time they buried Bürger here. Three men followed the coffin: Professor Althof—

SECOND CITIZEN: Shh, you’ll get us into trouble.

FIRST CITIZEN: Now the head of the procession has already arrived. The music will stop soon, and then it’ll get serious. Speeches will be made.

THIRD CITIZEN: He’s said to have believed in the transmigration of souls. I heard it from Poppe the mechanic himself, he’s the one who built him his instruments.

SECOND CITIZEN: Do you see where I’m pointing? Do you know what it is?

FIRST CITIZEN: That’s impossible. You’re right. His window. So he could look down from his laboratory at his grave site. That’s what I call having all your affairs in order.

THIRD CITIZEN: He’s said to have stood at that window and watched Bürger’s burial through a telescope. But when he saw the hearse rolling through the churchyard gate, his servant, who was in the next room, could hear sobbing. He could not bear to watch the body being taken off the wagon. He closed the shutters and shut the window.²⁵

SECOND CITIZEN: His whole life he flirted with death. This happened seven years ago, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. “The angels have let me know for some time in no uncertain terms that they feel a strong inclination to haul me to the churchyard in a small, portable house as soon as possible.”²⁶ Yes, he wrote that to me seven years ago.

THIRD CITIZEN: It’s said that he was a believer in the transmigration of souls.

SECOND CITIZEN: If his soul is transmigrating, then he could land on the Moon. He always loved long journeys.

FIRST CITIZEN: I can hardly credit that he was a professor of physics. “What is matter?” he’s supposed to have said. “Perhaps there’s nothing of the kind in nature. One kills matter and later pronounces it dead.”²⁷

THIRD CITIZEN: You shouldn’t believe everything they say about him; he hadn’t gone out in public for a long time. — There’s movement over there. They’ve lowered the coffin into the depths.

FIRST CITIZEN: It is an outrage that the professors didn’t even find it worth their while to cancel their seminars today.

SECOND CITIZEN: It really is quite a beautiful funeral cortege. If you remember Bürger’s funeral, where—

DIFFERENT VOICES: Shh! Shh! Shh! What insolent behavior. Disrespectful bunch.

THE PASTOR: Highly esteemed mourners, most particularly the honorable representatives of the university and the esteemed citizens of the town!

LABU: I open the last meeting of the Moon Committee for Earth Research. By a lamentable turn of events, the subject of our observations, the University of Göttingen Professor Lichtenberg, died before we could conclude our work. However, if I have switched off the funeral service, whose initial sounds you just heard, it is by rights, as our Committee has every reason to hold a separate funeral ceremony for Herr Lichtenberg. For what would our scientific honor be worth, gentlemen, if we did not concede that we had amends to make to the deceased?

Murmuring is heard from the Committee members.

Admittedly, gentlemen, it has been confirmed that humans are not happy. But we have too hastily drawn conclusions from that. We concluded that they can therefore amount to nothing. Now, it might seem that Professor Lichtenberg confirms that; you will all have inspected the extensive catalog of works the deceased wanted to write but never wrote. “The Island of Cebu” and “Kunkel” and “The Parakletor” and “The Double Prince” and whatever else they are called. But, gentlemen, perhaps he didn’t write books simply because he knew what their fate would be. As he said, for every one book that is read thoroughly, thousands are merely leafed through. Thousands more lie quietly around, others are wedged on top of mouse holes, or thrown at rats. And on top of others, so he says, people stand, sit down, drum, bake gingerbread. Others are used to light pipes, or to stand beneath windows.²⁸ Caring little for books, Lichtenburg cared all the more for thought. Thanks to our methods of photography we possess today the entries he wrote in his diaries, which will likely one day gain a reputation for themselves on Earth. As I’m sure you will have ascertained for yourselves, gentlemen, these diaries are full of curious, deep, and wise insights, at which he might perhaps never have arrived had he possessed the untroubled cheerfulness that is ours on the Moon. I therefore venture, most esteemed gentlemen, to call into question the basis of our research, that is, that humans can never amount to anything because they are never happy. Perhaps it is their unhappiness that allows them to advance, some of them as far as Professor Lichtenberg, who is worthy — and not merely because of his Moon map — of all the honor we can bestow. I therefore propose that we elevate Crater No. C.Y. 2802, in which we hold our meetings, into the company of those craters here on the Moon that we have dedicated to the minds on Earth we deem worthy. The craters — those at the edge of the cloud sea, those on the heights of the lunar mountains — that bear the exalted names of Thales, of Helvetius, of Humboldt, of Condorcet, of Fourier should accept into their ranks the Lichtenberg Crater, which lies clearly, purely, and peacefully in that magical light that illumines the millennium and is comparable to the light that begins to shine from the writings of this earthly Lichtenberg. We conclude the research of our Committee and switch on the music of the spheres.

Music.

“Lichtenberg, Ein Querschnitt,” GS, 4.2, 696–720. Translated by Lisa Harries Schumann.

Radio play commissioned by Radio Berlin. In April 1932, Benjamin noted in a letter to Scholem that, after the “great success” of both What the Germans Were Reading While Their Classical Authors Were Writing and Much Ado About Kasper, he had been commissioned by Radio Berlin to write Lichtenberg (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 391). By February 1933, Benjamin’s opportunities for employment on the radio had ceased. On February 28, 1933, he wrote to Scholem that he had spent the day on “the dictation of a radio play, ‘Lichtenberg,’ which I must now send in, in accordance with a contract, the better part of which has long been fulfilled… ‘Lichtenberg,’ though commissioned, is not sure to be produced” (Ibid., 402). The radio play was never broadcast.

¹ Benjamin borrows the names of the Moon Beings Labu, Sofanti, and Peka from Paul Scheerbart’s novel Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroiden-Roman (1913) [Lesabéndio: An Asteroid-Novel]. For Benjamin on Scheerbart, see Benjamin, “On Scheerbart,” in SW, 4, 386 (“Sur Scheerbart,” GS, 2.2, 631), and “Paul Scheerbart: Lesabéndio” (GS, 2.2, 618–20).

² Tobias Mayer (1723–1762), German astronomer known for his studies of the moon, and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), German writer, satirist, aphorist, and scientist. During the years 1931–1932, Benjamin had “prepared, for a commission, a complete bibliography of the writings of and about G. C. Lichtenberg” (Benjamin, “Curriculum Vitae [VI],” SW, 4, 382). The bibliography, commissioned by the Berlin lawyer and Lichtenberg collector Martin Domke, was never published and, apparently, does not survive. A card index for the bibliography is, however, extant (GS, 7.2, 837).

³ Lichtenberg met David Garrick (1717–1779), the influential English actor, playwright, and theater manager, in London in 1775. Lichtenberg wrote about the encounter in his “Letters from England,” on which Benjamin loosely bases the scene that follows. See Lichtenberg, Briefe, eds. Albert Leitzmann and Carl Schüddekopf, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1901–1904), vol. 1, 237. See also Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, vol. 3 (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1844), 197ff.

⁴ Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.

⁵ August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) and Konrad Eckhof (1720–1778), renowned actors of the German stage.

⁶ See Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriffen (1844), vol. 6, 50–3.

⁷ “Steht auf, ihr lieben Kinderlein!” a church song written by the Lutheran Erasmus Alberus in the mid-sixteenth century, was collected in a number of Lutheran hymnals as a “morning song.” Clemens von Brentano and his brother-in-law Ludwig Achim von Arnim included it as “Morgenlied” in their collection of romanticized folk poems and songs Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–1808). It was later set to music by Anton von Webern, Max Reger, and Armin Knab among others. [Trans.]

⁸ Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, ed. Ludwig Christian Lichtenberg and Friedrich Kries, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1800), 40.

⁹ James Cox (1723–1800) was a London jeweller, toy maker, goldsmith, clockmaker, and inventor whose firm produced elaborate automata and mechanical figures. He opened his museum in the 1770s.

¹⁰ See Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, eds. Lichtenberg and Kries, vol. 1, 26.

¹¹ See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, ed. Leitzmann, 5 vols. (Berlin: B. Behr, 1902–1908), vol. 4, 47.

¹² The denial of a life insurance policy (“Sterbethaler Direktion”) is mentioned by Lichtenberg in a letter to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi dated February 6, 1793 (see Lichtenberg, Briefe, vol. 3, 69). However, Benjamin probably invents the letter from the insurance company.

¹³ See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 2, 180.

¹⁴ The Göttinger Taschenkalender was a popular almanac founded by Lichtenberg’s publisher, Johann Christian Dieterich (1722–1800). Lichtenberg was a prominent contributor and, from 1777 to his death in 1799, its editor.

¹⁵ Letter from Lichtenberg to G. H. Amelung written at the beginning of 1783. See Lichtenberg, Briefe, vol. 3, 291–3. Benjamin quotes the same letter in his “German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters,” SW, 3, 169–70, first published under his pseudonym Detlef Holz from April 1931 to May 1932 in the Frankfurter Zeitung (GS, 4.1, 149–233).

¹⁶ Johann Stephan Pütter (1725–1807), German jurist, writer, and professor of law at the University of Göttingen.

¹⁷ Heinrich Julius Rütgerodt (1731–1775), murderer executed in Einbeck in 1775. Rütgerodt appears in Johann Caspar Lavater’s influential theories on physiognomy, which were satirized by Lichtenberg.

¹⁸ François Gayot de Pitaval (1673–1743), a French legal writer, compiled a multi-volume collection of famous criminal cases, Causes célèbres et intéressantes, avec les jugemens qui les ont décidées (1734–1743). After the work was translated into German in the mid-eighteenth century, “Pitaval” became a synonym for anthologies of true crime.

¹⁹ See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 4, 120.

²⁰ See Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, vol. 2, Fragment XVIII, “Zerstörte menschliche Natur, Rütgerodt” (Leipzig: Weidmanns, Erben and Reich, 1776), 194–5.

²¹ See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 3, 110.

²² Ibid., 218.

²³ In a letter to Dieterich written on October 31, 1775, Lichtenberg reports that he saw a number of executions in London. See Lichtenberg, Briefe, vol. 1, 242.

²⁴ See Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, vol. 5 (1844), 334–5.

²⁵ See Lichtenberg, Briefe, vol. 3, 1l5ff.

²⁶ Ibid., 12.

²⁷ See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 3, 189.

²⁸ Ibid., 85–6.