History: Benjamin's autobiographical masterpiece might alone justify this sedulously edited and beautifully translated volume (Selected Writings: Volume 3 1935-1938), writes Brian Dillon.
In 1937, Gisèle Freund photographed her friend Walter Benjamin at work in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The scholar sits hunched in an attitude of rapt concentration, his notes stacked neatly at the centre of a spray of papers and inkblots. In the background, the labels of a card index loom out of the darkness around his head like a sort of scholarly halo: an image of volumes yet unread, thoughts still to be condensed at the tip of the pen poised in his fleshy right hand.
Benjamin attracts such metaphorical fancies, symbols of a life's work at once supernaturally precise and rigorously mysterious. His own favoured symbol for the scattered unity of his writing was that of the constellation: a stellar array of apparently unrelated points rendered into magical coherence by the powers of thought and intuition. This third volume in Harvard's essential selection from his huge corpus offers something like a deep-space photograph of Benjamin's enigmatic universe: a book as fascinating for scholars as it is enrapturing for any reader as yet unseduced by this most sensitive and audacious of writers.
Born in Berlin in 1892 into a wealthy Jewish family, Benjamin might have taken a traditional, if distinguished, academic route; but as a Jew, he was debarred from the university position he craved for so long. His father's refusal to fund an unpaid post, and the failure of his scholarly thesis on 17th-century German drama, ruined his ambition (the first in a litany of wretchedly arbitrary setbacks). Instead, the writer's life fractured into a series of fragile and provisional "careers": snapshots of Benjamin as militantly independent intellectual, accomplished literary journalist, critical champion of avant-garde art, presenter of delightfully ruminative radio programmes for children.
He fled Germany in 1933 for a precarious exile in Paris, there to labour at his great fragmentary (and in the end, unfinished) work, The Arcades Project: a phantasmagorical "history" of 19-century Paris. It was in the 1930s, too, that he wrote his most famous essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', a still startling examination of the effects of mechanisation on the arts. Benjamin was fascinated by the proliferation of the copy in modern culture: a ceaseless doubling of reality that rendered impossible any access to the "original" that lurked behind the images of cinema and photography.
For Benjamin, the morganatic marriage of culture and modernity was always an ambiguous union: potentially liberating (so he hoped, alongside the likes of Brecht and the Surrealists), yet its lethal offspring was fascism.
In the end, despite the best efforts of friends and colleagues who had already escaped the coming European chaos, Benjamin could not evade its implacable advance.
Planning to escape via Spain to America, he fetched up at the border in the autumn of 1940, only to find the frontier closed and his last hope dashed. Exhausted and ill, he took his own life; in a final, horrible irony, the Spanish authorities promptly opened the border to his fellow refugees.
If Benjamin's death seems hopelessly tragic in its squalid irony, the key text reproduced here, 'A Berlin Childhood Around 1900', is a reminder of the astonishing courage and modesty of a writer who, in the mid-1930s, was fully and painfully aware both of the coming catastrophe and of what precisely had been lost already (both personally and collectively).
The essay's opening sentence is simply heartbreaking in its melancholy laconism: "In 1932, when I was abroad, it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth". Readers of W.G. Sebald will recognise here one source for that writer's characteristically stranded opening lines: the tentative realisation that any possible future will be won only at the cost of an excruciating reappraisal of what has gone before and can never be felt again.
'A Berlin Childhood' is an extraordinary work: as if the extravagant wanderings of Joyce and Proust in the labyrinths of memory and the city had been condensed and refracted to a kaleidoscopic 60 pages.
It is less a memoir than a hallucinated inventory of the space of childhood, an eerie projection of the most intimate and exposed places in the author's recollection, "images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated in a child of the middle class".
In an alternative (more knowingly theoretical) version of the essay, Benjamin had recalled a moment when, sitting outside a café in Paris, he had suddenly grasped the shape of his life in the shape of a diagram showing all its complex correspondences and connections. The picture he drew (and later lost) was of a labyrinth. 'A Berlin Childhood Around 1900' is the closest he came to rendering that maze in words: it imagines the city as a series of resonant nooks and crannies, suffused with an adult's longing that is never merely individual but which reconstructs a whole historical era in the sound of a carpet being beaten in a courtyard or the "giant bloom of plush" that was his grandmother's apartment.
Inevitably, minor childhood traumas prefigure mature miseries, the time and space of childhood and adulthood interweaving in the most telling ways.
His aversion to rising early is both endearing and terrible; dragging himself from bed, the child manages to overcome his fatigue on the way to school. "Of course, no sooner had I arrived than, at the touch of my bench, all the weariness that at first seemed dispelled returned with a vengeance. And with it this wish: to be able to sleep my fill. I must have made that wish a thousand times, and later it actually came true. But it was a long time before I recognised its fulfilment in the fact that all my cherished hopes for a position and proper livelihood had been in vain."
Benjamin's autobiographical masterpiece might alone justify this sedulously edited and beautifully translated volume. But here, too, alongside an outline of The Arcades Project and an early version of the 'Work of Art' essay, are his thoughts on a wondrous variety of subjects - Kafka, Brecht, painting and photography, carnivals, the problem of translation - as well as a host of supposedly "minor" writings (fragments, letters, diary entries) which often turn out to be among his most beautiful or thought-provoking.
Wandering in the labyrinth of Benjamin's works, I happened on my own autobiographical image, a memory-flash from the first blush of a romance with his writing: a quotation - "there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" - which burst like a firework above an otherwise forgotten undergraduate lecture.
It is no exaggeration to say that Benjamin's writing changes lives, lights up unknown landscapes of art and politics, even at this historical remove. If his thought lives on (some random avatars: Sebald, John Berger, Iain Sinclair, the visionary cinema of Chris Marker), it does so in the sense that Baudelaire's 19th century survived for Benjamin in the 20th: less a reminder of the past than a signpost to the future. There is no more incisive or elegant guide to that territory.
Brian Dillon teaches literature at the University of Kent
Selected Writings: Volume 3 1935-1938. By Walter Benjamin, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. by Edmund
Jephcott, Howard Eiland and others Harvard University Press, 512pp. £26.50