Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Walter Benjamin
III, p. 388). His carefulness stood him in good stead early on, and his friends ensured the conservation of the scripts passed to them as reservoirs of his thought and writing. “But now the moment has come,” Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem on May 31, 1933, “when you must allow me to shake a few meager fruits from the tree of conscientiousness which has its roots in my heart and its leaves in your archive” (Benjamin/Scholem Correspondence, p. 53).
Benjamin was extremely conscientious not only in distributing and conserving his works. The archival logging of his manuscripts and collections was an equally important task. He compiled a catalog (which is no longer in existence) of the contents of his library (Correspondence, p. 306) and he kept a notebook with meticulous details of his reading since graduation from high school (Correspondence, p. 268). This catalog, preserved in a small black leather lined notebook, begins with entry number 462 (the previous list of items is missing) and registers Benjamin’s reading from the age of twenty-two, in 1917, until 1939: it ends with Robert Hichens’ Le Toque noire (1939), which bears the number 1712. Another notebook preserves bibliographical lists on various themes such as “Romantic Journals,” “Gnomic Science,” “Mythological Research,” and “Greek and Roman Literature.” Numerous card indexes and scraps of paper with addresses, excerpts, and literature lists are likewise preserved. Benjamin ordered some of these odds and ends thematically, separated into envelopes marked with lists of their contents (fig. 1.1). A note on a slip of paper in the bequest mentions a “friendship book with quotation entries” (WBA 210/12), which Benjamin must have once possessed. And lastly there are also catalogs detailing the contents of his archive. An early inventory, left behind in his apartment when he fled Berlin, is presented here (figs 1.2 and 1.3). It is written in black ink on a chamois-colored piece of paper, which is folded in the middle to make a double sheet. Additional corrections, addenda, crossings out, and colored marks indicate that Benjamin contributed to it over a long period of time and reworked it on several occasions. The itemization it provides is a research tool, a floor plan of Benjamin’s archive. On the basis of this inventory, the life and writing of Benjamin can be traced in model form.
The inventory comprises thirty groups. Predominant amongst them is correspondence but there are also headings for manuscripts by others, personal and business documents, and his own writings. His writings are classified according to thematic aspects relating to content, as well as partly in relation to their written format (“printed,” “only in handwriting,” “typewritten”). The arrangement is systematic, “but according to a surprising coherence that is incomprehensible to the profane” (GS III, pp. 216f). Measured against any conventional system, Benjamin’s ordering appears distorted, affected by subjective memories and meanings. His classifications—including “Letters from deceased people except for Fritz Heinle and Rika Seligson” and “Letters from all living male correspondents except for relatives and Gerhardi, Blumenthal, Sachs, Wolf Heinle / In addition letters from Jula [Cohn]”—evidence a personal relationship to the material, in which the writers continue to live. It is as if only certain people might be brought together, while others must be kept apart from each other or be given their own separate place. These living connections break through the “mild boredom of order” (SW 2:2, p. 486), recognizing in things less their “functional, utilitarian value” than the “scene, the stage, of their fate” (SW 2:2, p. 487).
Each of the archival containers—folders, files, envelopes, cases, and boxes—is precisely described by an indication of the brand (Sönneken), color, size, provenance (“cardboard envelope from The Demons”), as well as any material peculiarities (“with crest,” “extendable”) or breakages (“torn in half”). These containers are aids in systematizing the material. At the same time, they offer protection against damage: they stow away and preserve the papers stored in them, holding them together in one place. For Benjamin, the securing of his archive was an important task in several regards. Mechanical damage to papers was mended with thin strips of vellum or the edges of sheets of stamps or, as in one case, sewn with needle and thread (figs 1.4 and 1.5). In the mid-1930s he arranged for The Arcades Project to be photographically reproduced and he sent the images to the Institute for Social Research in New York for safekeeping. He made transcriptions of his writings (or had them made) and sent them to friends and colleagues with the request, “please store the manuscript carefully” (GB I, p. 452). When it came to requests for their return or for them to be sent on to someone else, he asked, on various occasions, that they be insured, and indicated the estimated value. His “Memorandum on the Mexican Seminar,” for example, which he requested Scholem return, was assessed by him immodestly “at a value of 400M” (GB I, p. 453). According to an early note written in Berlin, he stored photographs “in the large bureau—middle compartment, small drawer at the bottom on the right” (fig. 1.6). He also owned a “magazine chest” (WBA 210/12). In the last apartment he inhabited in Berlin there was a locked manuscript cupboard (see GB IV, p. 90), in which Benjamin kept the residues of his life and writing, the “masked” things of his existence, ordered “in drawers, chests, and boxes” (SW 3, p. 403).
While the inventory evidences the significance that Benjamin attributed to his own writings, it provides just as precisely confirmation of the loss of documents from the years prior to exile. Some things listed were destroyed or are assumed missing—such as a large part of the correspondence, including letters from Grete Radt, his parents, Franz Sachs, Wolf Heinle, and other friends from the milieu of the youth movement. Whether and which of the “Philosophical works, Fragments” are lost is very difficult to ascertain. Proofs of published writings, which Benjamin most probably kept in the brown cardboard box with a crest on it, have survived. In a letter to Scholem on October 28, 1931 Benjamin indicates the “archival precision with which I preserve and catalog everything of mine that has appeared in print” (Correspondence, p. 385). Presumably this is a reference to the Catalogue of My Published Works, which is amongst the papers of the bequest (fig. 1.7). This consists of ten written sheets, some of which have writing on the reverse side and it collates—if not quite exhaustively—436 entries from the years 1911 to 1939. It is to be assumed that he arranged for a secretary to type up the copy that is in the archive (Ts. 2379–2393). Up until 1928 every entry was also individually transferred to an index card (WBA 218). Benjamin collected sheets of his published work, snipped them out (or received them as offprints) and then stuck them to large sheets with gummed strips. These were then furnished with details of sources and corrections, additions, and observations (fig. 1.8).
Through all of this careful ordering and classification of his papers, the compilation of bibliographic catalogs, the lists of themes and books, the collections of excerpts and notes, a mode of work is documented, which aims at something far more than the mere securing and stock-taking of knowledge. Benjamin’s archive represents a reserve of drafts, thoughts, and quotations. And yet what is collected is not only supposed to be held in safekeeping: it is also to be used productively and grounded in the present. For, as Benjamin notes in Excavation and Memory, “he who merely makes an inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his richest prize” (SW 2:2, p. 576).
Figures
1.1 Envelope for literature lists and notes on various themes.
1.2 and 1.3 Early inventory of Walter Benjamin’s archive—Manuscript on a double sheet, two sides.