Between Wars

By R.Z. Sheppard

REFLECTIONS by Walter Benjamin; Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich; 348 pages; $12.95

Critic Walter Benjamin had no claims on fame and little influence during his lifetime. He committed suicide in September 1940 at the Franco-Spanish border when his exit visa was not accepted and he feared, as a Jew and socialist intellectual, forced repatriation to Germany. His essays were not collected and published until 1955. Thirteen years later they were translated into English and appeared under the title Illuminations. By that time, Benjamin had become a posthumous culture hero of Europe's new left.

Illuminations contained pieces on Kafka, Baudelaire, Proust, Brecht and the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In it Benjamin related the development of 20th century mass movements and the mechanical means of mass art. Consider his observations on the film actor as a manipulated prop: "Let us assume," he wrote, "that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and cut into the screen version. Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the 'beautiful semblance' which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive."

Film making is a form of collage, and the beautiful semblance seems to have been an experience of wholeness that was missing from Benjamin's life. His background was not suited for survival in the '20s and '30s. As a youth he had the advantages that his father, a successful Berlin art dealer, could provide. Yet like so many young upper-middle-class intellectuals, Benjamin rejected the very bourgeois values that had enabled him to loll around reading Marx, collecting rare first editions and traveling. He thought of himself as a private man of letters, a scholar-prince supported by stipends from his family. Unfortunately his father's money was not always enough. Parental disagreements and later Germany's ruinous inflation burst Benjamin's financial cushion and forced him to live by his pen. He put the problem of freelancing succinctly when he wrote, "There are places in which I can earn a minimum and places in which I can live on a minimum, but there is no place where I can do both."

He tried in Moscow, Marseille, Paris, Naples as well as Berlin, cities whose textures and pungencies he focused with astonishing force in his writings. Thirsty for experience, Benjamin became a passionate stroller-observer who conveyed the impression that the streets bent to meet his oncoming perceptions. His pieces about Europe's great cosmopolitan centers contain the best writing in this translation of Reflections. The book is just that: reflections of a highly polished mind that uncannily approximate the century's fragments of shattered traditions.

Essays on surrealism, the mimetic faculty, Brecht and the Austrian polemicist Karl Kraus support Hannah Arendt's claim that Benjamin was the most important German critic between the world wars. His romantic attachment to anarchy and violence as messianic salvations may remind some readers of Norman Mailer at his steamiest. Yet at times, Benjamin's insights cast prophetic shadows. On the effect of film and advertising, for example: "Before a child of our time finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight."

His advice to writers contains both wit and sober utility: "Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial . The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it ... Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honor requires that one break off only at an appointed moment . . . Avoid everyday mediocrity. Semirelaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading." Benjamin ends his list with "The work is the death mask of its conception."

It is the perfect exit line for a man whose voice reaches us so many years after it was stilled.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.