level in order that it not “revolt him.” He did not lack in opportunities to publish bad stuff, but he did lack the courage needed to write it, he claimed (GB III, p. 414). His reviewing and his work for radio are, therefore, not to be seen purely as chores. A tolerably stable system of public activity collapsed, prior indeed to February 1933, once the press and radio were brought under a new political line. In exile in France, the opportunities for earning an income reduced dramatically, even though Benjamin was capable of writing in the tongue of his host land. Indeed Paris of all places was the one place where he could barely procure the cost of living: “There are places where I could earn a minimal income, and places where I could live on a minimal income, but not a single place where these two conditions coincide” (Correspondence, p. 402). How could he ever finance the primary researches for the books on Baudelaire and the arcades, which, after all, could only be undertaken in the Bibliothèque Nationale? In a letter dated July 20, 1938, Benjamin told his acquaintance Kitty Marx-Steinschneider, a resident of Jerusalem, of the difficulties of engaging with a larger project after months of unstable existence and countless obstacles. “I got behind with my ongoing projects and this always led to more or less disjointed scribbling, which then kept me on the go again for quite some time” (Correspondence, p. 568)1.
The word “paperwork” indicates—as the formulation “income paperwork” (GB III, p. 414) makes clear—a certain disdain for the results of the work. “I had to make a start on something new, something quite different and was handicapped by journalistic-diplomatic scribbles” (GB III, p. 321), as he put it as early as January 1928, prior to the appearance of One-Way Street. Benjamin liked to describe those works that kept him from other work as “allotria.” In similar fashion, he used the term “scrap” (verzetteln): as “disperse,” “hack up,” “lose,” “waste”—regarding the scrap as a handicap or hindrance preventing him from making something new, working on something else, doing something “essential.” He used his last bit of money to amalgamate his books, which were split between Berlin and Paris, at Brecht’s house in Svendborg, “so as not to lose hold of my library by virtue of its being spread [Verzettelung] throughout Europe” (Correspondence, p. 450), as he told Gershom Scholem in July 1934. In January 1934, when he sent the manuscript of Berlin Childhood around 1900 to Hermann Hesse (who had praised One-Way Street highly), he bemoaned that fact that, owing to his distance from Germany and the powerlessness that it implied, he was abandoned to an editorial that “did not accommodate” the manuscript “under its title or author, but rather printed it in scraps as individual contributions to the newspaper supplements” (GB IV, p. 334). The counter-image to this, which was never actually achieved, would be something completed, concentrated, collected, and undivided. Berlin Childhood counted for Benjamin as scrapped. It was one of his “shattered books” (Correspondence, p. 512).2
Benjamin acknowledged with gratitude every effort to safeguard his manuscripts. He appreciated a bibliographic mention of his works, published by the historian and theologian Karl Thieme in a journal titled Religious Reflection: it was “a genuine endorsement to hear of a reader here and there, who has been able to make himself at home in my scraps of writings, in some way or another” (GB IV, p. 394). He saw himself “in a span of history and life,” as he explained to Scholem in February 1935, “in which the final collecting together of the infinite scraps of my production seems less conceivable, indeed more improbable than ever” (GB V, p. 47). It was impossible for him to gather the scraps together, but it is owing to his calculations and the conscientiousness of his friends, that the improbable was still possible after his death. His bequest bears witness to the dogged attempt to write under adverse conditions.
And it tells the story of an extraordinary writing project in which aestheticism and pragmatism are held in balance. Benjamin used the choicest materials. But to an increasing degree, his life situation made any luxury in his working conditions impossible. In exile, it would seem, economic need dictated that everything he got his hands on be used (or re-used): the reverse sides of letters sent to him, postcards or an invitation to review, library forms, travel tickets, proofs, an advertisement for “S. Pellegrino,” prescription pads discarded by his friend Fritz Fränkel, doctor and drug connoisseur (figs 2.3–2.9). The formats are fascinating: some scraps are no bigger than 4.5cm × 9cm. But Benjamin was able to utilize every last square millimeter. And he left behind a wealth of compressed sheets, notes, scraps, on which his great work unfolds richly detailed.
The structure of Benjamin’s bequest is not only indebted to necessity. It exhibits idiosyncrasies in its modes of production, peculiar methods of thought and writing. “An economy of scraps just like in my family,” a distant relation exclaimed recently on seeing Benjamin’s condensed notes. Benjamin wrote constantly. When an idea occurred to him he did not delay its writing down by seeking out the right piece of paper, but rather used the nearest suitable thing at hand. In this way key thoughts are fixed in passing, “scrawled down,” often on the margins of other works or directly interleaved in them (figs 2.10 and 2.11). And of course he knew the meaning of the concept “verzetteln” prevalent in library science or lexicography: “to excerpt,” “to disperse things that belong together into individual slips or into the form of a card index.”
The court library at Vienna introduced a card index catalog around 1780, because the bound catalog could not accommodate the flood of entries. Parish registers are entered on slips or even card, in order to be able to deploy the individual entries independently of the place of their transmission, and to be able to order them according to different criteria. Transfer to individual scraps or cards makes possible lexical projects such as the Goethe-Dictionary, which began to index the Weimar edition on slips of paper in 1946. Slips or their stronger sisters, index cards—of which the Journal for Organisation declared in 1929, “cards can do everything”—stand out because of their flexibility, and thus they represent modernity.
Benjamin recognized the artistic potential of this method of sorting: Mallarmé named as his own “a working instrument for poetry in the form of a card file” (SW 4, p. 117). In the section “Attested Auditor of Books”, in One-Way Street, Benjamin points out a revolution in the administration of knowledge. The present mode of scholarly production demonstrates that the book is already “an outdated mediation between two different filing systems”: “For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index” (SW I, p. 456). Benjamin repeatedly treated the elements of his text according to the principle of building blocks: he copied them out, cut them out, stuck them on new sheets of paper and arranged them anew, long before such procedures became established in electronic word-processing under the name “copy and paste”—and before the appearance of the German computer program Zettelwirtschaft [Paper Jumble], which was developed to order and re-order notes. Benjamin’s idea of composing a work entirely of quotations ensures that the material within the collection can remain mobile, elements can be shifted at will. At the outset all material is of equal value: knowledge that is organized in slips and scraps knows no hierarchy.
Figures
2.1 Types of Knowledge (1921)—Manuscript, one side. Compare GS VI, p. 48.
2.2 Language and Logic 1 (1921)—Manuscript, one side. Compare SW 1, p. 272.
