On the natural history of ruins

On photographs, memory, and whether Walter Benjamin and W.G. Sebald are melancholic writers.

“...and almost every week we saw the mountains of rubble in places like Berlin or Hamburg, which for a long time I did not associate with the destruction wrought in the closing years of the war, knowing nothing of it, but considered a natural condition of all larger cities.”

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo.

Walter Benjamin at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1937, taken by Gisèle Freund

So much writing on both Walter Benjamin and W.G. Sebald begins with photographs. In one of his many essays on the later German writer, James Wood makes this connection explicit. Writing of his first meeting with Sebald in 1997, when Wood interviewed the newly-famous author and academic at a PEN American Center event, Wood describes Sebald as possessing a specifically Benjaminian and melancholy countenance. As Wood says, Sebald “resembled photographs of a pensive Walter Benjamin.” Yet, while Benjamin’s images possessed merely the depressive aura, or the “atmosphere of drifting melancholy”, for Sebald this is pushed further and made “almost comic by [a] sly self-consciousness.”

Maybe the reception of these great figures through their photograph shouldn’t surprise us considering the centrality of images in the work of each. While images haunt Sebald’s books, famously uncaptioned and often Xeroxed to the point of near-illegibility, Benjamin’s writing on photography was integral to the development of the art form in its comparative infancy. Both too had a kind of imagistic imaginary, a desire to grasp hold of the “image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger,” to quote from Benjamin’s famous final work “On the Concept of History.” Yet there’s also a point where each diverges from such an image, where the photo and the work begin to break apart.

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The most famous series of images of Benjamin are those taken in Paris in 1937 by a young Gisèle Freund. In one of these, Benjamin is sat hunched over his work at the Bibliothèque Nationale, presumably at work on his great, unfinished project on the city’s arcades. There is undoubtedly something melancholy about this image. It possesses a certain intensity and there’s an atmosphere of deep contemplation to Benjamin’s scribbling that we often associate with the melancholic. And this is not merely because we, the viewer 80 years on, already know what will happen to the work and to the man. The picture shows him as a solitary and singular figure, the scholar shunned by the world of letters awaiting his posthumous reception, his greying and thinning hair and the dark shock of a moustache making him almost the paradigmatic mitteleuropean intellectual. Everything about this image of the exiled German writer in Paris appears to speak to the traumas of the twentieth century. His hometown of Berlin, of which he writes so wistfully even before exile, seems to lie in the background, already reduced to a state of ruination — as if he knew of the catastrophes to come.

Seen this way, his life read backward, projected back through his posthumous image, Benjamin becomes the melancholic intellectual avant la letter. Looking at the images taken by Freund, both the Bibliothèque Nationale photograph and the equally famous close-up of him sat head-in-hands, his gaze directed downwards so that it nearly grazes the bottom of the camera’s lens (“the soft, day-dreamer’s gaze of the myopic” according to Sontag), it’s as if we can already read his tragic fate, dead at 48 after taking an overdose of morphine at the Franco-Spanish border town of Port Bou as he attempted to flee soon to be occupied Europe. Sebald too, with his Benjaminian glasses with their thin, round metal frame, and his thick moustache and deeply lined and furrowed brow, seems equally to hold the weight of history in his mind. Another early death, this time following a heart attack whilst driving, just as inevitable. Two melancholics destined to untimely departures.

Such is the usual way of reading these two writers, both of whom lived under the sign of Saturn. Sontag begins her essay on Benjamin with a description of a series of photographs as well. And from this begins the image of Benjamin as melancholic. As Sontag writes, his work “cannot be fully understood unless one grasps how much they rely on a theory of melancholy.” But what is such a theory?

W,G. Sebald

In his 1939 essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin discusses the dissolution of experience in modernity. He sees this as the movement between “long experience” (Erfahrung) and “isolated experience” (Erlebnis). Erfahrung is the traditional form of experience gained through the mingling of an individual's past in memory with “material from the collective past.” It therefore involves some relationship between the individual and tradition, the collective past and present. Erlebnis, however, is the form of experience generalised by the isolation of the modern individual. Here, Benjamin follows Freud in Beyond The Pleasure Principle. For Freud, consciousness is a defence mechanism built to parry the shocks of modern life, and thus stands to prevent the development of shock into trauma via its incorporation into memory. This parrying of shocks is then taken into memory as an isolated moment, or as Erlebnis.

The experience of modernity is thus one in which the modern individual is isolated from tradition and increasingly confronted with new and destabilising experiences. There are then two possible responses to this: one is anaesthetic, one aesthetic. The former is seen in the phantasmogoria, in Baudelaire’s poetry and Wagner's Gesammtkunstwerk, and in Junger's aesthetics of war. Each of these, Benjamin writes, attempted to parry the shocks of modernity by creating an image of it as a surface unity. The second option is the one that Benjamin chooses. It is only by embracing the shocks of modernity that one can overcome them.

It is here that Gillian Rose, in her essay on Benjamin in the elusive collection Judaism and Modernity, criticises Benjamin’s work of historical memory. Here, Rose turns to Freud's discussion of mourning, where the loss of a love-object and the withdrawal of libidinal attachment to that object results in detachment from the world. This demands a painful working through via a process of reality testing — until “respect for reality gains the day” and the ego is free and uninhibited once more. Rose sees Benjamin as stuck in “aberrated mourning,” unworked through mourning. Benjamin's figures of melancholy are not counterposed to mutual recognition or forgiveness, but rather to the “divine,” whether that divine is language or violence. For Rose, Benjamin's work ends thus in a new Trauerspiel (the Baroque “mourning play,” not “tragic drama” as it is usually translated). That is, it ends with the irruption of the divine into the fallen, profane world.

For Rose, Benjamin's mourning is a play, rather than the genuine work of mourning that would end in recognition. Rose points to the repetition of the injunction to remember in “On the Concept of History,” with remembrance acting as “both the method and the outcome of the revolution”. This remembrance is, for Rose, a messianic remembrance, which will resurrect the dead and undo past traumas in the lightening flash of the cessation of happening. Yet, any such remembrance is just as quickly lost again the next instance.

The Angel of History, Benjamin’s famous figure of historical memory based upon Klee’s Angelus Novus, is impotent to prevent past suffering. Yet in such impotence his gaze is firmly fixed on the ruins, both unable to look away and incapable of action to prevent the suffering of the ruined world. Stuck between remembrance of past traumas, always alive, and the melancholic inaction and withdrawal from the world, this angel can only yearn for other-worldly redemption. Rose counterposes this angel with another of Klee's angels, the Angelus Dubiosus, which constantly risks itself “for ideas and for others,” yet, with the recognition of brokenness that comes after at dusk, after the taking stock that happens at the end of the day.

Rose's neo-Hegelianism is one which is open to the experience of fragility, failure and incompletion, yet, alongside Hegel, still emphasises the working through of history, in what philosopher Irving Wohlfarth likened to a “philosophico-digestive system.” In such a system nothing is lost, all is retained, in the process of the phenomenological working through of the history of spirit.

Paul Klee’s Angelus Dubiosus

Again, after Sontag, after Rose, we have Benjamin the melancholic. Melancholy prevents action. If mourning is work, then melancholy is stasis, a sitting with the trauma, destined forever to remember and repeat.

Benjamin in his famous set of theses “On the Concept of History,” quotes Gotfried Keller's statement that “the truth will not run away from us”. For Benjamin, though, this is wrong. Instead he insists that history is emphatically incomplete. It will in fact always run away from us. Neither the past nor the present are finished, we are not through yet with either. As such neither the past nor the present can be fully possessed by each other – each one always exceeds the other’s grasp. There is in this always hope, for action, for change. One must also seek to grasp the handbrake, to stop the train of destruction.

Such is Benjamin’s melancholy. For a writer like this, whose life seems to determine so much of his reception, we need to resist the temptation to read him as a melancholic. Instead, what he attempted was to bear witness to the destruction of the century, and in such witnessing both hope to discover the fullness of the individual and collective past.

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But what of Sebald? There is certainly far more melancholy in his work than in Benjamin’s. But there is a similar urge to bear witness. To quote from Rings of Saturn:"

“From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing ever more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.”

This is a deeply melancholic vision. If we are, collectively, simply a brightness, a luminescence, and if “combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create”, then it is merely a question of how we will burn out, and when.