Walter Benjamin - The Storyteller Essays

WALTER BENJAMIN (18921940) was the oldest of three siblings born to an intellectual Jewish family in Berlin. From 1912 to 1915, he studied philosophy at the Universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich, befriending the young philosopher Gershom Scholem at the latter. In 1917, Benjamin transferred again, to the University of Bern, where he met and married Dora Sophie Kellner; their son, Stefan, was born in 1918. While working on the periphery of the academy, he wrote parables, criticism, and short stories; translated Baudelaires Tableau Parisien and two volumes of Prousts In Search of Lost Time; made major contributions to twentieth-century criticism and thought in essays such as The Task of the Translator, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, and Theses on the Philosophy of History; and worked on his unclassifiable and unfinished Arcades Project. After Hitlers rise to power, Benjamin fled Germany for Ibiza, Nice, and finally, Paris. In 1938 he was arrested and imprisoned in a furniture factory in Burgundy. After his release and the day before the Germans invaded Paris, he and his sister fled to Portbou, on the Spanish border. Carrying a leather suitcase with an unknown manu-script inside, Benjamin made the grueling crossing over the Pyrenees to Spain, where his request for entry was rejected by the local authorities; that night he committed suicide.

SAMUEL TITAN is an editor and translator based in Brazil. He teaches comparative literature at the University of So Paulo.

TESS LEWIS has translated works from the French and German, including books by Peter Handke, Anselm Kiefer, Philippe Jaccottet, and Christine Angot. Her awards include the 2017 PEN Translation Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She serves as the co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee and is an advisory editor for The Hudson Review.

THE STORYTELLER ESSAYS

WALTER BENJAMIN

Edited and with an introduction by

SAMUEL TITAN

Translated from the German by

TESS LEWIS

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Translation copyright 2019 by Tess Lewis

Introduction copyright 2019 by Samuel Titan

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Lorenz Frlich, Tod und Wandrer (Death and Wanderer), illustration from the Schsischer

Volkskalender for 1848; courtesy Universitts- und Landesbibliothek Dsseldorf

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Benjamin, Walter, 18921940, author. | Lewis, Tess, translator. | Titan, Samuel, editor, writer of introduction. | Benjamin, Walter, 18921940.

Storytellers.

Title: The storyteller essays / by Walter Benjamin ; trans. by Tess Lewis ; edited and introduction by Samuel Titan.

Other titles: Walter Benjamins Storytellers

Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2019. | Series: New York Review Books classics.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018036771 (print) | LCCN 2018058293 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681370590 (epub) | ISBN 9781681370583 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Benjamin, Walter, 18921940Translations into English. | Benjamin, Walter, 18921940Books and reading. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German. | FICTION / Short Stories (single author).

Classification: LCC PT2603.E455 (ebook) | LCC PT2603.E455 A2 2019 (print) | DDC 838/.91209dc 3

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036771

ISBN 978-1-68137-059-0

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

B OOKS have their fates, and the same probably applies to essays. The fate of The Storyteller is, in any case, a fine example of just how surprising the career of a text can be. The work of a German Jewish exile trying to scrape together a living after the Nazi takeover in 1933, it purports to discuss the stories of a great but lesser-read Russian writerbut then veers off into a number of other topics. The piece appeared in 1937 in the very last issue of an eccentric Swiss review, which counted a mere thirty-five subscribers at the time. Its author committed suicide three years later, as he fled occupied France, leaving behind a dispersed body of critical work and a formidable mass of unfinished manuscripts. None of this looks like the stuff a success story is made of, and yet Walter Benjamins The Storyteller has become one of the best-known literary essays of the twentieth century. Widely familiar to students of literature, it is also regularly featured on reading lists in fields such as anthropology, media studies, and creative writinga remarkable reversal of fate when one considers the essays obscure beginnings.

Benjamins renown owes much to the loyalty of the likes of Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Georges Bataille, to name just a few of those who kept his memory alive after the war. His writings and correspondence were devoutly unearthed, footnoted, and printed in multiple formats, from cheap paperbacks for undergraduates to multivolume hardbound editions of his complete writings, both in German and in translation. Right now, Suhrkamp Verlag, Benjamins publisher in his homeland, is halfway through its second take on his complete works, a densely annotated critical edition quite reminiscent of classical scholarship. Given that, why another collection of his essaysand, more to the point, why one like this, centered on The Storyteller?

The answer has to do exactly with the popularity of the essay, which all too often is presented as a stand-alone text, a brilliant piece of literary theory, or a poetic exercise in historical nostalgia that the reader can appreciate without, say, having to tackle Benjamins dense dissertation Origin of the German Trauerspiel or getting lost in the maze of his unfinished Arcades Project. The fluent prose of The Storyteller, full of memorable formulations and striking images, tends to confirm this preconception, and indeed the essay seems to have taken shape unusually easily for Benjamin. Begun around late March 1936, it was probably finished by June, though it was only in the summer of the following year that it came out in Fritz Liebs review Orient und Occidentquick work indeed when compared to the tortuous genesis of some of Benjamins other major essays.

The essay and its origins are, however, more complicated than this would suggest. The Storyteller was the outcome of a long train of thought that goes back to Benjamins student days in Berlin and gathers momentum in the second half of the 1920s. From 1926 to 1936, he published a number of piecesessays, newspaper articles, book reviews, short stories, etc.in which he tested concepts and probed images and observations that would finally converge in his critical portrait of Nikolai Leskov. The Storyteller Essays puts The Storyteller in the company of these texts, the better to chart the development of Benjamins thoughts about three key concepts in the 1936 essay: experience, tradition, and storytelling. Read in the company of its forerunners, one can hear how The Storyteller resonates with his larger themes and recognize its place at the heart of his oeuvre, next to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and the Baudelaire essays of the 1930s. Last but not least, this volume offers a revealing glimpse of the dynamics of Benjamins writing: the way he tries out an idea in one context only to take it up againsometimes quoting himself verbatimin quite another; his manner of smuggling ideas from authors like Michel de Montaigne or Paul Valry to reflect his own, different concerns; and his gift for aphorismsphrases that he would sometimes polish over the course of years (for example, Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience)but equally for jarringly abrupt, montage-like transitions.