Walter Benjamin - Walter Benjamins Archive: Images, Texts, Signs

The Walter Benjamin Archive
is an Institute of the Hamburg Foundation
for the promotion of knowledge and culture
based in the Academy of Arts Berlin.

First published in paperback by Verso 2015
First published in English by Verso 2007
Translation Esther Leslie 2007, 2015

First published as Walter Benjamins Archive: Bilder, Texte und Zeichen by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 2006 Suhrkamp Verlag 2006; Expose of Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Draft of the Arcades of Paris, Fragments of the General Layout, Layout for the Expose of Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century, and Notes and Materials for the Arcades Project, all reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, pp. 3, 34950, 87376, 91516, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Originally published as Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedeman 1982 by Suhrkamp Verlag; Language and Logic and Language and Logic II, trans. Rodney Livingstone, reprinted by permission of the publisher from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 19131926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, pp. 27273, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism, trans. Howard Eiland, Spain, 1932, trans. Rodney Livingstone, and Little History of Photography, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, reprinted by permission of the publisher from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 19271934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, pp. 35, 63839, 51415, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; A Berlin Chronicle, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings by Walter Benjamin, English translation 1978 by Harcourt, Inc., reprinted by permission of the Publisher.

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Photos

Gisle Freund Estate Gisle Freund, Paris

Germaine Krull Museum Folkwang, Essen

Sasha Stone Serge Stone, Blaricum

Photos supplied courtesy of Friedrich Forssman

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-203-0

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eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-205-4 (US)

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Excavation and Memory

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield those images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insightslike torsos in a collectors gallery. It is undoubtedly useful to plan excavations methodically. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam. And the man who merely makes an inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in todays ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his richest prize. In this sense, for authentic memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them. Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through. SW 2:2, p. 576

Abbreviated sources to be found in bibliography.