Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/91
2006
393-4
BERND WITTE (ED.): Benjamin und das Exil. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. 132 pp. € 22,80.
91
2006
John McCole
cg393-40419
Besprechungen / Reviews 419 philosophers think of themselves as offering: arguments. Consider the opening passage of her book: «Although untimely, the end of art is always up to the moment, for it can be near or can already have taken place. Whatever else the end of art may be, it is presumption. That the end of art, whether fortunately or regrettably, has so far turned out to be a matter of speech and rhetoric, a topos in any case, and perhaps even a discourse, does not mitigate its urgency in any given scenario» (1). It is hard to believe that these philosophers offered only «speech and rhetoric,» but it is convenient for Geulen to claim so much. Reducing these philosophers’ work to a string of rhetorical gestures has the effect establishing her thesis without her actually having to support it. If all they do is spin around in the void of «discourse,» of course they will seem to be offering nothing more than a way of merely talking about art. This is not to say that Guelen is wrong (I doubt she is). It is to say that she has virtually no interest in giving philosophical support to her thesis. This is a rather severe sin for a work that deals with philosophical material. Readers who see the philosophers she discusses as more than just rhetoricians will be unhappy. Indeed, they will think Geulen refuses to listen to these philosophers, jumping to find «ambiguity» in their «discourse» before even pausing to reason out what it is they are actually trying to say. Geulen’s driving thesis is, evidently, a philosophical one, but since her treatment of it is purely rhetorical, one finishes the book quite confused about what to do with it. Despite these criticisms, Geulen’s book is worth reading. Although her approach can be philosophically frustrating, her prose (in John McFarland’s translation) is often lively and exciting, and no one will be bored. The work is self-indulgent but spirited and bold, and even when the author is at her most frustrating, she still manages to provoke thought in very fruitful ways. Again, her thesis is startling. It is the sort of claim that generates discussion, and one imagines that it will be the focus of much debate. Even if Geulen does not defend her thesis in the way one would wish, her book is of considerable value for bringing it to our attention. University of Louisville John Gibson B ERND W ITTE (E D .): Benjamin und das Exil. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. 132 pp. € 22,80. This slim volume brings the topics of Walter Benjamin and exile into conjunction by collecting papers selected from two conferences, one directly concerned with Benjamin and exile, the other a symposium on the broader topic of German literature in exile. The result is more suggestive than tightly integrated, which is the nature of many a conference volume, but in this case the tensions are instructive. Benjamin’s experience of exile is not a new topic. His suicide at the Spanish border with France as a political refugee in 1940 has become the emblematic fact about his life, and Benjamin’s existence in exile has been the subject of earlier studies, including Chryssoula Kambas’s Walter Benjamin im Exil (1983) and Geret Luhr’s collection of letters and documents «was noch begraben lag»: Zu Walter Benjamins Exil (2000). The essays in Witte’s collection prompt us to think about Benjamin and exile in two 420 Besprechungen / Reviews less biographical, more challenging ways. Roughly half the essays in the volume raise the question of the how the experience of exile left traces in the images and concepts of his work from the 1930s. Just what does it mean to describe any of Benjamin’s works as an exile work? The remaining papers pose questions of comparison: how might Benjamin’s conceptual and literary figurations of exile compare to those of other authors? And how might concepts from his work - concepts that were decisively shaped by exile - help us to illuminate theirs? Bernd Witte’s opening essay «Heimat Exil. Von Heinrich Heine zu Walter Benjamin» provides the volume’s overture by placing both Heine and Benjamin in what Witte characterizes as a specifically Jewish tradition of exile, memory, and collective redemption. While his sketch of this tradition might seem suited to provide a sounding board for comparison, his own most effective analyses give a rich, concise account of what it means to call Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach a work of exile. Witte’s marvelous essay evokes, but never states, the links between Benjamin and this tradition. Rolf Goebel’s «Großstadterfahrung und das Exil in der Moderne» begins with the volume’s most explicit attempt to spell out the various dimensions of the concept of exile, which he identifies as «loss of tradition, accelerated social mobility, migration, cultural hybridity, deterritorialization, [and] multiple subject-constructions» (36). He proposes a reading of Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk through the lens of these experiences - which, he asserts, have since become radicalized in «global postmodernity» (42). Henriette Herwig’s essay on Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900 fashions some of the volume’s most powerful and interesting conclusions by making conspicuous use of the traditional methods of philology - comparing different versions of the text, and going to the archives to track down alternative versions of «Muhme Rehlen» and «Das bucklichte Männlein.» She shows us in detail how images in Berlin Childhood provide «poetological metaphors for the writing process of an author whose very existence was threatened» (46). Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky surveys Benjamin’s lifelong and even posthumous connections with Switzerland through the lens of a neglected text, his 1931 review Chrut und Uchrut. In the process, she provides a valuable reminder about what might be called Benjamin’s first experience as a political refugee: his move to Bern in 1917, motivated principally by his desire to continue avoiding military service during World War I. In the piece that opens the volume’s series of comparative essays, Irène Heidelberger-Leonard devotes most of her attention to Jean Améry’s postwar reflections on exile and Jewish identity. While she begins by posing the obvious question about Benjamin and Améry - «can one imagine two more exemplary antipodes? » - she then gently but firmly points to subtler affinities between two «wounded mavericks, outsiders, and late developers» who both, as exiles, came to understand their childhood as «a paradise in which expulsion had already been inscribed» (88-89). In the two following articles, Claudia Öhlschläger and Karl Ivan Solibakke take the alternate approach of using motifs drawn from Benjamin’s poetics of memory and his concept of history, themselves marked by his experience of exile, to illuminate works by Améry, W.G. Sebald, and Arnold Daghani. Both pieces are reflections on documents of what Solibakke aptly calls a «traumatized culture of memory, which relentlessly dedicates itself to the unspeakability of human suffering» (114). Peter Weibel’s brief conclud- Besprechungen / Reviews 421 ing piece, «Kultur als Exil,» dramatically widens the comparative perspective from particular authors and experiences of exiles to «culture» and «exile» as such. He contrasts the transnational biographies and cultural achievements of neglected migrants, refugees, and exiles with the oppressive logic of national identities and conceptions of Heimat, which he reduces to their manipulative «geopolitical function[s]» (125). Culture, he asserts, is «a medium of absence» that exists only in conjunction with exile (129). Hovering over much of the volume is the suggestion that Benjamin’s figuration and conceptualization of exile could be seen as having paradigmatic significance for understanding what Goebel calls contemporary «global postmodernity.» Witte, going even further, characterizes our world as one that may be becoming «an enormous site of exile» in which exile may be losing «its specific contour» (34). But the further the volume goes in the direction of this sort of abstraction, the more attenuated its insights. When speculation ranges into characterizations of «the» experiences of exile as an allegory of modernity per se, a cipher for an allegedly universal process of progressive alienation, it sacrifices the texture and specificity that the conjunction of Benjamin and exile might make possible. This volume’s best insights can be found in the middle ground between biographical specificity and overreaching generalization: in Witte’s insights into Heine; where Hellwig discovers genuinely new things about the figure of the little hunchback; where Heidelberger-Leonard asks us to look at Benjamin and Améry and think again; or where we test Benjamin’s poetics of memory in readings of other exile texts. Goebel’s essay includes a call for work in this middle ground, but the temptation to overreach sometimes proves difficult to resist. Unexamined in this volume is the full variety of Benjamin’s own complex experiences of exile and estrangement from any sort of «home.» After all, Benjamin fled Germany regularly from 1917 onward. He began living an extraterritorial existence long before becoming a political exile. In the 1920s, he felt more «at home» in Paris than in Frankfurt, a city he dreaded. His compulsive travel and self-dislocation before 1933 must be taken into account if we want to grasp how his work registered the experience of political exile. As Herwig points out, Benjamin described it as the purpose of Berlin Childhood to inoculate himself against the illusions of homesickness. «Home,» he discovered, had prefigured the broken experiences of political exile. University of Oregon John McCole L AURA B RADLEY : Brecht and Political Theatre: The Mother on Stage. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. xii + 261 pp. $ 125. Bradley’s revised dissertation examines the volatile production and reception history of Brecht’s play Die Mutter, arguably his most openly communist «Stück,» from the early 1930s to the early twenty-first century. Frequently quoting from archival materials, theater reviews, and interviews, she dedicates the first chapter to the genesis and premiere of the play (1931-32), which was based on a novel by Gorky and written by Brecht in collaboration with Günter Weisenborn, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and the composer Hanns Eisler. The second chapter discusses Brecht’s shifting performance
