The Storyteller (3 page)

But play is not something that resides in a world far from worldly affairs. Play involves toys, and toys emerge from the world of work, from particular webs of social relations, as Benjamin observed of the Russian toys that he saw in a Soviet museum during a 1926–7 visit.
⁴¹
These were made by craft labour, and they had found a safe asylum in the museum. The toys would not survive outside the museum's cabinets. The web of relations that formed them was dying. Though precious, they could not be works of art precisely because of their relation to the hand that made them and the hand that would play with them. In a note, Benjamin observes, ‘Toy is hand tool – not artwork.'
⁴²
That is to say, toys are tools for grasping the domain of the greater forms on which they base themselves. Handmade and manipulated by the hand as the child plays, they allow the child to pry a way into the cosmos of play and beyond that into the world itself.

Play is also present where Benjamin imagines strategies for revolutionary overhaul. His 1928 review essay ‘Toys and Play' considers the repetitive aspect of children's playful engagements.
⁴³
The essay reflects on the ways in which children play, a topic which, according to him, has fallen by the wayside. He argues further that children's play proposes a mode of thinking that extends beyond itself, much like folk art, another ‘primitivist' form that has the character of a model: ‘Folk art and
the worldview of the child demanded to be seen as collectivist ways of thinking.'
⁴⁴
Children take on the form of the new collective. Collectivist modes of thinking will, according to Benjamin, find historical shape in the Russian Revolution. In post-revolutionary Moscow he saw how ‘the liberated pride of the proletariat is matched by the emancipated bearing of the children'.
⁴⁵
The Bolsheviks conjoined the action of collective emancipation – or at least its outward sign – and the lives of children. In ‘Programme for a Proletarian Children's Theatre' (1929), Benjamin observes: ‘Just as the first action of the Bolsheviks was to hoist the Red flag, so their first instinct was to organize the children.'
⁴⁶

Where there are children, then there is also the work of learning. Benjamin did not disassociate play from pedagogy, and pedagogy was something that he returned to in various reviews and writings, beginning with his first published piece in 1912. This was a scathing critique of Lily Braun's
The Emancipation of Children: A Speech to School Youth
.
⁴⁷
As Benjamin writes, the ‘new youth, who out of the consciousness of themselves as
youthful people
place once more a higher sense and purpose in their existence',
⁴⁸
render today's schools as ruins. Theirs is a revolution in consciousness, in modes of apperception and apprehension – a point that anticipates his subsequent work on fantasy. As he matures, Benjamin builds on his early insight that play and playfulness facilitate learning, a communist learning, perhaps, that unlearns bourgeois morality
and undermines the training for war and death. For example, Benjamin's ‘Four Tales' draw on the folk wisdom expressed in parables from the past, whilst also echoing aspects of Brecht's work, where the anecdotal form is used as a modern learning model. Morality is undone by a politics of modernism.

Benjamin undertook his own experiments in pedagogy, broadcasting regularly on German radio to the children and youth on topics such as liquor bootleggers, Berlin dialects, the petrification of Pompeii, counterfeit stamps, slum housing, manufacture, the legend of Caspar Hauser, the history of the Bastille prison, witch trials and the history of toys. Benjamin spoke about the history and curiosities of Berlin, about figures from the shadow side of life and about catastrophes. Through these broadcasts, as well as radio plays and playful programmes that set riddles or puzzles, he drew the children of Berlin and Frankfurt into modes of thinking, perceiving, drawing connections and counteracting the conventional history of their cities, their dialect and their homes, revealing cities within the city and illuminating their forms.

The German word for play or game is
Spiel
. This same word relates to gambling.
Der Spieler
is a gambler. The activity of gambling and the figure of the gambler appear at various points in Benjamin's work. Gambling is a decayed form of divination. In his file on ‘Prostitution, Gambling' in
The Arcades Project
, Benjamin wonders about the links between the two: ‘Were fortune-telling cards around earlier than playing cards? Does the card game represent a deterioration of soothsaying technique? Perceiving the future is surely decisive in card games, too.'
⁴⁹
In his first sketch for
The Arcades Project
, Benjamin draws a link between automata and gods.

In front of the doorway to the ice rink, the local pub at those day-trip resorts, the tennis court: penates. Guarding the threshold: The hen who lays the praline-eggs of gold, the vending machine that punches out our names, machines for games of chance, the automated fortune teller. Strangely enough, such machines do not flourish in the town, but are more likely to be found as something at places where day trips happen, such as beer gardens in the outskirts. And, on a Sunday afternoon, out and about on the hunt for a little greenery, one is also heading to enigmatic thresholds. P.S.: coin-operated automatic scales – today's
gnothi seauton
(Know Thyself).
⁵⁰

In the game, a sporty one perhaps, in the act of gambling, placing the ball in the roulette wheel or laying the card, in divination by cards, entrails or stars, each player is aware of what move to make only at a subliminal bodily level. They mobilise, if they are to be successful, a motor reflex that works below the workings of the conscious mind. This appears as fate and is a communion between body and the order of the world that is present in the story ‘The Lucky Hand' and that Benjamin returns to again and again. But such a version of things does not send play completely into a mystical realm. And indeed the gambler may misjudge, may make a wrong move, a false play. As Benjamin states, ‘The ideal of the experience formed by shock is the catastrophe. In gambling this becomes very explicit; by persistently raising the stakes, in the hope of retrieving what is lost, the gambler steers toward total ruin.'
⁵¹
For Benjamin, gambling, as well as fate, has its historical materialist side. One of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century capitalism, as represented in
The Arcades Project
, is its simultaneous naturalisation and mythologisation of social and historical forces as fate. This
took on various forms, such as the language of a seemingly self-propellant rising and tumbling of stocks and shares – a consequence of the misconception (or ignorance) of the value-form, of playing the market, of prophecies of wide-scale destruction. Benjamin quotes from Paul Lafargue's ‘The Causes of Belief in God' (1906):

Today's economic progress in general inclines ever more to transmute capitalist society into a colossal international gambling house, where the bourgeois wins and loses capital as a consequence of events which remain unknown to him … The ‘inscrutable' is deified in bourgeois society just as it is in a gambling venue … Triumphs and losses, which are the result of causes that are unexpected, in the main indecipherable, and apparently reliant on chance, predispose the bourgeois to adopt the spiritual condition of the gambler … The capitalist, whose prosperity is bound up with stocks and shares, which are dependent on deviations in market value and yield whose causes he does not understand, is a professional gambler. The gambler, nonetheless … is a highly superstitious type. The habitués of gambling hells always possess magic spells to conjure up the Fates. One will mumble a prayer to Saint Anthony of Padua or some other spirit from the heavens; another will lay his bet only if a specific colour has won; while a third clasps a rabbit's foot in his left hand; and so on. The inscrutable in society shrouds the bourgeois, just as the inscrutable in nature the savage.
⁵²

Play and playing, toys and mimicry: these crack open the world. But the impulse of play leads back to the dreamworld, to wishing and longing, to the gambler's yearning to make the greatest win, and it leads back to the desires that both mitigate and make blind to the catastrophe of economic rule. In
‘Verdant Elements', Benjamin celebrates the attitude of ‘exaggerated exuberance' in a children's learning primer written by Tom Seidmann-Freud. Such an attitude informs all of Benjamin's works of fiction, be it the wild excesses of the early night-dreams and fantasies, the tall tales of wanderers and adventurers and the absurd reasoning in origin myths and riddles. Benjamin wrote the following of the consummate storyteller Proust: ‘He lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world, distorted in the state of similarity, a world in which the true surrealist face of existence breaks through.'
⁵³
The same can perhaps be said of him and his own fictions.

Woman and Beast (Weib und Tier)
, 1904.

The Balloon (Der Luftballon)
, 1926.

T
he sky had spread out a select German summer night between the trees. But as during a rococo rendezvous, the moon emitted a discreet yet bright yellow. Curling blossoms trembled down from the trees into the dark moss like yellow
strips of confetti. The gigantic outlines of the great literature pyramid towered in the blue darkness. It was cosily uncanny. And now it lay there. Its peak stood out against the clear sky. Shades of green and white – many colours – glowed delicately within the black mountain. E.T.A. Hoffmann shone from an undulating Baroque boulder that protruded half toppled from the mound. The moon illuminated him. At the bottom yawned a black gate. In the uncontrollable twilight, its pillars appeared like Doric columns,
Iliad
on the one,
Odyssey
on the other. A white marble staircase glowed halfway up the pyramid. Upon it moved, quick as a monkey, the silhouette of a thin little man who continually called out ‘Gottsched, Gottsched' in an unspeakably bright voice … so quiet was his call that it was only audible in this fairy tale silence. In the dark depths, as though from an abyss, protruded a desolate heap of rocks. Slopes tore it apart, dirt and snow lay in its crevasses. A harsh wind howled from it. Shadows of kings, sad women, and on a small green patch of grass before a cave, beautiful mist-elves sat in a circle and laughed at a strange lion with baggy fur that roared like a human. I turned around. I felt dreadful that night. I proceeded to the hill of the wise owls. I spun round in a circle three times until I sprayed fire and called out, ‘Wisest owl,
Eulenberg, Eulenberg
, wisest owl, wisest
Eulenberg
.' At first it was totally still, then there was a rustling in the trees. Then I heard a thin, sharp voice calling out from above. ‘Wait!' A man with a walking stick came down the mountain. The night owls shrieked and fluttered as he advanced. He was wearing a brown frock coat and a beautiful, albeit slightly dented top hat. We did not exchange a single word. He walked ahead. Initially our ascent was quite comfortable. Broad marble steps led us past chasms from which ruined temples jutted forth, echoing with the sad rush of mighty rivers. A portly
gentleman sat on a bench by the parapet. Snugly, and with a sour smile, he rubbed his hands. He had a wax tablet and a stylus in front of him. As soon as he saw us, he began to write slowly. ‘Horace – the first man of letters', noted my guide in a sharp tone of voice. Suddenly I was brought up short. On a ledge I saw a man in a heavily wrinkled toga. One could see that he spoke continuously, his weak body quivering from exhaustion. He appeared to be yelling and yet one could hear no sound. All around him was empty. Terror seized hold of me. ‘Cicero', whispered my guide. The comfortable steps came to an end. Stony, unruly paths appeared in their stead. The boulders took on strange shapes: slender stone flowers blossomed forth from them. Lining the way were rubble heaps, in front of which stood walls with tall pointed windows. Occasionally an organ sound seemed to become faintly audible. After some time we came upon a road in open country. A tiny little man with a greyish-green hood over his head fled as we approached. Quickly my guide took off his top hat. He wanted to trap the little fellow but he got away. ‘Opitz', my guide remarked regretfully. ‘I would have liked to have had him for my collection.' Then we walked for a long time along the dull country road. Suddenly a mountain appeared ahead of us. Upon it we saw, set against the sky, the silhouette of a writing man. He had an enormous sheet before him, and his pen was so long that it seemed to write in the heavens when he moved it. ‘Take off your hat', I heard the voice beside me say, ‘that is Lessing'. We greeted him, but the mighty figure on the peak did not move. There were dense shrubs at the foot of the mountain. The trees were finely trimmed. Little people moved around on paths like automatic puppets dressed as shepherds and beaus. Many danced around white statues that stood amid the greenery. A faint chirping rang from this party
of puppets in the moonlight. But occasionally it was silent and a mighty voice riven with woe and longing and joy could be heard penetrating as far as the stars. ‘Can you hear Klopstock?' I heard my guide ask. I nodded. ‘We will be there soon,' he announced.

We went around the mountain and before us lay another dark plain from which two bright temple-like structures arose. With horror I noted that the immense chasm opened up beside us, with its temple ruins and roaring streams. Along its side swayed a figure, inching closer and closer towards the edge until – finally – it plunged before our eyes. ‘Yes, we have arrived,' remarked my guide. ‘Did you see Hölderlin?' Once again, I nodded silently and in terrible fear. The clear air was filled with strange cries. The deep yet beautifully constant tone of the sad streams reverberated from below. The sunken man's bright, woeful song seemed to mingle with it. From behind our backs resounded Klopstock's booming song. But the closer we drew to the two tall structures, the lighter it got and the sound began to fade. One structure towered above a tall, irregular boulder: it stood alone. Many people surrounded the other one. Men with large flags and kettledrums and others with feathers and bows sat around it. Screams came from the crowd. A great many lecterns stood all over the place, from which wildly gesticulating people preached. Some bellowed loudly up to the temple, ‘Our Schiller!', but nobody came. Here my guide turned a corner. Soon we stood before the solitary temple. Hastily, a wizened little man in a tightly buttoned frock coat came hopping down the tall, broad stairs. ‘Haha, our Eckermann', he giggled. An authoritative and unfriendly glance from my guide made him wince. He led us upwards.

I felt a quiet tremor in the stone structure under our feet. To my surprise, I simultaneously heard a sound like a distant
drone. The farther we climbed up the tall marble steps, the more fiercely the ground shuddered, and the louder the drone echoed. It did not leave us again. As we entered, a dense darkness enveloped us. The mighty noises, which seemed to come not only from the ground but equally from either side of us, shook me. At the same time, I felt a transformation within myself. All my senses seemed to draw new strength from a force located within, which heightened them two- and tenfold. In the dense darkness, I could see; I felt with my eyes. I could feel myself in a large empty room. On every side, there were doors, gates and passages of every conceivable shape and size. Nearest to me was a bulky round doorway. It was tightly boarded up with wooden planks, between which protruded thick iron rods. From inside sounded the muffled ringing of ferocious bells. Further along, an equally wide Gothic gate swung open. Behind it, in the twilight, there appeared to be a room. Bright laughter came from the corridors that led inside. From time to time the figure of a biblical prophet appeared in the strange light; people in brown tails carrying feathers and bows hurried around the room and a young man spoke in a deep, sonorous voice: ‘To be or not to be.' Aside from that it was silent amid the lively commotion. Magnetic forces seemed to inhabit the depths of the temple. It became hard for us to walk. Ahead of us lay a range of portals – some larger, some smaller – all in a heavy, gold-flourished Baroque or Empire style. They were closed, but from behind them – perceptible amid the subterranean storm – came fine music. And opposite, at a great distance, an open, illuminated room became visible, from which a wealth of marble statues emitted their glow.

Beside us stood Mephisto. He trod on ahead up some steep, narrow stairs – it may have been a thousand steps. We stood
on one of the temple's elevated platforms. A wide, clear view of the earth spread out before us and we drank it in. But soon a stirring became discernible in this smooth, calm scene. It swelled and grew. The land appeared to surge in great waves. The sky darkened and contracted. It was as if the entire world drew together into this one point with terrifying force. While fleeing, we caught sight of torn laurel leaves strewn on the ground. Behind us resounded Mephisto's bright laughter. We reached a narrow corridor that continued on for an inestimable distance. Suddenly Mephisto's voice was with us again. Clearly and scornfully, but in a low voice, he seemed to ask a question: ‘To the mothers?'

—

Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski
.

Fragment written c. 1906–12; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime.
Gesammelte Schriften VII
, 636–9.