Dreams of the Collective—Or How to Wake Up?

Abstract

Reflections on dreaming, recounted dreams, dreams as a means of representation—Walter Benjamin's writings are peppered with hints as to these strange activities that infuse our nights. One-Way Street could be read as an intersection on his long road toward establishing a theoretical framework for writing and reading dreams. The unadorned dream-protocols that punctuate the aphorisms were part of the original conception of the book, and Benjamin's ascetic refusal to provide interpretation or context for these dreams irritated even his contemporaries. But by introducing unmediated dream-narratives into his prose, Benjamin was in fact participating in a particularly vital literary form, the dream book, a form that becomes the representative form in the early twentieth century. Benjamin's dreams were published not only in One-Way Street but at almost the same time in Ignaz Jezower's Buch der Träume. The externalized dreams moving between two venues illuminate the deep mystery governing the very distinction between subjectivity and collectivity. As a dream book, One-Way Street offers the occasion to reimagine the limits of collective awakening.

Keywords :

• awakening
• collectivity
• debates
• dreaming
• theories of dreaming
• Weimar republic

Notes

“If you elevate [One-Way Street] to the ‘expression of a great and, God only knows, articulated philosophy’ (here ‘great philosophy’ is suddenly excusable, even venerable), if you, expressis verbis, use the spoiled dream of an animal (the simple shared and uninterpreted fact of a dream) as an element of this articulation, then it seems to me that the exaggeration is just as unjust, if not fantastic, as in my case the understatement of the evil eye or of shaking my head ante rem.” Ernst Bloch, Briefe 1903–1975, 2 vols., ed. Karola Bloch et al. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), vol. 2, 425. The editors assume that Adorno's lost letter was written before December 18, 1934.

“He disturbed the sleep of the world.”

“Much in it blooms weakly or too poorly. At some points Benjamin transcribes mere dreams, none better than another and none better than others. Then one is surprised again by lame-broad comparisons, such as between books and prostitutes, that one does not look for here and has no need of. Many observations are like parts of a novel that would first set them in their landscape. In the book itself they don't make it home or better, to the street.” Ernst Bloch, Revueform in der Philosophie, Vossische Zeitung, No. 182, 1.8.1928, as quoted in Walter Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Detlev Schöttker and Steffen Haug (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009), vol. 8, 525–30; here, 526. Hereafter cited as WuN 8 with page number.

“Intimate dream-streets with stores in which the taste of the times, with houses in which the weather of the times has condensed—that is or could be the landscape of the book. It is therefore not only a new business in philosophy (which formerly had no stores), but also a portion of a new abyss, background, as it were: of ‘surrealism’ in philosophy. In dreams, various ‘spoiled animal-water’ (from one of these dreams), the most intricate empathy aligns with and reflects this world” (WuN 8: 530).

“But indirectly of course ‘revue’ could be used, as one of the most open and, against all intentions, most honest forms of the present as an imprint of that hollow space in which nothing can be closed any longer without lies, in which only parts now meet and mix.” Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1962), 368–71; here, 369.

“As a falling away of the broken coherence, as a sequence of dreams, aphorisms, and passwords between which at most a crosswise elective affinity wishes to exist.” Bloch, Erbschaft, 370.

“It is constitutive as montage which jointly builds real series of streets, such that not the intention but the fragment dies from the truth and is utilized for reality; even one-way streets have a goal.” Bloch, Erbschaft, 371.

“I saw in a dream ‘a house of ill-repute.’ ‘A hotel in which an animal is spoiled. Practically everyone drinks only spoiled animal-water.’ I dreamed in these words, and at once woke with a start. Extremely tired, I had thrown myself on my bed in my clothes in the brightly lit room, and had immediately, for a few seconds, fallen asleep” (WuN 8: 48).

“Expression of a great and, God only knows, articulated philosophy.”

 “The now of knowability is the moment of awakening. (Jung would like to distance awakening from the dream.)” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), vol. V/1, 608. Hereafter cited as GS with volume and page number. In another entry, Benjamin quotes Bloch's essay, “Imago als Schein aus der Tiefe,” a critique of C. G. Jung, that Bloch also had included in his Erbschaft dieser Zeit: “Sehr interessant …, wie die Fascisierung der Wissenschaft gerade jene Elemente Freuds ändern mußte, die noch der aufgeklärten, materialistischen Periode des Bürgertums entstammen.…Bei Jung…ist das Unbewußte…nicht mehr individuell, also kein erworbener Zustand im einzelnen.…Menschen, sondern ein Schatz der rezent werdenden Urmenschheit; es ist eben nicht Verdrängung, sondern gelungene Rückkehr.” [“Very interesting … how the fascistization of science had to alter precisely those elements in Freud which still stem from the enlightened, materialistic period of the bourgeoisie. … In Jung, … the unconscious … is no longer individual—that is, not an acquired condition in the single … human being, but a stock of primal humanity renewing itself in the present; it is not repression but a fruitful return.”] (GS V/1: 497). The context of this quote in Benjamin's notes suggests that from Benjamin's point of view the two authors agreed on the dangerous implications of Jung's theory.

 “A new lexicon for the language of flowers is opened, and the crossroads of the two wandering roads is the dream.” Franz Hessel, Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße, in Das Tagebuch 9 (1928), 3.3.1928, as quoted in WuN 8: 512.

 “The sum of the aphorisms consciously announces the end of the individualistic, naively bourgeois era. Benjamin's method of dissociating immediately experienced unities—which he uses in his book on the Baroque—must take on a meaning which, if not revolutionary, is nonetheless explosive when applied to the present.” Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse: Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963), 253. Translated as The Mass Ornament by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 263.

 “That Benjamin wants to wake the world from its dream is proved by some radical aphorisms in One-Way Street, a number of which were previously published in our feuilleton section. This small book, whose presentation is a bit too coy, combines thoughts from the most diverse realms of personal and public life. To take a few random examples: curious accounts of dreams, childhood scenes, and numerous cameos devoted to exemplary sites of improvisation (such as fairs and harbors), whose delicate contours are reminiscent of bas-reliefs; statements about love, art, books, and politics, some of them recording astounding troves of meditation.” Kracauer, Das Ornament, 253; Levin translation, 262–63.

 “The mediator redeems fragments of the past.” Kracauer, Das Ornament, 254; Levin translation, 264.

 “There are some extraordinary things in the George volume, above all the dream narration.” Theodor Adorno/Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, Ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994), 46.

 One of these dreams, entitled Zeitende, reads: “Die meisten menschen hatten im entsetzen die kraft zu leben verloren. Sie lagen zu tausenden in der stadt und auf dem land unfähig dem gedanken an den untergang zu widerstehen. Seit tagen war keine sonne aufgegangen eisige winde fuhren einher und es gurgelte im schooss der erde. Eben geht der lezte zug ins gebirg. Die lichter blinken matt in den schwarzen morgen. Die wenigen insassen sehen sich starr an zittern stumm. Der endliche stoss kommt vielleicht schon vor der ankunft im gebirg.” [“Most people had lost in horror the strength to live. They lay in thousands in the city and in the country unable to withstand the thought of the collapse. For days no sun had risen icy winds blew and the lap of the earth gurgled. The last train just went into the mountains. The lights blinked faintly in the black morning. The few inhabitants look at one another stiffly and tremble mutely. The final blow will arrive perhaps before they reach the mountains.”] Stefan George, Tage und Taten. Aufzeichnungen und Skizzen. Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1933), vol. 17, 30.

 “Collective unconscious”; “dream of the collective.” Adorno/Benjamin, Briefwechsel, 83.

 “Archaic” and “dialectical images.” In a letter, written half a year later, Adorno states that the “Kollektivbewußtsein … bei der gegenwärtigen Fassung … nicht vom Jungschen sich abheben läßt. […] Daß im träumenden Kollektiv keine Differenzen für die Klassen bleiben, spricht deutlich und warnend genug.” [“The collective consciousness … in its present form … cannot be distinguished from Jung's conception of the same. … The fact that the dreaming collective serves to erase the differences between classes should already act as a clear and sufficient warning in this respect.”] Adorno/Benjamin, Briefwechsel, 141–42. Benjamin was convinced that this difference could and should be established. Adorno, though, vetoed all these attempts. At a certain point, Benjamin gave in: “I had intended to write a critique of Jungian psychology, whose Fascist armature I had promised myself to expose. This has also been postponed.” Letter to Fritz Lieb, July 9, 1937, in Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994), 542.

 “Please forgive these vague and topological suggestions—to elaborate them in concrete detail would mean nothing less than anticipating your own theory, and that is the last thing I would dare to do.” Adorno/Benjamin, Briefwechsel, 84.

 “Glorious first draft of the Arcades.” Walter Benjamin, Pariser Passagen II, in GS V/2, 1044–59.

 Adorno's letters are quite consistent in this regard. On April 21, 1934, he writes that a short texts Benjamin had sent to him are “ausnehmend gut,” “exceptionally good,” especially a “dreischichtiger Traum,” “threefold dream” (“Der Wissende,” “The Knowing One”). The discussion in the summer of 1935 was ignited by Benjamin's “Exposé / Paris / Die Hauptstadt des XIX Jahrhunderts,” in GS V/2, 1237–49.

 “Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally wakeful, eternally agitated being that—in the space between the building fronts—lives, experiences, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls” (GS V/2: 1051).

 “That is You. Dreams of Contemporary Poets and Writers.” Ignaz Jezower, Das Buch der Träume (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1928). Benjamin's dreams are to be found pretty much at the end of the chapter; see 268–72. A couple of years later, Benjamin integrated two of the dreams published here in his collection Selbstbildnisse des Träumenden (1932/33), an attempt at composing a “dream book.” Two versions survived: One consists of five, the other of seven dreams.

 See Friedrich Huch, Träume (Berlin: Fischer Verlag, 1904); Isolde Kurz, Traumland (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1919); Wieland Herzfelde, Tragigrotesken der Nacht. Träume (Berlin: Der Malik-Verlag, 1920).

 A selection of Leonhards’ dreams written down in exile and in camps in Southern France was published posthumously: In derselben Nacht. Das Traumbuch des Exils, ed. Steffen Mensching (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2001). See also Margot Taureck, “Exil und Reisen im Geiste. Rudolf Leonhards ‘Traumbuch des Exils,’” in Exiles Traveling: Exploring Displacement, Crossing Boundaries in German Exile Arts and Writings 1933–1945, ed. Johannes Franciscus Evelein (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 329–46.

 The dreams in Jezower's collection do not bear titles; I therefore refer to the “content” of the dreams and not to the titles in One-Way Street.

 See note 13.

 This part of the dream reads: “Goethe rose to his feet and accompanied me to an adjoining chamber, where a table was set for my relatives. It seemed prepared, however, for many more than their number. Doubtless there were places for the ancestors, too” (WuN 8: 13). There are many convincing readings of these dreams relating them to Benjamin's quest for being integrated into “German” culture; see, for example, Henry Sussman, The Task of the Critic: Poetics, Philosophy, and Religion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 80–82.

 “At any given time, the living see themselves in the midday of history. They are obliged to prepare a banquet for the past. The historian is the herald who invites the dead to the table” (GS V/1: 603).

 See WuN 8, 79–128. Three entries are “dreams”: “Zu nahe,” “Die Ferne und die Bilder,” and “Noch einmal.”

 See Walter Benjamin, Träume, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2008). Up to now, Suhrkamp has published four more of these volumes: Theodor W. Adorno, Traumprotokolle, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (2005) [English translation by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2007)]; Arno Schmidt, Traumflausn, ed. Bernd Rauschenbach (2008); Heiner Müller, Traumtexte, ed. Gerhard Ahrend; Meret Oppenheim, Träume: Aufzeichnungen 1928–1985, ed. Christiane Meyer-Thoss (2010).

 See, for example, Gérald Raulet, “Ein Prospekt von jäher Tiefe,” Zum Konstruktionsgesetz der Einbahnstraße, in Topographien der Erinnerung. Zu Walter Benjamins Passagen, ed. Bernd Witte (Königshauen und Neumann: Würzburg, 2008), 206–15; Raulet states: “Das Konstruktionsgesetz der Einbahnstraße bleibt trotz einiger Untersuchungen…nach wie vor ein Rätsel, obwohl belegt ist, daß es sich nicht um eine bloße Buchbindersammlung handelt und daß Benjamin die Komposition seines kleinen Buches durchdacht und mehrfach verändert hat. Sie bezieht einen eigenen Standort zwischen Kracauers ‘Mosaik’…und Blochs ‘Spurenlesen kreuz und quer’” (208–09). In his reflections on the “Konstruktionsgesetz” of the book, dreams do not play a role at all.

 Heiner Weidmann in his “Erwachen/Traum,” in Benjamins Begriffe, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/Main, 2000), 341–62, reads Benjamin's reflections on dreams and awakening but also ignores the dreams.