NOAH ISENBERG
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Even when there is strife, however, the tone remains sober, if not
detached. Benjamin, in particular, shows exceptional civility in taking
the sometimes strong criticisms, thanking Adorno time and again for his
advice.
As conditions in Europe of the late
1930S
worsen, we can detect
within the letters certain personal events, carrying "real" palpable
threats, which bring the two poised theoreticians down from their man–
darin pedestals. In late
1938,
in the wake of the November pogrom,
Benjamin laments "the situation of the Jews in Germany from which
none of us can dissociate ourselves." Less than two months later, after
a brief delay in response that "has nothing to do with theoretical ques–
tions," Adorno tells of the difficulty of getting his mother and father,
who had been beaten and imprisoned during the pogrom, out of Nazi
Germany (he eventually procured entry visas to Cuba). Finally, as is
now well known and all too often romanticized, Benjamin's own cir–
cumstances eroded beyond repair. In the concluding letter, composed in
French on September
25, 1940,
the day of his suicide, Benjamin writes,
"In a situation with no escape, I have no other choice but to finish it all.
It
is in a tiny village in the Pyrenees [in Port Bou], where no one knows
me, that my life must come to an end ."
Six decades after Benjamin's untimely death, the sum achievement of
his work has finally gained worldwide attention, in part because it has
maintained a great degree of relevance. Reading Benjamin's scattered
reflections on the Parisian arcades-the "forerunners of the department
stores" and, by extension, the shopping mall-from today's standpoint,
it's hard not to think of the bearing they have on the Internet, that ulti–
mate temple of consumerism, a space, or hyperspace, of virtual
f/imerie
in the age of information. Indeed, contemporary readers may be inclined
to draw on Benjamin's ideas for a variety of uses; his eminent citability,
in the service of different enterprises, ranks among the prime factors in
his current popularity (there is in fact a seemingly endless appropriation
of epigraphs by Benjamin in contemporary writing, not to mention spe–
cific venues, such as the Web-based journal
Flaneur,
that use him as a
kind of intellectual helmsman) . One of the most recent examples of this
phenomenon is Larry McMurtry's elegant memoir,
Walter Benjamin at
the Dairy Queen
(1999),
a work that employs Benjamin as means of
opening up larger questions about autobiography, storytelling, memory,
and the cultural significance of fiction.
Although McMurtry anchors his reflections in the contemporary
world of his native Archer City, Texas-a world that couldn't be farther
removed from the one in which Benjamin lived-he shows that despite
