Ill-Starred Times

Jack Graveney

Berlin has been my home for over a month now. Physical markers of my residence here are few, enough to fill a handful of evidence bags, but no more: a dirty jar of pasta sauce repurposed as a coffee cup; a choice postcard and polaroid; a strand of scotch tape patching up a second-hand book. But what has really changed? Time leaves footprints in both world and mind, and it is upon the latter realm that this month has encroached further, an advance made all the more jolting on account of what preceded it. Human society is once more the dominant star in the constellation of my reality, the interior arrangements of summer shaken and phased out for a new cosmic imbalance.

Benjamin – the metaphor of the Sternbild is his also – was acutely aware of the violence the social animal opens themselves to. The vignette ‘Gesellschaft’ recounts an evening party organized and hosted by Pauline, his mother: a microcosm of society in its writhing whole. From behind his bedroom door, condemned to an early night, young Walter hears a battle taking place. The stakes in this conflict are high. One willingly enters a maelstrom, an ‘Ungeheuer’, which is ‘bereit…die zu erwürgen, die es jetzt umspielte’, and for this armour is required. Pauline is especially well equipped, fastening to her belt a vast oval jewel – a ‘Talisman’ defending against everything ‘was von draußen bedrohlich für sie werden konnte’ – whilst the ‘spiegelblanke Frackhemd’ worn by his father Otto becomes a carapace of armour. Benjamin’s metaphor is precise: in society one can map strategic offensives, survey territorial gains and losses, before retreating for now or for good to – like the dragon in her cave – warm cold spoils against a bare underbelly. Armour donned serves also as a filter or membrane, which declares: you will see only a part of me and I only a part of you; we are impure and incomplete.

Illustration: Annabel Jupp

Society features above all in Berliner Kindheit as something alien and alienating. This applies even if one is deeply entrenched within it. Entry into the social world inevitably implies a diminution of autonomy, an acceptance that the bounds of the self are fluid and must once more be negotiated. Ideally, it should invite an embrace of others’ ability to make claims on our mind and body, as spontaneous and unforeseeable as these may be. The anthropologist Michael Taussig writes of collections, and their subspecies the notebook, as kinds of ‘magic encyclopaedia’ endowed with divinatory powers. As he points out, the steady or abrupt drift of items into these collections is determined in large part by chance, and ‘chance is the flipside of fate’. Some relics must be sought out tirelessly; others are dropped by Fortuna and fall into our hands. In gathering friends and experiences in Berlin so far, I feel I’ve trodden a similar tightrope between proactivity and receptivity.

As the example of the fairy and her wishes attests to, Berliner Kindheit is also permeated by the heady air of fate, though Benjamin’s stance may be more distrust than amor fati. Christopher Hamilton rightly observes that there is no ‘structured cosmology’ in the text, no stable and overarching pantheon or determining principle through which fate is refracted. Yet there is a cumulative unity in its predictive aspirations and anticipations, which reminds me of a tarot reading or – better – a horoscope. Benjamin himself was no sincere believer in astrology. His friend Theodor Adorno would later, in the 1950s, write a scathing commentary on the LA Times astrology column, condemning it as a pathetic form of self-help designed to reinforce prevailing conditions of ideology and unfreedom. It was, however, a practice to whose more ancient forms Benjamin devoted repeated and sometimes mournful attention. In the astrological sphere, the symbolic world of the stars, he recognized the origin of mankind’s mimetic faculty, grown out of ecstatic dances serving to emulate the sky’s arrangement. ‘Die Mummerehlen’ hearkens back to this source, suggesting that humanity’s ability to recognize similarities at all is a ‘schwaches Überbleibsel des alten Zwanges, ähnlich zu werden und sich zu verhalten’. The ashes of this compulsion stir in the young Benjamin’s de- and reconstructions of words and objects.

If Berliner Kindheit is a horoscope, it is of a very particular kind. It reminds me of another literary horoscope: that of Samuel Beckett’s 1938 novel Murphy, in which one is procured as a means of outsourcing destiny and compelling its subject to work by the most tortuous means possible. The eponymous protagonist’s eventual employment at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat asylum, the result of a chance encounter with his former acquaintance Ticklepenny, is chosen for its union of the custodial role and the lunatic’s susceptibility, both prominent features of his birth-chart. The relationship between celestial and human does not, however, remain as uncomplicatedly one-directional as it appears here. Murphy progressively subverts the chart’s prescriptions and rebels against his supposed supervenience on the sky, becoming ‘revolted’ by its attribution of his defining characteristics ‘solely to the moon in the Serpent at the hour of his birth’, and reconceptualizing this tyranny as a ‘poem that he alone of the living could write’.

This desire to undermine and escape the conditions of one’s birth is double-edged, since one can also read Beckett’s horoscope as a metaphor for the wider socioeconomic forces constantly buffeting each person. Murphy’s re-submersion in the world of work is born of urgent necessity, the product of his chronic idleness and the precarious income of his girlfriend Celia, a street prostitute. It renders his mind not a poem of individuality but a slavish servant of the market’s mechanized self-image, enlisting him in a system he had previously rejoiced in – however bathetically – exploiting. (Beckett describes with great exuberance his protagonist’s lunchtime artifice of securing some 1.83 cups for tea for the price of one.) Ultimately, Murphy’s fall into the feared ‘mercantile gehenna’[1], with its ‘frenzied justification of life as an end to means’, will result in his death, the culmination of a series of scathing reflections by Beckett on work and its associated ‘ethic’.

Albeit a far more formal structuring principle than anything in Berliner Kindheit, Beckett’s horoscope captures perfectly the fraught relationship between autonomy and determination espoused by Benjamin. The device of the birth-chart shares his hope of reading the future from the signs contained in one distinct moment of the past. It too is animated by the spirit which – in the words of Friedrich Schlegel – sees the historian as a ‘rückwärts gekehrter Prophet’. Yet the steady decay of its influence on and ownership of Murphy gives it the character more of an interpretation or statement of possibility than a binding curse.

In an unpublished fragment titled ‘Zur Astrologie’, Benjamin wrote of the horoscope as a ‘Ganzheit, die in der astrologischen Deutung nur analysiert wird’ (the emphasis is mine). Here, it is the holism and openness of the astronomical tableau which is emphasized, its value independent of any sense-imbuing newspaper columnist trying to second-guess the future. Reading Berliner Kindheit, the historical reality of fascism shapes the futures we scry in the crystals laid out before us. Hindsight is deceptive and foolhardy; it sniffs out and holds aloft the inevitable on the faintest trails. But Benjamin’s intent with these images was to focus our attention not on determinism but contingency. He sought to lure out the political, emotional, or cultural potential that need not have been realized, the energy which could have transferred itself otherwise.

This is a time which lends itself to fatalistic thinking of the most idealistic kind: this was all meant to happen, but for a reason. Desperate aetiologies of the self seek refuge from the present in the past. The enforced reflection of lockdowns and quarantines is a rare upside to the situation. My perhaps naïve hope is that they inspire not a submission to epidemiological forecasts – pandemic horoscopes – but a renewed sense of the contingent possibilities of the time, a recognition that for all the destruction it may cause a crack or fissure is still an opening. The reasons for my being in Berlin are clear enough: the month I spent here last summer was one of the happiest of my life, and the orbit I stepped into then hasn’t yet released me. Over the year to come uncertainty reigns. Tucked away in the second appendix to his ‘Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen’, Benjamin offers a reassuring word. For the Jewish people, he notes, the future remained even in the bleakest moments a land of full and diverse possibilities, since its every second offered a ‘kleine Pforte, durch die der Messias treten konnte’. A memory from my now fading time in Rudow speaks to this also, of a church under construction, stained-glass window half-fitted, a sign outside proclaiming simply: ‘Hoffnung tut die Seele gut’.

[1] Gehenna is, in rabbinic literature, a kind of purgatorial waiting room for wicked souls soon to arrive in Hell.