Of Telephones and Messengers
Jack Graveney
As a child, I developed what an extraordinarily overoptimistic psychoanalyst might have dubbed a ‘complex’ around answering the phone in the living room. Its ringing seemed to beckon a twofold burden. Initially, to disentangle myself from my place at the sofa or table. And then, on top of that, to adopt responsibility for whichever concerns had necessitated the disruption in the first place. Sometimes I fell at the first hurdle, improbably failing to cover the distance required for physical contact with the landline. My mother, entering the room at breakneck speed, found me with my arm theatrically outstretched and a look of relieved regret on my face. More often than not, when I – at the last second – rounded on the receiver, all that greeted me was a recorded message, variously informing me about some technical malfunction, impending prosecution, or fiscal reimbursement. A lot of fuss over nothing.
I’m sure it would have reassured me to find out that my concerns were, at least in part, shared by the eldest child of a bourgeois German Jewish family living in Berlin at the dawn of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin, destined to become one of the foremost German intellectuals of the 1900s, was at this point yet to depart the butterfly fields of childhood. All is, however, not well in the Benjamin household. Discord surrounds the boy’s new sibling, his ‘Zwillingsbruder’: the telephone which has recently entered the family home.
No small amount of turmoil accompanies this entry. As the device completes its ‘königlichen Einzug’ into the living room, the relics of bygone eras, from chandeliers to dainty French tables, make a corresponding exit. ‘Lüster, Ofenschirm und Zimmerpalme, Konsole, Gueridon und Erkerbrüstung’ are sacrificed as the telephone takes centre stage. The list is, as Brian Dillon has written, ‘an excellent way to convey luxury, profusion and corruption’, and Benjamin’s is no exception; there is a certain grotesqueness to this catalogue of outmoded fashions. Yet the series of six objects also bears a mournful quality, an elegiac tone which invites the reader to focus not on the ownership of these furnishings and decorations, but on their loss – a post-mortem inventory of personal effects. Materiality is a recurring theme in Benjamin’s work. It features above all as something slipping from our grasp, in need of protection from total effacement. Benjamin’s contemporary and compatriot, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter to his Polish translator and friend Witold Hulewicz, frames the issue with suitably high stakes:
Noch für unsere Großeltern war ein „Haus“, ein „Brunnen“, ein ihnen vertrauter Turm, ja ihr eigenes Kleid, ihr Mantel: unendlich mehr, unendlich vertraulicher…Die belebten, die erlebten, die uns mitwissenden Dinge gehen zur Neige und können nicht mehr ersetzt werden. Wir sind vielleicht die Letzten, die noch solche Dinge gekannt haben. Auf uns ruht die Verantwortung, nicht allein ihr Andenken zu erhalten (das wäre wenig und unzuverlässig), sondern ihren humanen und larischen Wert.
Even for our grandparents a “house,” a “well” a familiar tower, their very dress, their cloak, was infinitely more, infinitely more intimate…The animated, experienced things that share our lives are coming to an end and cannot be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have still known such things. On us rests the responsibility of preserving, not merely their memory (that would be little and unreliable), but their human and laral[1] worth.
This worth is one casualty of the telephone’s triumphal march into the home, but there are others. Benjamin’s comparison of the device with ‘einem sagenhaften Helden’ hints at a displacement of myth and symbolism which he opposes with inexhaustible vigour (his corpus is replete with obliquely invoked deities). On a more mundane level, its shrill alarm signal cuts through the hallowed ‘Mittagsruhe’ – but nothing is banal with Benjamin, who sees this sonic incision as also wounding the entire era embodied by his parents’ desire for an undisturbed noontide.
Perhaps the greatest loss comes when the telephone’s call is finally answered. For Benjamin’s father Emil, a wealthy banker, the new presence becomes a conduit for rage through which assorted authorities, above all the complaints office, can be subjected to ‘Drohungen und Donnerworten’. The enduring image is a physical one: as Emil’s fury rises, so too does the aggression with which he manipulates the telephone’s crank, making his hand into a whirling dervish, overwhelmed by frenzy. In this orgiastic frenzy, all but the object of fixation blend into the background; the domineering father enters a state of ‘Selbstvergessenheit’. A similar change comes over young Walter when it is his turn to work the crank and lift the two receivers. No sooner has he answered the telephone’s call than he is ‘gnadenlos der Stimme ausgeliefert, die da sprach’, finding his ‘Besinnung auf Zeit und Pflicht und Vorsatz’ wrenched away from him, and himself rendered impotent and incapable of reflection. The voice’s strange dislocation and the uncertainty of its origin allow it to exert an overwhelming influence over its object, who submits himself to the first suggestion he hears.
Illustration: Annabel Jupp
So far, so charmingly childish – but the contextual gulf between Benjamin’s experiences and my own grants them a sinister predictive power mine entirely lack. ‘Das Telefon’, the present vignette, is one of a series of short autobiographical pieces drawn up and ordered during the 1930s and collected in the anthology Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert with a loosely tripartite end in mind. On the personal level, Benjamin intended these scenes’ composition to act as a kind of inoculation against longing – in this case, the longing swelling out of his departure from the city of his birth. As Christopher Hamilton has written, the hope nesting within the metaphor of memory as vaccine is that ‘desire comes to terms with its own non-fulfilment’, sating itself through the surrogate of tender remembrance.
The images which blossom from this attempt also serve purposes beyond Benjamin’s own suffering. Taken as a static or synchronic portrait, they come together to capture the ‘Erfahrung der Großstadt’ for ‘einem Kinde der Bürgerklasse’, crystallising into a big-city mirror to the many existing accounts of countryside childhood. Introducing a forward-looking element, allowing the images their ‘eignes Schicksal’, it might prove possible to excavate from within them shards of history’s subsequent course, revealing the ways in which the stifling ‘Geborgenheit’ they are characterised by was so easily disfigured and undone. Nowhere in his foreword does Benjamin explicitly mention the Nazi party and the increasingly repressive measures responsible for his forced exile from Berlin. This would undermine his every ambition for the text, which is concerned above all with the implicit, the unwilled, the leftover and residual. Nevertheless, the brutal events of the 1930s loom disconcertingly if one peers with a suspicious eye at the tantalising snow-globes laid out in Berliner Kindheit. The telephone’s obliterative effect on self-control gives way, for example, to a warning about the ease with which media can manipulate. In this respect, Benjamin’s anthology acts as a kind of literary non-Newtonian fluid: outwardly thick and intoxicating, then abruptly sharper and more solid as pressure is applied.
It will be 2020 when I arrive in Berlin. Benjamin hardly intended his reflections to stretch as far as the twenty-first century, his memories to echo into times such as these. All the same, I hope that the superimposition, however loose, whether contrasting or complementary, of my own experiences in the city onto his may be in some way illuminating. Not that there is much to speak of from my end for the moment. I remain decisively within the preparatory stage of my year abroad: sorting through timetables, schedules, lists of planned events; signing up for classes, registry offices, overpriced apartments; filling out forms, endless forms, insurance exemptions, authentications, matriculations, risk declarations; in sum, wagering my health and large proportions of my student loan against as yet unrealised enjoyments and liberations.
One thing all this preparation has not entailed is a large quantity of phone calls (toward which, incidentally, I’m fairly ambivalent nowadays). Vocal communication is no longer en vogue. Benjamin’s telephone has shrunk tenfold, departed the living room, and tucked itself into our trouser pockets. Interactions take place at a further remove; my first futile attempt at finding accommodation was to join the dedicated Facebook group ‘WG-Zimmer & Wohnungen Berlin’, blankly stare at the scrolling screen, and hope something jumped out at me. Forebodingly, the group’s members seemed to have taken it upon themselves to perform the opposite of its official purpose: dissuading people from moving to the German capital, rather than enabling them. This ranged from the subtle – ‘I hear Leipzig is a nice place to study’ – to the bald – ‘Stay away, there are enough here already’. All delivered in comments of brisk urgency but inevitably lacking efficacy.
Success would be an instant message or email. In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi recollects a moment when ‘the doorbell rang – it was a tall, thin young man wearing the uniform of the Italian army, and I immediately recognized in him the figure of the messenger, the Mercury who guides souls, or, if one wishes, the annunciatory angel’. It is not clear whether this figure, this archetype, can be said to exist any longer. By abolishing the distance between message and messenger – the epitome of this is the ‘donotreply’ address, which entirely forecloses the chance of interaction – email has all but destroyed the possibility of such symbolism.
This is, I’m sure, a development which would injure Benjamin on multiple levels: the loss of the mythic; the loss of the human; perhaps worst of all, the loss of the material – what is today’s prevailing technology fetishism if not a confirmation that Rilke’s commandments to Hulewicz have utterly failed? Sadder yet is that Benjamin’s reaction to these losses would not be a gasp of shock, but a knowing and wounded nod. Reality as it surrounds us may or may not be worse than the arch pessimist’s predictions. This column will be a success if it too can be more than just an elegy.
[1] Rilke’s coinage ‘laral’ (larisch) stems from the Lares, guardian deities of ancient Rome thought to protect different physical domains.