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Rendezvous in Berlin: Benjamin and Kierkegaard on the Architecture of Repetition

Author(s): Marc Katz


Source: The German Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Winter, 1998), pp. 1-13
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of German
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MARC KATZ
The ClaremontColleges

Rendezvous in Berlin:
Benjamin and Kierkegaard
on the Architecture of Repetition

It is frequently pointed out that contem- casions, most frequently in the notes for
porary theory has taken a spatial turn, and Das Passagen-Werk; but although Kierke-
that the pathos of temporality which in- gaard provides him with the basic unit of
formed the modern has given way to syn- an urban physiognomy-the 19th-century
chronicity and the juxtaposition of geo- bourgeois interior-Benjamin dismisses
graphical and historical referents. Indeed, him as a historical "latecomer" and in ef-
Walter Benjamin has achieved such pre- fect lets him fall through the cracks of his
eminent status at least in part because of project (3: 381).
his effort to re-map modernity in terms of Yet it could be said that Kierkegaard
built space. From the rubble of memory he haunts the spaces of Benjamin's Berlin
lays out a "history" of the 19th century in writings to a degree the latter is largely
architectonic terms, offering readers a tour unaware of. Kierkegaard himself was fix-
through its paradigmatic locales, his ated on Berlin. It was, apart from Ham-
"dreamhouses of the collective": winter- burg, not merely the only foreign city he
gardens, arcades, market-halls, panoramas, ever visited, but if we can trust hisjournals,
the ornamental faqades of train stations the only one he ever planned to visit.2 He
and factories (to be sure, some of these made the trip four times between the years
phantasmagorical structures have become 1841-1846, during the period Benjamin
so naturalized and ingrained in the idiom characterizes as the moment of "great
of cultural theory that they have by now firsts," as the city was experiencing a wave
acquired something of a second mythic of radical perceptual change that was set
life). Regardless of where Benjamin trav- in motion by the material and symbolic
eled, the Berlin of the outgoing 19th cen- forces of industrialization, including train
tury remained his autobiographical orien- travel, photography, steam power, gas light-
tation point, "the d6cor," as he put it, of all ing and, eventually, iron-frame architec-
his "walks and concerns" (5: 123). In his ture. It could be said that Kierkegaard,
memoirs and essays he is quick to mention coming from the provincial Danish capital
those who served him as guides in figuring and experiencing in Berlin the shock of the
the city's locales, chief among them Franz new at first hand, lapsed into an idiosyn-
Hessel, Ludwig Rellstab and Julius Roden- cratic kind of tourist-compulsion in which
berg; and he includes Baudelaire and he felt compelled to restage an encounter
Proust as well, since what he learned in with the city at the same sites and at regu-
Paris he applies to his reading of Berlin. lar intervals.
One figure, however, given short shrift by Curiously, the only sustained account of
Benjamin (and scarcely mentioned by his his visits to Berlin that he composed is
commentators) is Kierkegaard.1 Benjamin found in the pseudonymously authored
does make reference to him on several oc- "Repetition" (1843) in the form of a fic-

The GermanQuarterly71.1 (Winter1998) 1

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2 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Winter 1998

tional travelogue which serves as the text's through its paradigmatic structures.
narrative hinge. My argument is that in The Berlin Kierkegaard knew was de-
this work, Kierkegaard and Benjamin cross veloping into what Weimar-era theorists
paths not only topographically but concep- would later decipher as the classic Urland-
tually, most significantly in that they each schaft of modernity. As its dependence on
take practices of everyday life-theater- small trade and lingering guild mentality
going, interior decoration, strolling-and were giving way to the demands of an in-
render them disjunctive by using their lo- dustrializing economy with an increased
cales as forms of theoretically "inhabited" circulation of goods and individuals, Ber-
space. Adorno briefly alludes to an affinity lin's traditional legibility was being under-
of technique: "It is no accident," he writes, mined. As architect Peter Eisenman notes:
"that Benjamin's dialectic is one of images "the 18th-century development of the city
rather than continuity. He hit upon it with- fabric as a collection of extruded perimeter
out knowing that Kierkegaard's melan- blocks caused the streets to be seen as figu-
choly had long since conjured it up.'"3Given ratively negative, but the 19th-century ex-
the tremendous resonance of their work, tension of the main avenues ... [the Frie-
the web of connections between Benjamin drichstraBe and Unter den Linden] privi-
and Kierkegaard demands to be identified leged the space of the street."4 As central
and elucidated, particularly in the local axes emerged to displace the courtyard and
context of Berlin fldnerie. In doing so, how- square as key spatial reference points, the
ever, it is not the intention of this essay to city was being semantically renegotiated
rearrange points of origin or to find in according to sense bombardment and
Kierkegaard one more precursor for Ben- speed -categories productive of new forms
jamin's project, but rather, to bring the two of social relations and subjectivity. From
into a conjuncture with one another in or- Kierkegaard's scattered notes and journal
der to highlight habits of historicist entries it is clear that his habitus in the city
thought which linger on to inform Ben- was that of a cultural tourist. In fact, he
jamin's work, as well as our own. Although carefully models this by creating a pseu-
contemporary theory may be tireless in its donymous narrator for the account of his
ability to locate and debunk remnants of second stay in 1843. In the travelogue con-
historical master-narratives, pursuing in- tained in the first part of "Repetition,"
stead more multivalent, open sources, it Constantin Constantius, whom Kierke-
tends not to apply this approach to its own gaard characterizes as a Danish rentier,
practice. While Benjamin's spatializing stages a reencounter with Berlin in a psy-
method has been seen as a challenge to lin- chological dare with himself, and in the
ear historicism, it has itself emerged as a process he follows Kierkegaard's tracks
postmodern point of origin, with his read- through the city, including walks through
ing of metropolitan modernity serving as a the Tiergarten, attendance at a perform-
kind of "master itinerary" retraced again ance of Nestroy's "The Talisman," and a
and again as we orient ourselves in our passage by steamer to Stralsund. Neither
shifting cultural landscape. I would like to autobiography, nor fiction, Constantin's re-
suggest that Kierkegaard's Berlin trave- port plays itself out in an irresolvable ten-
logue works against this tendency to re- sion between the two, with Kierkegaard as
auraticize space by exposing the principle a missing point of confessional origin in a
of perpetual recirculation-what Benja- long chain of displacements. We should not
min's Das Passagen-Werk refers to as the miss the significance of Kierkegaard's
"ever-returning new"- which lies not only method, for what Constantin's travelogue
behind the formation of the modern, but details is the breakup of the emerging bour-
behind efforts like Benjamin's to see geois-urban subject into a sequence of se-

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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 3

rial identities both within the text's frame isters the tourist's impressions through
(Constantin retraces his own steps) and model itineraries, or spatial narratives (it
outside of it (while Constantin follows spectacularizes, and therefore defuses,
Kierkegaard's Berlin itinerary, he himself even seemingly non-touristic industrial
is framed when he later turns up in the sites by listing factory and steamworks
pseudonymously authored Stages on Life's along with hotels, eateries, bathing estab-
Way, 1845). In a pattern that, at least at lishments and "best views").5 In a practice
first glance, is familiar to us through stand- that would soon become standard with the
ard models of the "dispersed self' this re- Baedecker and Grieben guides of the
peated bracketing is highlighted as a part 1850s, Berlin was delineated through a se-
of subject formation. Since every attempt ries of consumable sights into which trav-
at self-recuperation is an act of self-media- elers were initiated as a variant of the read-
tion, unitary identity is made unstable sim- ing public. As Rumpf writes in How to Ex-
ply by being an object of retrospection. perience Berlin in the Shortest Possible
When Constantin returns to those sites in Time (1835): "In general, strangers want
Berlin where memory traces have been left, to take in all notable locales at a particular
he stages an uncanny encounter with him- place with a single glance."6 The efficiency
self as fldneur by establishing a chain of of the panoramic view and the demands of
dislocating selves whose successive acts of a developing commodity culture met in the
self-estrangement provide the piece with a new touristic dream of having "done" a city.
narrative, and whose compulsion to redu- Constantin derides the fact that tour-
plicate and reiterate suggests less the pas- ism functions this way as a play of signs.
sive anxiety of Baudelaire or Poe than the "If one is ... a courier," he writes, "who
more deliberate play of identity and non- travels to smell what everybody else has
identity that Benjamin admired in surreal- smelled or to write in the names of notable
ist nightwalkers like Aragon. sights in his journals and in return gets his
"Repetition" problematizes the cate- in the great autograph book of travelers,
gory of authenticity on two fronts: on the then he engages a day servant and buys das
one hand, it does so in individual terms, by ganze Berlin for four Groschen" (153). He
means of the pseudonyms; on the other, it defines his project of recuperating the self
operates in a more broadly discursive con- precisely in opposition to industrialized
text through Constantin's encounter with travel. His account begins with a recollec-
an emerging tourist industry. In the Berlin tion of "The Talisman," the Nestroy com-
of the Vormdirz,travel was in the process of edy he saw performed the year before at
being regularized and subsumed within a the K6nigstaidter Theater. Recalling his
pan-European network of transport and visit, Constantin compares his theater box
consumption. Binary train routes (e.g., to an apartment living room, the private
Berlin-Stettin) were expanding into a full- space of bourgeois memory and archive of
fledged transportation system with de- souvenirs: "one sits here at the theater," he
pendable schedules, connections to steam- writes, "as comfortably as one does at
ers, surface vehicles and station hubs home" (the comparison was not unique to
around which a services industry had be- Kierkegaard, since the decorum governing
gun to develop. Although travel firms were the mid-century theater loge was that of
still a rarity, and organized group travel a the private salon: unaccompanied women,
novelty, there was a proliferating market for example, could only avoid the taint of
for tourist guides, either in book or bro- the "fille publique" if they sat in a private
chure form. One contemporary example, box).7 As Constantin recollects being seat-
Schmidt's Wegweiser (1822), indexes the ed, he, in effect, takes his place within a
choice and sequence of sights and admin- fully naturalized bourgeois code of private

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4 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Winter 1998

and public, so that by acquainting the flaneur is the native tourist, the tourist a
reader with the theater's sightlines, he foreign fldneur-and he lays out a rationale
simultaneously asserts his bona fides as for privileging the former over the latter.
tour-guide, memoirist, and viewing sub- The tourist measures space in its own
ject: "In the first balcony one can be as- terms, i.e., exotic distance, while for the na-
sured of getting a box all to oneself. If not, tive fldneur, the city opens up as a temporal
however, may I recommend to the reader domain and a repository of past associa-
boxes five and six at the left, so that he can tions, so that its streets hold the promise
still have some useful information from of mnemonic aid. What Kierkegaard's pro-
what I write. In a corner at the back there ject does is lend the foreign traveler those
is a single seat where one has his own un- prerogatives Benjamin assigns the native.
surpassed position" (165). In Berlin, Kierkegaard's Constantin acts
In predictable fashion, his travelogue the part of local "archaeologist" excavating
that follows opposes the authentic and local the city for lost memory traces, only here
to the standardized, reiterated and com- the time differential is radically fore-
mercial. But, as Jonathan Culler has shortened. Where Baudelaire takes two
pointed out, the common binary authentic decades to return to the Place de Carrousel
traveler/mere tourist is illusory, since the of his childhood in "Le Cygne," Kierke-
tourist is nothing but a projection of the gaard's experiment is undertaken just a lit-
traveler's bad faith.8 While managed travel tle more than a year after his initial visit.
uses the rhetoric of Romantic subjectivity Benjamin himselfjudged the importance of
to promote direct, unmediated experience such time differentials in relative terms; as
and a recuperation of selfhood far from the he writes in his notes to Das Passagen-Werk
work-relations of the market economy, (5: 576), the quickened pace of technologi-
what is forgotten is that the very terms cal change opens wider distances between
"authentic" and "originary" are always shorter segments of time, so that the recent
after the fact. As Rosalind Krauss observes: past may assume a dense nostalgic or
"Although the singular and the formulaic mythic "visual spell." The compression and
or repetitive may be semantically opposed, isolation of variables like time and distance
they are nonetheless conditions of each lend Kierkegaard's "experiment" a kind of
other ... the priorness and repetition of pic- laboratory purity. If Constantin enacts his
tures is necessary to the singularity of the trip in theatrical time--time as a series of
picturesque ... for the beholder it depends repeat performances-then he does so with
on being recognized as such, a re-cognition the gestural compactness of farce. On re-
made possible only by prior example."9 turning to Berlin, he notices a new wedding
This masking of the interdependence of ring on the finger of his former landlord,
"origin" and "copy" was capitalized upon while the beggar he used to pass at the
and made to play an institutional role Brandenburg gate is now wearing a differ-
across all lines of 19th-century cultural ent colored coat. Back at the theater to see
production, from connoisseurship to the the Nestroy play for a second time, he is
extension of copyright. What the tourist in- forced to sit in a box on the right rather
dustry did was to employ the Romantic than the left. Temporal disjunction is thus
travel-ethos by offering its customers spon- played out in spatial terms. Although the
taneity and recuperation of self in serial arrangement of furniture in the bourgeois
form, through souvenirs, group travel and interior usually serves to stabilize identity
pre-set itineraries. by establishing a domain of habit (in fact,
Benjamin, in his typology of urban a Danish expatriate living in Berlin was
strollers, recognizes the family resem- startled to notice the care with which
blances between fldneur and tourist-the Kierkegaard had furnished his rooms

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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 5

abroad),10 when Constantin re-enters his the trauma victim, except that in Constan-
Berlin apartment and sees that a desk and tin's heightened state of anxiety, self-rep-
velvet chair have been rearranged, he finds resentation itself is perceived as traumatic
that something has, quite literally, "taken" occurrence. Kierkegaard and his chain of
place.11 multiple pseudonyms are consumed by
Yet more than such minuscule altera- copies because they cannot find a workable
tions, it is the experience of sameness that distance from them. We might consider this
is most destabilizing to Constantin. Enter- state to be marginally traumatic, since it
ing his Stammlokal as if on automatic pilot, exacerbates the liminality of deferred ex-
he finds everything-patrons, witticisms, perience which informs traditional ac-
greetings at the door-untouched by time. counts of trauma. Anxiety turns here on
"I could count the hair on every head," he the loss of traumatic origin, a situation
writes; and yet he concludes that repetition similar to that described by Mark Seltzer
is beyond him (170). Difference carried by in his analysis of the crisis of a "wound
the context of the familiar brings the un- culture" whose symbolic order is depend-
canny home to him in a way nothing else ent on, but not securely in possession of,
does. This acute perception of non-identity interiority: "The traumatic here is some-
"de-originates," that is, it works retroac- thing like a return to the scene of the crime,
tively, by calling into question the solidity not merely in that the trauma is the prod-
of the memories which Kierkegaard uses uct of its representation, but also in that it
as departure points for Constantin's return is the product not of an event itself, but of
trip. The first and second visits unfold not how the subject repeats or represents it to
as echo to original, but as echo to echo, so himself. In order for this return to take
that his Berlin is defined by serial experi- place, time must be converted to place, act
ences in which the model instance is brack- into scene.'"12Constantin's version of this
eted out as such. Something significant is self-staging registers this cultural shift
being detailed here, for Kierkegaard is through the serializing logic of tourism,
making Constantin trace the iterable logic whereby authenticity comes after the fact,
of an emerging culture of mass replication: like picturesque sights which, strangely, al-
repetition is seen as foundational, with ways resemble themselves.
authenticity as its self-defeating, periph- This is precisely the territory in which
eral effect. From the proliferation of pho- Benjamin makes his rendezvous with Kier-
tographs and the mobilization of tourism kegaard. In a series of autobiographical
to the introduction of the rotary press, new writings Benjamin works his way back to-
19th-century technologies destabilized the wards the Berlin of the Vormrnrz.His am-
concept-pairing of original and copy. In bition to "set out [his] bios as if on a map,"
"Repetition," this instability is experi- leads him to reconsider those architectural
enced, with hypochondriacal acuity, as a remnants from the mid-nineteenth cen-
flattening out of surface/depth models like tury which had left their impress on him as
that of bourgeois domestic space, which, a child (6: 466). The result is that across
coded as a storehouse of memory, ostensi- the distance of a century he and Kierke-
bly promises a recuperation of selfhood and gaard meet at particular autobiographical
authenticity. In this sense, Constantin's sites-on the Pfaueninsel, at the Royal Op-
return trip acts out a collapse of that bour- era House on the Gendarmenmarkt, before
geois interiority, or self-encapsulation, the Schinkelfassaden around the Kupfer-
which constitutes itself through perceived graben, at the Tiergarten monument to
threats and shocks. As a result, the subject Friedrich Wilhelm which was built shortly
is stranded in the ambiguity between inside before Kierkegaard's first trip, and which
and outside, between copy and original, like serves Benjamin as his point of entrance to

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6 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Winter 1998

the "labyrinthine weave" of the city (6: In one passage, photo and furnished dwell-
465). Benjamin's Berlin memoirs, written ing-the two great apparatuses of bour-
over a span of years, are in effect co-exten- geois memory-are fully conflated as he
sive with his career as a critic. He incorpo- considers a picture of himself as a boy posed
rated early autobiographical pieces from in a photographic studio mock-up of a do-
Die literarische Welt into the first version mestic interior, in which he is positioned as
of his memoirs, Berliner Chronik, which he a thing among things in a reified landscape
revised after his stay on Ibiza in 1932. The of memory:
unpublished text served as the basis for
Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert, WhereverI looked,I saw myself surroun-
selections of which were first sent to the ded by screens, cushions, pedestals which
lusted for my image like the shades of Ha-
Frankfurter Zeitung before being exten-
des for the blood of the sacrificialanimal.
sively rewritten in exile. Together the
memoirs constitute a series of compulsive ... The gaze [that] sinks into me from the
child's face in the shadow of the house-
reworkings (a long "good-bye" to the city hold palm ... it belongs to one of the stu-
is how Adorno characterized them). Al- dios that ... partakeof the boudoirand the
though Benjamin's stated project was to lay torture chamber....I am disfiguredby my
out his sphere of life topographically, he similarity to everything surroundingme
was doing so on shifting ground. He resists here. I dwelt in the nineteenth century as
the notion that Berliner Chronik or Ber- a mollusk dwells in its shell; and the cen-
liner Kindheit offer anything like autobi- tury now lies hollow before me like an
ography in the traditional sense of the empty shell. I hold it to my ear. (4: 261)
term, since they revolve not around conti-
nuity and a seamless recuperation of the There is no separating the autobio-
past, but rather around "space and the dis- graphical from the collective-historical in
junctive" (6: 488). Like Constantin, he Benjamin. His memoirs have to be read as
stands in an uncanny relation to the self he part of that broader matrix of texts through
conjures up. In Benjamin's memoirs, the which he patterns his history of the nine-
play of identity and non-identity, the search teenth century. The seriality he confronts
for an elusive moment of originary self- in autobiographical passages like the one
presence, is spatialized through a series of above haunts his contemporaries in the
receding interiors extending from the form of phantasmagoria, collective dream-
"masked rooms" of his parents' west-side images whose compulsion to repeat is
apartment, to his aunt's bay window, to the masked by the appearance of novelty and
Griinderzeit interior of his grandmother's its agent, fashion. "The eternal return," he
house in the Steglizterstrasse, and back writes, "is a projection onto the cosmos of
into architectural structures from what he the punishment of staying after school: hu-
delineates as his mid-century "horizon of manity is forced to copy out its text in end-
family memory." The autobiographical af- less repetition" (1: 1234). The naive belief
ter-images of these environments are spec- that Weimar culture in its most progressive
tral. Benjamin compares them to snap- guises is no longer subject to such anxious
shots, because he sees the process of ghost- compulsions has only consolidated their
ing the self as integral to the medium of mythic density (the equivalent of "dream-
photography with its capacity to serialize ing that one is awake"). Throughout his
and reduplicate. Confronted with photos of work, Benjamin seeks out early industrial-
himself as a child, he experiences a prox- era phantasmagorical forms and styles-
imity that estranges. "Moments of sudden panoramas, the embossing of facades-at
exposure are at the same time moments the moment of their impending obsoles-
when we are beside ourselves" (6: 516).13 cence, reanimating them as images in order

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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 7

to upset perceptual habit. His constellatory vides him with what he calls "threshold
pre-history of modernity turns not on the knowledge" (3: 196). Hessel wrote Spaz-
mutual illumination of particular histori- ieren in Berlin as a tourbook for natives
cal moments, but on their reinscription, so who were oblivious to the phantasmagori-
that the past emerges as a recollection of cal forces held by the city's streets through
the present. In this sense, Benjamin "exca- entertainment venues, signage, architec-
vates" traces of 19th-century Berlin which, tural detail and so forth. Hessel treats
although dismissed by official memory as phantasmagoria as double-edged, in that
obsolete, still lie on the surface of city. they embody collective wishes and striv-
The Berlin of the Vormdrz, Kierke- ings which although half-expressed or neu-
gaard's Berlin, is most extensively evoked tralized, are present as a potentially trans-
in Benjamin's 1929-1932 series of radio forming force (as Lefebvre would say, they
broadcasts for young people. Radio pro- comprise their own contradictions and are
vided Benjamin with the opportunity to therefore sites of alternative impulses). A
pursue his rarefied dialectic of ruin and structure like the arcade, for example, with
repetition through the popular discourse of its encapsulation of the street, upholds
tourism ("Asone leaves the city on the way bourgeois interiority at an illusory remove
to Oranienburg and Velten, one cuts through from the exigencies of public life, while at
Tegel, where there is a lot to be seen ..."). the same time it collapses the terms of this
Through a series of 28 half-hour talks, he otherwise strict dichotomy. As an instance
leads his listeners on auditory forays into of "dream-space," the arcade evinces the
Alt-Berlin, its streets, schools, public key to its own dissolution in the form of the
works, puppet theaters, workers' housing transparency embodied in its glass and iron
and early sites of industrial production. frame, but obscured by Griinderzeit pilas-
Benjamin operates through a public per- ters, embossing, pediments and friezes. Ac-
formance (rather than explication) of his cording to Benjamin, it is only when the
constellatory history. He does this by using structure is read with an eye to this prin-
the new mass medium to reach back to ciple of transparency that it shows itself as
early forms of metropolitan journalism in an awakening dream. The post-Baude-
an attempt to reanimate the panoramic per- lairean, post-surrealist fldneur creates op-
spective developed in guides like the Buntes positional space within the dream world of
Berlin and the Berliner Stadtklatsch the streets through reiteration, by recon-
and in E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "Des Vet- structing its representative structures as a
ters Eckfenster" (in which the Romantic series of legible images.
picturesque is first translated into the id- In Benjamin's project, Kierkegaard
iom of sensationalism and "local color"). plays a crucial (albeit inconspicuous) part,
In evoking the practices of the classic in that his work furnishes a virtual tem-
mid-century feuilletonist, Benjamin found plate for the bourgeois interior, the basic
a contemporary model in the work of Franz architectonic unit in Benjamin's theoreti-
Hessel, his close friend and co-translator of cal construction. For Benjamin, the inte-
Proust. According to Benjamin, Hessel rep- rior is a concrete expression of 19th-cen-
resents a second-coming, or Wiederkehr, of tury domestication mania, an illusory sanc-
the 19th-century fldneur who reinvigor- tum set up to shut out the very conflicts
ates the tradition of urban idling from a that make up its conditions: "The living
perspective at once retrospective and space constituted itself as interior. The of-
emancipatory. Benjamin's architectural in- fice was its compliment. The private citizen
terest is caught by Hessel's depiction of ... required of the interior that it should
communicating spaces (i.e., bridges, door- support him in his illusions" (5: 52). As a
ways, crossings etc.), because Hessel pro- locus of phantasmagoria, the interior is

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8 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Winter 1998

charged with mythic compulsion, so that it Kierkegaard's boyhood habit of taking


is endlessly replicated and inflected. Ar- "roomwalks" with his father, apartment
cades, museums, department stores are length strolls in which imaginary store-
versions of interior display space in monu- fronts and pedestrians would unfold pano-
mental form, while antimacassars and in- rama-like in front of them).
laid boxes are interiors within interiors. "It In his notes to Das Passagen-Werk, Ben-
is scarcely possible, Benjamin notes, "to jamin maintains that Kierkegaard's image-
discover anything for which the 19th cen- space (Bilderwelt) is co-extensive with the
tury did not invent casings-pocket wat- bourgeois interior and therefore within the
ches, slippers, egg cups, thermometers, bounds of a phantasmagoric "magic circle"
playing cards, and in lieu of casings, then marked out by contemporaries like Poe,
coverlets, carpet runners, linings and slip- Baudelaire, and E.T.A. Hoffmann.16 Yet
covers" (5: 292). According to Benjamin, we Kierkegaard resists such facile typologiz-
can find the architectonic code for these ing. A brief look at Hoffmann, Benjamin's
features of interior construction in a cita- prototypical Berlin fldneur, points up a
tion from Kierkegaard's Stages on Life's radical difference in the way street and in-
Way: "homesickness at home."14 "This," terior are negotiated. Although Benjamin
says Benjamin, "is the formula for the in- was unaware of it, Kierkegaard's Berlin
terior" (5: 289). The private sphere was apartment off the Gendarmenmarkt was
compulsively heaped with bric-a-brac, me- located around the corner from the Char-
mentos, heirlooms, photographic portraits lottenstrasse where Hoffmann had lived
and various objects of display, and thus was fifteen years earlier. A view of the square,
meant to furnish visible, reassuring proof in fact, turns up as a central locale both in
of an integrated and autonomous self. As "Repetition" and in Hoffmann's "Des Vet-
such, it is an extreme example of "striated" ters Eckfenster," the text Benjamin cites in
space obsessively parceled and held as ter- radio talks and essays as a crucial moment
ritory. Borrowed memories turned up in the in the genealogy of the Berlin fldneur: "this
form of "fake antiques" which created a last story which [Hoffmann] dictated on his
boom market in the '40s. In this elaborately deathbed is nothing short of a primer on
outfitted theater of subjectivity, identity physiognomical vision" (7: 91). The story
was constituted by an assumption of style revolves around a provincial visitor to the
suggesting less stability than schizophren- city, who is tutored by his cousin, a Berliner,
ic delirium--delirium being, as Deleuze in the "art of seeing" from the vantage
and Guattari remind us, the unseen outer point of a bay window overlooking the
wall or constitutive limit of consumer square. In a version of the urban pictur-
economies whose inner wall, or relative esque, the Berlin cousin construes a
limit, is a desocialized "commodity flow."15 number of Biedermeier tableaux vivants
"The Gothic, the Persian, the Renais- out of the crowd of people on the streets.
sance," Benjamin writes, "that meant: that He appropriates them as types, or touristic
there was a festival hall from Cesare Bor- landmarks in a panoramic display of uni-
gia, that out of the boudoir of the housewife versalized humanity. The window estab-
there arose a gothic chapel, and that over lishes the visual perspective into which the
the study of the master of the house there provincial visitor is initiated, as its pictur-
was the apartment of a Persian sheik" esque view renders him a bourgeois-urban
(5: 282). The succession of styles and accu- subject through the act of seeing. The
mulation of world-souvenirs allowed the cousin, for his part, is the archetypal jour-
occupants to play tourists at home, travers- nalistic guide who navigates a changeable
ing distances of time and place as domestic urban milieu and helps readers (native or
nomads (to this effect, Benjamin cites foreign) shop for authentic experience by

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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 9

introducing them to local "scenes." He are two identical rooms, identically fur-
serves to naturalize a perspective at once nished, so that one sees the room double
detached and acquisitive: through the win- in the mirror(151).
dow's frame, the unwieldiness of street life
and its potential threats are drawn into the The crisis-ridden and therefore (paradoxi-
room and domesticated as decor. cally) still functioning spatio-temporal
Kierkegaard shares a similar apart- unity of classic metropolitan perspective is
ment view of the Gendarmenmarkt's twin dissolved; and instead, Constantin's scene
churches, opera house and market-place of reenactment is folded back on itself in a
with the cousin in "Des Vetters Eckfen- mise-en-abyme, in which street life, win-
ster." But where the cousin's illustrative dows and the registering interior itself are
gaze extends into the square, Kierke- reduced, through mirroring, to a flat plane
gaard's Constantin, making his way back of representation suggesting the doubling
through Berlin, dissolves the habitus of the with a difference which informs Kierke-
fldneur. Constantin enters his old flat, a gaard's text as a whole.
paradigmatic dream-space which is here To draw the crucial point: the principle
permeated by the ambiguity-producing on which Constantin's travelogue turns is
glow of gas lighting and which has been one of disjunctive similitude. At first
filtered through the uncertainty of mem- glance, his report from Berlin would seem
ory: an assertion of bourgeois subjectivity in the
manner of Hoffmann or Baudelaire, that
Sitting in a chairby the window,one looks is, a subjectivity that, no matter how desta-
out on the great square, sees the shadows
bilized, is reconstituted as a refuge in ever
of passersby hurrying along the walls;
deeper interior space. What makes "Repe-
everythingis transformedinto a stage set- tition" so deceptive is the fact that it re-
ting. A dreamworldglimmersin the back-
volves not around identity with the figure
groundof the soul. One feels the desire to
toss on a cape,to steal softly alongthe wall of fldneur, but around uncanny proximity
with a searching gaze, aware of every to him. According to Benjamin, Baudelaire
sound. One does not do this, but merely suffers the anxiety of "duplicating selves
sees a rejuvenatedself doing it (151-52). and treading in place which is at the heart
of flanerie." He registers the discomfort of
If narrative is the unfolding of temporality such duplication, writes Benjamin, but be-
in space, then disjunctive time-Constan- cause of Baudelaire's "armature" of the
tin's "repetition"-plays itself out in a picturesque, he himself cannot read it as
built version of liminal trauma. This mem- such (5: 405). Benjamin's categorization of
ory theater, formed by a series of interlock- Kierkegaard as a flaneur in the Baude-
ing rooms, is the architectural equivalent lairean mode overlooks the fact that
of repetition mania. Constantin recalls Kierkegaard deliberately mobilizes this
subtle, dreamlike displacements which are fear of doubles as the very form-giving prin-
the more uncanny for being so slight. He ciple of his travelogue. Far from being the
steps outside himself, consumed as a stable "sanctum" or "refuge" it is assumed to be,
subject while in agoraphobic retreat. "One this interior is an infernal apparatus set by
climbs the stairs to the first floor," he the author for himself in which the attempt
writes, to recuperate the self is mocked, or shad-
owed, by "catastrophic" failure. Kierke-
and in the gas illuminatedbuilding,opens gaard registers his own impress on return-
a little doorand stands in the entry.To the ing to Berlin. His interior is already a form
left is a glass door leading to a room. ofdialecticized image, which is read against
Straight ahead is an anteroom. Beyond itself in Constantin's problematic restag-

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10 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Winter 1998

ing of his Berlin fldneries where progress and exploded this entire dungeon world
is measured by a series of perceptual shocks with the dynamiteof the tenth of a second
delivered by the juxtaposition of two dis- (1: 499).
creet moments.
Kierkegaard's spatial incognito finds Benjamin considers architecture's de-
something of an analogy in Benjamin's no- fining feature to be the fact that it ritual-
tion of "tactile nearness," a technique izes, or freezes the relationship of space and
worked up in his later writings which he action. It is a weak medium because it is
hoped would allow him to revisit outmoded appropriated by use and perception ("sight
structures so as to subvert their mythic- and touch") working in tandem under the
compulsive power to repeat. It is precisely guidance of habit (1: 504). Ritual passivity
this technique that alarmed Adorno when is simply the flip-side of auratic distance:
he read the first draft of the Baudelaire both are alibis for disengagement. "Archi-
piece. Benjamin, he believed, ran the risk tecture is appropriated by the collectivity
of collusion by offering a "wide-eyed pres- in a state of distraction," he writes (1: 504).
entation of facts at the cross-roads of posi- Yet as he goes on to suggest, the suscepti-
tivism and magic. "17 Benjamin was himself bility of the architectural medium is also
well aware of the danger of being held cap- the source of its potential strength. If "tac-
tive by what Adorno calls the "Medusan tile appropriation" can be mobilized for dis-
glance" of these images, but as Benjamin junctive effect, then proximity gains a re-
saw it, there was no choice, since the idea demptive component, if not for architec-
of safe distance which Adorno advocated ture per se, at least for an architecturally
shares the illusory structure of bourgeois structured theory like his own. While it is
autonomy Benjamin was examining. He certainly the case that some of his formu-
needed a means of breaking the spell of the lations on literary montage call to mind the
auratic which would no longer be depend- interventionist tactics of the 1920s avant-
ent on the perspective of critical or instru- garde and its pose of revolutionary intre-
mental mastery, since this perspective sup- pidity, their rhetorical register does not
ports the visual distance (Fernsicht) which necessarily mesh with the kind of stealth
constitutes the aura in the first place. He technique he develops in his later work.
found a potential model in film's ability to Benjamin's notion of "tactile appropria-
open up the human sensorium to new, in- tion" is not reliant on extraneous materi-
timate spatial formations through the id- als, like the parodic references or pictorial
iom of cross-cuts and close-ups. For Ben- commentary found in the montage of
jamin, film reconstitutes the optic field Heartfield or H6ch. On the contrary, it re-
both by bringing things "nearer to home," quires that phantasmagorical structures
while at the same time investing them with are preserved intact so as to allow them to
the kind of perceptual jolt, or "interval" release their own inherent contradictions
between shots first theorized by Vertov as and thus make evident their transforma-
cinema's formal principle. Film opens up tive possibilities: "The method of my work:
the spaces of everyday life in which phan- literary montage. I have nothing to say,
tasmagoria lodge. "In and of themselves," only to show" (5: 574). His late work ap-
Benjamin observes, proaches a form of spontaneous critique,
whereby the everyday is encountered,
these offices, furnished rooms, bars, city made visible, in its own unfamiliar terms.
streets, railwaystations, and factoriesare "Wepenetrate mystery," Benjamin writes,
ugly, incomprehensible, hopelessly sad. "only to the degree that we recognize it in
Or rather, they were so and seemed so, the everyday realm, by virtue of a dialecti-
until film came along. Film came along cal optic that perceives the everyday as im-

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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 11

penetrable, the impenetrable as everyday" guide, Proust's doctrine of involuntary rec-


(5: 90). ollection provides a model to open up the
In Kierkegaard and Benjamin, it is not Berlin of Benjamin's childhood by helping
simply that the domestic interior figures as him mediate the states of waking and
a dominant image, but that they regard the dreaming. Memory traces suspend the illu-
images themselves as interiors, that is, as sory duration of time through a process of
forms of inhabited and inhabiting space. spatialization in which they take on dimen-
One has to search out images where they sional form as discreet images ("space-
"dwell," Benjamin writes ("wo die Bilder crossed time"). Yet this "experimental re-
wohnen, wo sie hausen," 3: 196). Since the arrangement of furniture in slumber" is,
interior is the prime locus of everyday life, Benjamin insists, a mere half measure,
it is the very structural embodiment of the since space is left as a false eternity. Proust,
phantasmagorical (the site where social re- lying on his back in the middle of his bed-
lations are reproduced on a daily basis). For room and conjuring the past through im-
both Kierkegaard and Benjamin, then, "in- ages of elaborately differentiated decor,
habiting" the image of the interior means creates a hermetically closed environment
occupying a space which is governed by governed by compulsive, or mythic, reitera-
habit and repetition. The dream space of tion from which present time is barred.
the interior is reiterated into "waking Benjamin distances himself from Proust,
space" (Wachwelt) from within, which and in doing so he inadvertently echoes
means that its image is predicated not on Kierkegaard's Constantin: "Proust," Ben-
an anterior wakefulness but on the process, jamin writes, "traps us in memory's eleatic
or event, of awakening. This is borne out magic realm" (2: 313).
by Constantin's return trip to Berlin, This echo is more than slightly ironic,
which turns on a reenactment of a set of given the ease with which Benjamin classi-
mundane practices, rather then recollec- fies Kierkegaard as a historical "late-
tion. Indeed, when Constantin shows up comer."Yet one could say that it is precisely
again in Kierkegaard's Stages on Life's Kierkegaard's belatedness, his deliberate
Way, he offers an explicit countervoice to cultivation of epigonistic after-images, that
William Afham, the pseudonym who fur- in many ways makes his memoirs so con-
nishes Benjamin with the "formula" for the temporaneous with Benjamin's own. Kier-
bourgeois interior ("homesickness at kegaard does not employ his images in the
home"). As William speaks at a symposium development of a historiography, let alone
hosted by Constantin, he outlines a theory one informed by a materialist pedagogy, as
of recollection similar to involuntary mem- Benjamin's is. Nevertheless, Benjamin
ory: "to conjure up the past for oneself," he clearly repeats or "revisits" some of the key
declares, "is not as difficult as forget- structural features ofKierkegaard's dialec-
ting." 18Although Constantin supports this tic in developing the stealth tactic of the
attempt to work against the encrustations interior-image. It is difficult to say how
of habitual memory, he is wary ofWilliam's comfortable Benjamin would have been
"proficiency in illusion" and warns that with this convergence of perspectives. His
such memory-play will prove an "eleatic assumptions about the kind of critical
ruse"19 (a reference to the doctrine of Par- privilege history bestows shift and often
menides and the proto-idealists which overlap. He maintains that images become
holds that movement is an illusion obscur- readable only when juxtaposed according
ing the world's eternal stasis). Benjamin, to a specific historical "index" (something
for his part, engages in a similar internal not found in "Repetition," with its trun-
debate in assessing his relationship to cated time-differential between visits), but
Proust. As Benjamin's acknowledged there are also points in his work when this

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12 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Winter 1998

same index is then doubly privileged by be- phe. It is not that which is approaching, but
ing tied to a modernist teleology and its that which is" (1: 683). Whereas Mies van
assumption of heroic innovation and an un- der Rohe planned his 40-story glass and
derlying universal-history. "Dwelling in steel tower as a formalist rebuke to the ar-
the old sense is a thing of the past. With chitectural vernacular of the Friedrich-
Giedion, Mendelsohn, Le Corbusier ... strasse, Benjamin's Berlin memoirs are, in
what is coming in the future stands under effect, "built" out of outmoded structures
the sign of transparency," Benjamin writes and common haunts.
in reviewing Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin Here again Benjamin might be said to
(3: 196-97). Siegfried Giedion's historical cross paths with Kierkegaard, because
account of the Bauhaus and its anticipatory there is a similar form of secular messian-
moments in the 19th century institution- ism informing the everyday spaces of
alized transparency as an architectonic "Repetition." One hesitates to group the
and theoretical principle unfolding itself eschatologies of Benjamin and Kierke-
through three historically inevitable "space gaard together, given the explicit material-
conceptions."20 According to this modern- historical interests of the former, and the
ist narrative, the architectural past only be- expressly theological concerns of the latter.
comes readable in light of a progressive aes- But it may be that they meet here, in their
thetic of flowing light and imperceptible Berlin writings, as they do at no other
spatial transitions between rooms. In min- point. For Kierkegaard's account of his stay
ing avant-garde architectural theory for his takes place entirely within the sphere of
Arcades project, Benjamin clearly draws the secular, falling as it does under the cate-
from Giedion's survey; and yet, as becomes gory of his early, "aesthetic" production.
evident while he was finishing his memoirs His Berlin, like Benjamin's, is shot through
and compiling notes for "The Theses on the with an explicitly quotidian form of illumi-
Philosophy of History," Benjamin uses it nation (as opposed to his "ethical" or "re-
chiefly as a point of departure for putting ligious" stages). It occupies profane space,
the modernist notion of legibility through governed by immediacy and without re-
a drastic transformation: "The concept of course to the kind of ontology that could
the historical progress of mankind cannot possibly guarantee notions of repetition as
be sundered from the concept of its pro- mimetic return. Rather, what we find in the
gress through homogeneous empty time. A fldneries of both Benjamin and Kierke-
critique of the concept of such progression gaard is history as a perpetual piling up of
must be the basis of any criticism of pro- "debris," of ruined forms and unsuccessful
gress itself" (1: 701). In opposition to the reenactments that in their failure carry
historicism of the Bauhaus, with its prem- with them a utopian moment as potential.
ises in bourgeois epistemology, Benjamin The dialectical images they develop "on
came to view history under the sign of per- site" in Berlin work against both the stasis
petual rupture and disjunction (what the of perpetual ruin, and the illusory neutral-
angel of history sees before him is "wreck- ity of the historicist continuum. Instead,
age piled upon wreckage"). This is not to critical distance is renegotiated as inhab-
suggest, as J. Hillis Miller and others do, ited space, indistinguishable from the un-
that Benjamin eventually forgoes the es- canny shape of what is nearest at hand.
chatological, but rather that in his later
writings he effects a radical reinvestment
of the utopian moment within disjunction
itself.21 "The concept of progress," he
writes, "is to be grounded in the catastro-
phe; that things just go on is the catastro-

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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 13

Notes 278.
8JonathanCuller,"The Semiotics of Tour-
ism," American Journal of Semiotics I (1/2,
Unless otherwise noted, references to 1981): 127-29.
Kierkegaard and Benjamin are from: Soren 9Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repeti- Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
tion, trans. HowardH. Hong and EdnaV Hong (Cambridge,Mass.:MIT P, 1985) 166.
(New York:Princeton UP 1983); and Walter 10T.H. Croxall, Glimpses and Impressions
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf of Kierkegaard(London:Nisbet, 1959) 23.
Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhaiuser, 11Foran excellent discussion of place and
12 vols. (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1972- ). serialism in the context of Benjamin's work,
1See Benjamin's review of Adorno's see Samuel Weber,Mass Mediauras: Form, Me-
Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Asthetischen in: dia, Technics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996)
Benjamin, Schriften (3: 234). Scattered refer- 76-90.
ences to Kierkegaardare found in KonvolutD, 12MarkSeltzer, "Anatomyof a WoundCul-
I , J and M in Das Passagen-Werk as part of ture," October80 (Spring, 1997): 11-12.
planned chapters on the fldneur, Baudelaire, 13AlthoughEduardoCadavadoes not draw
boredom and the bourgeois interior. When on the bourgeoisinterior as a specific appara-
Kierkegaard is mentioned among Benjamin tus of memory,he does offer a very valuable
scholars, it is typically as a footnote in B.'s in- treatment of the function of photographyin
tellectual biography.See, for example, Susan Benjamin's dialectic, see Eduardo Cadava,
Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cam- Wordsof Light (Princeton:PrincetonUP, 1997).
bridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1989) 176. 14S0ren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way,
2Kierkegaard'sfirst visit lasted from Octo- trans. Howard H. Hong and Edna V Hong
ber 1841 to March 1842. He subsequently re- (New York:Princeton UP, 1978) 13.
turned to the city for two-weekstays in Mayof 15Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
1843, 1845, and 1846. He considereda fifth trip Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
in May of 1848, but was not able to make it on (Minneapolis:U of Minnesota P, 1987) 345.
accountof his failing health. See Kierkegaard's 16This observation is made explicit in his
Journals and Papers, ed. Howard H. Hong and review of Adorno's study, and it informs his
Edna V Hong, 7 vols. (New York:Indiana UP, comments on Kierkegaardin the notes to the
1978) 5: 399. Arcades Project.See Schriften, 3: 381.
3From Adorno's introduction to Ben- 17Walter Benjamin, Briefe, ed. Theodor
jamin's Schriften. In: On Walter Benjamin, ed. Adorno and GershomScholem, 2 vols. (Frank-
GarySmith (Cambridge,Mass.:MITUP, 1988) furt: Suhrkamp, 1966) 2: 620.
11-12. 18Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, 9-10.
4Peter Eisenman, "K Nowhere 2 Fold," 19Kierkegaard,Repetition,309.
Anywhere, ed. Cynthia Davidson (New York: 20Siegfried Giedion, Architecture and the
Anyone, 1992) 222. Phenomena of Transition (Cambridge, Mass.:
5Valentin Schmidt, Wegweiser fair Fremde HarvardUP 1971) 267-68.
und Einheimische durch Berlin und Potsdam 21In his study of Hitchcock, Slavoj Ziiek
(Berlin:B. Nicolai, 1822) xii. makes a similar point about Benjamin and
6Thomas Rumpf, Berlin: wie man es in kiir- Kierkegaardwhen he notes that they each use
zester Zeit erleben kann (Berlin: Arani, 1835) 4. ruin and return forutopianeffect:SlavojZilek,
7Kierkegaard, Repetition, 165. See: Enjoy Your Symptom! (London: Routledge,
Michelle Perrot, A History of Private Life, 5 1992) 80. See J. Hillis Miller, "Narrativeand
vols. (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUP, 1990) 4: History,"ELH 41(#3: Fall, 1974): 469-73.

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