"The Shape of a City": Recollection in Benjamin's "A Berlin Chronicle" and Breton's Nadja

Abstract

"The Shape of a City": Recollection in Benjamin's "A Berlin Chronicle" and Breton's Nadja Adam Woodruff In his essay "A Berlin Chronicle," Walter Benjamin reveals that an unnamed source once encouraged him to keep a diary of noteworthy phenomena of Berlin, the city of his upbringing, "in a loosely subjective form" (305). The task of ordering his recollections in a series of glosses, Benjamin explains, proved more problematic than it had first appeared: I believed a retrospective glance at what Berlin had become for me in the course of years would be an appropriate "preface" to such glosses. If the preface has now far exceeded the space originally allotted to the glosses, this is not only the mysterious work of remembrance—which is really the capacity for endless interpolations into what has been—but also, at the same time, the precaution of the subject represented by the "I," which is entitled not to be sold cheap. (305) As Pierre Missac has remarked, "the principles most solemnly affected are not always those practiced" (41)—a point perhaps ironically acknowledged in the self-conscious proliferation of the first person pronoun from the beginning of the essay. If the premium that Benjamin places on literary JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.2 (Summer 2003): 184-206. Copyright © 2003 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. "lhe Shape of a City" 185 objectivity can be seen as somewhat excessive, however, it is not altogether clear that the interest of "A Berlin Chronicle" resides, conversely, in the facets of Benjamin's "personal character" that it throws to light.1 Benjamin's recollection of a childhood and adolescence spent in Berlin consists of a fragmentary and elliptical set of thoughts and images that refuses to be ordered by autobiographical conventions of narrative and chronology. This formal dislocation is clearly linked to the topographies of the "Naples" and "Moscow" essays, in which Benjamin draws a thematic parallel between the experience of the child and that of the newcomer to a foreign city; but the formal arrangement of "A Berlin Chronicle " also manifests an anxiety over recent historical events, and their representation in literary form, characteristic of modernist literature. In his later essay "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," Benjamin would declare that "With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent— not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?" (83-84), and with its wandering anecdotes and jarring elisions "A Berlin Chronicle" presents a distorted terrain of memory where public symbols have hollowed into discarded shells while background figures have attained portentous significance (most poignantly Fritz Heinle, a friend from Benjamin's days in the "Youth Movement" who had formed a suicide pact with his lover in August 1914). An outsider in the city of his birth by the early 1930s by virtue of both his Jewish roots and political leanings, Benjamin was soon to be forced into permanent exile in France, and the very unfinished textual format of "A Berlin Chronicle," with its abrupt breaks and missing pages, can also be read as a figure of the National Socialist catastrophe that was to come. Thus, as Graeme Gilloch has noted, the many spectres that emerge in Benjamin's reflections on Berlin do not merely point toward the past: "The catastrophes and sufferings of the past, present and future are located within the spaces of the city" (57). In the opening pages of the essay, Benjamin enumerates some of the guides that first opened up Berlin as a readable space, a labyrinth of inscription : the nursemaids who regulated what activities he could perform, where he could go, and how long he could spend there, as a young child; the city of Paris, the setting for his "endless flâneries'" ("Berlin Chronicle" 299); and Franz Hessel, with whom Benjamin had worked on a translation 186 JNT of Proust. This (incomplete) selection of guides situates the city as a scene of memory, but it also illustrates the way that the events of childhood have been topographically re-encoded throughout adulthood...