Wings of Nike

Yesterday, with ten minutes to kill I pulled down Walter Benjamin’s Archive, a selection of artefacts and writings from his archive that I’d bought a few years ago and browse from time to time. I’d forgotten how interesting it was to see how his collecting/ archivist/ antiquarian(?) instincts were marshalled. On index files, scraps of paper and notebooks  there are pieces of criticism, like the one that follows, that nestle up against lists of his son’s developmental words and phrases (I intend to play the game Mr Quambusch with my own children one day if they’ll let me and put a poster of the brilliant little sketch Sleep my Sheepikin, Sleep on their wall before they have a say in the issue), postcards of whatever her found interesting (sibyls, architecture and “demotic” toys from Russia), the calculations of a restaurant bill (on the back of a small slip of paper with a question about whether the Marxist view that revolutions being the locomotive of history could, in fact, be put the other way around...)

            Looking at it again, I noticed several things that had slipped by me before – perhaps because I had nowhere to put them like I do now in this blog. The first was a sentence in the edited text, saying that one of the things that Benjamin collected in a notebook that hadn’t been included was a series of anecdotes about Immanuel Kant. I found myself wondering what these were and whether it’s possible to find them anywhere – something I’ll be following up at some point when I have time. The second was this draft of a critique he wrote some time in 1922 of Fritz von Unruh’s book Wings of Nike, which has sometimes been described as a "pacifist travelogue."
             Beyond the fact that I like Benjamin's writings in general, as well as the idea of a pacifist writer being named Unruh - Unrest in English translation - I’m not sure yet if or how it comes in useful for me, apart from having been thinking about interwar pacifism more than perhaps I should over the last few weeks. And, I must admit, I like the image of the peace flag being ‘tie-dyed’ with colours of both positive and negative connotations  - including the ‘drab brown of the roast turkey...’ (Incidentally, did they tie die things in the 1920s? I’d not really thought about it before, and assumed it was something that my own parents learned in the 1970s?)

               It's only a draft, which I think explains a little of the looseness. To me, it reads as though it's a bit hyperbolic. Although I’m sure Benjamin meant his criticism of Unruh's idealistic conceptions of pacifism to be meaningful one rather than simply point scoring, when I went looking for more about this piece, or about how Benjamin related to Kant’s pacifism, I couldn’t find very much. (Incidentally, it seems to me that the relationship between Kant and Benjamin probably warrants further study in the future.) What I did find was a suggestion in Walter Benjamin: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion, 2007, p.70) that this review was particularly savage – a polemic, as he said, aimed to devour the author’s ‘skin and bones’ - as he hoped that it would mark him out for great things as a political critic. The spelling retained in the Americanese and it stops in mid-sentence as if Benjamin was interrupted in his train of thought by something far more pressing. ...

Peace Commodity

            “Leafing through your volumes!”

From 1920 to 1923, in Rome, in Zurich, in Paris – in short, whatever place outside of German soil one might have happened to land upon – German products could be found for half the price that one would usually have paid for the same goods abroad, or indeed in Germany itself. Poorly assembled goods for an impoverished population who were no longer capable of normal consumption were thrown into the dumping ground of the inflation era, placed on the markets as “peace commodities” at bargain princess. Around that time, the barriers began to lift again and the traveling salesman set off on tour. One had to live on the clearance sales and the higher the dollar rose, the greater was the circulation of export goods. At the height of the catastrophe it included intellectual and cultural goods too. For, even if the financial benefit was smaller, turnover raised the prestige of the entrepreneur. The Kantian idea of eternal peace – long undeliverable in the spiritually bankrupt Germany – was right in the first ranks of those spiritual export articles. Uncheckable in its manufacture, a slow seller for the previous ten years, it was available for unbeatable prices. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to smooth the way for a far more serious export. No thought was given to the genuine quality of its peace. Immanuel Kant’s raw, homemade weave of thought had indeed proven itself to be highly durable, but it did not appeal to a broader public. It was necessary to take account of the modern taste of bourgeois democracy. The cloth of the peace flag was tie-dyed, its white threadbare weave brightly patterned and, given all the signs and symbols, it was difficult – this will be found to be corroborated – for the green of hope to stand out from the bellicose red of the lobster, the blue of faithfulness from the drab brown of the roast turkey. In such a form this renovated weave of a pacifism in all the colors of the world’s ways – which was sated in other ways too – was to be unveiled before the international public. And just as one expects that the simplest apprentice can throw out, fold, and prepare the bales of cloth according to the rules, so too the gentleman who markets this gaily colored pile, for good or for evil, has to drape himself in the colors of the universe and in front of the customers nose the world of God which he sells in pieces. All that was necessary was to find the traveling salesman who also had at his immediate disposal the required vim of gesticulation, such as has the journalist with his triply loosened wrist and pen. That the reserve lieutenant was formerly perceived as a traveling salesman is well known. He was easily imported into “better circles.” This is also thoroughly true of Mr von Unruh, who, in 1922, as a traveling salesman going from city to city for eternal peace, processed the Paris position. Of course – and this was accordingly so apt that Mr von Unruh himself bridled at moments – his import into French circles some years ago at Verdun did not occur without furore, nor without commotion, not without the spilling of blood. Be that as it may, the report that he presents Wings of Nike: The Book of a Journey – implies that his contact with his customer base has persisted, even when he presented for inspection peace commodities rather than heavy munitions. It is not equally as certain whether it can be assured that the publication of this travel journal – a list of his customers and done deals – is of use to the broader course of business. For barely had it occurred before the commodity began to be returned from Paris.

            In any case it is extremely instructive to examine Mr von Unruh’s pacifism more closely. Since the supposed convergence of the moral idea and that of right, on whose presupposition the European proof of the Kantian gospel of peace rested, began to disconnect in the mind of the nineteenth century, German “peace” has pointed more to metaphysics as the place of its foundation. The German image of peace emanates from metaphysics. In contast to this it has long been observed that the idea of peace in West European democracies is a thoroughly worldly, political, and, in the final instance, juristically justifaible one. Pax is for them the ideal of international law. To this corresponds, in practical terms, the instrument of the arbitration court and its treaties. The great moral conflict of an unlimited and reinforced right to peace with an equitable peace, the diverse ways in which this theme has been instrumentalized in the course of history, are not up for discussion in Mr von Unruh’s pacifism, just as indeed the world-historical events of this hour remain unaddressed. And “in terms of the philosophical politics of France” – Florens Christian Rang analyzed them for the Germans (in his final work German Shelters, the most truthful critique of war and post-war literature and one of the greatest political works ever, and of which out of the entire German press only the Frankfurter Zeitung took any note in any sort of adequate fashion): its rigor matched by its humanity, its precision detracting not in the least from its depth – here, thought, “philosophical politics” fuses in Unruh’s pathos with idealistic waffle. “Tout l’action de l’esprit des aisée si elle n’est plus coumise au réel” [All action of the spirit is easy if it is not subjugated to the real] – that is how Proust phrases the old truth. Mt Unruh has heroically wrestled himself free from reality. In any case, the great formal dinners are the only international facts that his new pacifism takes into account. His new  international is hatched in the peace of the communal digestion and the gala menu is the magna carta of the future peace of nations. And just as a cocky sidekick might smash available vessel at a love feast, so the thin terminology of the Königsberger philosopher [Kant] dispatches to the devil with the kick of a jackboot and what remains is the innerness of the heavenly eye in its attractive alcoholic glassiness. The image of the gifted blabbermouth with a teary look, as Shakespeare alone could capture! – The  great prose of all evangelists of peace spoke of war. To stress ones own love of peace is always the close concern of those who have instigated war. But he who wants peace should speak of war. He should speak of the past one (is he not called Fritz von Unruh,  the one thing about which he would remain silent), and above all, he should speak of the coming one. He should speak of its threatening plotters, its powerful causes, its terrifying means. And  yet this would be perhaps the only discourse against which the salons, which allowed Mr von Unruh entry, remain completely hermetically sealed? The much pleaded peace, which is already in existence, proves, when seen by daylight, to be the one – the only “eternal” known to us -  which those enjoy who have commanded in war and who wish to set the tone at the peace party. For this is what Mr von Unruh has become too.  “Woe” his Cassandra-like gobbledegook clamours over all who have realized at the correct moment - that is roughly between the fish and the roast – that “inner conversion” is the only acceptable revolt and that...’