The passage factory
The Passagen-Werk is an unfinished, philosophical-literary project on which Walter Benjamin worked from 1927 until his death in 1940. In it he drafted a philosophy of history of the 19th century, explicitly from the perspective of the 20th century, in the system of historical materialism , linked to theological moments. In doing so, he brought together various threads from his earlier works. While the early drafts tie in with the surrealist work Le paysan de Paris (1926) by Louis Aragon with his description of the Paris Opera Passage, which was demolished in 1925 and which he partially translated into German, he later distances himself from Aragon. The extensive collection in Benjamin's estate consists of two exposés (“Paris, the capital of the 19th century”) and several thousand thematically arranged notes, quotations and excerpts . It was first published in 1982 under the title Passagen-Werk as Volume V of the Gesammelte Schriften with well over 1000 pages and is considered one of the most important fragments of German literature.
The title Passages goes back to the covered shopping malls that first appeared in Paris from the early nineteenth century . As a flaneur - and filling this term - Benjamin collected background information about these Parisian passages, streets and department stores, also panoramas and world exhibitions , wrote down his thoughts on fashion, prostitution and advertising and wanted to create a dialectical fair in which the development of capitalism based on the Life worlds of the metropolis is illustrated. Originally he planned an essay of fifty printed pages, but it became an extensive collection of material, which he summarized in thirty-six bundles in the following years, loosely arranged thematically, and provided with keywords.
“Working on the Passages puts on an increasingly enigmatic, haunting face and howls into my nights like a little beast when I haven't soaked them in the most remote springs during the day. God knows what it will do if I let her go one day. "
In 1940 Benjamin entrusted the collection and manuscript to his friend Georges Bataille , who worked as a librarian in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and who hid it there , when he fled the German Wehrmacht which had invaded France . After the war, the latter passed part of it on to Theodor Adorno , but the post-war confusion led to some difficulties in the transfer and thus to some delay, so that Adorno received the estate in early 1947. Further parts were found in the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1981 and finally came to the holdings of the estate after a number of legal disputes over property rights.
The Arcades Project was in many ways rezipiert and interpreted far more speculative than other works of Benjamin. Theodor Adorno, for example, speculated that Benjamin wanted to publish the quotations as such and that the arrangement would make the theoretical considerations self-evident.
literature
- Walter Benjamin: The Passagen Factory. In: Collected Writings. Volume V in two parts; edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser , with the assistance of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem. Suhrkamp-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-518-28535-1 .
- Susan Buck-Morss : Dialectic of Seeing - Walter Benjamin and the Passage Work. Suhrkamp-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-518-29071-1 .
- Willem van Reijen, Herman van Doorn: Stays and Passages. Life and work of Walter Benjamin. A chronicle. Suhrkamp-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-58301-8 .
Web links
- The passage work in the text archive - Internet Archive
- Benjamin Passagen breakdown of the symbols used by Benjamin
Individual evidence
- ↑ Book of Lightning. In: The time. July 9, 1982. Retrieved October 15, 2016.
- ^ Walter Benjamin: Passages work. Second volume, Collected Works Volume V, p. 1086.
- ^ Fritz J. Raddatz: The homecoming of Walter Benjamin. In: The time. November 14, 1997, accessed October 15, 2016.
- ^ Willem van Reijen, Herman van Doorn: Stays and Passages. Life and work of Walter Benjamin. Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 191.