Tutto sommato non è nostra abitudine, né una nostra intenzione futura, scrivere recensioni di libri, ma tant’è un collettivo si può anche contraddire e in questo testo curato da Benjamin abbiamo trovato alcune parole che ci hanno affascinato, poiché siamo egocentrici e abbiamo intuito che potevano essere a noi affini. Questo non vuol dire nemmeno che ora cercheremo avanti e indietro nella storia i testi, i lavori, gli articoli che ci danno ragione, o ci smentiscono, ma è pur vero che tanta è la nostra consapevolezza di non poter essere, nel Mercato, originali (largamente motivata in molti altri nostri post) che pure possiamo riconoscere d’avere avuto dei precedenti, magari inconsapevoli.
Di cosa si tratta? Tra il 1931 e il ’32 Benjamin iniziò a pubblicare a puntate delle lettere di illustri personaggi tedeschi del passato (a volte anche poco illustri) sulla Frankfurter Zeitung con un proprio commento. Le 25 lettere, che sono state scritte in 100 anni esatti, 1783/1883, servivano a riflettere sulla fine della grande cultura tedesca e sull’avvento del nazismo, che difatti l’anno successivo saliva al potere. Nel 1936, in Svizzera e con lo pseudonimo di Detlef Holzn viene stampato il volume. E così possiamo leggere Goethe, Forster, Seume, Hölderlin, Brentano, Büchner, la poetessa von Droste o i fratelli Grimm e molti altri, come il chimico Liebig, famoso per l’invenzione del dado da brodo, mentre scrivono delle loro private faccende.Sullo sfondo il protagonista, nemmeno troppo nascosto, è Goethe. A lui sono spedite alcune lettere, ne viene pubblicata una sua, l’unica con commento finale sulla lingua, e tutto inizia con una lettera, tenuta fuori dal mazzo, in cui ne viene annunciata la morte nel 1832. C’è un prima e un dopo Goethe, poiché Benjamin, che si vede di fronte Hitler che giunge al potere, condivide questa sua frase “noi, come forse altri pochi, saremo gli ultimi di un’epoca che non tornerà tanto presto”.
“Uomini tedeschi”, ma ci sono delle donne ed uno svizzero, era un titolo per fare circolare il libro anche sotto il Terzo Reich, ma già dall’epigrafe “dell’onore senza gloria, della grandezza senza splendore, della dignità senza mercede” si capisce che si va contro il pomposo delirio nazista.
In tal senso le lettere vanno prese per tipo sociale e non per individuo. Singolarmente sono anche grette e imbarazzanti, come quella di Seume al marito dell’ex fidanzata, che ci fa ancora arrossire. O quella in cui l’autore vuole avere notizie d’un amico al fronte, comunica della morte della propria moglie e poi chiede se per caso l’editore, a cui la missiva era indirizzata, ha già pagato del tutto l’ultima traduzione della defunta e in caso se riesce a saldare “volentieri” il rimanente. E’ il generale delle lettere che dà il segno alla raccolta. La sobrietà del linguaggio diventa laconica, come sottolinea in un saggio Adorno. Ma, in quei tempi è importante, l’essere legati fino in fondo all’oggettività non preclude la speranza, delle speranze solo confusamente sentite, come nella lettera della giovane poetessa Annette von Droste-Hülsoff che confida la profonda nostalgia per i luoghi in cui non è o per le cose che non possiede.
It is not our habit, or an ours future intention, to write reviews of books, but a collective can also contradict himself and in this text Benjamin we have found some words that fascinated us, since we are egocentri, and we have intuited which could be similar to us. This does not even mean that we will now look back and forth in the texts, the works, the articles that give us reason, or they deny us, but it is true that we have so much is our awareness that we can not be original in the Market (largely motivated in many post) which we can also recognize we have had previous, perhaps unknowingly.
What is it about? Between 1931 and 32, Benjamin began publishing some letters from illustrious German characters of the past (sometimes even little illustrious) on Frankfurter Zeitung with his own commentary. The 25 letters, which were written in exactly 100 years, 1783/1883, served to reflect on the end of the great German culture and the advent of Nazism, which in fact came to power in the following year. In 1936, the volume was printed in Switzerland and under the pseudonym of Detlef Holzn. And so we can read Goethe, Forster, Seume, Hölderlin, Brentano, Büchner, the poet von Droste or the Grimm brothers and many others, like the Liebig chemist, famous for broomstick invention, while write about their private affairs. The protagonist hidden, not even too hidden, is Goethe. Some letters are sent to him, one of them is published, the only one with a final comment on the language, and it all begins with a letter, kept out of the bunch, where death was announced in 1832. There is a first and one after Goethe, because Benjamin, who sees Hitler coming to power, shares his sentence “we, like perhaps a few others, will be the last of an era that will not come back so soon.”
Why do we care? to the violent Nazi rhetoric Benjamin don’t oppose the high expression of German culture, the beauty of the arts or a kind of rhetoric of good. There is nothing of the best produced by the “German spirit”, but private letters of various levels and tenor, although some, such as those of Hölderlin and Goethe, are already well known. The alternative tradition to Nazism, which could not be assimilated in it, is almost subtle or, to use a term that we often referred to for the approach we deem necessary to the market today, “Discreet”. They are hints of enlightenment, never too germinated in Germany, an unreported rationality, a sobriety even in feelings. Not to incite the bourgeois qualities of which Benjamin sees the essence when in the introduction to a letter he speaks of the Humanitas that he sought to collect, but also of the boundaries that imprisoned him. Indeed, probably, if the authors were aware of the pettiness of small private property, they would have lost some of the naivety that makes these letters credibly settled in a space outside totalitarianism.
In this sense, letters must be taken by social type and not by individual. They are singularly sometimes narrow-minded and embarrassing, like that of Seume to her ex-girlfriend’s husband, which still makes us blush. Or the one in which are asked some friend’s news from the front, communicates the death of his wife and then asks if the publisher, to whom the letter was addressed, has already paid off the last translation of the deceased and if he succeeds in “willingly” pay the remainder. It is the general of the letters that gives the sign to the collection. The sobriety of language becomes laconic, as emphasized in an Adorno’s essay. But, in those times it is important, that being tied up to the objectivity does not preclude hope, often confused, as in the letter of the young poet Annette von Droste-Hülsoff who confides the deep nostalgia for places in which is not or for things that it does not possess.
But there is something more, deeper, in our opinion, in this collection. Apart from our little pleasure to see Benjamin mock the new objectivity, the literary current between the two wars, thinking of the umpteenth repurposed of realism (against any evidence called new) that somebody recently was still trying to lay on us. There is not even one philosopher in 25 letters plus one. Could it be that Benjamin thought that in all the German philosophy since the mid-eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth there was nothing suitable for this collection?
Certainly he did not hide his aversion to idealism and the archenemy Kant, but on the other hand those were his clashes and he did not so ungenerous to set them apart for this, on the contrary, his was an admiring contrast.
And then ? According to us, this is a text that experiences an idea on which Benjamin will return, that is, of a philosophy that does not need texts, or at least his “philosophy without texts”, but rather made up of editing, juxtaposition, of writings d ‘others, who speak for themselves. An expression that also chooses the terrain of confrontation with the great organized systems of the philosophers who had preceded it. A side deviation, where thought is intuited, not given in concluding concepts, which ultimately can only betray it. It is not a literary work, it is not a collection of texts, it is a philosophical work where the author retraces, offers a possibility by choosing and organizing the texts, but does not put on another armor that clashes with the others equally strong.
Sober and relevant texts to reality. Letters that from the real, however, allude to hope and therefore to utopia. A thinking thinker who builds fragments instead of walls. While offering militant text, though, in the end, Adorno himself recognizes that he has had little political weight. Of course we do not have comparisons to do, after all the analysis of the Market that we did, after all the joy we have told you to be immersed, would be a contradiction too strong for us to. But perhaps this seems to be a better method than many others, very solids and ideal and convincing, to see if there is an empty, outer, alternate space in the interstices of the Market.
