rendezvous in berlin, kierkegaard and benjamin

8/8/2019 Rendezvous in Berlin, Kierkegaard and Benjamin

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MARC KATZThe ClaremontColleges

Rendezvous in Berlin:Benjamin and Kierkegaardon the Architecture of Repetition

It is frequently pointed out that contem-porary theory has taken a spatial turn, andthat the pathos of temporality which in-formed the modern has given way to syn-chronicity and the juxtaposition of geo-graphical and historical referents. Indeed,Walter Benjamin has achieved such pre-eminent status at least in part because ofhis effort to re-map modernity in terms ofbuilt space. From the rubble of memory helays out a "history" of the 19th century inarchitectonic terms, offering readers a tourthrough its paradigmatic locales, his"dreamhouses of the collective": winter-gardens, arcades, market-halls, panoramas,the ornamental faqades of train stationsand factories (to be sure, some of thesephantasmagorical structures have becomeso naturalized and ingrained in the idiomof cultural theory that they have by nowacquired something of a second mythiclife). Regardless of where Benjamin trav-eled, the Berlin of the outgoing 19th cen-tury remained his autobiographical orien-tation point, "the d6cor,"as he put it, of allhis "walks and concerns" (5: 123). In hismemoirs and essays he is quick to mentionthose who served him as guides in figuringthe city's locales, chief among them FranzHessel, Ludwig Rellstab and Julius Roden-berg; and he includes Baudelaire andProust as well, since what he learned inParis he applies to his reading of Berlin.One figure, however, given short shrift byBenjamin (and scarcely mentioned by hiscommentators) is Kierkegaard.1 Benjamindoes make reference to him on several oc-

casions, most frequently in the notes forDas Passagen-Werk; but although Kierke-gaard provides him with the basic unit ofan urban physiognomy-the 19th-centurybourgeois interior-Benjamin dismisseshim as a historical "latecomer" and in ef-fect lets him fall through the cracks of hisproject (3: 381).Yet it could be said that Kierkegaardhaunts the spaces of Benjamin's Berlinwritings to a degree the latter is largelyunaware of. Kierkegaard himself was fix-ated on Berlin. It was, apart from Ham-burg, not merely the only foreign city heever visited, but if we can trust hisjournals,the only one he ever planned to visit.2 Hemade the trip four times between the years1841-1846, during the period Benjamincharacterizes as the moment of "greatfirsts," as the city was experiencing a waveof radical perceptual change that was setin motion by the material and symbolicforces of industrialization, including traintravel, photography,steam power,gas light-ing and, eventually, iron-frame architec-ture. It could be said that Kierkegaard,coming from the provincial Danish capitaland experiencing in Berlin the shock of thenew at first hand, lapsed into an idiosyn-cratic kind of tourist-compulsion in whichhe felt compelled to restage an encounterwith the city at the same sites and at regu-lar intervals.

Curiously,the only sustained account ofhis visits to Berlin that he composed isfound in the pseudonymously authored"Repetition" (1843) in the form of a fic-The GermanQuarterly71.1 (Winter1998) 1


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2 THE GERMANQUARTERLY Winter 1998tional travelogue which serves as the text'snarrative hinge. My argument is that inthis work, Kierkegaard and Benjamin crosspaths not only topographically but concep-tually, most significantly in that they eachtake practices of everyday life-theater-going, interior decoration, strolling-andrender them disjunctive by using their lo-cales as forms of theoretically "inhabited"space. Adorno briefly alludes to an affinityof technique: "It is no accident," he writes,"that Benjamin's dialectic is one of imagesrather than continuity. He hit upon it with-out knowing that Kierkegaard's melan-choly had long since conjured it up.'"3Giventhe tremendous resonance of their work,the web of connections between Benjaminand Kierkegaard demands to be identifiedand elucidated, particularly in the localcontext of Berlin fldnerie. In doing so, how-ever, it is not the intention of this essay torearrange points of origin or to find inKierkegaard one more precursor for Ben-jamin's project, but rather, to bring the twointo a conjuncture with one another in or-der to highlight habits of historicistthought which linger on to inform Ben-jamin's work, as well as our own. Althoughcontemporary theory may be tireless in itsability to locate and debunk remnants ofhistorical master-narratives, pursuing in-stead more multivalent, open sources, ittends not to apply this approach to its ownpractice. While Benjamin's spatializingmethod has been seen as a challenge to lin-ear historicism, it has itself emerged as apostmodern point of origin, with his read-ing of metropolitan modernity serving as akind of "master itinerary" retraced againand again as we orient ourselves in ourshifting cultural landscape. I would like tosuggest that Kierkegaard's Berlin trave-logue works against this tendency to re-auraticize space by exposing the principleof perpetual recirculation-what Benja-min's Das Passagen-Werk refers to as the"ever-returning new"- which lies not onlybehind the formation of the modern, butbehind efforts like Benjamin's to see

through its paradigmatic structures.The Berlin Kierkegaard knew was de-veloping into what Weimar-era theoristswould later decipher as the classic Urland-schaft of modernity. As its dependence onsmall trade and lingering guild mentalitywere giving way to the demands of an in-dustrializing economy with an increasedcirculation of goods and individuals, Ber-lin's traditional legibility was being under-mined. As architect Peter Eisenman notes:"the 18th-century development of the cityfabric as a collection of extruded perimeterblocks caused the streets to be seen as figu-ratively negative, but the 19th-century ex-tension of the main avenues ... [the Frie-drichstraBe and Unter den Linden] privi-leged the space of the street."4 As centralaxes emerged to displace the courtyard andsquare as key spatial reference points, thecity was being semantically renegotiatedaccording to sense bombardment andspeed -categories productive of new formsof social relations and subjectivity. FromKierkegaard's scattered notes and journalentries it is clear that his habitus in the citywas that of a cultural tourist. In fact, hecarefully models this by creating a pseu-donymous narrator for the account of hissecond stay in 1843. In the travelogue con-tained in the first part of "Repetition,"Constantin Constantius, whom Kierke-gaard characterizes as a Danish rentier,stages a reencounter with Berlin in a psy-chological dare with himself, and in theprocess he follows Kierkegaard's tracksthrough the city, including walks throughthe Tiergarten, attendance at a perform-ance of Nestroy's "The Talisman," and apassage by steamer to Stralsund. Neitherautobiography,nor fiction, Constantin's re-port plays itself out in an irresolvable ten-sion between the two, with Kierkegaard asa missing point of confessional origin in along chain of displacements. Weshould notmiss the significance of Kierkegaard'smethod, for what Constantin's traveloguedetails is the breakup of the emerging bour-geois-urban subject into a sequence of se-


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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 3rial identities both within the text's frame(Constantin retraces his own steps) andoutside of it (while Constantin followsKierkegaard's Berlin itinerary, he himselfis framed when he later turns up in thepseudonymously authored Stages on Life'sWay, 1845). In a pattern that, at least atfirst glance, is familiar to us through stand-ard models of the "dispersed self' this re-peated bracketing is highlighted as a partof subject formation. Since every attemptat self-recuperation is an act of self-media-tion, unitary identity is made unstable sim-ply by being an object of retrospection.When Constantin returns to those sites inBerlin where memory traces have been left,he stages an uncanny encounter with him-self as fldneur by establishing a chain ofdislocating selves whose successive acts ofself-estrangement provide the piece with anarrative, and whose compulsion to redu-plicate and reiterate suggests less the pas-sive anxiety of Baudelaire or Poe than themore deliberate play of identity and non-identity that Benjamin admired in surreal-ist nightwalkers like Aragon."Repetition" problematizes the cate-gory of authenticity on two fronts: on theone hand, it does so in individual terms, bymeans of the pseudonyms; on the other, itoperates in a more broadly discursive con-text through Constantin's encounter withan emerging tourist industry. In the Berlinof the Vormdirz, ravel was in the process ofbeing regularized and subsumed within apan-European network of transport andconsumption. Binary train routes (e.g.,Berlin-Stettin) were expanding into a full-fledged transportation system with de-pendable schedules, connections to steam-ers, surface vehicles and station hubsaround which a services industry had be-gun to develop. Although travel firms werestill a rarity, and organized group travel anovelty, there was a proliferating marketfor tourist guides, either in book or bro-chure form. One contemporary example,Schmidt's Wegweiser (1822), indexes thechoice and sequence of sights and admin-

isters the tourist's impressions throughmodel itineraries, or spatial narratives (itspectacularizes, and therefore defuses,even seemingly non-touristic industrialsites by listing factory and steamworksalong with hotels, eateries, bathing estab-lishments and "best views").5 In a practicethat would soon become standard with theBaedecker and Grieben guides of the1850s, Berlin was delineated through a se-ries of consumable sights into which trav-elers were initiated as a variant of the read-ing public. As Rumpf writes in How to Ex-perience Berlin in the Shortest PossibleTime (1835): "In general, strangers wantto take in all notable locales at a particularplace with a single glance."6 The efficiencyof the panoramic view and the demands ofa developing commodity culture met in thenew touristic dream ofhaving "done"a city.Constantin derides the fact that tour-ism functions this way as a play of signs."If one is ... a courier," he writes, "whotravels to smell what everybody else hassmelled or to write in the names of notablesights in his journals and in return gets hisin the great autograph book of travelers,then he engages a day servant and buys dasganze Berlin for four Groschen" (153). Hedefines his project of recuperating the selfprecisely in opposition to industrializedtravel. His account begins with a recollec-tion of "The Talisman," the Nestroy com-edy he saw performed the year before atthe K6nigstaidter Theater. Recalling hisvisit, Constantin compares his theater boxto an apartment living room, the privatespace of bourgeois memory and archive ofsouvenirs: "one sits here at the theater," hewrites, "as comfortably as one does athome" (the comparison was not unique toKierkegaard, since the decorum governingthe mid-century theater loge was that ofthe private salon: unaccompanied women,for example, could only avoid the taint ofthe "fille publique" if they sat in a privatebox).7 As Constantin recollects being seat-ed, he, in effect, takes his place within afully naturalized bourgeois code of private


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4 THE GERMANQUARTERLY Winter1998and public, so that by acquainting thereader with the theater's sightlines, hesimultaneously asserts his bona fides astour-guide, memoirist, and viewing sub-ject: "In the first balcony one can be as-sured of getting a box all to oneself. If not,however, may I recommend to the readerboxes five and six at the left, so that he canstill have some useful information fromwhat I write. In a corner at the back thereis a single seat where one has his own un-surpassed position" (165).In predictable fashion, his traveloguethat follows opposes the authentic and localto the standardized, reiterated and com-mercial. But, as Jonathan Culler haspointed out, the common binary authentictraveler/mere tourist is illusory, since thetourist is nothing but a projection of thetraveler's bad faith.8 While managed traveluses the rhetoric of Romantic subjectivityto promote direct, unmediated experienceand a recuperation of selfhood far from thework-relations of the market economy,what is forgotten is that the very terms"authentic" and "originary" are alwaysafter the fact. As Rosalind Krauss observes:"Although the singular and the formulaicor repetitive may be semantically opposed,they are nonetheless conditions of eachother ... the priorness and repetition of pic-tures is necessary to the singularity of thepicturesque ... for the beholder it dependson being recognized as such, a re-cognitionmade possible only by prior example."9This masking of the interdependence of"origin" and "copy" was capitalized uponand made to play an institutional roleacross all lines of 19th-century culturalproduction, from connoisseurship to theextension of copyright. What the tourist in-dustry did was to employ the Romantictravel-ethos by offering its customers spon-taneity and recuperation of self in serialform, through souvenirs, group travel andpre-set itineraries.Benjamin, in his typology of urbanstrollers, recognizes the family resem-blances between fldneur and tourist-the

flaneur is the native tourist, the tourist aforeign fldneur-and he lays out arationalefor privileging the former over the latter.The tourist measures space in its ownterms, i.e., exotic distance, while for the na-tive fldneur, the city opens up as a temporaldomain and a repository of past associa-tions, so that its streets hold the promiseof mnemonic aid. What Kierkegaard's pro-ject does is lend the foreign traveler thoseprerogatives Benjamin assigns the native.In Berlin, Kierkegaard's Constantin actsthe part of local "archaeologist" excavatingthe city for lost memory traces, only herethe time differential is radically fore-shortened. Where Baudelaire takes twodecades to return to the Place de Carrouselof his childhood in "Le Cygne," Kierke-gaard's experiment is undertaken just a lit-tle more than a year after his initial visit.Benjamin himselfjudged the importance ofsuch time differentials in relative terms; ashe writes in his notes toDas Passagen-Werk(5: 576), the quickened pace of technologi-cal change opens wider distances betweenshorter segments of time, so that the recentpast may assume a dense nostalgic ormythic "visual spell." The compression andisolation ofvariables like time and distancelend Kierkegaard's "experiment" a kind oflaboratory purity. If Constantin enacts histrip in theatrical time--time as a series ofrepeat performances-then he does so withthe gestural compactness of farce. On re-turning to Berlin, he notices a new weddingring on the finger of his former landlord,while the beggar he used to pass at theBrandenburg gate is now wearing a differ-ent colored coat. Back at the theater to seethe Nestroy play for a second time, he isforced to sit in a box on the right ratherthan the left. Temporal disjunction is thusplayed out in spatial terms. Although thearrangement of furniture in the bourgeoisinterior usually serves to stabilize identityby establishing a domain of habit (in fact,a Danish expatriate living in Berlin wasstartled to notice the care with whichKierkegaard had furnished his rooms


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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 5abroad),10 when Constantin re-enters hisBerlin apartment and sees that a desk andvelvet chair have been rearranged, he findsthat something has, quite literally, "taken"place.11Yet more than such minuscule altera-tions, it is the experience of sameness thatis most destabilizing to Constantin. Enter-ing his Stammlokal as if on automatic pilot,he finds everything-patrons, witticisms,greetings at the door-untouched by time."I could count the hair on every head," hewrites; and yet he concludes that repetitionis beyond him (170). Difference carried bythe context of the familiar brings the un-canny home to him in a way nothing elsedoes. This acute perception of non-identity"de-originates," that is, it works retroac-tively, by calling into question the solidityof the memories which Kierkegaard usesas departure points for Constantin's returntrip. The first and second visits unfold notas echo to original, but as echo to echo, sothat his Berlin is defined by serial experi-ences in which the model instance is brack-eted out as such. Something significant isbeing detailed here, for Kierkegaard ismaking Constantin trace the iterable logicof an emerging culture of mass replication:repetition is seen as foundational, withauthenticity as its self-defeating, periph-eral effect. From the proliferation of pho-tographs and the mobilization of tourismto the introduction of the rotary press, new19th-century technologies destabilized theconcept-pairing of original and copy. In"Repetition," this instability is experi-enced, with hypochondriacal acuity, as aflattening out of surface/depth models likethat of bourgeois domestic space, which,coded as a storehouse of memory, ostensi-bly promises a recuperation of selfhood andauthenticity. In this sense, Constantin'sreturn trip acts out a collapse of that bour-geois interiority, or self-encapsulation,which constitutes itself through perceivedthreats and shocks. As a result, the subjectis stranded in the ambiguity between insideand outside, between copy and original, like

the trauma victim, except that in Constan-tin's heightened state of anxiety, self-rep-resentation itself is perceived as traumaticoccurrence. Kierkegaard and his chain ofmultiple pseudonyms are consumed bycopies because they cannot find a workabledistance from them. Wemight consider thisstate to be marginally traumatic, since itexacerbates the liminality of deferred ex-perience which informs traditional ac-counts of trauma. Anxiety turns here onthe loss of traumatic origin, a situationsimilar to that described by Mark Seltzerin his analysis of the crisis of a "woundculture" whose symbolic order is depend-ent on, but not securely in possession of,interiority: "The traumatic here is some-thing like a return to the scene of the crime,not merely in that the trauma is the prod-uct of its representation, but also in that itis the product not of an event itself, but ofhow the subject repeats or represents it tohimself. In order for this return to takeplace, time must be converted to place, actinto scene.'"12Constantin's version of thisself-staging registers this cultural shiftthrough the serializing logic of tourism,whereby authenticity comes after the fact,like picturesque sights which, strangely, al-ways resemble themselves.This is precisely the territory in whichBenjamin makes his rendezvous with Kier-kegaard. In a series of autobiographicalwritings Benjamin works his way back to-wards the Berlin of the Vormrnrz.His am-bition to "set out [his] bios as if on a map,"leads him to reconsider those architecturalremnants from the mid-nineteenth cen-tury which had left their impress on him asa child (6: 466). The result is that acrossthe distance of a century he and Kierke-gaard meet at particular autobiographicalsites-on the Pfaueninsel, at the Royal Op-era House on the Gendarmenmarkt, beforethe Schinkelfassaden around the Kupfer-graben, at the Tiergarten monument toFriedrich Wilhelm which was built shortlybefore Kierkegaard's first trip, and whichserves Benjamin as his point of entrance to


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6 THE GERMANQUARTERLY Winter1998the "labyrinthine weave" of the city (6:465). Benjamin's Berlin memoirs, writtenover a span of years, are in effect co-exten-sive with his career as a critic. He incorpo-rated early autobiographical pieces fromDie literarische Welt into the first versionof his memoirs, Berliner Chronik, which herevised after his stay on Ibiza in 1932. Theunpublished text served as the basis forBerliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert,selections of which were first sent to theFrankfurter Zeitung before being exten-sively rewritten in exile. Together thememoirs constitute a series of compulsivereworkings (a long "good-bye" to the cityis how Adorno characterized them). Al-though Benjamin's stated projectwas to layout his sphere of life topographically, hewas doing so on shifting ground. He resiststhe notion that Berliner Chronik or Ber-liner Kindheit offer anything like autobi-ography in the traditional sense of theterm, since they revolve not around conti-nuity and a seamless recuperation of thepast, but rather around "space and the dis-junctive" (6: 488). Like Constantin, hestands in an uncanny relation to the self heconjures up. In Benjamin's memoirs, theplay of identity and non-identity, the searchfor an elusive moment of originary self-presence, is spatialized through a series ofreceding interiors extending from the"masked rooms" of his parents' west-sideapartment, to his aunt's bay window, to theGriinderzeit interior of his grandmother'shouse in the Steglizterstrasse, and backinto architectural structures from what hedelineates as his mid-century "horizon offamily memory." The autobiographical af-ter-images of these environments are spec-tral. Benjamin compares them to snap-shots, because he sees the process of ghost-ing the self as integral to the medium ofphotography with its capacity to serializeand reduplicate. Confronted with photos ofhimself as a child, he experiences a prox-imity that estranges. "Moments of suddenexposure are at the same time momentswhen we are beside ourselves" (6: 516).13

In one passage, photo and furnished dwell-ing-the two great apparatuses of bour-geois memory-are fully conflated as heconsiders a picture of himself as a boy posedin a photographic studio mock-up of a do-mestic interior, in which he is positioned asa thing among things in a reified landscapeof memory:

WhereverI looked,I saw myselfsurroun-dedby screens, cushions,pedestalswhichlusted formy imagelike the shades of Ha-des for the blood of the sacrificialanimal.... The gaze [that]sinks into me from thechild's face in the shadow of the house-holdpalm ... it belongsto one of the stu-dios that ... partakeof the boudoirand thetorturechamber....I amdisfiguredby mysimilarity to everything surroundingmehere.I dweltin the nineteenthcenturyasa molluskdwellsin its shell; andthe cen-tury now lies hollow before me like anempty shell. I hold it to my ear. (4: 261)There is no separating the autobio-graphical from the collective-historical inBenjamin. His memoirs have to be read aspart of that broader matrix of texts throughwhich he patterns his history of the nine-teenth century. The seriality he confrontsin autobiographical passages like the oneabove haunts his contemporaries in theform of phantasmagoria, collective dream-images whose compulsion to repeat ismasked by the appearance of novelty andits agent, fashion. "The eternal return," hewrites, "is a projection onto the cosmos ofthe punishment of staying after school: hu-manity is forced to copy out its text in end-less repetition" (1: 1234). The naive beliefthat Weimar culture in its most progressiveguises is no longer subject to such anxiouscompulsions has only consolidated theirmythic density (the equivalent of "dream-ing that one is awake"). Throughout his

work, Benjamin seeks out early industrial-era phantasmagorical forms and styles-panoramas, the embossing of facades-atthe moment of their impending obsoles-cence, reanimating them as images in order


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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 7to upset perceptual habit. His constellatorypre-history of modernity turns not on themutual illumination of particular histori-cal moments, but on their reinscription, sothat the past emerges as a recollection ofthe present. In this sense, Benjamin "exca-vates" traces of 19th-century Berlin which,although dismissed by official memory asobsolete, still lie on the surface of city.The Berlin of the Vormdrz, Kierke-gaard's Berlin, is most extensively evokedin Benjamin's 1929-1932 series of radiobroadcasts for young people. Radio pro-vided Benjamin with the opportunity topursue his rarefied dialectic of ruin andrepetition through the popular discourse oftourism ("Asone leaves the city on the wayto OranienburgandVelten,one cuts throughTegel, where there is a lot to be seen ...").Through a series of 28 half-hour talks, heleads his listeners on auditory forays intoAlt-Berlin, its streets, schools, publicworks, puppet theaters, workers' housingand early sites of industrial production.Benjamin operates through a public per-formance (rather than explication) of hisconstellatory history. He does this by usingthe new mass medium to reach back toearly forms of metropolitan journalism inan attempt to reanimate the panoramicper-spective developed in guides like the BuntesBerlin and the Berliner Stadtklatschand in E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "Des Vet-ters Eckfenster" (in which the Romanticpicturesque is first translated into the id-iom of sensationalism and "local color").In evoking the practices of the classicmid-century feuilletonist, Benjamin founda contemporary model in the work of FranzHessel, his close friend and co-translator ofProust. According to Benjamin, Hessel rep-resents a second-coming, or Wiederkehr,ofthe 19th-century fldneur who reinvigor-ates the tradition of urban idling from aperspective at once retrospective andemancipatory. Benjamin's architectural in-terest is caught by Hessel's depiction ofcommunicating spaces (i.e., bridges, door-ways, crossings etc.), because Hessel pro-

vides him with what he calls "thresholdknowledge" (3: 196). Hessel wrote Spaz-ieren in Berlin as a tourbook for nativeswho were oblivious to the phantasmagori-cal forces held by the city's streets throughentertainment venues, signage, architec-tural detail and so forth. Hessel treatsphantasmagoria as double-edged, in thatthey embody collective wishes and striv-ings which although half-expressed or neu-tralized, are present as a potentially trans-forming force (as Lefebvre would say, theycomprise their own contradictions and aretherefore sites of alternative impulses). Astructure like the arcade, for example, withits encapsulation of the street, upholdsbourgeois interiority at an illusory removefrom the exigencies of public life, while atthe same time it collapses the terms of thisotherwise strict dichotomy. As an instanceof "dream-space," the arcade evinces thekey to its own dissolution in the form of thetransparency embodied in its glass and ironframe, but obscured by Griinderzeit pilas-ters, embossing, pediments and friezes. Ac-cording to Benjamin, it is only when thestructure is read with an eye to this prin-ciple of transparency that it shows itself asan awakening dream. The post-Baude-lairean, post-surrealist fldneur creates op-positional space within the dream world ofthe streets through reiteration, by recon-structing its representative structures as aseries of legible images.In Benjamin's project, Kierkegaardplays a crucial (albeit inconspicuous) part,in that his work furnishes a virtual tem-plate for the bourgeois interior, the basicarchitectonic unit in Benjamin's theoreti-cal construction. For Benjamin, the inte-rior is a concrete expression of 19th-cen-tury domestication mania, an illusory sanc-tum set up to shut out the very conflictsthat make up its conditions: "The livingspace constituted itself as interior. The of-fice was its compliment. The private citizen... required of the interior that it shouldsupport him in his illusions" (5: 52). As alocus of phantasmagoria, the interior is


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8 THE GERMANQUARTERLY Winter 1998charged with mythic compulsion, so that itis endlessly replicated and inflected. Ar-cades, museums, department stores areversions of interior display space in monu-mental form, while antimacassars and in-laid boxes are interiors within interiors. "Itis scarcely possible, Benjamin notes, "todiscover anything for which the 19th cen-tury did not invent casings-pocket wat-ches, slippers, egg cups, thermometers,playing cards, and in lieu of casings, thencoverlets, carpet runners, linings and slip-covers" (5:292). According to Benjamin, wecan find the architectonic code for thesefeatures of interior construction in a cita-tion from Kierkegaard's Stages on Life'sWay: "homesickness at home."14 "This,"says Benjamin, "is the formula for the in-terior" (5: 289). The private sphere wascompulsively heaped with bric-a-brac, me-mentos, heirlooms, photographic portraitsand various objects of display, and thus wasmeant to furnish visible, reassuring proofof an integrated and autonomous self. Assuch, it is an extreme example of "striated"space obsessively parceled and held as ter-ritory.Borrowed memories turned up in theform of "fake antiques" which created aboom market in the '40s. In this elaboratelyoutfitted theater of subjectivity, identitywas constituted by an assumption of stylesuggesting less stability than schizophren-ic delirium--delirium being, as Deleuzeand Guattari remind us, the unseen outerwall or constitutive limit of consumereconomies whose inner wall, or relativelimit, is a desocialized "commodity flow."15"The Gothic, the Persian, the Renais-sance," Benjamin writes, "that meant: thatthere was a festival hall from Cesare Bor-gia, that out of the boudoir of the housewifethere arose a gothic chapel, and that overthe study of the master of the house therewas the apartment of a Persian sheik"(5: 282). The succession of styles and accu-mulation of world-souvenirs allowed theoccupants to play tourists at home, travers-ing distances of time and place as domesticnomads (to this effect, Benjamin cites

Kierkegaard's boyhood habit of taking"roomwalks" with his father, apartmentlength strolls in which imaginary store-fronts and pedestrians would unfold pano-rama-like in front of them).In his notes toDas Passagen-Werk, Ben-jamin maintains that Kierkegaard's image-space (Bilderwelt) is co-extensive with thebourgeois interior and therefore within thebounds of a phantasmagoric "magic circle"marked out by contemporaries like Poe,Baudelaire, and E.T.A. Hoffmann.16 YetKierkegaard resists such facile typologiz-ing. A brief look at Hoffmann, Benjamin'sprototypical Berlin fldneur, points up aradical difference in the way street and in-terior are negotiated. Although Benjaminwas unaware of it, Kierkegaard's Berlinapartment off the Gendarmenmarkt waslocated around the corner from the Char-lottenstrasse where Hoffmann had livedfifteen years earlier. A view of the square,in fact, turns up as a central locale both in"Repetition" and in Hoffmann's "Des Vet-ters Eckfenster," the text Benjamin cites inradio talks and essays as a crucial momentin the genealogy of the Berlin fldneur: "thislast story which [Hoffmann] dictated on hisdeathbed is nothing short of a primer onphysiognomical vision" (7: 91). The storyrevolves around a provincial visitor to thecity,who is tutored by his cousin, a Berliner,in the "art of seeing" from the vantagepoint of a bay window overlooking thesquare. In a version of the urban pictur-esque, the Berlin cousin construes anumber of Biedermeier tableaux vivantsout of the crowd of people on the streets.He appropriates them as types, or touristiclandmarks in a panoramic display of uni-versalized humanity. The window estab-lishes the visual perspective into which theprovincial visitor is initiated, as its pictur-esque view renders him a bourgeois-urbansubject through the act of seeing. Thecousin, for his part, is the archetypal jour-nalistic guide who navigates a changeableurban milieu and helps readers (native orforeign) shop for authentic experience by


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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 9introducing them to local "scenes." Heserves to naturalize a perspective at oncedetached and acquisitive: through the win-dow's frame, the unwieldiness of street lifeand its potential threats are drawn into theroom and domesticated as decor.

Kierkegaard shares a similar apart-ment view of the Gendarmenmarkt's twinchurches, opera house and market-placewith the cousin in "Des Vetters Eckfen-ster." But where the cousin's illustrativegaze extends into the square, Kierke-gaard's Constantin, making his way backthrough Berlin, dissolves the habitus of thefldneur. Constantin enters his old flat, aparadigmatic dream-space which is herepermeated by the ambiguity-producingglow of gas lighting and which has beenfiltered through the uncertainty of mem-ory:

Sittingin a chairbythe window,one looksout on the great square,sees the shadowsof passersby hurrying along the walls;everything s transformed ntoastageset-ting.A dreamworldglimmers n theback-groundof the soul. One feels the desire totoss on acape,to steal softlyalongthe wallwith a searching gaze, aware of everysound. One does not do this, but merelysees a rejuvenatedself doingit (151-52).

If narrative is the unfolding of temporalityin space, then disjunctive time-Constan-tin's "repetition"-plays itself out in abuilt version of liminal trauma. This mem-ory theater, formed by a series of interlock-ing rooms, is the architectural equivalentof repetition mania. Constantin recallssubtle, dreamlike displacements which arethe more uncanny for being so slight. Hesteps outside himself, consumed as a stablesubject while in agoraphobic retreat. "Oneclimbs the stairs to the first floor," hewrites,

andin the gas illuminatedbuilding, opensa little doorand standsinthe entry.To theleft is a glass door leading to a room.Straight ahead is an anteroom. Beyond

are two identical rooms, identicallyfur-nished, so that one sees the roomdoublein the mirror(151).The crisis-ridden and therefore (paradoxi-cally) still functioning spatio-temporalunity of classic metropolitan perspective isdissolved; and instead, Constantin's sceneof reenactment is folded back on itself in amise-en-abyme, in which street life, win-dows and the registering interior itself arereduced, through mirroring, to a flat planeof representation suggesting the doublingwith a difference which informs Kierke-gaard's text as a whole.To draw the crucial point: the principleon which Constantin's travelogue turns isone of disjunctive similitude. At firstglance, his report from Berlin would seeman assertion ofbourgeois subjectivity in themanner of Hoffmann or Baudelaire, thatis, a subjectivity that, no matter how desta-bilized, is reconstituted as a refuge in everdeeper interior space. What makes "Repe-tition" so deceptive is the fact that it re-volves not around identity with the figureof fldneur, but around uncanny proximityto him. According to Benjamin, Baudelairesuffers the anxiety of "duplicating selvesand treading in place which is at the heartof flanerie." He registers the discomfort ofsuch duplication, writes Benjamin, but be-cause of Baudelaire's "armature" of thepicturesque, he himself cannot read it assuch (5: 405). Benjamin's categorization ofKierkegaard as a flaneur in the Baude-lairean mode overlooks the fact thatKierkegaard deliberately mobilizes thisfear of doubles as the very form-giving prin-ciple of his travelogue. Far from being the"sanctum" or "refuge" it is assumed to be,this interior is an infernal apparatus set bythe author for himself in which the attemptto recuperate the self is mocked, or shad-owed, by "catastrophic" failure. Kierke-gaard registers his own impress on return-ing to Berlin. His interior is already a formofdialecticized image, which is read againstitself in Constantin's problematic restag-


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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 11penetrable, the impenetrable as everyday"(5: 90).In Kierkegaard and Benjamin, it is notsimply that the domestic interior figures asa dominant image, but that they regard theimages themselves as interiors, that is, asforms of inhabited and inhabiting space.One has to search out images where they"dwell," Benjamin writes ("wo die Bilderwohnen, wo sie hausen," 3: 196). Since theinterior is the prime locus of everyday life,it is the very structural embodiment of thephantasmagorical (the site where social re-lations are reproduced on a daily basis). Forboth Kierkegaard and Benjamin, then, "in-habiting" the image of the interior meansoccupying a space which is governed byhabit and repetition. The dream space ofthe interior is reiterated into "wakingspace" (Wachwelt) from within, whichmeans that its image is predicated not onan anterior wakefulness but on the process,or event, of awakening. This is borne outby Constantin's return trip to Berlin,which turns on a reenactment of a set ofmundane practices, rather then recollec-tion. Indeed, when Constantin shows upagain in Kierkegaard's Stages on Life'sWay, he offers an explicit countervoice toWilliam Afham, the pseudonym who fur-nishes Benjamin with the "formula"for thebourgeois interior ("homesickness athome"). As William speaks at a symposiumhosted by Constantin, he outlines a theoryof recollection similar to involuntary mem-ory: "to conjure up the past for oneself," hedeclares, "is not as difficult as forget-ting."18Although Constantin supports thisattempt to work against the encrustationsof habitual memory, he is wary ofWilliam's"proficiency in illusion" and warns thatsuch memory-play will prove an "eleaticruse"19 (a reference to the doctrine of Par-menides and the proto-idealists whichholds that movement is an illusion obscur-ing the world's eternal stasis). Benjamin,for his part, engages in a similar internaldebate in assessing his relationship toProust. As Benjamin's acknowledged

guide, Proust's doctrine of involuntary rec-ollection provides a model to open up theBerlin of Benjamin's childhood by helpinghim mediate the states of waking anddreaming. Memory traces suspend the illu-sory duration of time through a process ofspatialization in which they take on dimen-sional form as discreet images ("space-crossed time"). Yet this "experimental re-arrangement of furniture in slumber" is,Benjamin insists, a mere half measure,since space is left as a false eternity. Proust,lying on his back in the middle of his bed-room and conjuring the past through im-ages of elaborately differentiated decor,creates a hermetically closed environmentgoverned by compulsive, ormythic, reitera-tion from which present time is barred.Benjamin distances himself from Proust,and in doing so he inadvertently echoesKierkegaard's Constantin: "Proust," Ben-jamin writes, "traps us in memory's eleaticmagic realm" (2: 313).This echo is more than slightly ironic,given the ease with which Benjamin classi-fies Kierkegaard as a historical "late-comer."Yet one could say that it is preciselyKierkegaard's belatedness, his deliberatecultivation ofepigonistic after-images, thatin many ways makes his memoirs so con-temporaneous with Benjamin's own. Kier-kegaard does not employ his images in thedevelopment of a historiography, let aloneone informed by a materialist pedagogy, asBenjamin's is. Nevertheless, Benjaminclearly repeats or "revisits" some of the keystructural features ofKierkegaard's dialec-tic in developing the stealth tactic of theinterior-image. It is difficult to say howcomfortable Benjamin would have beenwith this convergence of perspectives. Hisassumptions about the kind of criticalprivilege history bestows shift and oftenoverlap. He maintains that images becomereadable only when juxtaposed accordingto a specific historical "index" (somethingnot found in "Repetition," with its trun-cated time-differential between visits), butthere are also points in his work when this


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12 THE GERMANQUARTERLY Winter1998same index is then doubly privileged by be-ing tied to a modernist teleology and itsassumption of heroic innovation and an un-derlying universal-history. "Dwelling inthe old sense is a thing of the past. WithGiedion, Mendelsohn, Le Corbusier ...what is coming in the future stands underthe sign of transparency," Benjamin writesin reviewing Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin(3: 196-97). Siegfried Giedion's historicalaccount of the Bauhaus and its anticipatorymoments in the 19th century institution-alized transparency as an architectonicand theoretical principle unfolding itselfthrough three historically inevitable "spaceconceptions."20 According to this modern-ist narrative, the architectural past only be-comes readable in light of a progressive aes-thetic of flowing light and imperceptiblespatial transitions between rooms. In min-ing avant-garde architectural theory forhisArcades project, Benjamin clearly drawsfrom Giedion's survey; and yet, as becomesevident while he was finishing his memoirsand compiling notes for "The Theses on thePhilosophy of History," Benjamin uses itchiefly as a point of departure for puttingthe modernist notion of legibility througha drastic transformation: "The concept ofthe historical progress of mankind cannotbe sundered from the concept of its pro-gress through homogeneous empty time. Acritique of the concept of such progressionmust be the basis of any criticism of pro-gress itself" (1: 701). In opposition to thehistoricism of the Bauhaus, with its prem-ises in bourgeois epistemology, Benjamincame to view history under the sign of per-petual rupture and disjunction (what theangel of history sees before him is "wreck-age piled upon wreckage"). This is not tosuggest, as J. Hillis Miller and others do,that Benjamin eventually forgoes the es-chatological, but rather that in his laterwritings he effects a radical reinvestmentof the utopian moment within disjunctionitself.21 "The concept of progress," hewrites, "is to be grounded in the catastro-phe; that things just go on is the catastro-

phe. It is not that which is approaching, butthat which is" (1: 683). Whereas Mies vander Rohe planned his 40-story glass andsteel tower as a formalist rebuke to the ar-chitectural vernacular of the Friedrich-strasse, Benjamin's Berlin memoirs are, ineffect, "built" out of outmoded structuresand common haunts.Here again Benjamin might be said tocross paths with Kierkegaard, becausethere is a similar form of secular messian-ism informing the everyday spaces of"Repetition." One hesitates to group theeschatologies of Benjamin and Kierke-gaard together, given the explicit material-historical interests of the former, and theexpressly theological concerns of the latter.But it may be that they meet here, in theirBerlin writings, as they do at no otherpoint. For Kierkegaard's account of his staytakes place entirely within the sphere ofthe secular, falling as it does under the cate-gory of his early, "aesthetic" production.His Berlin, like Benjamin's, is shot throughwith an explicitly quotidian form of illumi-nation (as opposed to his "ethical" or "re-ligious" stages). It occupies profane space,governed by immediacy and without re-course to the kind of ontology that couldpossibly guarantee notions of repetition asmimetic return. Rather,what we find in thefldneries of both Benjamin and Kierke-gaard is history as a perpetual piling up of"debris,"of ruined forms and unsuccessfulreenactments that in their failure carrywith them a utopian moment as potential.The dialectical images they develop "onsite" in Berlin work against both the stasisof perpetual ruin, and the illusory neutral-ity of the historicist continuum. Instead,critical distance is renegotiated as inhab-ited space, indistinguishable from the un-canny shape of what is nearest at hand.


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KATZ:Rendezvous in Berlin 13Notes

Unless otherwise noted, references toKierkegaard and Benjamin are from: SorenKierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repeti-tion,trans. HowardH.HongandEdnaV Hong(New York:Princeton UP 1983); and WalterBenjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. RolfTiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhaiuser,12 vols. (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp,1972- ).1See Benjamin's review of Adorno'sKierkegaard: Konstruktion des Asthetischen in:Benjamin,Schriften(3: 234). Scattered refer-ences to Kierkegaardare found in KonvolutD,I , J and M in Das Passagen-Werk as part ofplanned chapters on the fldneur, Baudelaire,boredom and the bourgeois interior. WhenKierkegaard is mentioned among Benjaminscholars,it is typicallyas a footnotein B.'s in-tellectual biography.See, for example, SusanBuck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cam-bridge,Mass.:MITP,1989) 176.2Kierkegaard's irst visit lasted from Octo-ber 1841 to March 1842. He subsequentlyre-turnedto the city fortwo-weekstays in Mayof1843, 1845,and 1846.Heconsideredafifthtripin Mayof 1848,but was not ableto make it onaccountofhis failinghealth. See Kierkegaard'sJournals and Papers, ed. Howard H. Hong andEdnaV Hong, 7 vols. (New York: ndianaUP,1978) 5: 399.3From Adorno's introduction to Ben-jamin's Schriften. In: On WalterBenjamin, ed.GarySmith (Cambridge,Mass.:MITUP,1988)11-12.4Peter Eisenman, "K Nowhere 2 Fold,"Anywhere,ed. Cynthia Davidson (New York:Anyone, 1992) 222.5Valentin Schmidt, Wegweiser fair Fremdeund Einheimische durch Berlin und Potsdam(Berlin:B. Nicolai, 1822)xii.6Thomas Rumpf, Berlin: wie man es in kiir-zester Zeit erleben kann (Berlin: Arani, 1835) 4.7Kierkegaard, Repetition, 165. See:Michelle Perrot, A History of Private Life, 5vols. (Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUP,1990)4:

278.8JonathanCuller,"The Semioticsof Tour-ism," American Journal of Semiotics I (1/2,1981): 127-29.9Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of theAvant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths(Cambridge,Mass.: MITP,1985) 166.10T. H. Croxall, Glimpses and Impressionsof Kierkegaard London:Nisbet, 1959)23.11Foran excellent discussion of place andserialism in the context of Benjamin's work,see Samuel Weber,Mass Mediauras: Form, Me-dia, Technics (Stanford:Stanford UP, 1996)76-90.12Mark eltzer,"Anatomy f aWoundCul-ture,"October80 (Spring,1997): 11-12.13AlthoughEduardoCadavadoes not drawon the bourgeoisinterior as a specificappara-tus of memory,he does offer a very valuabletreatment of the function of photography nBenjamin's dialectic, see Eduardo Cadava,Words fLight(Princeton:PrincetonUP,1997).

14S0ren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way,trans. Howard H. Hong and Edna V Hong(NewYork:PrincetonUP,1978) 13.15Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AThousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi(Minneapolis:U of MinnesotaP,1987)345.16Thisobservation is made explicit in hisreview of Adorno's study, and it informs hiscomments on Kierkegaardn the notes to theArcadesProject.See Schriften,3: 381.17WalterBenjamin, Briefe, ed. TheodorAdornoand GershomScholem,2 vols. (Frank-furt:Suhrkamp,1966) 2: 620.18Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, 9-10.19Kierkegaard, epetition,309.20Siegfried Giedion, Architecture and thePhenomena of Transition (Cambridge, Mass.:HarvardUP 1971)267-68.21Inhis study of Hitchcock, Slavoj Ziiekmakes a similar point about Benjamin andKierkegaardwhen he notes that they each useruinandreturn forutopianeffect:SlavojZilek,Enjoy Your Symptom! (London: Routledge,1992) 80. See J. Hillis Miller,"NarrativeandHistory,"ELH 41(#3: Fall, 1974):469-73.

rendezvous in berlin, kierkegaard and benjamin

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