Walter Benjamin - Radio Benjamin

From that point on we expected the house to cave in at any moment and to swallow us whole. It seemed that the house must already have been completely undermined save for one especially strong wall, and if that gave way everything else would go down with it. I trembled at the thought that the roof would no longer carry our weight. The house might have lasted the whole night, but the roof began to give way under the constant barrage of beams. We had fled to the left side of the roof, where the rafters were still more or less intact. But then they, too, began to sway and it was plain to see that they would not hold much longer if all three of us stayed huddled together in the same spot.

My brother Bill had, very mechanically, placed his pipe back in his mouth. Grumbling to himself, he curled his moustache and furrowed his brow. The rising danger he saw before him, against which all his courage amounted to nothing, began to make him impatient. He spat a few times into the water with angry disdain. Then, as the timber beneath him continued to give out, he made his decision and climbed from the roof.

“Bill, Bill,” I called. I sensed, with horror, what he was doing. He turned himself around and said, peacefully: “Farewell, Louis … You see, it’s taking too long. I want to make room for you two.”

First he threw his pipe and then himself into the flood. “Farewell,” he said again, “I’ve had enough.” He never resurfaced. He was a bad swimmer and he probably didn’t even try to save himself. He didn’t want to survive our ruin and the death of our loved ones.

And so it ends, the tale of the third brother, the only member of this family to be rescued by one of the boats combing the water.

More than 50,000 ships, motorboats, and steamers had been mobilized. The government even requisitioned luxury boats for the rescue operations. Entire aircraft squadrons were deployed day and night, as they were last year when, under the command of Charles Lindbergh, food and medical supplies were brought to the Chinese in the Yangtze River valley after they had been completely cut off from all other forms of contact. And on the banks of the Mississippi hundreds of thousands of refugees camped under the open sky, lacking shelter and warm clothing, exposed to hunger, rain, and the horrific tornadoes that further devastated the flood regions at that time.

So much for the raging elements of the Mississippi. On some other occasion we’ll return to its banks during times when the river flowed peacefully in its bed, but there was little peace to be found on its shores. For a long time now I’ve planned to tell you the story of America’s greatest and most dangerous secret society, next to which all bands of whiskey smugglers and criminal gangs are child’s play: the Ku Klux Klan. Once again we’ll find ourselves on the banks of the Mississippi, but this time facing the raging elements of human cruelty and violence. The dams that the law has built to contain them have held up no better than the actual ones made from earth and stone. And so, stay tuned for the Ku Klux Klan and Judge Lynch and the other unsavory characters that have populated the human wilderness of the Mississippi, and still populate it today.

“Die Mississippi-Überschwemmung 1927,” GS, 7.1, 237–43. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin on March 23, 1932. The Funkstunde announced the broadcast under the title “Die Überschwemmung des Mississippi” [The Mississippi Flood] for March 23, 1932, from 5:30–5:50 pm.

1Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, was appointed by President Coolidge to lead the federal, state, and private flood relief efforts. He called for the appointment of state flood commissions, to be headed by a single “dictator” in each of the affected states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

You probably think you know dogs. By this I mean, when I read you a famous description of dogs, you will have the same feeling I did when I first read it. I said to myself: if the word “dog” had not appeared in the description, I wouldn’t have guessed which animal it was about; things look so new and special when a great scientist looks at them, as if they had never before been seen. The name of this scientist is Linnaeus, the very same Linnaeus you all know from botany and the man responsible for the system we still use today to classify plants. Here’s what he has to say about dogs:

Feeds on meat, carcasses, farinaceous grains, but not leaves; digests bones, vomits up grass; defecates onto stone: Greek white, exceedingly acidic. Drinks by lapping; urinates to the side, up to one hundred times in good company, sniffs at its neighbor’s anus; moist nose, excellent sense of smell; runs on a diagonal, walks on toes; perspires very little, lets tongue hang out in the heat; circles its sleeping area before retiring; hears rather well while sleeping, dreams. The female is vicious with jealous suitors; fornicates with many partners when in heat; bites them; intimately bound during copulation; gestation is nine weeks, four to eight compose a litter, males resemble the father, females the mother. Loyal above all else; house companion for humans; wags its tail upon master’s approach, defends him; runs ahead on a walk, waits at crossings; teachable, hunts for missing things, makes the rounds at night, warns of those approaching, keeps watch over goods, drives livestock from fields, herds reindeer, guards cattle and sheep from wild animals, holds lions in check, rustles up game, locates ducks, lies in wait before pouncing on the net, retrieves a hunter’s kill without partaking of it, rotates a skewer in France, pulls carts in Siberia. Begs for scraps at the table; after stealing it timidly hides its tail; feeds greedily. Lords it over its home; is the enemy of beggars, attacks strangers without being provoked. Heals wounds, gout and cancers with tongue. Howls to music, bites stones thrown its way; depressed and foul-smelling before a storm. Afflicted by tapeworm. Spreads rabies. Eventually goes blind and gnaws at itself. 1

That was Linnaeus. After a description like that, most of the stories frequently told about dogs seem rather boring and run-of-the-mill. In any case, they can’t rival this passage in terms of peculiarity or flair, even those told by people out to prove how clever dogs are. Is it not an insult to dogs that the only stories about them are told in order to prove something? As if they’re only interesting as a species? Doesn’t each individual dog have its own special character?

No single dog is physically or temperamentally like another. Each has its own good and bad tendencies, which are often in stark contradiction, giving dog owners precious conversation material. Everyone’s dog is cleverer than his neighbor’s! When an owner recounts his dog’s silly tricks, he is illuminating its character, and when the dog experiences some remarkable fate, it becomes something greater, part of a life story. It is special even in its death. 2

Now let’s hear about some of these peculiarities. It must also be true of other animals that they possess many unique qualities that are not found in the species as a whole. But humans make this observation so readily and definitively only with dogs, with whom they have a closer bond than with any other animal, except perhaps horses. It all began thousands of years ago with man’s great victory over the dog, or more precisely, over the wolf and the jackal; yielding to man, allowing themselves to be tamed, these wild animals became dogs. However, the most ancient dogs, which first appeared around the end of the Stone Age, were far removed from our pets and hunting dogs of today. They were more similar to the half-wild dogs of Eskimos, which have to fend for themselves for months at a time and resemble the Arctic wolf in every respect, as well as the fearful, treacherous, and currish dogs of Kamchatka, which, according to one traveler’s account, haven’t the slightest love for or loyalty to their master — in fact, they constantly try to kill him. The domesticated dog must have arisen from such a beast. It is truly regrettable that later on, some dogs, especially mastiffs, returned to their old savagery as a consequence of breeding, becoming even more dreadful and bloodthirsty than they had been in their primitive state. Here is the story of the most famous of all bloodhounds, named Bezerillo, whom the Spaniards of Fernando Cortez came upon while conquering Mexico, and then trained most hideously.