Walter Benjamin - Radio Benjamin

SPEYER: I would be grateful if you could provide a good diagnosis of the ailments currently besetting me, which cause me to be apprehensive and, thankfully, allow me to see the value in collaboration, which — if I may speak earnestly — I have often tried in the past. At the moment, perhaps the most appropriate thing is to abide by the words of Nietzsche: “Go not to the people, stay in the desert.” In other words: a friend of mine has a cabin in the mountains of Upper Bavaria. I will go there to reflect on the problem in my third act.

BENJAMIN: As always, your escape plans will end, as far as I can tell, in a shared car ride, and I am hereby ready to take part.

SPEYER: I would like to remind you that your dramaturgical theories are the most expensive ones around. The last time you shared your constructive ideas about our social comedy, during a particularly riveting aperçu I drove straight into the guardrail on the road from St. Moritz to Tarasp. This aperçu cost my car insurance company three hundred marks.

BENJAMIN: Of course, you say nothing of what it earned you.

SPEYER: A play that lacks a final act, dear Dr. Benjamin, earns absolutely nothing. I have no intention of giving German literature a new Robert Guiscard. So let’s try to cure the disease! Are you honestly of the opinion that I should not go to my cabin?

BENJAMIN: I’m happy to share my thoughts on your literary housing schemes. For one thing: enough of this going-it-alone business! For the writer of dramas of any kind, collaboration is practically the rule. If not in his study, then later in stage rehearsals.

SPEYER: But there is a fundamental difference between those two things.

BENJAMIN: I grant you. That’s what I was getting at. But let’s first agree on one thing: the drama is a collaboration to a much higher degree than any other literary work.

SPEYER: But is collaboration today anything like it was fifty years ago, with Sardou and Scribe? 3

BENJAMIN: Not in the least. You have to adhere to the most modern tendencies of the theater, where the collective itself writes the plays.

SPEYER: This does seem to be your inclination.

BENJAMIN: Indeed! But I’m not interested in what has come from these experiments that, for the most part, remain wholly unsatisfactory. Here’s what does interest me: how do such efforts come about? It’s very simple: precisely because our concept of society is shattered and in flux, the theater, and the playwright, need correctives and control measures so as not to lose the ground under their feet. Fifty years ago it was very different; collaboration could be a mere act of improvisation, of whim, of mutual enjoyment. Hopefully this is also true for us from time to time. But behind it lies an imperative about which, I believe, we both are clear.

SPEYER: But in using such methods there’s always the risk of the central literary idea getting completely lost. Everything becomes just a montage.

BENJAMIN: But that’s just it: the central idea should not be sheltered, so to speak, in a literary finishing school, protected from the harsh winds of reality. It should develop in this harsh reality amid the objections of the critic, the dramaturge, etc., etc.

SPEYER: I relinquish my literary solitude to you, because something has become very clear to me in the last few days: I need to be challenged by you, my dear Dr. Benjamin, to take a stand.

BENJAMIN: What do you mean, “take a stand”?

SPEYER: I’ll explain in a moment, and in so doing, we will have arrived at the difficulties concerning my third act. Writing my last act is not so much a technical problem as a moral one.

BENJAMIN: You’ll have to address this moral problem in dialogue on stage. As in life, a problem is best conceptualized through conversation, for which I stand at the ready.

SPEYER: Once again I’ve seen that nothing is easier than writing the opening acts. The hand just flies over the paper, as it’s all about creating expectations. And creating expectations that you cannot later fulfill? That has a name: literary swindle. You know, the whole problem with drama comes down to an issue of credit. In the first two acts you can write out an almost unlimited number of promissory notes.

BENJAMIN: Until, in the third act, the audience comes to cash them in.

SPEYER: Mark Twain illustrated this very nicely. He began one of his stories with the most outrageous characters and events. At breakneck speed, twists are piled on twists, leaving the impression that the author cannot possibly extricate himself from his own ideas. The reader’s heart races in anticipation of how all these tensions will be resolved, how this tangled web will ever be unraveled. But then, right in the thick of it, Mark Twain suddenly breaks off: “I’ve lost my way in this story of mine,” and leaves the reader adrift with the characters.

BENJAMIN: Hmm. That’s an example and at the same time no example at all. For the imbroglio in the last act is perhaps not so much about resolving the plot as, in doing so, showing the author’s true colors. With a writer of tragedy, after a few scenes it will usually be clear what he thinks of his hero and the other characters. For the author of today’s social comedies, it’s an altogether different matter. He can, and perhaps must, maintain a certain air of neutrality. He should not throw himself at his heroes. He should let them quietly be. But at the end the audience will certainly demand that the man — that is, the author — make his own opinion known while refraining, as far as possible, from putting the words directly in the mouth of one of his characters.

SPEYER: This is precisely my difficulty. You get the picture. We have a man and two women, the famous triangle in the social comedy. This man marries the girl he loves. But he can’t break away from his previous lover: whether due to sensual attachment, sympathy, or human solidarity. His wife accepts this lover as part and parcel of the marriage, as she believes that there can be no moral obstacle for three people if the people involved are of strictly noble convictions, and we are certainly dealing here with three fair and levelheaded people.

BENJAMIN: But that is precisely the crux of your social comedy, to see how far modern people get with their vaunted sporting fairness.

SPEYER: Of course. We have two ladies and one gentleman, in the best sense of these words. But it emerges: in such a situation ordinary people would say, “My dear man, you have just married; you must give up the lover from your bachelor years.” But that’s not brave enough or fair enough for our people. It turns out, of course, that marriage is not a sport and that fairness has no place in the human proto-relationship. In fact, instead of simplifying things, it complicates them to a degree that was previously unimaginable for our three people. As time goes on, one of the women obviously has to go. The casualty is of course the lover.

BENJAMIN: That would still be much too easy. Now, to show myself as a critic of a somewhat more pleasant nature, I would like to draw your attention to something beautiful and important in your play, something that is worth considering: you say that the man married the woman he loves. As is proper. But the reason he hangs onto the other woman, with whom he had been together for years, has absolutely nothing to do with devotion. He loves this other one too. Only he loves her with a vague and somewhat extravagant love that conforms to his concepts of chivalry and fairness. Our hero is actually a man living in two eras: sometimes as troubadour and knight, and other times as a citizen of today’s Berlin.

SPEYER: Now we’re left to come to the right decision for the last act: how to proceed with the third woman. There are many possible resolutions. Even Goethe once allowed himself to coolly juxtapose two final scenarios in examining a very similar subject, with his Stella . 4In the first and lovelier version the hero pulls to his chest both his beloveds: his spouse and his mistress.