Walter Benjamin - Radio Benjamin

STELLA ( embracing him ): May I?—

CECELIA: Are you grateful that I kept you from fleeing?

STELLA ( embracing her ): Oh you!—

FERNANDO ( embracing both ): Mine! Mine!

STELLA ( seizing his hand, dialogue1 on him ): I am yours!

CECELIA ( seizing his hand, embracing him ): We are yours!

In the second version, Fernando shoots himself and Stella takes poison.

BENJAMIN: And you’ve managed to squeeze as many as three different resolutions out of me:

The elegiac, in which Marie — our Stella is called Marie — departs, waving;

The cynical, as in “Let’s try it all again and somehow it will work”;

The heroic, as in the first Stella version.

SPEYER: You don’t yet know my fourth, which I came up with last night. I’m a little anxious about what you’ll say, because in this case I’ve disregarded our underlying plan. You were never in agreement that we should simply find a second man for our poor Marie to fall in love with.

BENJAMIN: That doesn’t worry me too much. The underlying plan is there so that it can be breached at times.

SPEYER: But I didn’t go about it so lightly. As a matter of fact, last night I made a peculiar discovery. I’d like to apply to poetry Bismarck’s principle of occasional candor in diplomacy. You know of the immense impact Bismarck sometimes achieved in ruthlessly deploying Machiavellian plans when his interests required it. In my case, the spectators have gone into the intermission after the second act thinking: “How will the author get himself out of these difficulties?” So I will show them. I will transpose the difficulties, which plague me in my work, into my work itself.

BENJAMIN: So your heroes are to become drama writers of a sort?

SPEYER: That’s right. I’m making them into colleagues, as I can’t seem to manage with just you.

BENJAMIN: I will most likely find these colleagues more pleasant than my previous one.

SPEYER: I hope I have done all I could to make them pleasing to you. Here’s my draft from last night:

Sitting together we have our two women, Luisa and Marie, along with their man, Golo, who is loved by them both, and finally the new man, the fourth, whom you will meet here for the first time, a man by the name of Walter. Marie says:…

[ Here, the manuscript breaks off. ] 5

BENJAMIN: So, you have made a moral decision, but I don’t know whether you will be satisfied with my interpretation. Do you know why you were able to bring in a new man in the last act?

SPEYER: Hmm.

BENJAMIN: If it were an important character, this fourth one, it would be a flagrant technical violation to introduce him at the last minute. But do you want to hear what he actually is? He’s nothing at all. He’s the first available man. And perhaps that will be your moral position, that our friend Marie consoles herself with the first available man. That marriage today is frequently not all that important, at least relatively speaking; but that the things that tend to rattle, complicate, or call it into question are not more important than the marriage itself.

SPEYER: I have nothing against the interpretation, for it reflects the Berlin of a certain social class today. You know, it’s not so easy for me to show how these three people of noble convictions carry their death sentence around in their pockets, the man in the pocket of his dinner jacket and the two women in their evening bags.

BENJAMIN: Or better yet: each the death sentence of the other.

SPEYER: It’s not so easy to be in love with a certain social class, as I am, and to point the finger at it, saying: you are despicable, you are lost. And how difficult these occasional hints are in comedies when one tries to avoid the perils of becoming obtrusive.

BENJAMIN: But do you not experience the consolation, the great consolation of the comedy writer: that the audience takes its castigation as entertainment?

SPEYER: Of course! And the comedy of today, in contrast to the relentless and cruel comedies of Molière — think of Georges Dandin —is a mirror, but in a silver frame. No matter how much it reflects the misshapen and murky nature of today’s society, it’s still enclosed in a finely wrought metal, and he whose gaze falls upon it takes it not as a mirror, but as a painting.

BENJAMIN: Right you are. But it’s a good thing no one heard us.

“Rezepte für Komödienschreiber, Gespräch zwischen Wilhelm Speyer und Walter Benjamin,” GS, 7.2, 610–16. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt on May 9, 1930. The Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung announced the broadcast for this date from 6:05–6:35 pm.

1Wilhelm Speyer (1887–1952) was a writer, former classmate, and friend of Benjamin’s with whom he collaborated on several projects. In addition to “Prescriptions for Comedy Writers,” Benjamin consulted on Speyer’s novel Gaby, weshalb denn nicht? [Gaby, Why Not?] (Berlin, 1930), and his plays Jeder einmal in Berlin [When in Berlin] (Berlin, 1930), Es geht. Aber es ist auch danach [It Works. And How!] (Munich, 1929), and Der große Advokat [The Great Advocate] (1932). According to a written agreement between them, Speyer promised to pay Benjamin “ ‘10 % (ten)’ of the ‘box-office takings’ or max. RM. 5,000 (five thousand) as payment for his advice” (quoted in Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers, ed. Martina Derviş [London: Verso, 1996], 198, 298 n.84; on their collaborations and the remuneration Benjamin received, see also GS, 6, 794, and GS, 7.2, 609).

2Stefan Großmann’s play, Apollo, Brunnenstraße, written with Franz Hessel, debuted on January 9, 1930 at Berlin’s Volksbühne, directed by Jürgen Fehling.

3Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), and Eugène Scribe (1791–1861), French dramatists best known for their pursuit of the “well-made play,” a term associated with formulaic, commercially motivated theater.

4In the first version of Goethe’s play Stella (1776), the play ends with the three protagonists vowing to live together under the motto, “One apartment, one bed, one grave.” In the second version (1806), Fernando and his lover Stella commit suicide, he by pistol and she by poison, while the wife, Cecilia, lives on. For the quotation that follows, see Goethe, Stella: Ein Schauspiel für Liebende in fünf Akten [Stella: A Play for Lovers in Five Acts] (Berlin: August Mylius, 1776), 115.

5In place of the implied line by Marie, Benjamin’s typescript provides a reference: “see pp. 68–69 of the manuscript … Welt [world].” The manuscript of Speyer’s play containing this quotation was not available to the editors of the GS, who indicate that the published edition (Wilhelm Speyer, Es geht. Aber es ist auch danach! [Munich and Berlin: Drei Masken, 1929]) contains a significantly different version, in which the character of Walter does not appear.

Put yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, in the position of a fourteen-year-old who has just left primary school and is now faced with choosing a job. Think about the largely vague, sketchy images of jobs that float in his mind, about how impossible it is to attain a more exact insight into them without paying for a costly experience, about the many considerations that must influence a well-deliberated decision and of which he can only act upon a few: the economic situation of each line of business, the demands on or dangers to one’s health, the special nature of professional colleagues, the possibilities for advancement, etc. Does not the image of a carousel seem particularly apt — a carousel of jobs that whirls at such a speed past the candidate, who stands there ready to leap on, that it is impossible for him to study the individual spots that it offers? And, furthermore, you know how grave and oppressive all questions of career choice have recently become, because of unemployment in Europe. Where previously the question of aptitude — the expectation of producing one’s top performance in this or that profession — could direct a young person, now what predominates is the task of snatching a spot where the risk of slipping back down — the danger of being driven out of the production process, never perhaps to gain access to it again — seems as low as possible. The simple slogan “The right man in the right place” 1—still often heard these days — actually comes from a more idyllic era of professional life; in fact, it comes, at least in its official recognition, from the time of demobilization. At that point, it was about directing the fifteen- to seventeen-year-old apprentices who had earned eighty to ninety marks a week in the munitions factories toward a regular job. For this reason, the commissioner for demobilization promoted career counseling. But the slogan that circulated then has a very different meaning today. Today, the right place is the place where there’s a chance of holding on.