[gisèle freund / walter benjamin in the bibliothèque national / 1939]

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of stumbling across Walter Benjamin’s Archive, a book published by Verso earlier this year. The text consolidates material pertaining to a fall 2006 exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin which cataloged a variety of Benjamin related ephemera for public display. This material included notebooks, postcards, drafts and scribbles, project outlines and photography. Given Benjamin’s obsession with the analysis of historical waste, it follows that his legacy would inspire a rigorous archival project. This gorgeously designed text provides a side-door into his life and work enables a proximity that is both fascinating and somewhat melancholic.

[benjamin’s paris address book]

The text is organized into thirteen short chapters which cover a diverse range of topics including collecting, traveling, graphic forms, puzzles and Benjamin’s time in Paris researching the Arcades Project. Each of these sections is comprised of a selection of documents, many of which are extensively annotated and a few of which are translated. The chapters are also accompanied by introductory texts by Ursula Marx, Erdmut Wizisla and Michael and Gudrun Schwarz which frame specific interests, obsessions and spans of time in Benjamin’s life. There is some great material pertaining to his interest in toys, his linguistic adventures in parenthood and several plans and outlines analyzing the life and work of Franz Kafka.

What is so interesting about this project, is rather than approach Benjamin as the subject for a standard biographical profile, this text employs his research and writing methodology to dissect and taxonomize his interests. In many ways, working through this text felt like a continuation of a reading of the Arcades Project as all the content is fleeting, self-contained and schematic. Despite the fragmentary nature of this collection, the whole is indeed more than the sum of the parts and a very vital, humane impression of Benjamin shines through this (curated) marginalia. Beyond the content of the text, Benjamin was a steady-handed craftsman when it came to writing – his research, documents and notebooks are meticulous constructions with the potential to inspire both scholars and designers.

The following two images and related excerpts made quite an impression on me, perhaps you’ll find them of interest. The first, annotated by Ursula Marx, deals with Benjamin’s editing process. The second is a trademark Benjamin observation, dealing with one of his favourite topics — the intangible nature of memory.

“Alongside this work on the sheet Benjamin also used a very different technique: work with the sheet. He cut it crosswise into units which each represent one motif or building block of the text. In the case of the Kafka material [examples shown above] this resulted in about eighty manuscript strips in total. The complexity of Benjamin’s editing procedures is revealed in this process: presumably, as a consequence of previous collations and groups of ideas, individual motifs are formulated and written out randomly on a sheet of paper. Using coloured symbols on the clear edge of the sheet, these are then pooled into units, which are placed in a sequence indicated by the number of the signs. After this—if necessary—the sheets are cut up in order to make the placing of the units in the planned order physically possible.”

“What lends an incomparable tone to the very first view of a village or a town in the landscape is the fact that in one’s image of it distance resonates just as importantly as nearness. This latter still has not yet gained preponderance through the constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way around the place, the earliest picture can never be restored.”

This post originally appeared on Greg J. Smith’s blog, Serial Consign