Walter Benjamin on the French Exile of German Men of Letters

"Allemands de quatre-vingt-neuf" (1939)

Momme Brodersen, Benjamin's biographer, points out that Deutsche Menschen had lost its relevance by the time it was published in book form.[19] The letters addressed the dilemma of intellectuals in one venue or another of spiritual exile. They might have appealed to an audience whose hopes had been tied to the fortunes of the Weimar Republic. The coming of the Third Reich had changed all that and turned Benjamin's attention to the crisis conditions of the 1930s and the more radical remedies they demanded. In his retreat to the Bibliothèque Nationale during these years, he discovered the revolutionary tradition. The France of the French Revolution, not the Germany of the Enlightenment, spoke to the dilemmas of the present age. For Benjamin, the revolutionary tradition lived on in these remembered connections.

Benjamin's second set of letters, therefore, published in French in the journal Europe in July 1939 on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the French Revolution, resonated more closely with the crisis of his times. "Les Allemands de quatre-vingt-neuf" showcased the dilemmas of German exiles caught in the maelstroms of the revolutionary era. While Deutsche Menschen had evoked the gentle manners of a republic of letters, this collection spoke to the thoughts of his forbearers in these more dangerous circumstances. Here his strategy of presentation is different. Whereas in the earlier collection he had letters speak for themselves with only limited commentary, here his observations on their meaning predominate. As for the letters themselves, he included only passages germane to his argument, and sometimes the names of the correspondents go unmentioned.[20]

In his preface, Benjamin underscored how the French Revolution had inspired a living tradition in Germany that animated the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, before being driven into oblivion in the late nineteenth century by Prussian authoritarianism. As an aid to his search, he was particularly taken with the life and thought of the mid-nineteenth century French insurrectionary Auguste Blanqui and his theory of the eternal return to precedents that had inspired revolutionary passion. Benjamin highlighted letters that uncovered this lost tradition.[21]

Benjamin referenced eight letters, all composed by intellectuals who bore witness to the Revolution, either in France or nearby in cities of the Rhineland sympathetic to its cause. His purpose was to show how deeply committed German intellectuals were to the Revolution, with its emphasis upon human rights as a guide for the liberation of the people in Germany and eastern Europe generally.[22] As in his earlier edited collection, Benjamin identified personally with each of the letter writers, caught in circumstances largely beyond their own control. His comments bespeak his frustration with the predicament in which he found himself, and his longing to rekindle the memory of a past that might point the way towards the renewal of the revolutionary tradition whose beginnings German intellectuals had witnessed.

Most of the letters that Benjamin reproduced present intellectuals resigned to their fate as exiles. There are few hints of personal satisfaction, only expressions of deep commitment to an unfinished cause. For example, he included a letter from Georg Forster, in 1793 a delegate from Mainz to the Convention in Paris, who came to expect the worst as an exile during the Reign of Terror and later died in that city (as Benjamin suspected he would, too).[23] Other letters, such as those by Sueme and Hölderlin, explained how they wandered about Europe as "judicious observers," committed to the revolutionary cause in Germany whose realization they were never to see (like Benjamin in his peregrinations as a self-styled flâneur).[24]

One exceptional letter, though, suggested another way of understanding their legacy. It had been written by the forgotten literary critic Carl Jochmann during the era of the Bourbon Restoration.[25] Jochmann showed Benjamin how his idea about memory's restoring power might be joined to another about memory's role in history, thereby rescuing the meaning of the revolutionary tradition for the present age. "Jochmann was 100 years ahead of his time," Benjamin commented—roughly the interval between Jochmann's prime and his own.[26] To signal his importance, he saw to the publication not just of this letter but also Jochmann's essay, "Die Rückschritte der Poesie"(The Regression of Poetry).[27]