Walter Benjamin, here in his early twenties, discusses his short tenure at Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, an institution that he would remain at for only a few months before relocating back to Berlin, where he spent most of his boyhood. The letter’s recipient, Carla Seligson, was a medical student in Berlin, and later the wife of Herbert Belmore, a playwright and dramatist. Der Anfang (mentioned below) was a short-lived magazine of politics and art, published between 1908 and 1914, in which Benjamin published his first poems and essays. It is through his involvement with Der Anfang that Benjamin became associated with members of the avant-garde Expressionist art collective Neue Club—among them the eminent poet George Heym—which had a lasting influence on his approach to criticism and art.
Freiburg
July 8, 1913
My most esteemed Miss Seligson,
Thank you for your letter. It arrived here in Freiburg and did not come as a total surprise. Let me formulate what you have written and I have experienced here as the One Question: How are we to save ourselves from the lived experience of our twenties?
You may not know just how right you are—but one day we will really notice that something is being taken from us (not that we had it too long, but they are not going to let us hang on to it anymore). All around us we see those who once suffered the same thing and saved themselves by taking refuge in coldness and superiority. It is not that we fear what we are experiencing, but rather the dreadful result: that after the lived experience we will become numb and assume the same cowardly gesture unto eternity. These days, I often recall Hofmannsthal’s lines:
and that my own I, restrained by nothing
glided over out of a small child to me
like a dog, eerily mute and alien.
Is this not true? that the question for us now is whether these lines are to come completely true, and whether we must choose this kind of existence simply in order to defend ourselves from the others, who are also so “eerily mute and alien.”
How can we remain true to ourselves without becoming infinitely arrogant and extravagant? People want us to fit in without complaint, and we are completely ridiculous in the solitude we want to preserve—and we cannot justify that.
I felt this when I came here, having let the familiar circle of my Berlin friends; I discovered aloofness, incongruities, nervousness—now I have become acquainted with loneliness for the first time; I turned it into a lesson for myself by spending four days hiking alone through the Swiss Jura—completely alone with my exhausted body.
I am still unable to tell you what kind of tranquility I have achieved with this solitude. But in my first letter to you, when I so fulsomely praised my room with its window looking out onto the church square, it signified nothing but this tranquility.
I have completely divorced myself from someone who was the reason I came here; because at the age of twenty-two he wanted to be a forty-four year old like many of the most spiritual young people around us. It is quite true that now, at the age of twenty, I have not the slightest guarantee that the life I am leading will be a success: I am very busy supporting Der Anfang by organizing the divisions and I am separated from my friends. During the first weeks of my stay in Freiburg, these friends received letters that were uneven, confused, sometimes depressed. For two days, I was thoroughly unhappy here in Freiburg.
So in recent weeks I have worked very quietly for the Anfang. You will find my article, “Gedanken uber Gerhart Hauptmanns Festspiel” [Thoughts on Gerhart Hauptmann’s Festspiel], in the next issue, and in the September issue an essay, “Erfahrung.”
My father visited me a few days ago, and I was surprised at how very reserved and friendly I was. (Of course my father is opposed to my aspirations.) I assure you that this is so without the least trace of arrogance.
Why is it? Recently I saw a schoolboy on the street. I thought: you’re working for him now—and how alien he is to you; how impersonal your work is. Meanwhile I took another look at him. He was carrying his books in his hands and had an open, childish face with only a slight overlay of schoolboy blues. He reminded me of my own school days: my work on the Anfang no longer seemed at all abstract, at all impersonal.
I really believe that, for the second time, we are beginning to feel at home in our childhood, which the present wants to teach us to forget. We need only to live in rational solitude, somewhat less concerned about this difficult present and about ourselves. We will steadfastly rely on young people who will find or create the forms for the time between childhood and adulthood. We are still living in this period without these forms, without mutual support—in short: alone. I do believe, however, that one day we will be allowed to move very freely and confidently among the others, because we know that the multitude of others are no more “eerily mute and alien” than we ourselves. How do we know that?
Because we wanted to mobilize the openness and sincerity of children who later will also be twenty years old.
Think of the secretive and noble gestures of the people in early Renaissance paintings.
I hope you won’t be annoyed if these words, which could be uttered only from my point of view, failed to touch on anything of importance to you, if I made the mistake of keeping my remarks too general. But you will surely agree with me that everything depends on our not allowing any of our warmth for people to be taken from us. Even if, for a while, we must preserve this warmth in a less expressive and more abstract way, it will endure and surely find its form.
My most sincere regards.
Yours, Walter Benjamin
From The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940. Edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1994. p. 38-40.
FURTHER READING
Read an overview of Walter Benjamin’s contributions to philosophy and literary criticism at The New Statesman.
Read a translation of Benjamin’s 1913 essay, “Erfahrung” [Experience].
Read the Hugo von Hofmansthall poem, “On the Transitory: I-IV,” from which Benjamin quotes in his letter.