Projects

A film on Walter Benjamin, in collaboration with writer Anthony David.

“As he fled toward the Spanish frontier, Benjamin refused to have anyone else carry his black attaché case, which contained, he told me, a new manuscript ‘that is more important than I am.’ —Lisa Fittko

Walter Benjamin sat day after day under the ornamented, vaulted ceiling of the reading room at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris working in obscurity to save European culture from the totalitarian ideologies threatening it. In what Hannah Arendt calls his “moment to moment messianic hope,” there was more than a passing resemblance to that other German-Jewish prophet, Karl Marx, who sat in the British Library Reading Room for years writing a Das Kapital. Benjamin (1892-1940) deeply admired Marx but found his theory of history one of the sources of totalitarianism that he profoundly opposed in his own work.

In 1940, as the Nazi armies race through Holland and Belgium and into the heart of France, Benjamin gives over some finished and unfinished manuscripts to the writer George Bataille, who hides them in the Bibliotheque nationale, grabs a change of clothes and an attaché case containing what he considers his most valuable literary work of all - “more important than I am,” he says. Benjamin boards one of the last trains out of Paris before the Nazis seal the city. In the pocket of his threadbare jacket is a cyanide capsule he will soon take.

For years historians have debated what was in the attaché case. It was undoubtedly related to his life’s work, the Arcades Project. Many think the case contained the essay “On the Concept of History.” More likely, it was a much-expanded version of his “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (the title he took from a famous letter Marx wrote in 1844); and if so, it was lost forever.

Among the thousand pages of the Arcades project, and Benjamin’s far more succinct “On the Concept of History,” are numerous hints at what he was seeking to achieve and what in manuscript form might have been in the case. With the backdrop of totalitarianism spreading across the European continent, his project can best be described as an emergency repair job on a deadly flaw within “progressive” Marxist thinking, a flaw more dangerous than the fascist military machine because progressives and intellectuals, the people capable of saving European culture, so easily fell victims to it. With his work – his praise of Baudelaire and employing his emblematic characters of the flâneur, the junk dealer, the collector, the bibliophile, the translator, and the chiffonier- Benjamin wanted to exorcise from Marxism the “false semblance of totality,” a totalizing system of supposedly inexorable Laws of History and the prognostications of the future based on them. Such laws reduced human consciousness to ephemeral shadows cast up onto the brick walls of a factory building.

Benjamin’s multiple mini-portraits of nineteenth-century Paris were his way to shed light on European civilization threatened by totalitarianism, and to find a way to struggle free from the noose. He turned the rubble from the past into an allegory of freedom, human creativity, and spirit— of human redemption.

The Film

Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? … From the compression of a centuries-long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour? And does the flâneur do anything different?

Pedagogic side of this undertaking: To educate the image-making medium within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows.
—The Arcades Project (N 1, 8), 458.

What Benjamin was after at the Bibliotheque nationale were “images, not stories.” Stories were too complete for him; by contrast, images could be recombined, or recomposed, into a montage. He was a fan of documentary film because there was something in the genre, with its use of montage, that created the surprising and revealing juxtapositions he was after.

Our sixty-minute documentary will interest - and surprise - the countless admirers of Benjamin who interpret his works through the prism of postwar deconstructionism and postmodernism. The image that emerges in this film, by contrast, is that of that of one the twentieth century’s greatest homme de lettres, a Romantic and mystic, battling the ideological core of totalitarianism from his place in the reading room of the Bibliotheque National. The film should engage anyone interested in culture and its fate in the 1920s to 1940s in Europe.

The film will incorporate footage and photographs of nineteenth and twentieth-century Paris, audio interviews of Scholem, Arendt, Adorno, and Susan Sontag, along with letters, photographs of Benjamin, his family and associates, his handwritten manuscripts, and other documents. True to the spirit of Benjamin, “fragments” from his life and work in the 1930s will be points of entry to explore his wider biography, from his childhood in Berlin, to his travels to Moscow, to his suicide in 1940.

Anthony David, writer of the script, is the author of Salman Schocken, Once upon a Country, a biography of Sari Nusseibeh, Gershom Scholem, a Life in Letters, and currently working on The Correspondence of Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt.

Judith Glatzer Wechsler is an art historian of 19th century France and has made 25 films on art and culture, many award winning, including ones for the Louvre, the Comedie Francaise, The Metropolitan Museum, The Reunion des Musees Nationaux. Among her books, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris, and The Interpretation of Cézanne. She is professor emerita from Tufts University and has taught at MIT, Harvard, L’Ecole normale superieur, and the Hebrew University.

Daumier’s Saltimbanques. An essay for the catalog of the Leiberman museum in Berlin Daumier Exhibition, 2013.

The motif of the saltimbanques, street performers, acrobats, clowns, and jesters— are close to Daumier’s heart. They first appear in his political caricatures of 1830-1835 where, as metaphor, they mostly have negative and comical implications. The paintings, drawings and watercolors of 1866-1871, present these ambulatory performers in empathetic representations of their their displacement, weary state, and destitution.

Daumier and his use of allegory. An essay for the catalog of the Royal Academy of Art Daumier exhibition 2013.

Daumier (1809-1879) employed allegorical figures as a means of averting or subverting the restraints of censorship. Unlike caricatures of individual political figures, which tend toward exaggeration and the grotesque, allegorical figures representing principles, countries, and institutions appear, for the most part, positively. I examine the range of Daumier’s allegorical figures, from his earliest. work in the 1830s to his final period, ending in 1872. I am studying sources on which they draw, the circumstances in which they are used and their metaphorical implications. Daumier’ s use of allegorical figures was clearly important for communicating his political and ideological positions.

“I am a Memory Come Alive”
Nahum N. Glatzer
And the Transmission of German-Jewish Learning

The following is a description of the project as submitted to the American Academy in Berlin: Nahum Glatzer -Exile and Renewal

Nahum N. Glatzer And the Transmission of German-Jewish Learning

Lecture at the American Academy in Berlin, April 27, 2010.

Photos and documents related to Nahum Glatzer

Click on any photo above to view enlarged version.