The city as crime scene: Walter Benjamin and the traces of the detective

New German Critique

Volumn , Issue 100, 2007, Pages 165-187

  Salzani, Carlo ^a  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

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EID: 34249662264     PISSN: 0094033X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/0094033X-2006-022     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. All references to Benjamin's works are made parenthetically in the text. All references to The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), are to the convolute number.
2. For the other works, references are provided both to the German text of the Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. in 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972-89)
3. or the Gesammelte Briefe (Collected Letters), ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995-2000) (hereafter cited as GS and GB, respectively),
4. and to the English translation of the Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996-2003),
5. and The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) (hereafter cited as SW and C, respectively). Where no English translation is available, as for "Kriminalromane, auf Reisen" or part of the correspondence, I use my own.
6. Pierre Missac argues that the traveler's anxieties are probably Benjamin's own anxieties for the deteriorating political and social situation of Weimar Germany: "Just as he needed to escape from his anxiety, counterpart to fascination, about the train journey... so the detective novel is in some sense an antidote to obsession with the increasing dangers now that Hitler has arrived on the scene and new conflicts are in the offing" (Walter Benjamin's Passages, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995], 58-59).
7. From a few sources we can get an idea of what Benjamin read and admired: Scholem writes that "Benjamin was very fond of reading mystery novels, particularly the German translations brought out by a Stuttgart publisher, of American and French detective classics like those of Maurice i sic] A. K. Green, Emile Gaboriau (Monsieur Lecoq), a nd - when he was in Munich - Maurice Leblanc's stories about Arsène Lupin, the gentleman burglar. Later he read a great deal by the Swedish author Frank Heller, and in the thirties he added the books of Georges Simenon" (Walter Benjamin: The History of a Friendship [London: Faber and Faber, 1982], 32).
8. In "Kriminalromane, auf Reisen," Benjamin gives a list of authors, characters, and works: the Dane Sven Elvestad (1884-1934) and his character Asbjörn Krag; the Swede Frank Heller (a.k.a. Martin Gunnar Serner, 1886-1947); the Briton Wilkie Collins (1824-89); the Czech-Austrian Leo Perutz (1882-1957); the Frenchman Gaston Leroux (1868-1927), specifically Le fantôme de l'opéra and Le parfum de la dame en noir
9. Arthur Conan Doyle's (1859-1930) Sherlock Holmes; and the American Anna Katherine Green (1846-1935), specifically Behind Closed Doors and The Affair Next Door (GS, 4.1:381-82).
10. As early as 1920 Benjamin gives a list of guten Kriminalromanen in a letter to Scholem: Green's Affair Next Door, Behind Closed Doors, and Filigree Ball
11. Elvestad's Der Mann der die Stadt plünderte and Die zwei und die Dame
12. Gaboriau's (1832-73) Monsieur Lecoq
13. Leroux's Le fantôme de l'opéra and Le mystère de la chamber jaune
14. Lawrence L. Lynch's Schlingen und Netze
15. August Gottlieb Meißner's (1753-1807) Platanenallee No. 14
16. E. Balmer and W. M. Hary's Feine Fäden
17. Arnold Bennett's (1867-1931) Grand Babylon Hotel
18. and Alfred Kubin's (1877-1959) Die andere Seite (GB, 2:104-5).
19. From a couple of letters to Kracauer of 1926 and 1928, we know that he read G. K. Chesterton's (1874-1936) Man Who Knew Too Much and Club of Queer Trades (which Kracauer reviewed for the Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung i GB, 3:147, 342]).
20. In the 1930s Georges Simenon (1903-89), an "author of worthy detective novels" (GB, 4:208-9), is the main reference in the correspondence, where Benjamin mentions the novels Les suicidés (GB, 4:539,4:541, 5:28)
21. Le locataire (GB, 5:28, 271, 276)
22. Les Pitard (GB, 5:231, 271, 276),
23. L'évadé (GB, 5:271, 276)
24. and La Marie du Port (GB, 6:329)
25. but Agatha Christie's (1890-1976) Mystery of the Blue Train and the French mystery author Pierre Véry (1900-1960) are also mentioned (GB, 5:28, 37).
26. In a 1937 letter to Willi Bredel, Benjamin includes a study on Simenon in a proposal for a series of "Pariser Briefe," which were in fact never written (GB, 5:516).
27. For the planned detective novel (or series of novels), see Materialen zu einem Kriminalroman, in GS, 7.2:846-51.
28. In Brecht's Nachlaß, the notes for Kriminalromanen go under the title of "Tatsachenreihe:'of which one episode follows a schema in Benjamin's Materialen (Werke, vol. 17 [Berlin: Aufbau; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989], 443-55).
29. Whereas Messac's book is a constant reference in The Arcades Project, there is no trace of Kracauer's study. In fact, Kracauer wrote Der Detektiv-Roman between 1922 and 1925 but never published it
30. only the chapter "Hotelhalle" was later included in Das Ornament der Masse (1963).
31. The full study was published only posthumously (Schriften, ed. Karsten Witte, vol. 1 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971], 103-204). In a letter to Kracauer of March 1924 (thus before the completion of the work), Benjamin writes that he is "curious" (gespannt) about Kracauer's "Detective Analysis" (GB, 2:430); he was thus acquainted with at least a part of it, and the two possibly discussed it. But no other reference to this work appears in the correspondence between the two, and therefore an influence of Kracauer on Benjamin's Theorie des Kriminalromans is rather unlikely. On the other hand, Kracauer's study is a phenomenological analysis of the metamorphoses of the ratio, the systematic scientific-industrial thought, with the dissolution of piety in bourgeois society and the relationship between kitsch and will of power, and thus diverges from Benjamin's interest in the genre.
32. Tom McDonough, "The Crimes of the Flâneur," October, no. 102 (2002): 116.
33. Ernest Mandel, "A Marxist Interpretation of the Crime Story," in Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Woodstock, VT. Countryman, 1988), 210.
34. Gavin Lambert, "The Dangerous Edge,"' in Winks, Detective Fiction, 49.
35. Benjamin quotes from Roger Caillois in The Arcades Project: "Elements of intoxication at work in the detective novel.... The characters of the childish imagination and a prevailing artificiality hold sway over this strangely vivid world. Nothing happens here that is not long premeditated; nothing corresponds to appearances. Rather, each thing has been prepared for use at the right moment by the omnipotent hero who wields power over it. We recognize in all this the Paris of the serial instalments of Fantômas" (G15,5).
36. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 141.
37. This observation is repeated in several passages. In The Arcades Project: "The masses in Baudelaire... they efface all traces of the individual: they are the newest asylum for the reprobate and the proscript" (M16,3). In a letter to Max Horkheimer on April 16, 1938: "The crowd... is the outcast's latest place of asylum" (GB, 6:65-66; C, 557).
38. McDonough, "Crimes of the Flâneur," 105.
39. Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 409.
40. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 8.
41. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, 142.
42. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," in The Complete Tales and Poems (London: Penguin, 1982), 478.
43. Poe, "Man of the Crowd;' 478, 475. The whole passage reads: "It was well said of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen' - mit does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.... Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged."
44. Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 172.
45. The same formulation is repeated in The Arcades Project: "Preformed in the figure of the flâneur is that of the detective. The flâneur required a social legitimation of his habitus. It suited him very well to see his indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight" (M13a,2).
46. Rob Shields, "Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin's Notes on Flânerie," in The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), 63.
47. James V. Werner, "The Detective Gaze: Edgar A. Poe, the Flâneur, and the Physiognomy of Crime," American Transcendental Quarterly 15 (2001): 10.
48. In "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" Benjamin writes: "An important trait of the real-life Baudelaire - that is, of the man committed to his work - has been omitted from this portrayal: his absentmindedness. - In the flâneur, the joy of watching prevails over all. It can concentrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective. Or it can stagnate in the rubbernecker; then the flâneur has turned into a badaud. The revealing representations of the big city have come from neither. They are the work of those who have traversed the city absently, as it were, lost in thought or worry" (GS, 1.2:572; SW, 4:41).
49. Tom Gunning, "The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin's Optical Detective," boundary 2 30, no. 1 (2003): 127. Werner's argument is very similar (cf. "Detective Gaze," 13-19).
50. Cf, e.g., "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" (GS, 1.2:546; SW, 4:23) and The Arcades Project (M12a,1).
51. Shields, "Fancy Footwork, 63.
52. Or, even better, as Patricia Merivale argues, for what has been called the "metaphysical" detective story, "in which the triadic multiplicity of detective, criminal, and victim is reduced to a solipsistic unity" ("Gumshoe Gothics: Poe's 'the Man of the Crowd' and His Followers," in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999], 107).
53. Cf. Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 79. Benjamin himself distinguishes between the flâneur-as-physiognomist and the detective: "One can speak, in certain respects, of a contribution made by the physiologies to detective fiction. Only, it must be borne in mind that the combinative procedure of the detective stands opposed here to an empirical approach that is modelled on the methods of Vidocq, and that betrays its relation to the physiologies precisely through the Jackal in Les Mohicans de Paris" (d14a,4).
54. In "To Live without Leaving Traces" (GS, 4.1:427; SW, 2:701-2), and, with almost the same words, in "Experience and Poverty," Benjamin reiterates this concept: "If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s, for all the coziness it radiates, the strongest impression you receive may well be, 'You've no business here.' And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no spot on which the owner has not left his mark - the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the armchairs, the transparencies in the windows, the screen in front of the fire. A neat phrase by Brecht helps us out here: 'Erase the traces!' is the refrain in the first poem of his Lesebuch für Städtebewohner. Here in the bourgeois room, the opposite behaviour became the norm. And conversely, the intérieur forces the inhabitant to adopt the greatest possible number of habits - habits that do more justice to the interior he is living in than to himself. This is understood by everyone who is familiar with the absurd attitude of the inhabitants of such plush apartments when something broke. Even their way of showing their annoyance - and this affect, which is gradually starting to die out, was one that they could produce with great virtuosity - was above all the reaction of a person who felt that someone had obliterated 'the traces of his days on earth'" (GS, 2.1:217; SW, 2:734).
55. Gilloch argues that the bourgeois interior is the space of dying, but without the body, it is not so much a space of death as a "dead space": "The interior becomes 'ageless,' the sense of 'bourgeois security that emanated' from the middle-class home stemming from 'timelessness,' from the denial of transience. The space of death, the murder, simultaneously becomes that of immortality, of permanence' ( Myth and Metropolis, 81-82).
56. An entry in The Arcades Project refers to this intoxication as "satanic," connecting the intoxication of interior with modernity as "the time of hell" (S1,5): "Nineteenth-century domestic interior. The space disguises itself - puts on, like an alluring creature, the costumes of moods.... In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness - a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream.... To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry" (I2,6).
57. Heiner Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: Die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 1992), 108.
58. An entry of The Arcades Project reads: "Multiplication of traces through the modern administrative apparatus. Balzac draws attention to this: 'Do your utmost, hapless Frenchwomen, to remain unknown, to weave the very least little romance in the midst of a civilization which takes note, on public squares, of the hour when every hackney cab comes and goes; which counts every letter and stamps them twice, at the exact time they are posted and at the time they are delivered; which numbers the houses...; which ere long will have every acre of land, down to the smallest holdings..., laid down on the broad sheets of a survey - a giant's task, by command of a giant.' Balzac, Modeste Mignon" (I6a,4).
59. In "Commentary on Poems by Brecht," Benjamin notes: "'Erase the traces': A rule for those who are illegal" (GS, 2.2:556; SW, 4:233). On the one hand, the poor and the bohème are not allowed to leave traces; on the other, though, they are pursued by a panoptical state that, at the same time, tries to control them and obliterate their existence. Therefore "the rule in the First Poem, 'Erase the traces!' can be completed by the reader of the Ninth: 'It's better than having them erased for you"' (GS, 2.2:560; SW, 4:327).
60. Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel, 105-6.
61. Almost the same words are repeated in "Experience and Poverty" (GS, 2.1:217-18; SW, 2:734).
62. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin; or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), 29. Hereafter cited as WB.
63. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 56, 211.
64. Pierre Missac, "Walter Benjamin: From Rupture to Shipwreck," trans. Victoria Bridges et at., in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 214.
65. David Frisby, "The Flâneur in Social Theory," in Tester, Flâneur, 99.
66. Angelika Rauch, "Culture's Hieroglyph in Benjamin and Novalis: A Matter of Feeling," Germanic Review 71, no. 4 (1996): 254.
67. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 11.
68. See, e.g., Michael J. Arrato Gavrish, "The Historian as Detective: An Introduction to Historical Methodology," Social Education 59, no. 3 (1995): 151-53
69. Cushing Strout, "The Historian and the Detective," Partisan Review 61 (1994): 666-74
70. Robin W. Winks, ed., The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York: Harper and Row, 1968)
71. Winks, Modus Operandi: An Excursion into Detective Fiction (Boston: Godine, 1982)
72. and Winks, "The Historian as Detective," in Winks, Detective Fiction, 242-50.
73. Winks, "Historian as Detective," 242.
74. Mike Featherstone, "The Flâneur, the City, and Virtual Public Life," Urban Studies 35 (1998): 909.
75. Mandel, "Marxist Interpretation," 211.
76. The evolution of detective fiction took, though, a different direction: parallel and opposed to Dupin's model (from Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and Christie to the "hardboiled" figures of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler), a different model evolved on the blueprint of "The Man of the Crowd:' the metaphysical or antidetective story (Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Paul Auster). In this different account of detection, victim, pursuer, and pursued are the same person, and detection results in a quest for identity. This second model became predominant in the development of the genre and transformed it from a popular lowbrow consumer good into a highly intellectualized and refined postmodern allegory. In this model all the traces lead inward, in a quest for identity that is always open-ended or failed and that has been related specifically to the crisis of the modern order. This project of detection does away with crime, truth, justice, right, or wrong and thus also with any reference to history and politics: the space of the city implodes and is reduced to a play of mirrors in which the other disappears and the protagonist (or the author) contemplates his or her own image; the crimes of history (and history as such) fall into oblivion; the detective works no longer as an allegory of the historian. From a Benjaminian point of view, what remains when the historical-political component recedes is a phantasmagoric - that is, ahistorical and self-indulgent - romanticization of the self. For introductory readings see Merivale and Sweeney, Detecting Texts
77. Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984)
78. and Ralph Willett, The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).