The 29 childrens talks arranged chronologically here give evidence of a pronounced shift in emphasis in the direction of the macabre, the sensational and the mysterious, with dashes of political reflection subtly folded into the mixture of later talks. Aware that nothing holds the attention of young minds better than a mystery, Benjamin gave talks on Kaspar Hauser, the famous Bastille internee known only as the Man in the Iron Mask, and on the opportunist adventurer and occultist swindler Cagliostro. By autumn 1931, the talks began to feature accounts of famous historical catastrophes: the eruption of Vesuvius, the earthquake of Lisbon, a theatre fire in Guangzhou in 1845 that killed 2,000 people, the Tay Bridge disaster, the 1927 flooding of the Mississippi. These gruesome accounts, in which little of the horror is spared, are given in the pedagogical belief that children, if told only about the agreeable side of life, will resort to finding out for themselves about the other side. Amid the captivating mayhem, a talk on stamp-collecting must have gone down like thin gruel. Anybody tempted to skim through the childrens talks will miss treasurable moments of stealth politics and fine dialectical observation. Benjamin was a convinced Marxist by the time he was giving these presentations, and already seems to have had a precisely judged intuition for how much critical acerbity he could get away with. The puppet theatre talk concludes with the observation that, in the United States, one could observe a perfect example of a republic that was about to turn into an effective monarchy. One lesson we can draw from Cagliostros antics was that he was able to hoodwink people during the alleged age of Enlightenment precisely because their scepticism towards the supernatural had now taken a dogmatic form, so that they failed to reflect seriously on his outlandish claims. [P]owers of observation and knowledge of human nature are even more valuable than a firm and correct point of view. A preternaturally alert ten-year-old already grown beyond the Jackanory stage might imbibe an elementary lesson in the immanent critique favoured by Frankfurt philosophy. One can only correctly comprehend something from the outside if one knows it on the inside, Benjamin notes on a visit to the brassworks at Eberswalde, adding, that is true for machines just as it is for living things. If knowledge is power, it is a power that can be put to the practical use of understanding the way of the world and ones own relation to it. Devoting two successive talks to a visit to the toy section of a Berlin department store, the speaker paints a tantalising verbal picture of its array of attractions but, wary of prompting the young listeners to a frenzy of acquisitive lust, ends the first talk with the observation that the more you understand something, and the more you know and see it for what it is, the less you need to possess it. Whether the younglings fastidiously recalled, when confronted with the Christmas displays, that the rage to accumulate is ideology, we can only guess.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 15:42:40 +0000