Benjamin a Gretel, un entrelíneas

Hace un tiempo compartí por aquí fragmentos del Diario de Moscú de Walter Benjamin, en particular las letras en que éste narraba sus encuentros con Asja Lacis. Comparto ahora un fragmento de una de las cartas más hermosas que Benjamin le escribió a Gretel Karplus (a quien llamaba 'Felizitas') desde su retiro en Ibiza. (Walter Benjamin, Cartas de la Época de Ibiza, Pre-Textos)

Benjamin y Gretel eran una especie de confidentes, mantenían una amistad de complicidad. Ella le enviaba contribuciones económicas para ayudarlo a sobrevivir en Ibiza y él le escribía muy frecuentemente y le comentaba sus escritos. Se carteaban y comentaban sobre Teodoro Adorno (Gretel fue esposa de Adorno), sobre lo que ocurría en Berlín en esa época, sobre sus estados de ánimo. Este fragmento de carta es uno de los más elocuentes en términos de la relación entre ellos y al igual que en los relatos de Benjamin sobre Asja, en éste se deja leer su sensibilidad, ingenio y pasión en el querer.

Salud!.

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A Gretel Karplus

San Antonio, Ibiza, [aproximadamente], el 25 de junio de 1933.

Querida Felizitas:

…

Como ve, mi correspondencia es escasa, de hecho no sé qué pensará cuando sepa que usted es la que lleva la voz cantante de la misma. Por eso tendría que valorar la orquesta más por la atención que le dedica su único oyente que por la fuerza de su reparto. Pero de todos ellos es seguramente Gerhard el que tiene la parte más importante. Las cartas que vienen de Jerusalén, como usted fácilmente se imaginará, son para mí en este momento especialmente interesantes; además de que cada catorce días puedo contar con una de ellas con bastante seguridad.

Me agrada saber que ha terminado con los lavados de estómago; espero también que los días de sol no le falten mientras navega en la lancha. Es cierto que recibo noticias de personas que aún mantienen correspondencia con sus familiares, y que también oyen que el tiempo en Alemania amenaza con tormenta. Aquí este verano en cualquier caso se diferencia del anterior, en el que las tormentas y las lluvias fueron escasas. Aunque prefiero por los días grises tanto en el sur como en el norte.

Algunas veces me da por pensar, querida Felizitas, en si usted no sufre demasiado por la felicidad de su niño. Un “niño problemático” y un niño adoptado…[1] ¿No desea a veces un adulto? Este papel podría representarlo yo a su lado si usted estuviera presente, pero en estas circunstancias el alejamiento no hace seguramente sino empequeñecer mi figura. Con mis cartas intento al menos estilizarla, y quizá en algún momento hasta llegue a aparecer una silueta lo bastante aceptable. Sin embargo cuando su núcleo se ensombrece de un color negro intenso deja de corresponder a su modelo original. Aunque no es menos cierto que este comportamiento técnico conduce en ocasiones a un nivel crítico de verdad existencial. Por no abandonar la simbología de colores le diré que le doy las gracias de nuevo por la “hojita rosa”:[2] nos hace más que destacar y de nuevo esperanzadoramente en el susodicho trasfondo negro. ¿Y cómo podría darle réplica a esta confirmación sino con este pequeño dibujo de tinta que Baudelaire tan inteligentemente interpretó como “charme inattendu d’un bijou rose et noir” (la gracias inesperada de un joyel negro y rosa)?.

Escríbame lo antes posible para decirme lo que hace, piensa y lee. Puesto que yo, como berlinés nativo, creo tener alguna autoridad sobre osos, me dirigiré a Georg Tenglershen para recomendarle encarecidamente que le ofrezca su afable zarpa.

Y aquí le entrego la cinta* con la que usted podrá atar todos los pequeños y buenos deseos que seguramente habrá descubierto entre líneas.

Suyo

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[1] Si el “niño problemático” es Adorno, el “niño adoptado” es el propio Benjamin. Gretel Karplus había escrito en su carta del 17 de junio que ella adoptaría a Benjamin “en lugar del niño que nunca había tenido”.

[2] Se trata de los giros postales con los que Gretel Karplus ayudaba con frecuencia a Benjamin.

*Benjamin había trazado una larga línea oscilante que partía de la "H" de "Hier" (aquí).

(las notas son de la edición de Pre-Textos).

las preguntas triviales

26 diciembre

"Asja's stay in the sanatorium seems to be reaching its end. Over the past few days the hours she has spent lying outdoors have proved beneficial. She likes to lie there in her sack of blankets and listen to the crows in the air. She is even convinced that the birds have organized themselves with great precision and that their leader informs them as to what to do; certain birdcalls preceded by a long pause are, according to her, orders that they all follow. I have barely spoken to Asja in private of late, but in the few words we do exchange I believe I detect her closeness to me so distinctly that I feel a great sense of calm and well-being. I can think of nothing that has as healing and yet as intense an effect on me as the most trivial little questions she puts to me about my affairs. To be sure, she doesn't do this often. But on this day, for example, she turned to me in the middle of a meal where only Russian was being spoken and asked me what mail had arrived for me the previous day. Before eating, three of us had played dominos together".

W. Benjamin (Moscow Diary) 

más Benjamin y 'the feeling of solitude'

24 diciembre

"Back in my room, I lay down on the bed and read Proust while eating some of the candied nuts we had bought because they are a favorite of Asja's. Reich arrived after seven, Asja came somewhat later. She spent the whole evening lying on the bed and Reich sat next to her on a chair. After a long wait, a samovar finally arrived - our earlier requests for one had been futile because apparently a guest had locked all of them in his room and had then gone off - and hearing its hum fill a Russian room for the first time, able to look straight into Asja's face as she lay there across from me, sitting next to the little potted pine tree, I experienced something I had not felt in years, a sense of security on Christmas Eve. We spoke of the job that Asja was to have taken, then talk turned to my book on the Trauerspiel, and I read aloud from the preface directed against the University of Frankfurt.

Asja's opinion may take on importance for me; she thought that despite everything I should simply write: rejected by the University of Frankfurt-on-Main. We were very close that evening. Asja got a lot of laughs out of some of the things I was saying to her. Other things, such as the idea for an article on German philosophy as a tool of German domestic politics, excited her intense approbation. She couldn't make up her mind to leave, she was feeling good and tired. But in the end it was not even eleven when she left. I went right to bed because my evening had been full, however short it may have been. I realized that solitude does not exist for us as long as someone we love, even though they be somewhere else well beyond our reach, is feeling alone at the same time. The feeling of solitude would therefore seem to be basically a reflexive phenomenon that only strikes us when emitted back to us by people we know, and most often by people we love, whenever they enjoy themselves socially without us. And even the person who feels fundamentally alone in the world only experiences his solitude when he thinks of a woman, even an unknown woman, or of anybody else who is not alone and in whose company he, too, would cease to be.

W. Benjamin (Moscow Diary)

it takes half a day of deliberation to go drop a letter in a mailbox

20 diciembre

"Whether I will achieve the secondary purpose of my journey - to escape the deadly melancholy of the Christmas season - remains to be seen. If I am still holding out fairly well, it is also because despite everything, I recognize Asja's attachment to me. The familiar Du seems to have gained ground between us, and the long gazes she directs at me - I cannot remember a woman granting gazes or kisses this long - have lost none of their power over me. Today I told her that I now wanted to have a child by her. Certain gestures, spontaneous yet rare and not without significance given the control she has now imposed on herself in erotic matters, tell me she is fond of me. Just yesterday, as I was in the process of leaving her room to avoid an argument, she grabbed hold of me violently and ran her hands through my hair. Also, she often says my name. At one point in the past few days she said it was entirely my fault that we were not now living on a "desert isle" and didn't have two children. There is some truth to this. On three or four occasions, I directly or indirectly avoided sharing a future with her: when I didn't "run off" with her in Capri, but how? - when I refused to accompany her from Rome to Assisi and Orvieto, when I didn't follow her to Latvia in the summer of 1925 and didn't want to be tied down waiting for her in Berlin that winter. What came into play were not the financial considerations, nor even the fanatic urge to travel, which has since diminished in me over the past two years, but rather the fear of those hostile elements in her which only now do I feel I can confront. In the past few days I also said to her that had we decided to join together back then, I don't know that we wouldn't have split up long ago. 

Everything happening in and around me combines to make the idea of living apart from her more intolerable to me than it ever was before. A contributing factor is certainly the fear that in the future, when Asja is finally well again and living here with Reich on stable terms, it will only be with a considerable amount of pain that I will be able to come up against the boundaries of our relationship. I still don't know if I will be able to disengage myself from it. At this point, I have no cause to sever myself from her completely, even admitting I were capable of it. The thing I would prefer the most would be the bond a child might create between us. But I have no idea whether I could even now bear living with her, given her astonishing hardness and, despite all her sweetness, her lovelessness. - Life here in the winter is richer by a dimension: space literally changes according to whether it is hot or cold. People live on the street as if in a frosty hall of mirrors, and every decision, every stop becomes incredibly difficult: it takes half a day of deliberation to go drop a letter in a mailbox, and despite the bitter cold, it takes an effort of the will to enter a store to buy something".

-Walter Benjamin, Mascow Diary, p.35.

Cartagena, Benjamin y Asja

Andamos por Cartagena, Colombia en el 10Mo. Encuentro Internacional de Educación y Pensamiento, para presentar los resultados de una investigación interdisciplinaria en la que he participado en los últimos dos años con otros dos investigadores del Centro de Investigaciones Sociales y el de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias de la UPR. Grande Cartagena, verdaderamente precioso!. (luego ofreceré detalles).

Pero por acá trajimos de paseo a Walter Benajmin y a su espléndido diario de sus dos meses en Moscú (Moscow Diary). Ya citamos algo en el post anterior y que espero poder disfrutar por acá intensamente de los días rusos de Benjamin.

Benjamin estuvo en Moscú de visita desde el 6 diciembre de 1926 hasta fines de enero del 27, principalmente movido por su aficción y pasión por Asja Lacis, una mujer con una historia fascinante, rusa, activista comunista, actriz y emprendedora de un proyecto de teatro popular y proletario para niños. Asja y Walter tuvieron una relación intensa, se conocieron en Capri y coincidieron en Berlin y en Moscú. La visita de Benjamin a Rusia se debió en gran medida a ella y a la pasión e intelectualidad que le generaba, por un lado, y a su intención de mirar de cerca la posibilidad de integrarse en el Partido Comunista, cosa que descartó luego de la visita.  El diario, detallado en temas de la cotidianidad, incisivo y libre de auto-censura, recoge su experiencia en esos dos meses y da cuenta de la sociedad rusa en esos años. Por acá iremos citando algunas de las partes más fascinantes y las tiernas miradas benjamianas a Asja y al Moscú de esos días, según los vaya encontrando en estos mis días cartaginenses!

12 diciembre

'Reich took a walk with Asja in the morning. Then they dropped in on me - I was still in the process of dressing. Asja sat on the bed. I got a great deal of pleasure out of the way she was unpacking my suitcases and tidying up my things; in the process she picked out two ties for herself that she liked. Then she recounted how she used to devour trashy serial novels when she was little. She would hide the small booklets from her mother in her schoolbooks, but one day she had acquired a large bound volume of Laura and it came into the hands of her mother. On another occasion, she ran out of the house in the middle of the night in order to get the next installment of a dime novel from one of her girlfriends. The latter's father was at an utter loss when he answered the door he wanted to know what she was doing there, and realizing the mess she had gotten herself into, she replied that she herself hadn't the faintest idea'.

W.B., Moscow Diary, pág. 19.

Asja Lacis

9 diciembre

"After the meal, Asja comes to my room; Reich is also present. Before leaving, Asja tells the story of her illness. Reich accompanies her back to the sanatorium, and then returns. I'm lying in bed - he wants to work. But he soon interrupts himself and we talk about the situation of intellectuals here and in Germany; and about the techniques of contemporary writing in both countries. Which leads into Reich's reservations about joining the Party. He focuses on the Party's reactionary bent in cultural matters. The leftist movements which had proved useful during the period of wartime communism are now being completely discarded. It's only quite recently that the proletarian writers have been officially recognized as such (despite Trotsky), although they were at the same time made to understand that they could in no event count on governmental support.

Then the Lelevich case -measures taken against the cultural front of the left. Lelevich had composed a treatise on the methods of Marxist literary criticism. - In Russia, they put the utmost weight on taking an extremely nuanced political position. In Germany, a vague and general political background suffices, though it [would] nonetheless be essential to demand the same thing there. - The method of writing in Russia: the broad exposition of an argument and, if possible, nothing further. The cultural level of the public is so low that formulations would inevitably remain incomprehensible. By contrast, in Germany the only thing demanded is: results. No one cares to know how you have arrived at them. Which explains why German newspapers only place a minimal amount of space at the disposition of their reporters; here, articles of 500 to 600 lines are not a rarity. This discussion went on for a long while. My room is well heated and spacious, a pleasant place to stay".

-Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 1926