Walter Benjamin's Voyage to Mars
When the Bavarian Soviet Republic collapsed in 1919, its nascent physics and engineering corps went into hiding in the countryside outside Frankfurt, where they continued their research into rocketry.
Walter Benjamin killed himself on the border of Spain in September 1940. The nature and time of his death and other facts of his official biography are all true. True, but incomplete. The official biography doesn’t mention his remarkable 1925 voyage to Mars, where he wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels.
The late Charles Rosen liked to say about Benjamin’s esotericism, “…the argument is not made explicit, and the connection between ideas is only suggested, never emphasized. The difficulty of reading his mosaic of quotations and commentary, which demands a pause for reflection after each sentence, is characteristic of his era, an age of great esoteric literature.” Rosen is right to note the esotericism of Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, but he’s wrong to read it as an example of modernist esotericism. The strange difficulty of the work—and make no mistake, his withdrawn habilitation thesis is the strangest and most difficult work from that strange and difficult century—comes less from its style and arguments, which, anyone would agree with Rosen, are characteristic of 1920s modernism, than from its perspective. It’s as if Benjamin sought to see what human things might look like from the perspective of the demiurge but merely ended up on another planet. Which is of course what he did.
When the Bavarian Soviet Republic collapsed in 1919, its nascent physics and engineering corps went into hiding in the countryside outside Frankfurt, where they continued their research into rocketry. Privately, they called themselves The Friends of Franz Lipp, toasted every meal to the defeat of Switzerland, and devoted themselves to solving the mystery of interplanetary travel. Publicly, they were a hiking club.
The Bavarian rocketeers got so good at space travel that by 1923 they had established a Martian Soviet Republic, and it was this young republic that Benjamin visited in 1925. Like its Bavarian predecessor, the experimental Martian government was chaotic and always on the verge of collapse; unlike the Munich commune, the Red Planet was run by engineers instead of playwrights, had fewer food shortages, and, being the lone human outpost on a seemingly desolate planet,1 faced no military opposition. The Martian communists brought Benjamin to the planet to document their efforts; he wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels.
The plain reading of Ursprung is that it defines the limits of literary criticism and points the way for an as of yet unpursued philosophical study of Origins.2 But read with attention to its perspective and it reveals not the origin but the end of tragedy. The playwrights were still in charge but acted through the engineers to write the grand, horrible tragedy of interplanetary communism. The secret end of that tragedy is the end of all tragedy, and the end of all tragedy forecloses the attendant Trauerlebensform.
We have lost, irretrievably, a way of being human.
See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “If it were possible to settle by any sort of experience whether there are inhabitants of at least some of the planets that we see, I might well bet everything that I have on it. Hence I say that it is not merely an opinion but a strong belief (on the correctness of which I would wager many advantages in life) that there are also inhabitants of other worlds.”
Edmund Husserl lacked the strength to follow; Heidegger lacked the subtlety..!