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The Meaning of Working Through the Past by Theodor Adorno – Summary

Introduction: Adorno and his Aims

Theodor Adorno, a real curmudgeon of thought if ever there was one, is well-known for his sceptical attitude towards such modern inventions as “jazz” and mass culture. But then again, the professor had plenty of reasons to be. Reaching academic maturity in the years after the end of the Second World War Adorno, as a German and Jew, was determined in his critical writings to outline the ways in which the society and culture of postwar West Germany left open the door to a potential resurgence of fascism, so that such problems could be dealt with before it was too late. As he wrote in “Education after Auschwitz”: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again”, and he does everything he can in his own work, including “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”, to body forth that very idea.

Adorno’s essay „Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?“, translated as “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” by Henry W. Pickford in the collection Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, has as its primary target is the ways, most of them unhealthy, that we try to deal with the past. In this it has relevance not just to German history, but also to America’s relationship to the destiny it once so gladly made manifest, and the United Kingdom’s often ambiguous attitude towards its colonial past, to give a few examples. Yet the focus remains on Germany in particular, and the way that Germans fell under Hitler’s spell, and could perhaps again. What follows is a summary of the piece, alongside the important contexts for it.

Picture of Adorno — Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was one of the leading members of the Frankfurt School of German thinkers, alongside Herbert Marcuse and others.

Context

“This day” being 1959, when the lecture was given. It was a time of crisis in the newish country of West Germany. The grand coalition of the CDP and CSU led by Konrad Adenauer, which had run the Germany since 1949, was sustaining a great deal of negative public attention after it emerged that Theodor Oberländer, one of the major ministers, had committed war crimes for the Nazis. It raised questions throughout the whole of West Germany about the way that the government, socially and economically conservative, had been dealing with the past. The problem was that it had not been dealing with the past at all – rather, it had done its best to treat the events of the Holocaust and the Third Reich almost as if they had not happened, in what Adorno called “collective amnesia”. And this, naturally, once it was revealed publicly, led to pressure for change.

The Social Democrats in Germany, long unpopular for stances such as being in favour of unconditional reunification with the Eastern part of the country, saw the failure of the grand coalition to answer for the past as a potential weapon to boost their own popularity. Adorno’s essay thus came at a time where it was particularly relevant to public discourse. Not only in this way did it seem timely though. Shortly after the essay was given for the first time, in December 1959 in Cologne a synagogue was daubed with a swastika and the words “Juden raus” (“out with the Jews”), proving Adorno’s fears of lingering fascist elements within German society to be completely justified.

The essay was given as a lecture, but it was also given over the radio too. Adorno’s saw his work, in spite of its academic style and nature, as important to the average German citizen because of its educational content. Through this essay and others given in the radio format he hoped to help Germans learn how they themselves can identify the signs of fascism, both within their own thoughts and actions and in those of other people. Though it is philosophy, it is manifestly practical too.

The Essay

Language as a Way of Hiding from the Past

One of the major arguments of “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”, and the one that begins it, is that language is very much a potential tool that can aid the survival of fascist tendencies, even as in other hands it can be used to stop them. One need only think of the great heights reached by Joseph Goebbels as Reich Minister for Propaganda under Hitler for an example of language’s recent abuse for evil. Adorno begins his piece with a much finer distinction however: the difference between “Aufarbeitung” and “Verarbeitung” in German. By the time of the essay, public debate was already primarily using the first term. In Adorno’s mind this is a mistake, because the former term suggests “the intention to close the books on the past” rather than the idea of carrying through a consciousness of the past into the present of the latter term.

As a result, the word “Aufarbeitung” is associated with “the unconscious and not so unconscious defensiveness against guilt”. Adorno’s point here is that by moving on too rapidly we run the risk of avoiding the very guilt we should be confronting. For, although moving on seems like the rational thing to do, “because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive” we cannot yet pretend that it is simply history and not still in some form present today (in 1959). This is especially important because the people who most loudly call for the country to move on often turn out to be those people who are most guilty and in need of working on their own past.

Adorno points out that even the term “guilt complex” is dangerous. The phrase undermines itself because “complex” suggests that there is no real guilt but rather just a psychological problem. Furthermore, it also suggests that healthy people do not look towards the past, but only towards the future and present moment. With the threat of fascism still present ignoring the past instead of trying to understand it is not a healthy attitude at all in Adorno’s view.

Changing the Subject

This is not the only way that language was used dangerously in the in the years after the War’s end. Adorno singles out various other ways that language helped Germans to avoid the past. First among them is the use of euphemisms like “Kristallnacht” to refer to the pogroms against Jews throughout Germany in early November, 1938. In English the phrase “The Night of Broken Glass” is sometimes used – like the German phrase it too distracts attention from the potentially 100+ Jewish deaths by focusing on abstract objects. A better name, in Adorno’s mind, would force its user to reflect upon the nature of the event with each utterance. Thus calling it a pogrom is much better than referring to it by means of a euphemism.

Another linguistic method often used by Neo-Nazis in our own time is creating an argument out of specifics. By forcing a discussion to focus on whether, for example, it was five or six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, acknowledgement of the reality of the huge death toll – whatever its specifics – is sidelined, and sometimes even ignored together. In the same way, when people talk about “the balance sheet of guilt”, such as by claiming that the bombings of Dresden and other German cities may mitigate Auschwitz, what they actually do is avoid facing the reality of German guilt by changing the subject. No doubt the bombings were bad, but they are neither here nor there when it comes to the fact of the Holocaust.

People might also try to suggest that they had no idea that something was happening to the Jews, which Adorno finds to be a poor excuse given that Jews were literally disappearing in broad daylight. Sometimes “a lax consciousness consoles itself with the thought that such a thing surely could not have happened unless the victims had in some way or another furnished some kind of instigation”. This attitude is idiotic because even if a small number of the Holocaust’s victims were in some way guilty, that in no way justifies the mechanised slaughter that faced them. Moreover, focusing on potential guilt of the victims is once more a way of changing the subject from the certain guilt of the perpetrators.

Who is to Blame?

Well-intentioned people when talking about German postwar guilt tend to focus on those people who tolerated Hitler’s rise and later on claimed blamelessness because they were merely “following orders”. While it is undoubtedly true that these people must admit and bear their share of the guilt, Adorno is keen to point out that this approach nonetheless can sometimes lead us to forgetting about those who enthusiastically cheered the Nazis on. Even before Hitler became Chancellor, in the (free) Federal Election in November 1932 the Nazi Party was receiving 37.27% of the popular vote. With propaganda on his side the number of Germans who actively supporting the state would have grown even higher by the time of the war, and so it is foolish to pretend honest supporters of the Nazis did not exist in large numbers.

“But what about the Autobahns and the Soviets?!”

Another dangerous trend in thinking about the Nazi era is the tendency to think of the time after Hitler gained power as being one of mass oppression and suffering. Moving on is easier when we think that the past is no longer attractive, but trying to conceal the truth of the matter is even more foolish. The Nazi era was an awful time for minorities, especially Jews, within the German borders. It was a bad time for non-straight sexualities and for communists. But for the average man and woman, NSDAP member or not, it was not so bad. As Adorno writes, “terror’s sharp edge was aimed only at a few and relatively well-defined groups”. Hitler came to power at the tail end of a huge economic downturn, and thus much of his time was marked by a massive recovery, which brought huge benefits to the German people.

Picture of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a cruise ship that was used by the Nazi's for state-organised recreation — Germans under the Nazis used to be able to go on cruises on ships such as this one, the Wilhelm Gustloff. Adorno is keen to stress that though not everything about Nazi Germany was bad for everyone, that’s no excuse to want to return to fascism.

Large scale building projects like the Autobahn system suggested a new and modern Germany. After the social alienation and mass political disillusionment of the Weimar era Nazi Germany brought the “warmth of togetherness”. Public gatherings and group trips with the famed Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) state leisure organisation all meant that for most of the people left in Germany to discuss Nazism as it had appeared before the war began the period had not been in any way a bad one. More importantly still, the contemporary Cold War between the West and the East seemed to vindicate Hitler’s concerns about the Soviet threat.

To ignore both of these aspects is, to Adorno, fatal. If we pretend that the Nazi era was bad instead of acknowledging its ability to bring benefits to much of the German population, then it provides an easy opportunity for someone arguing against us to begin undermining the rest of our argument too. If we are wrong about one thing, then we may be wrong about other things. And if Hitler was right about the Soviets, our opponent might argue, perhaps he was right about other things too. Adorno thus wanted to focus on conveying as much of the reality of the past as possible, instead of concealing that which doesn’t fit into easy arguments. For it soon turns out that much of what was seen to be so good about Hitler and his time actually wasn’t. For instance, economic “recovery” was really down to rearmament and unsustainable without war.

What Remains of the Conditions that Caused Fascism in Germany?

The reason that Adorno is so concerned about fascism is “the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism continue to exist”, but what were these conditions? One of them is that both in the home environment and in school obedience was promoted and praised above and beyond autonomy. This produced good worker drones, but it also produced people who would easily be led astray by a charismatic leader like Hitler. Because it encouraged obedience, it was thus inherently conservative and supportive of the status-quo. This meant that once society was changed towards totalitarianism these people would see little reason to complain about the new status quo that would have emerged. Such a system fosters what Adorno terms “the authoritarian personality”, that is people who “identify themselves with real-existing power per se, prior to any particular contents”. It is these people who are vital in the running of a totalitarian system.

The causes were not merely educational – they were also economic and political. Here Adorno’s membership of the Frankfurt School of thinkers comes into play. Though he was no supporter of the USSR, he found a number of faults within laissez-faire and other forms of unbridled capitalism that meant they were vulnerable to fascism. Economically, Germans were still dependent on conditions beyond their control and thus they were politically immature, seeing democracy as “one system among others” rather than as the ultimate system of organisation. Adorno was thus not worried about neo-Nazi organisations so much as the trends within democracy that could lead to fascism becoming dominant again. He mentions as an example the way that many Germans hoped that Black Friday 1929 and its economic trauma would not happen again. Adorno notes that the hope contains within itself the belief that a strong state would protect Germans economically once more.

It is the individual’s impotence on the one side and the massed power of the state on the other, that leads towards totalitarian forms of domination in Adorno’s view of the matter.

Nationalism Nowadays

A key part of Nazism was the idea of returning to an ideal specifically German past. Though Hitler’s defeat ought to have broken Germany’s belief that it could conquer vast swathes of Europe, instead it had the opposite results. The “collective narcissism”, as Adorno calls it, that manifested itself as national vanity and exceptionalism, carries on in the form of “chimerical hopes.” German nationalists thus fall into “an illusory inner realm” where they can construct “reality itself as though the damage never occurred” to begin with. Instead of being focused on one idea, nationalists now seek anything that seems to conform to the idea of German greatness. Nazism’s hopes of creating a great German nation remain, even if their form has changed. Thus, with the right leader, these hopes could be focused again and millions mobilized to try to achieve “goals they cannot immediately identify as their own.”

Nonetheless, nationalism has lost a lot of its power and charm. Though it “does not completely believe in itself anymore”, still it remains a political tool to make people insist on conditions that otherwise they would not tolerate. Thus it is “both obsolete and up-to-date”. It is obsolete because clearly, with NATO and the Warsaw Pact the truth was that countries were now organised into military blocks under the most powerful; yet it was and is up-to-date because it continues to have psychological power and the force of tradition behind it. Still, Adorno writes that the countries that now are most vulnerable to fascism are actually the less developed ones – those victims of Western imperialism who want some of the West’s previous power for themselves.

Solutions: Education for Self-Reflection

Still, the focus of the essay is on Germany its own dangers, and Adorno here proposes a few solutions. Chief among them is a change in education, of the sort he writes about in more detail in “Education after Auschwitz”. I mentioned the problems of education towards obedience above, so Adorno instead wants to educate people towards something different. In the same tradition as thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Adorno sees education’s goal as “Mündigkeit” – maturity. What this means is that students must be taught how to think for themselves instead of falling into whichever collective appeals to them the most. In the first appendix printed in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords there is a discussion of the lecture between Adorno and some of his students. It is here that he explains that people must “be led to self-reflection and thereby be prevented from becoming blind victims of… instinctual impulse”.

Part of this means an increased emphasis on psychoanalysis in schools. Children must be able to analyse themselves so that they can be aware of the cognitive biases that they are vulnerable to, and thus prevent themselves from acting from pure or manipulated emotion rather than reason and logic. This education would also include a focus on propaganda, and how to identify and avoid it so that Germans would be better able to come to their own conclusions regarding how to live. What this means ultimately is not a focus on facts, but rather on understanding oneself and one’s motivations. Adorno writes that “a working through of the past understood as enlightenment is essentially such a turn towards the subject, the reinforcement of a person’s self-consciousness and hence also of his self.”

Difficulties: Anti-Semitism the Appeal to Self-Interest

Perhaps all this is too optimistic, and indeed Adorno admits as much. The difficulty of dealing with anti-Semites and other people who reject rationality is precisely the way that they reject logic. For example, Adorno write that “panegyrics to the Jews that isolate them as a group already give anti-Semitism a running start”. By encouraging us to see the Jews as different, we allow anti-Semites to start thinking of them as different in a bad way. Another method that Adorno is sceptical of is using individual examples to educate anti-Semites. Anne Frank, probably the most famous of those murdered in the concentration camps, can thus be seen as a tragic exception, rather than one guiltless individual among many others, none of whom deserved to die. “I have a black friend” does automatically mean you are not a racist; it may just mean you have taken your friend as an exception.

Picture of Anne Frank, one of the many murdered in the Holocaust — Anne Frank, pictured here, may help us to understand the human face of the Holocaust’s victims. But at the same time, focusing on her can lead to us inadvertently singling out victims like her as exceptions, rather than the rule.

Indeed, even trying to introduce anti-Semites to Jews in the hopes of demonstrating to the first group that the latter are humans just like the rest of us is not necessarily the best argument against the fascism that can result from anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites, Adorno writes, have “an incapacity for any experience whatsoever”. Instead, ultimately what he suggests we ought to do when arguing with people who have rejected self-reflection and are acting against reason and logic is actually simple: “the most effective antidote is still a persuasive, because true, demonstration of their own interests and, moreover, their most immediate ones”. Appealing to eternal values like equality and freedom, or even to the huge suffering views like anti-Semitism can cause, is far less effective than simply explaining to the anti-Semite in question that fascism means war, it means you might lose your house or money or family. Everybody listens to that.

Conclusions

“The Meaning of Working Through the Past” is ultimately a demonstration of way we ourselves might do the same self-reflection that Adorno advocates. It shows the ways, linguistic and otherwise, that we might avoid facing the truth of the horrible consequences of Nazism. It also shows us how to argue with those who might be unwilling to admit or acknowledge that Nazism was an awful mistake. In this way, it does everything it can to educate its readers in how they might avoid fascism’s recurrence, just as Adorno wanted.

But it is not only relevant in the context of Germany in 1959. The piece is relevant to any country which has a past that it needs to come to terms with. The deliberate starvation of certain parts of Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the early years of the USSR; and European, American and Japanese colonialism, are all unpleasant pasts that countries deal with in different ways, some more healthily than others. And in a world where nationalism and the far-right are on the rise again, Adorno’s exhortation towards self-reflection and his warnings about propaganda have never seemed less timely.

For more German thought, check out my piece on Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”. For a more practical look at the consequences of living under a totalitarian regime, my review of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma stories, detailing his time in the Soviet Gulags, is here.

Picture of Adorno by Jeremy J. Shapiro used under [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]; Picture of the Wilhelm Gustloff comes from the Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H27992 / Sönnke, Hans / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)]; and Picture of Anne Frank is in the public domain.

The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin – Summary and Analysis

“The Storyteller”, or “Die Erzähler”, is an essay, written in 1936, by the German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, consisting on one level of a discussion of the stories of the little-known Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, and on another of Benjamin’s views on the division between stories and storytelling, and novels and writing. It is included in the collection of essays entitled Illuminations, which I’ve been reading in the past weeks, but I had been meaning to have a look at this particular essay for much longer, since I had guessed already that its contents would appeal to me. Though Benjamin is a challenging thinker and I doubtless missed things here and there, still I want to share what I got out of the piece. Here is a summary of its main points.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German-Jewish critic and philosopher who took his own life after encountering difficulties fleeing the advancing armies of Nazi Germany.

The Death of Experience and the Death of Stories

Benjamin begins by making us consider what exactly a storyteller is. Though the name is surely familiar, they are almost entirely confined to the past. In the modern day, for various reasons, the craft – and it is a craft – of telling stories, is dying out. We may see the “great, simple outlines which define the storyteller”, but we cannot find them among our number anymore. The main reason for this is that experience, which is the source of all stories, has fallen in value and is no longer used. As to why, Benjamin suggests three potential causes.

The first of them is that society is, in its industrialised state, changing so rapidly that experience from the past no longer can have much effect upon the present. He finds examples of this in the horrors of his time: one’s experience of the economy becomes useless against the unprecedented nature of hyperinflation. One’s knowledge of war and battle is deemed useless in the face of new military technologies like the tank and mounted warfare. A related cause is the consequence of the first World War: “was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience”. As a result of the truly awful things they have seen in the early 20^th century – overexperience, in a word – people no longer wish to talk about what a hundred years before might have made a ballad or a thousand years before an epic poem.

The third and final cause Benjamin gives special mention to: the rise of “information”. Information, Benjamin writes, “lays claim to prompt verifiability.” We have newspapers which will tell us not only what has happened, but why it has happened, regardless of where in the world it took place. In the past, intelligence and experience that came from afar was valued, even if it could never be verified that a traveller spoke the truth. But now, through the ubiquity of the “why” in the form of news, we no longer care for the experience of others. Information, however, “proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling”, and since we are so surrounded by it, it can be hard to escape the idea that an informational understanding of the world is the only and best way to understand it. A further problem with information is the way that it is intimately connected to its own time: “the value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new.” As time passes, news becomes out of date, explanations for events are improved, and the newspaper becomes good for nothing except scrap paper.

The Origin of the Storyteller

But Benjamin is not aiming to be depressing, at least not entirely. He sees a beauty in the story and he wants to share that with us, even as it breathes its last. Storytelling, as has become something of a commonplace, is something ancient, deeply rooted inside us. Benjamin concludes the essay by calling the storyteller a craftsman – they take raw experience from themselves and from others and make solid, useful, and unique works from it. And the best storytellers, for him, are those whose work has the quality of being little different from the speech of unnamed multitudes of storytellers. That is, those who seem to belong to a whole greater than themselves. He sees part of the success of the growth of the story in the structures of earlier societies. There were two people who gained a lot of experience: those who spent much time in the same place, such as master craftsmen; and those who travelled a great deal and saw much of the world, albeit in less detail, such as journeymen. For Benjamin, the cross-pollination of these two groups, such as in a blacksmith’s home, lead to the exceedingly fruitful combination of “deep” experience with “wide” experience. Storytellers, the essay notes, are often interested in practical matters, and Benjamin makes the point that the best of them are also “rooted in the people”, with jobs that fully immerse them into life itself, such as being soldiers, sailors, or other manual workers.

Stories: Wisdom and Advice

But what exactly is a story? What are these mysterious things that the storytellers tell? Well, to begin with, every real story has “openly or covertly, something useful” hidden within it. “A moral… some practical advice… a proverb or a maxim”, whatever the case, the story has “Rat” within it – some advice, or counsel. This is not surprising – if the storyteller lives among the people and works among them too, then naturally what they want to do is help them using their experience. There is more to them than that, but Benjamin already hears criticism of this idea of stories. It’s awfully old fashioned to want a moral, to want some kind of advice, out of the things we hear or read. But Benjamin doesn’t see the problem in the stories themselves, but rather in a society which, due to its ever-growing specialisation, has meant that “the communicability of experience is decreasing.” What an accountant might be able to say usefully to a cleaner at a hotel nowadays is far less than, two hundred years ago, two similar such people might be able to share with each other. Barriers have arisen between us. This has the knock-on effect of disarming wisdom too, which is “Rat” “woven into the fabric of real life”. What use could be the use of the wisdom of a banker, unless we want to be a banker? Consciously, or unconsciously, we devalue the wisdom of others more and more and instead rely upon that upstart known as information. Another reason for wisdom’s death is that instead of using experience for finding our “truth”, we also increasingly use bigger narratives, such as ideologies, cutting out the human element entirely.

“The Storyteller” is included in the collection *Illuminations,* pictured here, alongside other famous works of Benjamin’s, like “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.

Stories: Novels and Isolation

Nowadays we still come across what can be called “a story” within novels and other works of written art, but we no longer see “stories”. The novel rose in prominence as the story declined. Benjamin sees novels as completely separate from stories because it is completely “dependent on the book”. “It neither comes from the oral tradition nor goes into it.” Think about the last serious novel you read, and then think about the times you spoke about it with others. Rarely does the story itself assume prominence in these kinds of discussions anymore. Literary criticism is partially to blame for this, but whatever the reason, the plot takes a back seat to forces like form, style, and genre. Novels have their value, of course, in Benjamin’s eyes, but that value is one disconnected from the value of stories. Novels for him show the confusion of life, but they do not and cannot be vehicles for the dissemination of wisdom – the instant they do there are cries of “moralising”, “preachy”, and all sorts of other insults.

Another difference between the novelist and their work and the storyteller and their own is to do with their relationship to their readers and listeners. Born out of social interactions and experience, a storyteller is a social animal, and so is their work. I tell you a story, and you are in dialogue with me, able to ask questions, and challenge things. More importantly still, my stories are a mixture of my own experiences and those of others, and when I tell you my story, you have a new story for yourself – storytelling involves connection and giving. Even if written down a story still creates a copy of itself in your head in a way that a novel, for Benjamin, does not. By contrast, the novelist is isolated, creating alone, for a reader who may not even exist. He is “no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot counsel others”. He doesn’t have any advice to give because his experiences cannot create stories. There is a sense of great loneliness implied here. Benjamin has in mind here, I think, those truly huge and serious novels, works like Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov, which deal with such great philosophical and theological concerns, but are all ultimately the product of too much thinking, rather than too much experience. A story about the same topics of faith and God, one imagines, would be simply tell of a man or woman pacing up and down in a wood-panelled room and raging against their mind and the world it contains. Not exactly a good story, in short. The practical nature of the storyteller’s life means that their stories are also practical in theme and advice.

A good and simple way of comparing the division between stories and novels is this: consider the contrast between our two phrases “the moral of the story” and “the meaning of life.” A story has its moral and answer, whereas a novel merely searches for an answer to that undoubtedly greater but certainly also more abstract question of “what is it we must do?”.

Stories: Ambiguity

Benjamin relates a story told by Herodotus. King Psammenitus of Egypt, defeated in battle and enslaved, sees his son go by to be executed without any outward show of emotion. Next he sees his daughter go by as a maid. But when finally he sees one of his old servants go by as a prisoner he starts crying and falls into the deepest mourning. Herodotus does not explain why. The story illustrates the next key idea of stories – their ambiguity. When I read Benjamin’s description of the incident, I thought initially that the king was crying because he suddenly realised that all previous social ranks had been abolished, and he was no different to one of his servants in status. Yet another, equally valid suggestion that Benjamin puts forward is that the king was restraining his grief, and seeing the old servant is the feather that finally made the dam of his sorrows burst. We have no way of knowing who of us is right, or whether the explanation is yet another one.

Stories are marked by their ambiguity. Unlike the novel, coming from an age of information, which tries to explain everything through psychological detail, stories do not try to explain things. “The most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy”, but there are no attempts to offer up a “why” for them. Our own imaginations are left with that task. Information demands an attempt to offer a why, which also means it is bound to what is scientific, verifiable. On the other hand, stories can use any manner of fantastic ideas or miracles, because they are not defined by the pursuit of a “why” or a scientific idea of “truth”. You can tell a story again and again, and each time, depending on one’s mood, one’s station in life, one’s age, you will get a different reaction to it. But information is always the same – the work of imagining is impotent before facts and their explanations. Stories “resemble the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day”: each time they are told, they create a new version of themselves, a new experience, within us. Whereas a novel is doomed to being dated – its psychological framework always bears the brand of its own age.

Stories: Memory, Boredom, and Endings

Stories are told for plenty of reasons. Ambiguity is one of them, because it means a retelling is never in vain. They are also told because of boredom. Benjamin writes that “boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience”. Through boredom we are receptive to stories, but not only in the sense that we are willing to listen to them – we are also willing to remember them. For remembering, and then retelling, stories is key to the art of storytelling, “and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained”. Unfortunately, Benjamin sees our age as one without the sort of boredom we need for stories. There are many of us who get bored – children especially complain of it. But nowadays we hardly ever live in such a state for long. Phones, games, and videos all provide a rapid escape from that tiresome emotion. But they also provide an escape from the possibility of telling stories, of passing the time through conversation and company. Given this environment of boredom, Benjamin adds that stories end with the sense that they can always be picked up and carried on. Novels, however, end without the same kind of feeling that they can just be continued. A novel, once it has ended upon a sufficiently good revelation about the meaning of life, stops and digs its heels in. Again, this is also a formal thing – a speaker can carry on, but a novel always arrives as a finished article.

Stories: the “transparent layers”

Benjamin is critical of the short story too, which is due to its intimate connection to the novel, but the shorter work has the added problem of struggling to deal with the larger thematic concerns that novels excel at. So, it occupies an awkward artistic position of failing to be either story or novel and thus flounders. In the case of a story, the “how” of its creation is important. Each storyteller will give their account of how they heard the tale, and in this way “traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel”. Short stories, though they can approximate this with certain frame narrative structures, nonetheless prove themselves storytelling “abbreviated”. They have lost their connection to the oral tradition, and also no longer permit “that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings”. By cutting out the middleman – the storyteller – a short story also cuts out the power and mystery that a history of retellings brings to a story. By doing so they also lose the “chain of tradition”, that a real story has. A short story, no matter how good, no longer reaffirms our connection to our roots.

Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895) is not one of the most famous Russian authors here in the West. No doubt a part of this is due to the fact that his stories rarely conform to the more acceptable bourgeois forms like novels

Leskov and the Rest

So, where does Nikolai Leskov fit in to all this? The Russian is a modern-day storyteller for Benjamin, though his dates (1831-1895) mean he had been long dead even by the time that our author put pen to paper. Leskov was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and throughout his life had worked various odd jobs around the country, most successfully for an English firm which paid him to travel all around Russia on behalf of its leaders. Because of this, Leskov had the wealth of experience needed to give his work a story-like quality. He wrote novels, but more often shorter stories and novellas, all of them incorporating the ideas of story-ness that Benjamin highlights above. His most famous story, at least in the English-speaking world, is “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, and Benjamin also singles out stories such as “The Deception” and “The White Eagle”. Leskov is not the only storyteller who Benjamin names, though he is the focus. Among the others are Kipling, Poe, and Johann Peter Hebel. I might add Joseph Conrad, whose tales of the sea often also display the characteristics of stories.

Conclusion: Against the System

Even today, Benjamin writes, do people still pay attention to the words of a dying man or woman. In dying we have the same power, place the same demands of silence and thought and memory, as did the storyteller long ago. The story is not dead, but from my own experience it is certainly dying out in our time. I remember rare evenings, long ago, walking back from a long run with friends in the dark and fog of a November night, trying desperately to find some kind of ghost story worth telling, and being unable to. Only one us knew one, which they heard one from someone else. But that story remains with me, buried in my memory, unlike so many carcasses of novels and short stories. We oughtn’t let stories disappear from our lives without a fight. For stories, as Benjamin hints at, allow us to escape the systems that dominate our lives, most notably capitalism itself. They allow us into a carefree existence of laziness, boredom, and relaxation, safe from deadlines and reckoning up of bank accounts. They also, unlike novels, draw us closer to other people. Novels, formed by the bourgeois and capitalist system of their origin, can never truly escape it. Telling stories, meanwhile, is a permanent act of rebellion, an assertion of our freedom and the value of our experience against a world that tries to tell us we are nothing unless we add to information. Stories are the deepest, and greatest, treasure we have.

If all this has inspired you to take a look at Leskov for yourself, my translation of “A Righteous Man” is located here.

Alternatively, for another recent writer who has carried on the tradition of ambiguous storytelling, my translation of Franz Kafka’s story “Before the Law”, can be found here.