Entsetzen
Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part One
Irving Wohlfarth
The true politician reckons only in dates. And if the abolition of the bourgeoisie is not effected by an almost calculable moment in economic and technical development (one signalled by inflation and poison-gas warfare), then all is lost. Before the spark reaches the dynamite, the lighted fuse must be severed. (‘Fire Alarm’, 1928)1
Between 1865 and 1875 a number of great anarchists each worked, without knowing of one another, on their infernal machine. And the astonishing thing is that they independently set its clock at exactly the same hour – and forty years later the writings of Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont all simultaneously blew up in Western Europe. One might, to be more exact, single out one episode from Dostoevsky’s entire work …: ‘Stavrogin’s Confession’ in The Possessed. This chapter … contains a justification of evil… ‘Hatred, to you I have entrusted my treasure,’ [Rimbaud] writes in Une saison en enfer… Since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a radical concept of freedom. (‘Surrealism’, 1929)2
Is this dull multitude not waiting for a disaster great enough to strike a spark from its own inner tension: a conflagration or world-end, something that could suddenly convert this velvet thousand-voiced murmuring into a single cry, as a gust of wind suddenly exposes the scarlet lining of a cloak? For the piercing cry of terror [des Entsetzens], panic dread, is the other side of all authentic mass celebration [Massenfeste]. In the unconscious depths of mass existence, conflagrations and celebrations are both only so much play, preparation for its coming of age, the hour when panic and celebration, now recognizing the other as a long-separated brother, embrace one another in the revolutionary uprising. (‘Schönes Entsetzen’ [‘Fine Terror’], 1929–34)3
The course of history as represented in the concept of catastrophe has no more claim on the thinking man’s attention than the kaleidoscope in the hands of a child. With each new twist, everything collapses into a new order. The image is thoroughly well-grounded [hat sein gutes, gründliches Recht]. The concepts of the rulers have always been the mirrors by which the image of an ‘order’ was established. – The kaleidoscope must be smashed. (‘Central Park’, 1938)4
Strength of hatred in Marx. Fighting spirit of the working class. Interlay revolutionary destruction and the idea of redemption. (Netschajev. The Possessed.) (Notes for ‘On the Concept of History’, 1939)5
‘Dangerous relations’?
Benjamin and the Red Army Faction – is the subject even worth discussing?* Its background, or underground, has, it is true, hardly been broached in the secondary literature. Yet both sides claimed that violence was needed to avert disaster; and Benjamin underwrote an ethics which did not shrink from the ‘revolutionary killing of the oppressor’.6
But a difficult question remains. Does any kind of fuse or trail lead from his words to their deeds? If so, it would mark a striking instance of the general problem: how responsible is a thinker for the fate of his/her ideas? Such questions were hardly foreign to Benjamin. He had, he wrote only a year before Hitler seized power, not yet considered what meaning might be extracted from Nietzsche’s writings ‘in an extreme case’ (im Ernstfall).7 But who, or what, determines, precisely when such a case obtains? Does the trajectory of the Red Army Faction (which will here henceforth be termed the RAF) raise in retrospect the question of the political meaning that might be wrested, in an extreme case, from Benjamin’s writings – especially since such states of emergency were their common concern?
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