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Hashish in Berlin:

An Introduction to Walter Benjamin's Uncompleted Work On Hashish

Paper read at the Walter Benjamin Congress, University of Amsterdam, 1997: Scott J. Thompson.

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O braungebackne Siegessäule

mit Winterzucker aus den Kindertagen [1]

This motto beginning Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around the Turn of the Century and appearing in a slightly altered form in Berliner Chronik has its origins in Benjamin's experiments with hashish, as Gershom Scholem and the editors of Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften have noted. The "golden leading strings" [2] of childhood and the attempt to recapture their magic are interlaced throughout Benjamin's writings and experimental notes on hashish, opium and mescaline. As he expressed it in the mescaline protocol recorded by Dr. Fritz Fränkel in Paris on 22. May 1934, "The first experience the child has of the world is not that the adults are stronger, but rather that it cannot conjure."[3] In Benjamin's novella "Myslowitz - Braunschweig - Marseilles: Story of a Hashish Rausch" (1930), the narrator's hashish vision transforms a man in a restaurant into the image of a young boy in an Eastern European town. [4] In the essay "Hashish in Marseilles" (1932), a young boy on an electric tram is transformed into the sad child, Barnabus, from Kafka's The Castle. [5] In "Crock Notes" (1932), the opium smoker and hashish eater are said to "playfully exhaust those experiences of the ornament which childhood and fever made us capable of observing." [6] In the protocol to the hashish experiment with Gert and Egon Wissing in March 1930, Benjamin recorded the following:

I was not very attentive to what Egon said because my hearing immediately converted his words into the perception of colorful, metallic glitter which coalesced in patterns. I made this understandable to him by comparing it to the knitting patterns which we loved as the beautiful colored plates in Herzblättchens Zeitvertreib [Darling's Diversions] when we were children. [7]

In a more recreational experiment with the Wissings on 7. June 1930, Benjamin saw Gert transformed into "a slender boy in black attire." [8] When Egon Wissing supervised Benjamin's experiment with hashish and the opiate Eucodal on 7. March 1931, he noted that "toys or colorful children's pictures thrust themselves to the foreground again and again." [9] In the session of 18. April 1931, supervising doctor, Fritz Fränkel, noted Benjamin's extremely childlike sensitivity to color and wordplay, particularly his "remarkable number of diminutives." [10]

In his attempt to regain the child's magical power of conjuring by availing himself of Dr. Ernst Joël's invitation to become a test subject in a series of loosely monitored hashish experiments, Benjamin was able not only to independently evaluate the findings of Baudelaire's Artificial Paradise, which he told Ernst Schoen in 1919 would be required to appreciate the book, [11] but was also able to explore that root of his philosophical intentions, which Theodor W. Adorno has described as an ability "to render accessible by rational means that range of experience that announces itself in schizophrenia." [12] In his essay "A Portrait of Walter Benjamin," Adorno drew attention to the concept which unites the magic of childhood with "mental derangement," when he wrote that "The rebus is the model of [Benjamin's] philosophy." [13] The playful disorientation of the rebus and the delight in the sudden spark that ignites the mind with its solution are keys to Benjamin's concept of "profane illumination." Given Benjamin's mania for collecting children's books and books by the "mentally deranged," to which Scholem has attested in his essay "Walter Benjamin," [14] it is logical that he would have taken advantage of an opportunity to explore substances the experimental value of whose attendant rausch was described by his old acquaintances, Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel, in their article "Der Haschisch-Rausch" in the following manner:

Without proposing a blanket identification of spontaneous psychotic episodes with the phenomena observed in these experiments, we nonetheless maintain that an experimental way of penetrating abnormal states exists here, which allows us to investigate how far the individual can deviate from the norm, and to determine which psychotic symptoms in general are within the realm of the normal individual. The rausch provides a remarkable yield of sympathetic understanding for pathological symptoms (compulsion, schizoid behavior, delusions, incoherence, etc.). One acquires a new understanding for the mythic and the mystical. As for the alterations of particular qualities or the lack of such alteration, first we must identify the qualities in the norm, if the conditions of normal psychic processes are to be disclosed by pathological modification. [15]

Though they do not employ the term in their article, the concept of the psychotomimetic, a substance the ingestion of which is said to imitate or simulate a psychosis, supplies the operative paradigm in Joël and Fränkel's "experimental psychopathology," which they understood as both an attempt at "a total comprehension of altered psychic life" [16] and as a necessary corrective to the mechanistic psychopharmacology of Emil Kraepelin's school. It is important that we understand Joël and Fränkel's theoretical presuppositions if we are to bring an informed reading to Benjamin's experimental protocols and the extant writings which testify to what remains of that uncompleted book on hashish, once described by Benjamin in a letter to Scholem on 26. July 1932 as "ein höchst bedeutsames Buch" ["a truly significant book"]. [17]

In his pathbreaking book Du Hachich et de l'Alienation mentale [Hashish and Mental Illness] (1845), Jacques-Joseph Moreau (de Tours) [1804-1884], the doctor who introduced hashish to Charles Baudelaire and the Club des Haschischins, suggested that psychiatry could benefit by comparing hashish experiments with the symptoms of the mentally ill. [18] This idea was adopted by Emil Kraepelin (1855-1926), father of psychopharmacology, when he called rausch "Irresein im kleinen" ["derangement in miniature"]. [19] The Kraepelinian method however, according to Joël and Fränkel, failed to comprehend the entire human being, because it mechanistically severed partial functions of the psychic life, which were then altered by psychopharmaka and subjected to behavioristic testing. In this important respect, Jöel and Fränkel's critique of Kraepelin was related to Benjamin's critique of the Kantian concept of experience.

In his early treatise "On the Program of the Coming Philosophy" (1917), Benjamin had called into question the Kantian concept of experience based on Newtonian physics, describing it as "view of the world of the lowest order." [20] Against Kant's Enlightenment mythology, Benjamin offered anthropological and psychological evidence of alternative realities outside the Kantian purview.

We know of primitive peoples of the so-called preanimistic stage who identify themselves with sacred animals and plants and name themselves after them; we know of insane people who likewise identify themselves in part with objects of their perception...we know of sick people who relate the sensations of their bodies not to themselves but rather to other creatures, and of clairvoyants who at least claim to be able to feel the sensations of others as their own. [21]

The cognizing subject of Kantian philosophy was called "a type of insane consciousness." [22] Against the Enlightenment worldview of the Protestant burgher, Benjamin posited a coming philosophy which would reclaim the cosmic rausch possessed by the human being of antiquity. In his later essay "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" (1929), this cosmic rausch and its materialist, anthropological "profane illumination" were to be appropriated by the proletariat in the coming seizure of power.

Some scholars have seized upon the Surrealism essay to downplay Benjamin's interest in psycho-pharmaca. The concept of "profane illumination" is stressed as an awakening from a rausch, which is all-too-often characterized as a "narcotic trance," [23] despite the fact that cannabis and mescaline are not narcotic. The "profane illumination" of the rebus, however, presupposes an initial disorientation and sense of being puzzled. The problem with taking Benjamin's Surrealism essay as a definitive statement on rausch is that in so doing we overlook the fact that most of Benjamin's hashish, opium and mescaline experiments were written after 1929. Protocols V - X were conducted between March 1930 and May 1934. In November 1930, "Myslowitz - Braunschweig - Marseilles" appeared in the journal Uhu. During the spring of 1932, the more theoretical Crock Notes were written in Ibiza, and in December 1932, "Hashish in Marseilles" appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Then there are the passages on hashish in the Passagen-Werk. Nor may we forget that Benjamin had first told Scholem that "even my experiences while under the influence of the drug" were a "worthwhile supplement" to philosophical investigation. [24]

Other scholars, such as Gershom Scholem, Susan Buck-Morss, Sándor Radnóti, Norbert Bolz, [25] have been much less reticent to admit the extent of Benjamin's hashish investigations. In her Origin of Negative Dialectics (1977), Susan Buck-Morss went to far as to assert that:

...the insights induced by drugs were not insignificant to Benjamin's theoretical endeavors. His notion of the subject-object relationship which lay at the heart of his theory of knowledge bore the stamp of these sessions and characterized the particular nature of his empiricism. [26]

Despite these less reticent scholarly remarks about Benjamin and rausch, a book length study of these writings has not appeared, and although these writings have been available in German for twenty-five years, "Hashish in Marseilles" is the only work of this nature by Benjamin which is available in English. Were one to substitute "Benjamin" for "Baudelaire" and Über Haschisch for Flowers of Evil in the following passage from Benjamin's letter to Max Horkheimer [6. January 1938], one would discover an apt analogy to the status of these writings in Benjamin scholarship. Voicing his displeasure with what he perceived as their bourgeois limitations, Benjamin characterized the Baudelaire scholarship of his day in the following words:

The mark of Baudelaire commentaries is that, in all fundamental aspects, they could have been written the same way had Baudelaire never written Flowers of Evil. They are, in fact, challenged in their entirety by his theological writings, by his memorabilia, and above all by the chronique scandaleuse. The reason is that the limits of bourgeois thinking and even certain bourgeois ways of reacting would have had to be discarded - not in order to find pleasure in one or another of these poems, but specifically in order to feel at home in the Flowers of Evil. . . [27]

Having been able to feel "at home" in what remains of Walter Benjamin's uncompleted book on hashish, a new breed of Benjamin research-activists have begun to examine this material in depth. As Hermann Schweppenhäuser noted in his essay, "The Propadeutics of Profane Illumination," "like the micrological explorations that typify his philosophizing as a whole, [Benjamin's] experiences of rausch bring to light surprising finds." [28]

--Scott J. Thompson

San Francisco, July 1997

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Notes:

[All links to www.wbenjamin.org as The Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate have been inactive since 2016]

[1] "O brown-baked victory column with winter sugar from children's days" appears with the altered line "With children's sugar from the winter days" in Berlin Chronicle, trans. Edmund Jephcott in Reflections, NY, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978, p. 27. The original poem which was inspired by hashish appears in Über Haschisch, ed. Tillman Rexroth, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, p. 142: "Im berliner Nebel/ Gottheils Berliner Märchen:/ Oh braungebackne Siegessäule/ Mit Nebelzucker in den Wintertagen/ Französische Kanonen überragen/ Mein Fragen. /Barbarossa 1771" [In Berlin fog/ Gottheil's Berlin Fairy-tale/ Oh brown-baked victory column/ with frosted sugar in winter days/ above my questions spire/French cannon fire," in On Hashish, trans. S. Thompson, San Francisco, 1996, p. 105 <http://www.wbenjamin.org/translations.html>Cf. Gershom Scholem's afterword to Berliner Chronik, Frankfurt a.M., 1970, p. 132, cited in GS IV/2:973 and GS VI:798.

[2] Friedrich Hölderin, "Dichtermut" [Poet's Courage] and "Blödigkeit" [Timidity], cf. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. I: 1913 - 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock & Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996, pp.21-22; GS II/1: 105-126.

[3] On Hashish,op. cit., p. 91; Über Haschisch, op. cit. p. 130; GS VI: 608.

[4] GS IV/2:729-737; 1075; cf. also Über Haschisch, op. cit., pp. 41-42; On Hashish, op.cit., p. 9; As the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften have pointed out, Benjamin borrowed this vision of the schoolboy in Myslowitz from Ernst Joël's hashish protocol of 11. May 1928. The boy in the vision was none other than Benjamin himself. Cf. GS VI: 577; Über Haschisch, pp. 90-91; On Hashish, pp. 50-51.

[5] GS IV/1:415; Über Haschisch, p. 53; On Hashish, p. 19.

[6] GS VI: 603, 824; Über Haschisch, p. 57; On Hashish, p. 22.

[7] GS VI:588; Über Haschisch, pp. 107; On Hashish,p. 66.

[8] GS VI:592; Über Haschisch, p. 112; On Hashish, p. 71.

[9] GS VI:593; Über Haschisch, p. 114; On Hashish, p. 73.

[10] GS VI:598; Über Haschisch, p. 122; On Hashish, p. 82.

[11] Benjamin, Briefe I, ed. G.Scholem & T.W.Adorno, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978, p. 219; The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, trans. M.R. & E.M. Jacobson, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 148.

[12] Theodor W. Adorno, "Benjamin the Letter-Writer" in On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991, p. 329.

[13] Theodor W. Adorno, "A Portrait of Walter Benjamin" in Prisms, trans. Samuel & Shierry Weber, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1967, p.230.

[14] Gershom Scholem, "Walter Benjamin" in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, trans. W. Dannhauser, NY, Schocken, 1976, p. 175; cf. also Neue Rundschau , 76, Jahrgang, 1965, p.3.

[15] Ernst Joël & Fritz Fränkel, "The Hashish-Rausch: Contributions to an Experimental Psychopathology," trans. S.Thompson [Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate: <http://www.wbenjamin.org/contrib_1926.html>, San Francisco, 1997]; it originally appeared in Klinische Wochenschrift, 5:1707,1926. Benjamin opened "Hashish in Marseilles" with a long except from this article.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Walter Benjamin/Gershom Scholem, Briefwechsel,ed. G.Scholem, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980, p. 23; Correspondence, op.cit., p. 396.

[18] Bo Holmstedt, "Historical Survey" in Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, ed. D.H. Efron, B.Holmstedt & N.S. Kline,U.S. Dept. of Health,Education & Welfare, 1967, pp. 4-9.

[19] E.Joël & F.Fränkel, op.cit.

[20] Walter Benjamin, "On the Program of the Coming Philosophy" in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989, p.2; GS II/1:159.

[21] Ibid., p. 4; GS II/1:161-162.

[22] Ibid., p.5; GS II/1:162.

[23] Cf. Peter Demetz, "Introduction" to Reflections, trans. E.Jephcott, NY, Harcourt,Brace, Jovanovich, 1978, pp. xx, xxxi; Herman Schweppenhäuser, "Propadeutics of Profane Illumination," trans. L.Spencer, S.Jost, & G.Smith in On Walter Benjamin, op.cit., pp. 35-36; Richard Sieburth's interpretation of profane illumination in "Benjamin the Scrivener" [in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History,op.cit., p. 18] would divorce it from its propadeutics altogether, characterizing altered consciousness as "private avant-garde narcosis." John McCole [Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, Ithaka, NY, Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 225-227] expatiates on Benjamin's accusations that the surrealists had an "entirely undialectical conception of intoxication" and not surprisingly find little value in "narcotic ecstacies." The list could be greatly expanded.

[24] Correspondence, op. cit., p. 323.

[25] See "Walter Benjamin's Hashish Experimentation: Remarks from Selected Secondary Sources," on the Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate website, op.cit.

[26] Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics,New York, The Free Press, 1977, p. 126.

[27] Correspondence,op. cit., pp. 549-550.

[28] Hermann Schweppenhäuser, "Propadeutics of Profane Illumination," op. cit., p. 35.

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