536 Notes to pp. 214–217
Chapter 13 Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel
and Kracauer1 ‘Initially, until the middle of 1935, Benjamin lived in a series of hotels in
the 16th, 6th and 14th arrondissements. For a short time he was a guest in
homes of his sister Dora, who had also emigrated to Paris. From August
or September 1935 to June 1937, he had a furnished room in Montparnasse,
at 23 rue Bénard.... In September 1937, on his return from a stay in San
Remo, he found the room had been rented to someone else and had to
move out to the suburb of Boulogne for four months, where an acquaint-
ance let him have a servant’s room for the time being. The room looked
out onto a main road which was too loud for him to concentrate on work.
Not until January 1938 did Benjamin succeed in finding somewhere to live
on his own; a studio in 10 rue Dombasle in the 15th arrondissement’ (Rolf
Tiedemann, ‘Zeugnisse der Entstehungsgeschichte’, in Benjamin, Das
Passagen-Werk, GS, vol. V.2, p. 1144.
2 The New York Institute of Social Research declared the arcades project
to be an integral part of its research plans from 1936 on, and included it in
the report on its activities under the heading of Études sur l’histoire de la
culture française. Benjamin was listed there among the ‘research associates’.
See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, p. 163f.
3 ‘The covered shopping arcades of the nineteenth century were Benjamin’s
central image because they were the precise material replica of the inter-
nal consciousness, or rather the unconscious of the dreaming collective.
All the errors of bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity
fetishism, reification, the world as “inwardness”), as well as (in fashion,
prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams. Moreover, the arcades
were the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of the
lived experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation’ (Susan Buck-
Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 39).
4 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, p. 84.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., p. 85.
7 Ibid.
8 W. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, GS, vol. V.2, p. 1112.
9 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 7.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 4f.
12 Ibid., p. 10.
13 Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, pp. 105
and 107.
14 Ibid., p. 92.
15 Ibid., p. 106.
16 See Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Zeugnisse zur Entstehungsgeschichte’, in Benjamin,
Das Passagen-Werk, GS, vol. V.2, pp. 1206ff., and especially pp. 1237ff.
and 1255ff.
17 Benjamin had started work on it in autumn 1935 and had produced
several versions subsequently. See ibid., p. 1145.
18 On 30 June 1936 Benjamin wrote to Adorno that their ‘respective invest-
igations, like two different headlamps trained upon the same object from