schöttker, norbet elias and walter benjamin

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History of the Human Sciences

DOI: 10.1177/095269519801100203 1998; 11; 45 History of the Human Sciences

Detlev Schöttker context

Norbert Elias and Walter Benjamin: an exchange of letters and its

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45

Norbert Elias and Walter

Benjamin: an exchange ofletters and its context

DETLEV SCHÖTTKER

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the background to Walter Benjamin’s famous’letter to an unknown correspondent’, which was part of a series ofletters between Benjamin and Norbert Elias. Elias had just finishedwriting the first volume of The Civilizing Process, and he wrote to Ben-jamin asking him to review it, but Benjamin declined. The reasons forhis reluctance are discussed. The letters themselves are reproduced atthe end of the article.

Key words Walter Benjamin, Norbert Elias, Institute for SocialResearch

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 11 No. 2@ 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)[0952-6951(199805)11:2;45-59; 003906]

I

The 1967 double issue of the journal Alternative (56/7) devoted to WalterBenjamin carried a brief piece by him, dated 12 June 1938, headed ’Letter toan Unknown Correspondent’. The issue became famous because it broughtabout the dispute concerning the collection of Benjamin’s works, whichHelmut Heiflenb3ttel resolved when, in a review of the two-volume editionof Walter Benjamin’s letters published in Merkur (228, March 1967), heexpressed the view that Adorno had ’erased’ the Marxist-materialistic side ofhis later works, not only here but also in his editing of other works. The



46

controversy soon led to the question of Benjamin’s relationship to the leadingfigures of the Institute for Social Research, a question still debated today.

The ’letter to an unknown correspondent’ received no comment. No doubtit had been taken up by Alternative because it contained a clear indication ofBenjamin’s relation to Marxism. For the editors wanted to support, and sub-stantiate with new documents, Heii3enbuttel’s claim that Benjamin had beenappropriated in a one-sided way. To that end, they examined every part ofthe Benjamin estate. At that time it was located in the German CentralArchives in Potsdam, later moving to the Literature Archive of the DDR’sAcademy of Arts. This is also the source of the ’letter to an unknown corre-spondent’ ; in this, Benjamin characterizes class antagonism as the foundinginstance of a theory of history, in which - and this is important - the refer-ence point is a particular understanding of social psychology. ’But what oneis to understand as social psychology’, wrote Benjamin, ’is to be decided inmy view first on the basis of a social theory which has made its primary themethe opposition between classes.’

Nevertheless, the piece by no means restricted itself to this statement. Ben-jamin was responding here to an ’extensive letter’ from his correspondent, inwhich the latter had laid out his ’train of thought’, apparently in order tomove him to a ’review’. One could have expected some commentary on this.The more detailed points, however, were missing, and the relatively short andmodest piece also remained unnoticed in the following years. That wouldhave been different had the identity of Benjamin’s correspondent beenknown. In fact, his letter did not include the name and address. And perhapsthe preceding letter, from which one could have extracted the information,was not part of the former Potsdam collection. Presumably, however, thewriter was actually unknown to the Alternative editors, because in those dayshardly anyone knew of him. Since the estate was closed as a result of the pub-lishing dispute, the correspondent’s anonymity also remained further pro-tected.

It was Norbert Elias to whom Benjamin wrote in 12 June 1938 and fromwhom he had shortly before received a ’detailed letter’. The biographies ofthe two men had many similarities. Both had a close relationship with Frank-furt and its university, both had to flee Germany in 1933, and both emigratedto Paris. That they knew of each other, one can regard as a possibility; thateach also had a connection with the other was hitherto unknown. One of thefew people who could have provided the information was Elias himself, buthe could no longer recall a contact with Benjamin (letters to me, 4 July 1981and 18 May 1987). This, however, is not surprising, when one considers hiseventful life-history.

Elias also remained forgotten for a long time. Well into the 1960s, only a fewinsiders knew of him. In principle that did not change even when a new editionof his major work, Uber den Prozej3 der Zivilisation, was published in 1969.



47

Only when Suhrkamp took over this edition in 1976, published it in paper-back, and thus made it a best-seller, did anyone outside the groves of academecomplain about the decades-long shadowy life of a significant work and itsauthor. This book and a possible review of it was also the topic of the corre-spondence between Elias and Benjamin. The piece printed in Alternative wasonly the last of a series of letters, each author writing twice to the other in 1938.We can thank a chain of unusual circumstances for the fact that this and other

documents were preserved as part of the Benjamin estate, first in Potsdam andthen in Berlin. Before Benjamin fled from the German invasion troops, leavingParis in June 1940 and going by way of Marseilles to the French-Spanishborder, where he took his life at Port Bou on 26 September,’ he divided hispersonal archive into three parts. Less important material he left behind in hisroom at rue Dombasle 10, which he also gives as his address in his second letterto Elias. More important manuscripts were deposited by Georges Bataille inthe Paris National Library. Further material Benjamin took with him on hisescape. It ended up in the possession of his sister, who had fled Paris togetherwith Benjamin, and was taken to Adorno in the USA in 1942. In 1947 Adornoalso received the part of the estate deposited by Bataille in the NationalLibrary. Both parts were transported to Frankfurt in 1950 and together withthe manuscripts on the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung they constitute theFrankfurt Benjamin Archive. In 1981 further documents handwritten by Ben-jamin were discovered in the National Library. In addition, there is the col-lection of Gershom Scholem, who died in 1982; this is in Jerusalem.

In the foreword to his correspondence with Benjamin, published in 1980,Scholem also reported on the rescue of the materials that Benjamin had hadto leave behind in his room.2 By coincidence, after their seizure by the Nazis,the documents, of which the letters between Elias and Benjamin were a part,ended up in the similarly seized archive of the German-language PariserTageszeitung. Through an act of sabotage by a Gestapo worker it escaped thedestruction ordered for it at the end of the war. In 1945, together with theBenjamin papers, the archive was brought to the Soviet Union. The Benjaminfile came to the Potsdam German Central Archive in 1957, and from there itlater went to the DDR Academy of Arts’ Literature Archive.The correspondence with Elias, like the other documents which survived

this odyssey, was printed in full in a supplement and provided with a com-mentary on its context. The letters are of interest - apart from their later for-tunes - for three main reasons. First, they clarify the interconnectionsbetween Karl Mannheim’s circle and the Institute for Social Research, andalso document a piece of the history of the intellectuals in exile.3 Further,Elias here says more than in his book about his methodological foundations,while Benjamin’s uncomprehending reaction is exemplary for most of theearly reception of Elias’ book. And finally the letters indirectly throw a spot-light on Benjamin’s situation at the end of the 1930s.



48

II I

Elias’ letters indicate that he was himself concerned about the distribution ofhis book. He had begun ?’he Civilizing Process well before his emigration,after he had come to the University of Frankfurt as Karl Mannheim’s assist-ant in 1930; here he gained his Habilitation in 1933. Around 1936, by whichtime Elias was already living in London, at least the first volume must havebeen complete. It was to be published in Breslau by Theodor Marcus - aJewish publisher specializing inter alia in political science - who also had thework printed in two volumes. Marcus himself was exiled in 1936, but anassistant in the firm carried on with its work until 1939/40.4 The proofs werethen offered for publication to the Swiss publishers-in-exile Haus zumFalken, which the emigrant Berlin lawyer Fritz Karger had founded in Basel.The publisher accepted the offer. He received the proofs of the secondvolume shortly before the outbreak of the war and after he had blacked outthe words ’Printed in Germany’, the work appeared in 1939 in two volumes.5Bound editions of the first volume, which Elias sent to Benjamin along

with other acquaintances and possible reviewers,6 were certainly available in1938. The conditions in exile were extremely unfavourable for the sale of acomprehensive academic work written in German. Without mediation onecould hardly count on an extensive audience. This is why it was important tokeep an eye out for suitable reviewers in contact with the important period-icals. Benjamin would, of course, have been the right man. Not only was heknown for his reviews, he also worked with the Zeitschrift für Sozial-forschung, which was then the only leading German-language organ for thesocial sciences in exile, which one could anticipate would be read by manyinterested readers in Europe and the USA. The journal, established in 1932,was published from 1933 until January 1940 by Felix Alcan, although theInstitute for Social Research as sponsor of the publication had already movedto New York in 1934, and only had a branch office in Paris. In its extensivereview section the journal had made it its task to provide the most importantnew works in all areas of social science with at least a short review.

This was why Elias approached Benjamin, aiming for the Zeitschrift fiirSozialforschung at the beginning of his first letter and the end of the second.However, a review never appeared. In fact, Benjamin was not part of theInstitute for Social Research’s inner circle. Despite a series of publications inthe journal, and despite the institute’s financial support during his exile, therelationship was based above all on the friendship of Adorno, which datedfrom the end of the 1920s.The decisive role for the contact between Elias and Benjamin was played

by the photographer Gisele Freund, later to become famous, whom we alsohave to thank for the well-known portrait of Benjamin in 1937/8. Elias men-tions her name right at the beginning of his first letter to Benjamin. Both men



49

were close friends with the German woman, born in Berlin in 1912; she borethe name Gisela, which Elias used, until her emigration to Paris in 1933. Closeon 50 years later, however, Gisele Freund could no longer remember eitherany contact with the correspondents or her mediator role (letter to me, 18September 1981).

Interested in photography both theoretically and practically, she came toFrankfurt University in 1932 and studied sociology with Mannheim and Eliasas well as Horkheimer and Adorno, as she reported in a short contributionto Human Figurations. When with Mannheim in Frankfurt, she had alreadybegun a dissertation on the history of photography, which was encouragedand further fostered by Elias even in the Paris exile period. The fact that theirconversations, which Gisele Freund referred to in her article, also includedElias’ work, is indicated in the September 1936 foreword to ?’he CivilizingProcess. Here the author thanks his former student for her help. Gis6leFreund’s work, a study of the development of portrait photography in the19th century, was submitted as a dissertation to the Sorbonne in 1936 and

published in Paris in the same year under the title La photographie en Franceau dix-neuvième siècle. Walter Benjamin, so reported the author in her 1977Memoiren des Auges, was present at the public defence of her PhD.

Benjamin and Gisele Freund got to know each other in 1932 and met eachother again in Paris in 1933. From that time on, they were in regular contact.In 1938 Benjamin reviewed the published dissertation in the Zeitschrift furSozialforschung and included part of it in his second Paris Letters on ’Paint-ing and Photography’, after he had already indicated his interest in the topicin 1931 in his Short History of Photography in the Literarischen Welt.That Benjamin was well informed about the origins of Gisele Freund’s

work and thus at least knew Elias’ name is made clear in a letter to MaxHorkheimer, dated 3 November 1937. Here he remarks on the submittedreview: ’Gisele Freund’s book has appeared with Adrienne Monnier. It is agood work, although it originated in Mannheim’s Frankfurt seminar. I sug-gested to Leo Lowenthal to take over the report for him.’ Whether this is trueis not known; we can better assume that Benjamin wrote the review withoutbeing invited. What is actually more important here is that he did not writethat the work originated with Karl Mannheim, but ’in Mannheim’s Frankfurtseminar’, which tallies with the fact that, as mentioned, Elias was the actualpromoter and supervisor of the work.The letter is also an eloquent testament to how the opposition between

Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge and critical theory continued into exileand here manifested itself, no doubt for tactical reasons, in Benjamin.7 In Feb-ruary 1937 he read Adorno’s critique of Mannheim’s 1935 Mensch undGesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus [Man and Society in an Age of Recon-struction, 1948] in manuscript form; this was to appear in the Zeitschrift fiirSozialforschung, but was published in German only in 1953 under the title



50

Das Bewufltsein der Wissenssoziologie. In the subsequent letters to Adornoand Horkheimer, who had already published a critique of Mannheim’s major1929 work Ideology and Utopia in 1930, Benjamin understandably referredback to it on numerous occasions.

III I

In his first letter to Benjamin on 17 April 1938, Elias argued for the utiliza-tion of psychoanalysis to explain historical and social phenomena. In hisbook he had applied Freudian theory in this sense, without, however,methodologically explicating his procedure. It is, wrote Elias in a footnote tothe first volume, ’perhaps worth emphasizing explicitly, how much this studyowes to the discoveries of Freud and the psychoanalytical school. The con-nections are obvious to anyone acquainted with psychoanalytical writings,and it did not seem necessary to point them out in particular instances, especi-ally because this could not have been done without lengthy qualifications’(1994: 249).g 8

In principle Elias could here have known of Benjamin’s interest in thecombination of the two perspectives, since he had simply taken on a funda-mental premise of the Institute for Social Research since the late 1920s. Eliaswas also doubtless well informed on the institute’s concern about an inte-

gration of psychoanalysis with social scientific questions. while his teacherKarl Mannheim first began to deal intensively with Freud’s work in exile.’Among the problems of social research’, wrote Horkheimer in his pro-grammatic preface to the first volume of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschungin 1932, ’stands foremost the question of the relationship between the sepa-rate cultural spheres, their dependence on each other, the regularities in theirtransformation. One of the most important tasks for the resolution of thisquestion is the construction of a social psychology meeting the requirementsof history. Its promotion will be one of the journal’s particular tasks.’

So far Elias’ reference to the unproductiveness of a Marxist critique ofpsychoanalysis had the simultaneous function of highlighting what the twocorrespondents had in common. For ’on the Marxist side’, as he wrote,Freudian theory was only ’criticized or opposed’ in the 1920s and 1930s byrepresentatives of Soviet Marxism, by Jurinetzm Deborin, Sapir, or Stoljarov,whose positions had been taken on in Germany by the KPD theorist AugustThalheimer above all. ’There are two moments which have made Freud the

prophet of a particular stage of bourgeois decadence,’ wrote Thalheimer in1925 in the periodical Unter dem Banner des Marxismus. These were: first,’the diving from the upper world of clear consciousness in the underworldof the &dquo;subconscious&dquo; and the dark drives’; second, ’the sexual as the axis ofthe world’.



51

From the middle of the 1920s, in contrast, there were numerous attemptsat a mediation between psychoanalysis and Marxism, producing the firstimportant results in the work of Siegfried Bernfeld, Wilhelm Reich and OttoFenichel, and later further developed in a different direction by the membersof the Institute for Social Research. In 1932, in the first issue of the Zeitschriftfiir Sozialforschung, under the title ’History and Psychology’, Horkheimertook up the methodological position of a historically and psychologically ori-ented discipline for a unified theory of society, which Erich Fromm hadworked on by himself. As a practising analyst Fromm came to the FrankfurtPsychoanalytic Institute, founded with Horkheimer’s help in 1929, but soonmoved to the Institute for Social Research, where a tenured appointmentmade him part of its inner circle. Together with Horkheimer’s contribution,the first issue of the Zeltschriftfiir Sozialforschung carried his programmaticarticle ‘LJber Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie’.Further theoretical works and the psychoanalytic foundations of the insti-tute’s collective research made Fromm one of the central representatives ofearly critical theory.So it was no accident that in his letter of 3 June 1938 Elias twice mentioned

Fromm’s name, when concerned as to who beside Benjamin was at all com-petent to judge his work. However, in the 1930s Fromm, with his increasingscepticism about Freudian theory, had already begun to separate himself fromthe institute, with a final break in 1939, so that he was no longer a potentialreviewer of Elias’ work.

Benjamin himself, in his article on Eduard Fuchs, which appeared after twoyears of oft-interrupted work in the Zeitschriftfiir Sozialforschung in 1937,had engaged critically with Fuchs’ reception of Freud and his conception ofsocial psychology; Horkheimer had referred him to this as early as January1935: ’If you would write the article on Fuchs soon, it would meet a generaland important need. It is indeed necessary that an academic, serious treat-ment of Fuchs’ social psychological theories should finally appear.’ Andwhile he was going over the corrections of the article with Horkheimer, Ben-jamin suggested the next theme for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung: ’first,the confrontation between the bourgeois and the materialist conception ofhistory and, second, the importance of psychoanalysis for the subject ofmaterialist historiography’ (according to Horkheimer’s report to Adorno of6 April 1937).Thus in principle at least Benjamin should have been able to work up inter-

est in Elias’ work, since the ’relation between the social process and the &dquo;psy-chical&dquo;’, which Elias speaks of in his first letter, was of importance at

precisely this time. When he nonetheless did not take up the offer to reviewit, two reasons - in terms of the topic - were decisive. They can be deduceddirectly and indirectly from Benjamin’s replies. First, the volume of historicalmaterial presented in ?’he Civilizing Process held the danger, as Elias himself



52

noted in his first letter, of overwhelming the central argument. Second, thebook’s basic idea was so unusual that Benjamin was probably unable tofollow it, particularly since his reading appears not to have been very inten-sive. The history of the book’s reception has shown that he was not alone inhis limited preparedness to understand it.9 Elias’ book cut across comparableworks of the period.For the author the question was not how social structures become embed-

ded in the subject through familial socialization processes and determine thesubject’s behaviour, a question that Fromm, and before him, in anothermanner, Bernfeld and Reich, had made the topic of analytical social psychol-ogy. It was more one of establishing how the human psychical apparatuschanges in the same way as social conditions change, and thus from a long-term perspective is subjected to a similar lawlike order, without this develop-ment being either determined or able to be planned, as historical materialismassumed. For this reason Elias could not be a Marxist.The author expanded on this underlying methodological concept in both

his letters to Benjamin, but gave no indication of the result he came to.Perhaps there would have been little point in doing so by letter, which is whyElias suggested a conversation in person. But one can see that the core thesisof the book is that the increasing social intertwinement in which individualsare bound in the course of history has led to ever-stronger self-discipline andaffect control. Their cause lies on the political and social level, the result ispsychical and also social in nature. ’The manner in which people live witheach other changes; this is why their behaviour changes; this is why their con-sciousness and their emotional economy as a whole changes’ is what iswritten in the second volume of The Civilizing Process.

Elias demonstrated this connection between the changes in social andpsychic structures with the transformation of table manners, sleeping andeating habits, conversation rules, aggression, sexual behaviour and the atti-tude towards bodily needs. To this end he used etiquette manuals, lexiconsand literary texts and let the sources speak extensively for themselves. Thenumerous examples are above all the medium which is to clarify the centralthesis. It is not spiritual, religious, or artistic phenomena that stand in theforeground as products of human imagination or labour, but elementaryforms of behaviour. This is why Elias made a clear distinction in his bookbetween ’culture’ and ’civilization’ and vigorously rejected Benjamin’s viewthat the work had a ’cultural-historical content’. Already in his 1937 articleon Eduard Fuchs, Benjamin had polemically established the boundarybetween cultural history and the historical-materialist conception of history.He did not perceive how things really stood with Elias. For the author of TheCivilizing Process was concerned only with demonstrating an increasingpsychic and physical self-constraint among people over the centuries.

In the second part of his book Elias showed that this development was not



53

possible without an increasing monopolization and division of functions atthe political level, which was brought about by state formation in the earlymodern period. He also referred to this in his letter to Benjamin of 17 April1938, but did not expand on its substance. This meant that like many review-ers Benjamin could not empathize with the organic connection between thetwo parts and expressed views which occupied him but which had little to dowith the conception of the book. But the ’misunderstanding’ which Eliastried to clear up in his second letter could no longer be eliminated, since Ben-jamin wanted to make his discussion rigidly dependent on particular pre-suppositions. They were absent in Elias’ case, so he had to take Benjamin’sreply as a rejection of his request.

IV

For Benjamin himself there were also personal grounds for his reaction toElias. When Elias’ letter reached him, he was working intensively on anarticle on Baudelaire, which he had discussed with Horkheimer in April 1937as a project to follow on from the Fuchs essay, instead of the suggested studyof the relationship between cultural history and historical materialism, withrespect to the significance of psychoanalysis for historiography. But in April1938 ’not one word had been written’, as he wrote in a letter to Scholem onthe 14th of the month. Nothing occupied him more in this period, as almostall his letters indicate. Elias’ request came to him in the middle of a difficult

period. The article was part of Benjamin’s PassagenWerk, his great project onthe prehistory of modernity in the 19th century, which he worked on from1929 to his death, a fragment of which constitutes Volume 5 of Ralph Tiede-mann’s excellent edition of his collected works.

Although he constantly came back to the project, Benjamin knew that hecould never properly bring it to fruition. This is why he removed the workon Baudelaire from the conception. A book with the title Charles Baudelaire:A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism was to contain the philosophy ofhistory. The Baudelaire article was then planned as a part of that book. It wasnot completed. In order to work on the article in peace, Benjamin was forcedto leave Paris. In July 1938 he travelled to Skovsbostrand near Svendborg tosee Brecht, whom he had visited for longer periods in 1934 and 1936. Thedeparture date for the trip to Denmark was 12 June, the day of the secondletter to Elias; this emerges from his two-part letter to Scholem written onthe same day.

Like the trip, this double letter was also of existential significance. The firstpart is over eight pages long, in which Benjamin discusses Max Brod’s 1937biography of Kafka. It contained the sum of his engagement with Kafka’swork, which dated back to the mid-1920s and had begun to appear in print



54

in 1931; it was also to appear as a review. The second letter of 12 June pro-vides information on the background of his writings on Kafka. Scholemreferred to it in 1975 in his book Walter Benjamin - the History of a Friend-ship, but it was first printed in full in 1980 in his later correspondence withBenjamin. The letter refers to ideas that Benjamin and Scholem exchanged inFebruary 1938 in Paris. Benjamin thought then, according to Scholem in hispersonal report, that ’it would represent a great liberation for him in his workto be able to be completely independent of the Institute for a longer period’.Thought was given to emigration to Israel. For financial reasons, Benjamin

hoped for a contract with Salman Schocken, who had published the six-volume Kafka series edited by Max Brod. Scholem was to mediate the contactwith Schocken for a book on Kafka. A critique of Brod’s recently publishedbiography of Kafka was made part of the plan for the study. Nothing cameof the plan, since Schocken did not get involved. But Benjamin had also notpursued its realization consistently, as his correspondence with Scholemshows, although he completed the Kafka text and sent it on 12 June 1938.Indeed, in the additional comments he wrote: ’To begin with, everythingmust firstly take second place to my work on Baudelaire.’Benjamin was so occupied with his work on Baudelaire that he rejected not

only Elias’ offer, but also that of Scholem to meet him in Paris in the summerof 1938. The editors of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, who had plannedto take the article, kept pressuring him, and Benjamin sent the not quite com-pleted manuscript on 28 September from Copenhagen to New York. It wasnot accepted and after a long correspondence, in the form of a reworking ofthe ’Flaneur’ fragment, which Benjamin took on between late February andlate July 1939, it was published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung underthe title’Cber einige Motive bei Baudelaire’ in 1940. For a number of reasons,Elias’ request came at an unsuitable time.

V

Elias to Benjamin1 University Street,

W.C.1 [London]17.4.38

Honourable Herr Doktor,I have taken the liberty of sending you a copy of the first volume of my

work ’Ueber den Prozess der Zivilisation’ under separate cover. GiselaFreund wrote to me that she had spoken to you about it. I would be verypleased - and it is rather my wish - to see the book reviewed by you in theinstitute’s journal.



55

I will say to you openly, that I have posed myself a rather considerable taskwith this book. Behind all the many materials and examples, which perhapsattract too much attention, but which were unavoidable if I was not to speakonly in generalities, stands the idea that we can never understand the relationbetween the social process and the ’psychical’ as long as we see in the psy-chical only something static and unchangeable, as long as we do not also seethe psychical as ’in process’. It leads nowhere, it seems to me, if from aMarxist position one criticizes or opposes psychoanalysis or some other ahis-torical form of psychology because of this or the other detail. Before usstands the more positive task of making the rules of the historical change inthe psychical accessible to our understanding. This is the contribution whichthis first volume seeks to make. Then it remains for us to investigate, step bystep, which social processes are the motors of this psychical change. Thattakes place in the second volume, which is in press at the moment, althoughfor external reasons we will unfortunately have to wait some time before itappears.

I cannot judge if I have succeeded in representing the problem I have posedmyself clearly and convincingly. I hope, after a Scandinavian lecture tourwhich I am commencing now, to be able to pass through Paris, and I wouldbe very pleased if I then had the opportunity of speaking personally to youabout it. But because it appears that I will have to go to America in theautumn, it would be doing me a great favour if you could arrange for thereview to appear before that.

In the meantime I am,with best wishes

yourvery sincere

Norbert Elias

[signature]

Benjamin to Elias

Paris, 13 May 1938

Very Honourable Herr Elias,With thanks I acknowledge receipt of your work. I have read it with great

interest. The material you presented was unknown to me; it illustrates yourdiscussion very well.

If I have understood it correctly, you are initially concerned with an intro-duction to the problem. The general variability of the concept of civilizationwill become clear to the reader of your work. At times the evidence which

you produce is extraordinarily gripping.In relation to the underlying methodical question, which you develop on



56

page xvii, you will, as you have written to me, develop an answer to it in thesecond volume of your work. You pose this question because you distanceyourself from historical relativism and keep in view an order in historicalchange. Here it seems that for you the choice which presents itself is betweenthe idealist conception of history and that of dialectical materialism. I

presume that in the second volume you will take up a position in relation tothis methodical question.

It is the question which stands at the centre of my own interests. I wouldprefer, before I review your book, to await the development of your posi-tion, since I am not very competent in relation to the pragmatic accomplish-ments of your work. There are those who know the cultural history of the16th-18th centuries better than I do.

In my view there would be no barrier to my reviewing your book later ifthe Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung deals with the cultural-historical contentof your work with an interim reviewer. It would hardly need my encourage-ment ; otherwise I would gladly see it appear.With best wishesYour very sincere

[no signature, carbon copy]

Elias to BenjaminDr Norbert Elias 1 University Street,

London WC. 13 June 38

Very Honourable Herr Doktor,Thank you for your letter of 13 May and for the kind words about my

work. Forgive me for the delay in my reply. I was on a rather strenuouslecture tour for six weeks and only now am I approaching settling down.

Let me come immediately to one of the central points of what you havesaid to me. There is a misunderstanding: apart from the introductory com-ments, which you know, the second volume of my work contains as little byway of methodological considerations as the first. As the first volume ismainly concerned with particular concrete psychical processes, so the secondvolume deals with the concrete social processes which set the psychical inmotion. It seems to me, that better than all methodological debates - ofwhich, I am sure in this respect you and I have very similar views, we havehad more than enough of in Germany - is practice, the concrete researchwork which we are all dedicated to. And I am a little surprised to see that youhave doubts about my first volume in this respect. I would never havebelieved it possible to see in it an example of the ’idealist’ conception ofhistory.



57

I have, to my great satisfaction, seen on my Scandinavian trip that peoplewho read this book with no prejudice against me see immediately what myprimary concern is: I wanted to find a clear method and unambiguousmaterial which would overcome the hitherto dominant static conception ofpsychical phenomena. Whoever, like you and I myself, never loses sight ofthe picture of clearly structured social processes, cannot be satisfied with thekind of static conception of the psychical which currently still predominatesin the most modern of psychological currents. Whatever one might under-stand by ’dialectic’, this word strives to grasp the order, the structure, theregularity of social changes. To show that the construction of the psychicalis subject to the same order, is the task of this first volume. This task has todaybeen recognized by very few people - including, for example, Erich Fromm- not to mention tackling it. This is the reason why I have turned to you withthe request for a review. I was sure that you are one of the people competentto judge such a book. It is a misunderstanding if you believe that it is a workof cultural history and cultural historians are particularly able to understandit. There is already something in the distinction between ’civilization’ and’culture’. And I have examples of how cultural historians, used to seeing the’essence’ of history in the sphere of the spirit and ideas, have a very limitedunderstanding of this attempt at a historical psychology, which discusses suchsimple things as eating, nose-blowing and the most elementary human drives.Above all I was not aiming - as is so often the case among cultural historians- at a simple collection of historical data, but at the demonstration of social-psychological structures, from which it is more unequivocally possible thanever to build the bridge to social structures.

So, once again: I would be very pleased if you could take the trouble toreview this volume of my work in the Zeitschriftfiir Sozialforschung. If youwould prefer not to do so, we can leave the matter with you. I have been outof touch with Erich Fromm for some time. And you will understand thatunder no circumstances would I want this book to be reviewed by an incom-petent person.

I amwith warmest greetingsYour very sincereNorbert Elias

[signature]

Benjamin to Elias

Paris XV, 10 Rue Dombaslethe 12th June 1938

Very Honourable Herr Doktor,Thank you very much for your detailed letter of 3rd June.



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Nothing would please me more than to be able to follow your train ofthought. But what one is to understand as social psychology is, in my view, tobe determined first on the basis of a social theory, which has made its primarytheme the opposition between classes - namely the form of exploitation of thework of the majority by a minority predominating in the existing society.

Contributions to such a social theory, founded on the materialist method,which differ from the so-called methodological studies, about which I shareyour low opinion, we have not had a surplus of here in Germany, nor do wehave one today.Not impossible, that my approach appears limited to you; but what I

produce, including a review, has exactly this as a precondition.With the best greetings,Your very sincere

[no signature, carbon copy]

Institut für Literaturzvissenschaft, University of Stuttgart, GermanyTranslated by Robert Van Krieken

NOTES

For their assistance I wish to thank Gisèle Freund, Norbert Elias, Fritz Karger,Walther Killy, Hermann Korte, Gershom Scholem, Rolf Tiedemann, SiegfriedUnseld, Manfred Wekwerth and the staff at the Literature Archive at the DDRAcademy of Arts in Berlin. Norbert Elias and Suhrkamp kindly gave permission topublish the letters, which consist of typewritten originals from Elias and carboncopies from Benjamin, and in which only apparent typing errors have been corrected.

1 Fittko (1982).2 Scholem (1992).3 See also Jay (1973), and Wiggershaus (1994).4 Marcus (1964).5 Karger (1977).6 On the origins and reception of the book, see Korte (1988).7 Elias reported on the relationship between the Mannheim circle and the institute

staff in his Adorno-prize speech: Elias and Lepenies (1977).8 Elias (1994).9 See Gleichman et al. (1979 and 1984), especially the pieces by Goudsblom and

Rehberg.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Elias, N. (1994) The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.Elias, N and Lepenies, W. (1977) Zwei Reden [Two speeches]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.



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Fittko, L. (1982) ’Der alte Benjamin’ [The old Benjamin], Merkur 403: 35-49.Gleichmann, P., Goudsblom, J. and Korte, H., eds (1979) Materialen zu Norbert Elias’

Zivilisationstheorie [Materials on Norbert Elias’ Theory of Civilization].Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Gleichmann, P., Goudsblom, J. and Korte, H., eds (1984) Macht und Zivilisation:Materialen zu Norbert Elias’ Zivilisationstheorie [Power and Civilization:Materials on Norbert Elias’ Theory of Civilization], Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp.

Jay, M. (1973) The Dialectical Imagination. London: Heinemann.Karger, F. (1977) ’Fata Libelli’, in P. Gleichmann, J. Goudsblom and H. Korte (eds)

Human Figurations. Amsterdam: Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift.Korte, H. (1988) Norbert Elias. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.Marcus, T. (1964) ’Als jüdischer Verleger vor und nach 1933 in Deutschland’ [Being

a Jewish publisher before and after 1933 in Germany], Bulletin des Leo BaeckInstituts 1: 138-53.

Scholem, G., ed. (1992) The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and GershomScholem 1932-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wiggershaus, R. (1994) The Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Polity.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

DETLEV SCHOTTKER (born in 1954) works at the Institut fur Literaturwis-senschaft at the University of Stuttgart. He studied German and PoliticalScience in Braunschweig and Kiel, and gained his doctorate at Kiel in 1987.His publications include: Hermen Bote: Braunschweiger Autor zwischenMittelalter und Neuzeit, edited with W. Wunderlich (1987), Bertolt Brecht’sAesthetik des Naiven (1989), Konstruktiver Fragmentarismus. Form undRezeption der Schriften Walter Benjamins (1998), as well as a number ofarticles on literary and cultural history from the 16th to the 20th centuries.

Address: Institut fiir Literaturwissenschaft, University of Stuttgart,Germany.



schöttker, norbet elias and walter benjamin

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