Debris and Remembrance: Anna Seghers's “Ausflug” and Walter Benjamin's “Engel der Geschichte”

In contemporary Germany, the visual remains of Trummer are interspersed throughout the landscape. Bronze and Stone Age vestiges, castle ruins, and old cityscapes reveal former government and urban structures. Other more recent images of ruins and piles of debris-especially the rubble of destroyed cities and surreal piles of dead bodies of two World Wars-are still freshly imprinted on our collective memory. The historical wreckage scattered through present-day life is a reminder of earlier periods and former life experience that adds to our desire to understand more about the past. While historical remnants cannot reveal the past in its former entirety, they nevertheless guide our collective understanding of who we were and who we are today. The conceptual framework of historical debris figures prominently in Anna Seghers's novella "Der Ausflug der toten Madchen" (1943-44)1 and Walter Benjamin's 1940 interpretation of Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus.2 Unsettled by memories of World War I and persecuted by the Nazis in World War II, the Jewish intellectuals Anna Seghers (1900-1983) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) not only experienced the deterioration of their world, but also engaged in a related literary, social, and political discourse about the Trummer of their time. In Seghers's novella and Benjamin's interpretation, imagery of rampant physical destruction and merciless death challenge readers to recognize the past in present experience. At the core of each text one finds the desire to identify some type of spatial or temporal continuity that links past and present generations. Embodied in the protagonist Netty and the representation of the Angel, both texts favor the figure of a collector. Although the past is lost and inaccessible to present experience, both figures wish to peruse-if only in an imaginative fashion-its scattered remains. Unlike the postwar Trummerfrauen working through the rubble of the Third Reich, neither author aims to clear the waste and remove history in order to create space for a new existence. Rather, Benjamin and Seghers each acknowledge the existence of historical debris and seek to preserve it. By locating former wreckage in the midst of their own culture, they raise awareness of lost and hidden moments of a vanished past. There is a remarkable confluence of thought in these two texts from the 1940s. Seghers and Benjamin share not only a similar Weimar Marxist sensibility for social justice but also a fascination with aspects of Jewish mysticism. In these texts both authors reflect a belief in the continuity of human experience in which Splitter of Messianic premonition are passed from generation to generation. After a short introduction to both works, this essay offers a close reading of Seghers's "Der Ausflug der toten Madchen" and Benjamin's interpretation of the Angel of History. By concentrating on the treatment of space, time, and recovery in both texts, the article examines how each author utilizes the trope of debris to engage in a related discourse of history. Moreover this discussion reveals how, in light of the quickly accumulating ruins of their time, both writers develop concepts of remembrance derived from a dialectic of debris and recovery. The novella "Der Ausflug der toten Madchen" is the mournful narrative of a survivor who has lost family members and friends to the Nazi regime. At the center of the novella one finds Netty who, like Seghers herself, has fled Germany for exile in Mexico. Sparked by her memory of a sunny and idyllic school excursion down the Rhine river, Netty recalls multiple moments involving her former classmates and teachers that revolve around real historical events extending from before World War I to 1943. The story is compactly structured in inner and outer narrative. The Rahmenerzahlung establishes the current time and place, Mexico, from which Netty recollects stories of her Heimat. The description of the hot afternoon sun gives the landscape of the cyclic frame an eerie and desolate atmosphere. …