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The pounding of the gavel.

THE AUCTIONEER: Sold to?

UNGER: Johann Friedrich Unger, Bookseller, Berlin.

THE AUCTIONEER: Number 212. The Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschen, 1787–1790. Unfortunately, we only have the seventh volume of this handsome edition.

UNGER: The seventh volume, distinguished scholar, but that’s … The sound of a gong.

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Faust!65 The world legend of the German bourgeoisie, beginning on the worldly stage, ending in the proscenium of Heaven, beginning with the infernal devil of black magic, rising to the earthly devil of statecraft, beginning with appearances, ending in voices. A small puppet show opens at the annual fair to address the sufferings and humiliation of the German bourgeoisie, but also its history, and at the heart of this history the image of antiquity, Helen, and the Palace at Sparta.

THE ANNOUNCER: Silence! How dare you steal my lines?

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: I am the nineteenth century, and have already stolen the lines of many others. I anticipated the Classical authors before they had even finished writing, and was greeted by the greatest among them before he had even glimpsed a quarter of me, with such words that I have the right to be heard here.

THE ANNOUNCER: How is it, in your opinion, that he greeted you? I believe we are speaking here of Goethe?

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: I see that you are still in school. Goethe said of me:

Everything nowadays is ultra, everything perpetually transcendent in thought as in action. No one knows himself any longer, no one understands the element in which he moves and works, no one the subject which he is treating. Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires, and what everyone strives to attain. Railways, quick mails, steamships, and every possible kind of facility in the way of communication are what the educated world has in view, that it may overeducate itself, and thereby continue in a state of mediocrity. Properly speaking, this is the century for men with heads on their shoulders, for practical men of quick perceptions, who, because they possess a certain adroitness, feel their superiority to the multitude, even though they themselves may not be gifted to the highest degree. Let us, as far as possible, keep that in mind with which we came hither; we, and perhaps a few others, shall be the last of an epoch that will not so soon return again.66

THE ANNOUNCER: You have no cause to be proud of such a greeting.

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: I lived up to it. I expanded a middling culture generally, as Goethe prophesied.

THE ANNOUNCER: A middling culture? As long as your nineteenth century lasted, the Germans didn’t open their greatest volume of poetry. And only recently did Cotta sell the last copy of the Westöstlicher Divan from the publishing house.67

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: It was too expensive. I brought editions to the market that reached the people.

THE ANNOUNCER: People who didn’t have time to read them.

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: At the same time, my century gave the mind the means to expand itself more quickly than by reading.

THE ANNOUNCER: In other words, it founded the tyranny of the minute, the lash of which we still feel today.

We hear quite clearly the ticking of the second hand of a clock.

THE VOICE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Goethe himself embraced this cadence, and advised his grandson to adapt himself to it.

The following poem is read briskly to the cadence of the second hand:

Sixty are in every hour.

Fourteen-forty in a day.

Each one, son, provides some power

To achieve or flit away.68

“Was die Deutschen lasen, wahrend ihre Klassiker schrieben,” GS, 4.2, 641–70. Translated by Diana K. Reese.

Broadcast on Radio Berlin, February 16, 1932, from 9:10–10:10 pm. Announced as part of the series “1789–1815” in the Funkstunde (Schiller-Lerg, Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 233).

In September 1932, the radio magazine Rufer und Hörer published an excerpted version of the text, which differs from the above version in that the excerpt contains simplifications as well as the “germanization” of foreign words (see GS, 4.2, 1054–71). Along with the excerpt, the magazine also published Benjamin’s programmatic statement, “Two Kinds of Popularity,” which can be found in this volume (369).

1 Benjamin refers here to the Leipzig publishing house of Breitkopf, renowned for music and scholarly works on music, founded in 1719 by Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf. The Leipzig Book Fair rose to prominence in the eighteenth century to become Germany’s leading venue for the national and international book trade.

2 Johann Friedrich Unger (1753–1804), German printer, bookseller, and publisher of authors including Goethe, Schiller, and the Schlegel brothers.

3 Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793), German author of works including Versuch einer kleinen praktischen Kinderlogik [Logic for Children] (1786) and Anton Reiser (1785–1790); and August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814), German actor and dramatist.

4 Johann Georg Heinzmann (1757–1802), conservative Swiss bookseller, publisher, and author of Appell an meine Nation: Über die Pest der deutschen Literatur [Appeal to my Nation: Concerning the Pestilence of German Literature] (Bern, 1795).

5 Friedrich Schiller, Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (1791–1793); Goethe, Leben des Benvenuto Cellini, (1803). The Göschen publishing house was a leading Leipzig printer and publisher, led by Georg Joachim Göschen, known for having published the first collection of Goethe’s writings.

6 See Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräch mit Eckermann in den letzen Jahren seines Lebens, ed. H. H. Houben (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1910), 683.

7 Rudolf Zacharias Becker, Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein für Bauersleute (Gotha, 1788). Becker (1751–1822) was a proponent of the “popular Enlightenment” (Volksaufklärung), which advocated social stability through the extension of liberal Enlightenment ideals and benefits to the peasants and lower classes. His advice book was one of the great commercial successes of his time.

8 Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), Swiss educational reformer.

9 Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow, author of Der Kinderfreund (Frankfurt, 1776).

10 Possibly Garlieb Helwig Merkel (1769–1850), Baltic German writer; Markus Herz (1747–1803), German Jewish physician, philosopher, student and correspondent of Kant, friend of Mendelssohn; and Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811), polemical German writer, critic, bookseller, and publisher.

11 From the Christmas hymn for children by Martin Luther, “Vom Himmel hoch,” translated by Catherine Winkworth, in Lyra Germanica: Hymns for the Sundays and Chief Festivals of the Christian Year (London: Longman, 1856), 12–14.

12 The “Deputy Headmaster” is Karl Philipp Moritz, who worked for a time as an educator and schoolmaster in Berlin.

13 Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818) was a prominent pedagogue and one the editors of the Braunschweig Journal, which focused on issues related to education, individual and societal enlightenment, and reform. He was author of Robinson der Jüngere [Robinson the Younger, or the New Crusoe] (1779).