Content area
Full text
Theorie des Kriminalromans
In 1930 Benjamin published in the Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung a short piece titled "Kriminalromane, auf Reisen" ("Crime Novels, on Travel"). Starting with the observation that people do not usually bring their own books to read in trains but buy new ones in the stations, Benjamin wonders why crime novels are particularly suitable for this kind of journey. Entering a railroad station, writes Benjamin, is like entering the middle of a gigantomachy between the gods of the railroads and those of the station, so the modern traveler must pay his or her offertory to the divinities of modernity, "in a dark feeling of making something which will please the gods of the railway" (GS, 4.1:381).' These divinities are the god of the steam, the naiads of the smoke, and the demons of the stucco; a railroad station, a cathedral of modernity (GS, 4.1:381), is populated, Benjamin had learned from the surrealists, by myth; and the city dweller- in this case the train traveler- must forge his or her way through it as if in the primeval forest. A train journey is a "succession of mythic trials and dangers," from the anxiety of being "too late" to "the solitude of the compartment," from "the fear of missing a connection" to "the horror of the unknown lobby" (GS, 4.1:381). The easiest way to free the mind from this series of fears, writes Benjamin, is to provoke another fear, which will anesthetize the first: "The anesthesia of a fear through another one is his [the traveler's] salvation. Between the fresh cut pages of the crime novel he looks for the idle, as it were, virginal apprehensions [Angst], which could help him to get over the archaic fear of the journey" (GS, 4.1:381). The Kriminalroman thus constitutes a momentary escape from the anxieties of modern life. In the station-as-cathedral of modernity, "we want to thank," concludes Benjamin, "the mobile and gaudily colored altars," and "the minister of the new, of the absence of spirit and of the sensational," which allow us, for a couple of hours, to envelop ourselves in the protective scarf of fictitious excitement (GS, 4.L382-83).2
Benjamin's taste for crime and detective novels is well known.3 Less known is perhaps the fact that...