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Walter Benjamin's Hashish Experimentation:
Remarks from Selected Secondary Literature
Index to Selections:
[1.] Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Story of a Friendship
[2.] Gershom Scholem, "Walter Benjamin and his Angel" (1972)
[3.] Rolf Tiedemann, "Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk" (1982)
[4.] Jean Selz, "Benjamin in Ibiza"
[5.] Jean Selz, "Jean Selz zu Walter Benjamin: Ein Interview von Manuel Cassó-Ferrer"
[6.] from Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920's
[7.] from Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography
[8.] Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute
[9.] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
[10.] Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution
[11.] Norbert Bolz & Willem van Reijen, Walter Benjamin
----Auf Deutsch---
[12.] Peter Krumme, "Gesichtsbilder
[13.] Arthur Lehning, "Walter Benjamin und i10,"
[14.] Leandro Konder, "Benjamin und die Revolution,"
[15.] Peter Zudeik, Der Hintern des Teufels: Ernst Bloch, Leben und Werk
[1.] Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Story of a Friendship, trans. H. Zohn, NY: Schocken Press, 1981, p. 177:
"Benjamin's encounter with Surrealism probably prepared the ground for his experiments with hashish, which he began shortly after our separation and his return to Berlin and which he wrote me about several times in those years. As late as 1932 a book on this subject was among his projects that remained unfinished. Naturally he did not want to content himself with the notes and descriptions that have been preserved but wished to probe the philosophical relevance of such perceptions from an altered state of consciousness, which he regarded as more than mere hallucination. This was still wholly in keeping with his conception of the scope of genuine experience that I have discussed earlier. Of his notes on this subject he sent me only a printed one, but he repeatedly requested my strictest discretion about the experiments he made with two physicians, Dr. Fritz Fränkel and Dr. Ernst Joël. In these experiments he derived special inspiration from the presence of Ernst Bloch and a lady friend who later took her life. Benjamin was extremely cautious in the use of the drug, and when I questioned him in Paris in 1938, he told me that he had completely stopped using it several years before."
[2.] Gershom Scholem, "Walter Benjamin and his Angel" (1972) in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991, p. 66:
"The Luciferian element, however, entered Benjamin's meditations on Klee's picture (Angelus Novus) not directly from the Jewish tradition, but rather from the occupation with Baudelaire that fascinated him for so many years. The Luciferian element of the beauty of the Satanic, stemming from this side of Benjamin's interests comes out often enough in his writings and notes. His recently published notes on hashish referred, in a record of a hashish-impression of January 15, 1928, to a "Satanic phase" he went through during this intoxication: 'My smile assumed Satanic features: though more the expression of Satanic knowing, Satanic contentment, Satanic serenity than that of Satanic destructive activity.'..."
[3.] Rolf Tiedemann, "Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk" (1982) in On Walter Benjamin [Op.cit.], pp. 269-270:
"Almost concurrently with his first notes for the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin included in his writings many protocols of his own dreams; this was also when he began to experiment with drugs. Both represented attempts to break the fixations and the encrustations in which thinking and its object, subject and object, have been frozen under the pressure of industrial production. In dreams as in narcotic intoxication, Benjamin watched 'a world of particularly secret affinities' reveal itself, a world in which things enter into 'the most contradictory ties' and in which they could display 'indefinite affinities' (V: 993). Intoxication and the dream seemed to unlock a realm of experiences in which the id still communicated mimetically and corporeally with things. Ever since his earlier philosophical explorations, Benjamin sought a concept of experience that would explode the limitations set by Kant and regain 'the fullness of the concept of experience held by earlier philosophers,' which should restore the experiences of theology. But the experiences of the surrealists taught him that it was not a matter of restoring theological experience but of transporting it into the profane:
'These experiences are by no means limited to dreams, hours of hashish eating or opium smoking. It is a cardinal error to believe that, of 'surrealist experiences,' we know only the religious ecstasies or the ecstasies of drugs. ...But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration to which hashish, opium or whatever else can give a preliminary lesson (One-Way Street, p.227).'
Benjamin wanted to carry such profane illuminations into history by acting as an interpreter of the dreams of the nineteenth-century world of things. The epistemic intention manifest here seems to fit in with the context of Benjamin's soon to be formulated theory of mimetic ability, which is, at its core, a theory of experience...."
[4.] Jean Selz, "Benjamin in Ibiza" in On Walter Benjamin [p. 357]:
"He would sometimes linger over a word, considering it from all sides, and in doing so, often discovered in its individual syllables an unexpected meaning. One night at my house, he was struck by the dominance of a certain color in a room with white walls, a dominance that had, occurred without any intention on my part. The color was red. Several bunches of roses, carnations, and pomegranate flowers presented an entire spectrum of reds to which was added the stark red of a peasant woman's handkerchief, made even more vivid by the light of a lamp. Benjamin was quick to give the room its definition: 'A laboratory designed to extract the essence of the color red.' He then uttered the German word rot (red). 'Rot,' he said, 'is like a butterfly alighting upon each shade of the color red.' Later on his attention was drawn by the red handkerchief: 'To me, it occupies a space between 'torch' and 'torchon' (cloth).' In this manner he associated two words whose difference in meaning had drawn them away from their common etymology (torquere, to twist)."
[Compare this quote with Benjamin's Crock Notes:]
"Colors can exert an uncommonly powerful impression upon the smoker. A corner in S[elz]'s room was decorated with scarves hanging on the wall. a pair of tumblers filled with flowers were sitting on a crate, which was draped over with a lace scarf. In the scarf and flowers various shades of red predominated. At an advanced stage of the fête I suddenly discovered this nook. It had an almost deafening effect upon me. Instantaneously I realized that, using this incomparable tool, my task was to discover the sense of color. I called this nook the 'Laboratoire du Rouge."
[Benjamin concludes this piece with the two sentences quoted above by Jean Selz:]
"Les mouchoirs accroches au mur tiennent pour moi la place entre torche et torchon.
Rot c'est comme un papillon qui va se poser sur chacune des nuances de la couleur rouge."
[5.] Jean Selz, "Jean Selz zu Walter Benjamin: Ein Interview von Manuel Cassó-Ferrer" in Für Walter Benjamin: Dokumente, Essays und ein Entwurf, hrsg. Ingrid/ Konrad Scheurmann, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992, p. 69:
"M.Cassó-Ferrer: How and in what manner did you proceed in your opium experience with Benjamin, which you've recounted your recollections?
Jean Selz: Benjamin told me about an experience with hashish, concerning which he had published a text entitled 'Hachich à Marseilles' in the Cahiers du Sud. Likewise I told him of an experience which I had had with opium two years earlier. Benjamin was very curious about the effect of opium, and in the following year when we met again in Ibiza we were able to smoke a small dosage of opium together which I had been able to bring along with me. I have described this experience in the text 'Une experience de Walter Benjamin' which appeared in the journal Les Lettres Nouvelles" [Trans. by S.T.]
[6.] On Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel: from Otto Friedrich's Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920's, NY: Harper & Row, 1972, pp. 343-344:
In the context of describing the prevalence of drugs, particularly cocaine, in Berlin, and the anecdote about Carl Zuckmayer, Friedrich mentions Drs. Joël and Fränkel:
"'There was enormous addiction,' says Salka Viertel, the actress, serving tea in the Swiss mountain resort of Klosters. 'Cocaine, morphine. I had one friend, a doctor, Dr. Joël, his name was. He had been a prisoner of war in England, and I think he got addicted there. Then he came to Berlin, and he and a friend, Dr. Fränkel, started a hospital for addicts. He talked a lot about addiction, very frankly, answered questions about it. Then he committed suicide, and only after he died did we learn that he himself had been an addict. He was our own doctor. We had trusted him."
[7.] From Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. James Rolleston, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991, pp. 130-132:
"Benjamin himself viewed the few years between the onset of the world economic crisis and the Nazi seizure of power as the high point of his life. Not only had he consolidated his professional situation and , for the first time, fulfilled his vocation as a critic working in Brecht's circle, he had also, after emancipation from all familial entanglements, found his way to a personal life-style that suited him. ...
To this picture of new-found existential security belongs also the quest for new experiences, which Benjamin sought in smoking hashish since 1927 and with special intensity in the years 1930-31. Under the scientific supervision of two doctors, Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel, and sometimes in the company of Ernst Bloch or other acquaintances, he would take a previously fixed dose of the narcotic and note down his sensations during the intoxication. These notes, on the basis of which he planned to write a book on hashish, try to crystallize the 'cognitive field' from absorption and trance, and reveal vividly traits of an aesthetic mode of existence such as was characteristic of Benjamin's life-style at the time.
Happily he notes the fluid connectedness engendered by intoxication, in which he knows himself to be 'at the center of all excesses': 'People and things relate to each other at such times like those elderwood props and elderwood figures in a glassed-in tinfoil box, which have become electric through rubbing of the glass and now, with every movement are propelled into the most bizarre juxtapositions with each other.' The person at the center of these narcotic images experiences his own being as that of an omnipotent essayist with the world at his disposal, ceaselessly projecting new configurations in the kaleidoscope of his text.
To come closer to an understanding of the joy of intoxication, one must re-think the story of Ariadne's thread... We are going forward: But as we go we not only discover the bends in the cave into which we are penetrating, but experience this joy of discovery only on the basis of that blissful counter-rhythm which consists in the unwinding of a skein. Such certainty about the ingeniously woven skein, which we are unwinding - is that not the joy of all productivity, at least in prose form? And in smoking hashish we are prose beings enjoying our existence at its highest potency.
The feeling of professional and emotional independence finally achieved leads Benjamin to an admission surprising for someone almost forty years old: ' I could say - and certainly material difficulties have their part in this- that I seem to myself to be an adult for the first time in my life. Not only no longer young, but adult, in that I have virtually realized one the many forms of existence that were latent within me.' But the image of the intellectual who has found peace after outward storms and lives only for his work --this image is deceptive. The extent to which the delight in hashish smoking has to be seen against a dark background can be gleaned from a sentence written in the state of hashish intoxication on 18 April 1931: 'No one will be able to understand this intoxication, the will to awaken has died.'
[8.] Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute, NY: The Free Press (Macmillan), 1977. ["Surrealism as Model: The Experience of Hashish" pp. 126-127 (Footnotes to this passage also from Buck-Norss)]:
"Not only did Benjamin use dreams, the surrealist material par excellence, in his writing. 29 Like the precursor of surrealism Charles Baudelaire (whose works he translated), Benjamin experimented with consciousness-transforming drugs - hashish primarily, but also opium and mescalin. Benjamin was prompted by reading Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse's 1927 novel,30 to record his experiences both under the influence and afterward. These records of sessions dating from 1927 to 1934 were found in his estate and recently published. They reveal that although he recognized drug-taking as a liberating act, he considered its relationship to political liberation problematic:
Since Bakunin no radical conception of freedom has existed any longer in Europe. The surrealists have it. ... But are they successful in uniting this experience of freedom with the other revolutionary experience which we must recognize since we have had it: with the constructive and dictatorial [aspect] of revolution: in short --in uniting revolt with revolution? To win for the revolution the powers of being high: surrealism revolves around this in every book and endeavor. That can be called its most particular task.
Drugs did not themselves provide the "profane illumination" that Benjamin was seeking: "The true, creative transcendence of religious illumination... does not really lie in narcotics":
...the most passionate examination of hash-smoking will certainly not teach half as much about thinking (which is an imminent narcotic) as the profane illumination of thinking about hash-smoking. The reader, the person thinking, the person waiting, the flâneur, are just as much types of Illuminati as the opium-eater, the dreamer, the intoxicated, and they are profaner.
Nonetheless, "hashish, opium and whatever else" could "provide the introductory course" for profane illumination, and the recordings of these sessions make it clear that the insights induced by drugs were not insignificant to Benjamin's theoretical endeavors. His notion of the subject-object relationship which lay at the heart of the theory of knowledge bore the stamp of these sessions and characterized the particular nature of his empiricism, in which concentration on the objects' appearance did not result in a mere reflection of the given. Under the gaze of the hashish smoker the object transformed itself so that the very details of its surface appeared in changing configurations: "the first rush loosens and entices things out of their familiar world; the second places them very quickly into a ...new one."
The drug experience was especially significant for Benjamin's secularized theory of the "aura" of objects. Emanating from the surface of the phenomena and revealing their inner essence, this aura became visible with the "image-zone" of drugs, and could be reproduced on the artists canvas: "Perhaps nothing gives a more correct concept of authentic aura than the late pictures of van Gogh, where --so one might describe these pictures --the aura is painted into all things. "The goal of Benjamin's writings as a series of dialectical images was to capture this aura in the written word as well."
[9.] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989, pp. 220 & 388 [fn. 52]:
"To describe the experience of 'revolutionary historical consciousness,' Benjamin cites Baudelaire's account of temporal experience under the influence of hashish: 'Although [the night] must have seemed long to me... it nonetheless seemed that it had lasted only several seconds or, more, that it had not become part of eternity.'" [p. 220]
[fn 52] "...Benjamin did not rule out the importance of drug-induced states for such illumination; the latter came about through reflection on such states, not the states themselves (ibid.) Benjamin's own experiments with hashish began in 1927, were more frequent in 1930-31, and occurred as late as 1934. See "Protokolle Zu Drogenversuchen," pp. 558-618. [p. 388]:
[10]. Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 187-188:
"Benjamin's surrealism essay differs markedly from One-Way Street in suggesting that the privileged experience of Erfahrung and its accompanying affect of Rausch have not been lost in the contemporary world. This Erfahrung, however, seems to be different enough from past experiences to warrant a name of its own. 'The true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics,' writes Benjamin. 'It resides in a profane illumination [Erleuchtung ], a materialist, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson.'"
[11.] Norbert Bolz & Willem van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, trans. Laimdota Mazzarins, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996, p. 57-58:
"For Benjamin, World War I marked the end of the humanistic human being, but also the possible beginning of humankind. In this connection his anthropological materialism develops perspectives that exempt his work as a whole from any humanistic argumentation. His volume of aphorisms, One-Way Street , ends with a scandalous thesis: antiquity's experience of the cosmos as a state of intoxication, which was superseded by the visual orientation of the modern sciences, returns in distorted form as the bloody frenzy of world war. Thus Benjamin views war as a distorted form of communication with the cosmos. The only thing that could save us from the chaos of destruction would be successful cosmic communication through the technical organization of the body of mankind. Thus the aim is to discern a collective surgery of the social body in the turbulent development of the new technologies. The aesthetic fascination of war cannot be otherwise explained. "Masses of people, gases, electrical forces were thrown into the open countryside, high-frequency sounds pierced the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, air space and the depths of the ocean hummed with propellers.... During the last war's nights of destruction, the limbs of humankind were shaken by a feeling that looked like the thrill of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first attempt to bring the new body into their power." (IV 147 f.)
In a state of frenzy, the war unleashed technology in the collective collapse, because technology has not become a human instrument and thus man's 'key to happiness' (III 250). To this frenzy of technology Benjamin's anthropological materialism contrasts a technology of frenzy --"secular enlightenment" [or 'profane illumination' --ST]. The main difficulty here is to attain a synthesis of frenzy and construction. For secular enlightenment is meant to provide the experience of frenzy with an intelligible structure. It could be expressed in the formula: secular enlightenment is to narcotic intoxication as the dialectical image is to the mythical image. As in some gnostic models of knowledge, dream and clarity are meant to coincide. Thus understood, intoxication is an original phenomenon of experience. It is always radical and extreme: radical in its "radicalization" of the ego and its opening-up of experience to the masses, and extreme in its stretching of individual experience.
Thus Benjamin's experiments with drugs were also motivated by his wish to gain access to the forces of intoxication (which in themselves have an isolating, divisive effect) usable for the revolution." For intoxication holds the dialectical middle ground between two types of resolution that mediate between theory and revolution: "transcending the rational individual through a state of intoxication -- but transcending the motoric and affective individual through collective action." (II 1021f.) The chaos that intoxication brings into the order of bourgeois reason must be made to serve revolutionary discipline as liberating energy. And it is this utilization that demythologizes anarchic intoxication into materialistic inspiration. The unity of intoxication and discipline that Benjamin sought is determined, in the last analysis, by the "constructive, dictatorial aspect of revolution" (II 307).
Auf Deutsch:
[12.] Peter Krumme, "Gesichtsbilder ---Geschichtsbilder: Zu Benjamins Schreibweise" in Alternative,132/33 (23. Jahrgang, Juni/Aug. 1980, S.101-109):
(105): "Das profane Lesen hingegen, wenn auch noch immer mit dem magischen verschränkt, habe mit einem 'Archiv unsinnlicher Ähnlichkeiten' zu tun, denn seine Gegenstände seien lediglich Sprache und Schrift. Damit aber sei die Wahrnehmung der Ähnlichkeiten an 'eine fundierte Intention, die überhaupt nur an etwas Fremdem, eben dem Semiotischen, Mitteilenden der Sprache also ihrem Fundus in Erscheinung treten kann.. So ist der buchstäbliche Text der Schrift der Fundus, in dem einzig und allein sich das Vexierbild formen kann.' Beim Lesen eines 'Vexierbilds' stellt sich der Sinn als des Rätselbilds Lösung nicht mehr wie selbstverständlich ein, sondern seine 'Erzeugung durch den Menschen' ist 'in vielen und zumal den wichtigen Fällen an ein Aufblitzen gebunden.' Die 'profane Erleuchtung', die Benjamin also notwendige Eigenschaft des heutigen Lesers fordert (ob er nun ein Grübler, Flaneur oder Berauschter ist), ist vom 'Glück des Erratens' abhängig. Die Stunde oder (in einem antiken Sinn) der Kairós, der günstige Moment, in dem die Kontigenz des Sinns durchbrochen wird und in eine Entsprechung verwandelt werden kann, kommt einem Aufwachen gleich. Lesen hat in Benjamins Erläuterungen eigentlich den Status einerTraumdeutung. Es ist darum gar nicht rätselhaft, wenn es in den 'Undatierten Notizen' am Schluß des Bändchens Über Haschisch knapp und einprägsam heißt: 'Jedes Bild ist ein Schlaf für sich' (142). Es zu Erwachen zu bringen, ist Sache des Lesers, der die in dem 'Bildtraum' seiner Merkwelt befindlichen Bilder sammeln muß; denn Lesen heißt nach der Etymologie des Wortes nichts anderes als eben: Sammeln."
(105-106): "Benjamins Theorie des Lesens gilt für die Literatur ebenso wie für Einzelnen ebenso wie für die des Kollektivs, gilt für die Literatur ebenso wie für die Geschichte. Denn das Lesen ist für ihn eine Tätigkeit, ohne die Erfahrung überhaupt nicht möglich ist. Lesen ist ein Lesen von Erfahrungen, die sich nur als 'flüchtige Bilder' zeigen, weil der Strom der Zeit sie fortreißt. 'Die Ewigkeit der geschichtlichen Vorfälle festhalten, heißt eigentlich: sich an die Ewigkeit ihrer Vergängnis halten' (GS I/3, 1246). Lesen von Erfahrung ist nur möglich, wenn die 'reißende Zeit' (Hölderlin) unterbrochen wird. Wie Hölderlin geht es Benjamin um das 'vesteste Bleiben vor der wandelnden Zeit' (Hölderlin, StA V, 268), einer 'leeren und homogenen', die für Benjamin stets auch eine Zeit des Schlafes ist. Darum formuliert Benjamin in seinen schon erwähnten 'Undatierten Notizen': 'Tun ist ein Mittel zu Träumen --Betrachtung ist ein Mittel Wachzubleiben.' Benjamins Traumdeutung in historischer Absicht ist auf die Unterbrechung eines Kontinuums angewiesen, auf die Unterbrechung der, wie man nun sagen darf, Traumzeit. Erwachen und Errinern, Betrachten und Lesen sind voneinander nicht zu trennen. Wirklichkeit muß man 'wie einen Text lesen'. Wie einen Text, der indes nicht immer und zu jeder Zeit lesbar ist. Entschiedene Abkehr vom Begriffe der 'zeitlosen Wahrheit' ist am Platz. Doch Wahrheit ist nicht ---wie der Marxismus es behauptet --nur eine zeitliche Funktion des Erkennens, sondern an einen Zeitkern, welcher im Erkannten und Erkennenden zugleich steckt, gebunden. Das ist so wahr, daß das Ewige jedenfalls eher eine Rüsche am Kleid ist als eine Idee. Nötig ist das 'Pathos der Nähe', das die fliehenden 'Dinge räumlich' heranrückt, damit 'sie in unser Leben treten' können."
[13.] Arthur Lehning, "Walter Benjamin und i10," in Für Walter Benjamin: Dokumente, Essays und ein Entwurf, hrsg. von Ingrid und Konrad Scheurmann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992, S. 56-67:
(61): "Für Benjamin war der französische Surrealismus nicht nur von literarischem Interesse, sondern vielmehr von politischer Bedeutung, außerdem eine persönliche Erfahrung. Der Rausch war Benjamin nicht fremd, und der Versuch, den ,Rausch' als Korrelat der ,Revolte' mit der ,Revolution' zu verbinden, war für ihn die entscheidende Entdeckung des Surrealismus: 'Die Kräfte des Rausches für die Revolution zu gewinnen, darum kreist der Surrealismus in allen Büchern und Unternehmen. Das darf er seine eigenste Aufgabe nennen. Für die ist's nicht damit getan, daß, wie wir wissen, eine rauschhafte Komponente in jedem revolutionären Akt lebendig ist. Sie ist identisch mit der anarchischen.' [GS II/1: 307 --Dazu heißt es in einer Vorarbeit: "...in jeder Revolution (gibt es)...eine rauschhafte Komponente, die übrigens mit ihrer anarchistischen identisch ist" (GS II/3: 1037)."
[14.] Leandro Konder, "Benjamin und die Revolution," in Für Walter Benjamin , op. cit. S. 226-232:
(229): "Insofern setzte die Revolution eine Leidenschaft voraus, die nur aus dem Bereich religiöser Erfahrungen kommen konnte. Da es gewaltige Widerstände gegen eine Veränderung gibt, muß das Vorhaben einer revolutionären Umwandlung der Gesellschaft auf alle Energien zurückgreifen, die diese mobilisieren kann: nicht nur diejenigen aus dem Bereich der religiösen Erfahrungen, sondern auch die 'Kräfte des Rausches' und die kreative Kraft, die sich in den Träumen manifestiert.
Die Bereitschaft, Elemente aus dem Bereich der Theologie, des Rauschhaften und der Traumwelt zu übernehmen, bedeutet nicht, daß Benjamin dem historischen Materialismus abgeschworen hätte: In einer dezidiert materialistischen Betrachtungsweise verstand er die Revolution als materielle Aktion, als Bewegung, die ein konkretes Subjekt, einen kollektiven ,Körper' als Handelnden voraussetzte. Einen Körper, handlungsfähig war, bereit, Initiativen zu ergreifen, Entscheidungen zu treffen und Risiken einzugehen. Einen Körper also, der auch träumen konnte. Der potentiell revolutionäre Traum des kollektiven Körpers konnte auf individuelle Träume nicht verzichten. Demzufolge interessierte sich Benjamin lebhaft für die individuellen Träume, die sich in den kollektiven Traum integrieren."
[15.] Peter Zudeik, Der Hintern des Teufels: Ernst Bloch, Leben und Werk, Elster Verlag, 1987, S.108:
"Die 'letzten Wimpel der Freundschaft' zwischen Bloch und Lukács wehten also Anfang der 20er Jahre nur mehr schwach, so daß Walter Benjamin eine für Bloch recht schmerzliche Lücke füllte, auch was gemeinsame Unternehmungen nicht philosophischer Art betrifft. 1928 beteiligten sich beide an Haschisch-Experimenten, die ärztlich überwacht und später in der ,Zeitung für Neurologie' auswertet wurden. ,Der heutige Rausch verhält sich zu vorigen wie Calvin zu Shakespeare,' notiert Bloch bei der Sitzung vom 14. Januar 1928. Benjamin: ,Der erste Rausch machte mich mit dem Flatterhaften des Zweifels bekannt; das Zweifeln lag also schöpferische Indifferenz in mir selber. Der zweite Versuch aber ließ die Dinge zweifelhaft erscheinen.' Michael Landmann, mit dem Ernst Bloch ausführliche Gespräche geführt hat, erzählt von dieser Begebenheit so: ,Benjamin sah alsbald Dante und Petrarca im Gespräch, an dem er sich beteiligte. Bloch reif dazwischen: 'Seit wann kannst du so gut italienisch?' Benjamin machte eine Handbewegung, so also ob das das Dümmste sei, was einer überhaupt sagen kann.' Bloch soll sich insgesamt also ungeeignetes Versuchsobjekt entpuppt haben, weshalb er auch an späteren Sitzungen nicht mehr teilnahm: ,Statt in andere Welten entrückt zu werden, sprach er höchst diesseitig dem kalten Buffet zu, das die Ärzte, da Haschisch Appetit erzeugt, aufgebaut hatten.' Benjamin notiert seine Reaktion, also er aufgefordert wird zu essen: ,Nein, ich nehme nichts. Selbst wenn Sie sich zu diesem Zweck Jamben vorbinden, werde ich nicht essen.'"
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