Finding Walter Benjamin in the Neue Galerie
... about Walter Benjamin and the perfect place, the Neue Galerie, where I found his book, The Story Teller: Tales out of Loneliness.
Story and Photos by Gloria Abella Ballen
We came back from New York a couple of days ago, and here is what is on my mind about Walter Benjamin and the perfect place, the Neue Galerie, where I found his book, The Story Teller: Tales out of Loneliness.
When you enter the Neue Galerie Museum in NY, on 5th Avenue, you feel as if you're entering another era, the beautiful 1914 Beaux-Arts style, which was originally the William Starr Miller House, later (1994) bought by Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsky, and renovated by the architect Annabelle Selldorf to be the Neue Galerie which opened in 2001 to show early 20th century German and Austrian Art.
They house the famous Klimt "Woman in Gold"(1907), officially known as Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, famous for its golden style, incorporating gold leaf into the painting, and the high-profile restitution case after its looting by the Nazis.
While looking in the Galerie's bookshop, I found The Storyteller by one of my favorite writers, dreamers, cultural critics, and philosophers, Walter Benjamin. He celebrates the centrality of dreams, the passion of travel, and of intense looking to discover the layers of culture, the meanings of folklore in people's expressions, not as nostalgia but as cultural persistence. He brings out the ways our encounters and exposures are overwhelming and even mysterious, and magical or otherworldly.
His Jewish values are ever-present in his writings, with mysticism entering as a way to approach the darker times. He left Germany in 1933. While living in Paris, in 1940 he joined a Jewish group that fled the evil Nazi forces and, rather than being apprehended and returned to France by the Franco forces in Portbou, Catalonia, he took an overdose of morphine that killed him. Such a tragedy!
In his book of Tales out of Loneliness, there are short stories like "The Second Self," a new year story for contemplation, where a man named Krumbacher, living alone and with no attachments, wonders where he is going to spend the last night of the year. With the last of his money, he buys two bottles of punch, and on that night, he sits waiting for someone to call him while holding a cup of punch. When no one calls, he goes out and enters a secluded alley where he finds a faded sign that says "IMPERIAL PANORAMA, Gala performance and journey through the old year." He hesitates but enters, and the only person there is a sleeping Italian widower who, at hearing him, immediately wakes up and tells him to sit on a stool before two peepholes, and that he will make a curious acquaintance with a gentleman who has no resemblance to him: his second self. The journey to the old year begins, and 12 images begin to appear one by one with captions like: The path that you wanted to take. The letter that you wanted to write. The man that you wanted to rescue. The seat that you wanted to occupy. The woman that you wanted to follow. The question that you wanted to pose. The opportunity that you wanted to seize. It is at the last ringing of the New Year's bells when Kranbacher wakes up in his chair with an empty punch glass in his hand... This was written circa 1930-3, and unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime.
Link: Neue Gallerie NY
Gloria Abella Ballen has won international Awards in painting and graphics. She has been a visiting artist at the university of Essex, the Camberwell School of Art in the UK, the Mishkan Omanim inHerzliya Israel. Abella Ballen has published 3 award-winning books: The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet, Garden of Eden and The New World Haggadah, the latter with Ilan Stavans. All have won Best Book Awards.
Editor's Note: Perhaps because he refused to be pigeonholed, writing poems, stories, philosophical essays and political explorations, Benjamin's thoughts were wide-reaching. His best known work is the essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It is acutely resonant today as we watch our quick-quick consumer existence drown in screens, reproductions, and copied images, and some ache silently for another time that seemed more real, wondering if their nostalgia is justified – it is. Benjamin wrote this essay from Paris in 1935 explaining how capitalism was driving this trend. Read a synopsis in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction.
See also a new biography, just released this week, coincidentally! 2/24/26: Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver, by Peter E. Gordon, and a review and Q&A with Gordon, the biographer, by PJ Grisar in The Forward, https://forward.com/culture/books/807136/walter-benjamin-biography-jewish-lives-peter-e-gordon/.
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