History of the Human Sciences

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Norbert Elias and Walter Benjamin: an exchange of letters and its

context
Detlev Schttker
History of the Human Sciences 1998; 11; 45
DOI: 10.1177/095269519801100203
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/2/45

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HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES

Vol. 11 No. 2
45
@ 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
[0952-6951(199805)11:2;45-59; 003906]

Norbert Elias and Walter

Benjamin: an exchange of
letters and its context
DETLEV SCHÖTTKER

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the background to Walter Benjamins famous

letter to an unknown correspondent, which was part of a series of
letters between Benjamin and Norbert Elias. Elias had just finished
writing the first volume of The Civilizing Process, and he wrote to Benjamin asking him to review it, but Benjamin declined. The reasons for
his reluctance are discussed. The letters themselves are reproduced at
the end of the article.

Key words Walter Benjamin, Norbert Elias,

Institute for Social

Research
I

The 1967 double issue of the journal Alternative (56/7) devoted to Walter
Benjamin carried a brief piece by him, dated 12 June 1938, headed Letter to
an Unknown Correspondent. The issue became famous because it brought
about the dispute concerning the collection of Benjamins works, which
Helmut Heiflenb3ttel resolved when, in a review of the two-volume edition
of Walter Benjamins letters published in Merkur (228, March 1967), he
expressed the view that Adorno had erased the Marxist-materialistic side of
his later works, not only here but also in his editing of other works. The

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46

controversy soon led to the question of Benjamins relationship to the leading

figures of the Institute for Social Research, a question still debated today.
The letter to an unknown correspondent received no comment. No doubt
it had been taken up by Alternative because it contained a clear indication of
Benjamins relation to Marxism. For the editors wanted to support, and substantiate with new documents, Heii3enbuttels claim that Benjamin had been
appropriated in a one-sided way. To that end, they examined every part of
the Benjamin estate. At that time it was located in the German Central
Archives in Potsdam, later moving to the Literature Archive of the DDRs
Academy of Arts. This is also the source of the letter to an unknown correspondent ; in this, Benjamin characterizes class antagonism as the founding
instance of a theory of history, in which - and this is important - the reference point is a particular understanding of social psychology. But what one
is to understand as social psychology, wrote Benjamin, is to be decided in
my view first on the basis of a social theory which has made its primary theme
the opposition between classes.
Nevertheless, the piece by no means restricted itself to this statement. Benjamin was responding here to an extensive letter from his correspondent, in
which the latter had laid out his train of thought, apparently in order to
move him to a review. One could have expected some commentary on this.
The more detailed points, however, were missing, and the relatively short and
modest piece also remained unnoticed in the following years. That would
have been different had the identity of Benjamins correspondent been
known. In fact, his letter did not include the name and address. And perhaps
the preceding letter, from which one could have extracted the information,
was not part of the former Potsdam collection. Presumably, however, the
writer was actually unknown to the Alternative editors, because in those days
hardly anyone knew of him. Since the estate was closed as a result of the publishing dispute, the correspondents anonymity also remained further protected.
It was Norbert Elias to whom Benjamin wrote in 12 June 1938 and from
whom he had shortly before received a detailed letter. The biographies of
the two men had many similarities. Both had a close relationship with Frankfurt and its university, both had to flee Germany in 1933, and both emigrated
to Paris. That they knew of each other, one can regard as a possibility; that
each also had a connection with the other was hitherto unknown. One of the
few people who could have provided the information was Elias himself, but
he could no longer recall a contact with Benjamin (letters to me, 4 July 1981
and 18 May 1987). This, however, is not surprising, when one considers his
eventful life-history.
Elias also remained forgotten for a long time. Well into the 1960s, only a few
insiders knew of him. In principle that did not change even when a new edition
of his major work, Uber den Prozej3 der Zivilisation, was published in 1969.

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47

Only when Suhrkamp took over this edition in 1976, published it in paperback, and thus made it a best-seller, did anyone outside the groves of academe
about the decades-long shadowy life of a significant work and its
author. This book and a possible review of it was also the topic of the correspondence between Elias and Benjamin. The piece printed in Alternative was
only the last of a series of letters, each author writing twice to the other in 1938.
We can thank a chain of unusual circumstances for the fact that this and other
documents were preserved as part of the Benjamin estate, first in Potsdam and
then in Berlin. Before Benjamin fled from the German invasion troops, leaving
Paris in June 1940 and going by way of Marseilles to the French-Spanish
border, where he took his life at Port Bou on 26 September, he divided his
personal archive into three parts. Less important material he left behind in his
room at rue Dombasle 10, which he also gives as his address in his second letter
to Elias. More important manuscripts were deposited by Georges Bataille in
the Paris National Library. Further material Benjamin took with him on his
escape. It ended up in the possession of his sister, who had fled Paris together
with Benjamin, and was taken to Adorno in the USA in 1942. In 1947 Adorno
also received the part of the estate deposited by Bataille in the National
Library. Both parts were transported to Frankfurt in 1950 and together with
the manuscripts on the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung they constitute the
Frankfurt Benjamin Archive. In 1981 further documents handwritten by Benjamin were discovered in the National Library. In addition, there is the collection of Gershom Scholem, who died in 1982; this is in Jerusalem.
In the foreword to his correspondence with Benjamin, published in 1980,
Scholem also reported on the rescue of the materials that Benjamin had had
to leave behind in his room.2 By coincidence, after their seizure by the Nazis,
the documents, of which the letters between Elias and Benjamin were a part,
ended up in the similarly seized archive of the German-language Pariser
Tageszeitung. Through an act of sabotage by a Gestapo worker it escaped the
destruction ordered for it at the end of the war. In 1945, together with the
Benjamin papers, the archive was brought to the Soviet Union. The Benjamin
file came to the Potsdam German Central Archive in 1957, and from there it
later went to the DDR Academy of Arts Literature Archive.
The correspondence with Elias, like the other documents which survived
this odyssey, was printed in full in a supplement and provided with a commentary on its context. The letters are of interest - apart from their later fortunes - for three main reasons. First, they clarify the interconnections
between Karl Mannheims circle and the Institute for Social Research, and
also document a piece of the history of the intellectuals in exile.3Further,
Elias here says more than in his book about his methodological foundations,
while Benjamins uncomprehending reaction is exemplary for most of the
early reception of Elias book. And finally the letters indirectly throw a spotlight on Benjamins situation at the end of the 1930s.

complain

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48

III

Elias letters indicate that he was himself concerned about the distribution of
his book. He had begun ?he Civilizing Process well before his emigration,
after he had come to the University of Frankfurt as Karl Mannheims assistant in 1930; here he gained his Habilitation in 1933. Around 1936, by which
time Elias was already living in London, at least the first volume must have
been complete. It was to be published in Breslau by Theodor Marcus - a
Jewish publisher specializing inter alia in political science - who also had the
work printed in two volumes. Marcus himself was exiled in 1936, but an
assistant in the firm carried on with its work until 1939/40.4The proofs were
then offered for publication to the Swiss publishers-in-exile Haus zum
Falken, which the emigrant Berlin lawyer Fritz Karger had founded in Basel.
The publisher accepted the offer. He received the proofs of the second
volume shortly before the outbreak of the war and after he had blacked out
the words Printed in Germany, the work appeared in 1939 in two volumes.5
Bound editions of the first volume, which Elias sent to Benjamin along
with other acquaintances and possible reviewers,6were certainly available in
1938. The conditions in exile were extremely unfavourable for the sale of a
comprehensive academic work written in German. Without mediation one
could hardly count on an extensive audience. This is why it was important to
keep an eye out for suitable reviewers in contact with the important periodicals. Benjamin would, of course, have been the right man. Not only was he
known for his reviews, he also worked with the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung, which was then the only leading German-language organ for the
social sciences in exile, which one could anticipate would be read by many
interested readers in Europe and the USA. The journal, established in 1932,
was published from 1933 until January 1940 by Felix Alcan, although the
Institute for Social Research as sponsor of the publication had already moved
to New York in 1934, and only had a branch office in Paris. In its extensive
review section the journal had made it its task to provide the most important
works in all areas of social science with at least a short review.
This was why Elias approached Benjamin, aiming for the Zeitschrift fiir
Sozialforschung at the beginning of his first letter and the end of the second.
However, a review never appeared. In fact, Benjamin was not part of the
Institute for Social Researchs inner circle. Despite a series of publications in
the journal, and despite the institutes financial support during his exile, the
relationship was based above all on the friendship of Adorno, which dated
from the end of the 1920s.
The decisive role for the contact between Elias and Benjamin was played
by the photographer Gisele Freund, later to become famous, whom we also
have to thank for the well-known portrait of Benjamin in 1937/8. Elias mentions her name right at the beginning of his first letter to Benjamin. Both men
new

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49

close friends with the German woman, born in Berlin in 1912; she bore
the name Gisela, which Elias used, until her emigration to Paris in 1933. Close
on 50 years later, however, Gisele Freund could no longer remember either
any contact with the correspondents or her mediator role (letter to me, 18

were

September 1981).
Interested in photography both theoretically and practically, she came to
Frankfurt University in 1932 and studied sociology with Mannheim and Elias
as well as Horkheimer and Adorno, as she
reported in a short contribution
to Human Figurations. When with Mannheim in Frankfurt, she had already
begun a dissertation on the history of photography, which was encouraged
and further fostered by Elias even in the Paris exile period. The fact that their
conversations, which Gisele Freund referred to in her article, also included
Elias work, is indicated in the September 1936 foreword to ?he Civilizing
Process. Here the author thanks his former student for her help. Gis6le
Freunds work, a study of the development of portrait photography in the
19th century, was submitted as a dissertation to the Sorbonne in 1936 and
published in Paris in the same year under the title La photographie en France
au dix-neuvime sicle. Walter Benjamin, so reported the author in her 1977
Memoiren des Auges, was present at the public defence of her PhD.
Benjamin and Gisele Freund got to know each other in 1932 and met each
other again in Paris in 1933. From that time on, they were in regular contact.
In 1938 Benjamin reviewed the published dissertation in the Zeitschrift fur
Sozialforschung and included part of it in his second Paris Letters on Painting and Photography, after he had already indicated his interest in the topic
in 1931 in his Short History of Photography in the Literarischen Welt.
That Benjamin was well informed about the origins of Gisele Freunds
work and thus at least knew Elias name is made clear in a letter to Max
Horkheimer, dated 3 November 1937. Here he remarks on the submitted
review: Gisele Freunds book has appeared with Adrienne Monnier. It is a
good work, although it originated in Mannheims Frankfurt seminar. I suggested to Leo Lowenthal to take over the report for him. Whether this is true
is not known; we can better assume that Benjamin wrote the review without
being invited. What is actually more important here is that he did not write
that the work originated with Karl Mannheim, but in Mannheims Frankfurt
seminar, which tallies with the fact that, as mentioned, Elias was the actual
promoter and supervisor of the work.
The letter is also an eloquent testament to how the opposition between
Mannheims sociology of knowledge and critical theory continued into exile
and here manifested itself, no doubt for tactical reasons, in Benjamin.7 In February 1937 he read Adornos critique of Mannheims 1935 Mensch und
Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus [Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, 1948] in manuscript form; this was to appear in the Zeitschrift fiir
Sozialforschung, but was published in German only in 1953 under the title

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50

Bewufltsein der Wissenssoziologie. In the subsequent letters to Adorno

and Horkheimer, who had already published a critique of Mannheims major
1929 work Ideology and Utopia in 1930, Benjamin understandably referred
back to it on numerous occasions.

Das

IIII
In his first letter to Benjamin on 17 April 1938, Elias argued for the utilization of psychoanalysis to explain historical and social phenomena. In his
book he had applied Freudian theory in this sense, without, however,
methodologically explicating his procedure. It is, wrote Elias in a footnote to
the first volume, perhaps worth emphasizing explicitly, how much this study
owes to the discoveries of Freud and the psychoanalytical school. The connections are obvious to anyone acquainted with psychoanalytical writings,
and it did not seem necessary to point them out in particular instances, especially because this could not have been done without lengthy qualifications

(1994: 249).g8
In principle Elias could here have known of Benjamins interest in the
combination of the two perspectives, since he had simply taken on a fundamental premise of the Institute for Social Research since the late 1920s. Elias
was also doubtless well informed on the institutes concern about an integration of psychoanalysis with social scientific questions. while his teacher
Karl Mannheim first began to deal intensively with Freuds work in exile.
Among the problems of social research, wrote Horkheimer in his programmatic preface to the first volume of the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung
in 1932, stands foremost the question of the relationship between the separate cultural spheres, their dependence on each other, the regularities in their
transformation. One of the most important tasks for the resolution of this
question is the construction of a social psychology meeting the requirements
of history. Its promotion will be one of the journals particular tasks.
So far Elias reference to the unproductiveness of a Marxist critique of
psychoanalysis had the simultaneous function of highlighting what the two
correspondents had in common. For on the Marxist side, as he wrote,
Freudian theory was only criticized or opposed in the 1920s and 1930s by
representatives of Soviet Marxism, by Jurinetzm Deborin, Sapir, or Stoljarov,
whose positions had been taken on in Germany by the KPD theorist August
Thalheimer above all. There are two moments which have made Freud the
prophet of a particular stage of bourgeois decadence, wrote Thalheimer in
1925 in the periodical Unter dem Banner des Marxismus. These were: first,
the diving from the upper world of clear consciousness in the underworld
of the &dquo;subconscious&dquo; and the dark drives; second, the sexual as the axis of
the world.

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51

From the middle of the 1920s, in contrast, there

were numerous attempts

mediation between psychoanalysis and Marxism, producing the first
important results in the work of Siegfried Bernfeld, Wilhelm Reich and Otto
Fenichel, and later further developed in a different direction by the members
of the Institute for Social Research. In 1932, in the first issue of the Zeitschrift
fiir Sozialforschung, under the title History and Psychology, Horkheimer
took up the methodological position of a historically and psychologically oriented discipline for a unified theory of society, which Erich Fromm had
worked on by himself. As a practising analyst Fromm came to the Frankfurt
Psychoanalytic Institute, founded with Horkheimers help in 1929, but soon
moved to the Institute for Social Research, where a tenured appointment
made him part of its inner circle. Together with Horkheimers contribution,
the first issue of the Zeltschriftfiir Sozialforschung carried his programmatic
article LJber Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie.
Further theoretical works and the psychoanalytic foundations of the institutes collective research made Fromm one of the central representatives of
early critical theory.
So it was no accident that in his letter of 3 June 1938 Elias twice mentioned
Fromms name, when concerned as to who beside Benjamin was at all competent to judge his work. However, in the 1930s Fromm, with his increasing
scepticism about Freudian theory, had already begun to separate himself from
the institute, with a final break in 1939, so that he was no longer a potential
reviewer of Elias work.
Benjamin himself, in his article on Eduard Fuchs, which appeared after two
years of oft-interrupted work in the Zeitschriftfiir Sozialforschung in 1937,
had engaged critically with Fuchs reception of Freud and his conception of
social psychology; Horkheimer had referred him to this as early as January
1935: If you would write the article on Fuchs soon, it would meet a general
and important need. It is indeed necessary that an academic, serious treatment of Fuchs social psychological theories should finally appear. And
while he was going over the corrections of the article with Horkheimer, Benjamin suggested the next theme for the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung: first,
the confrontation between the bourgeois and the materialist conception of
history and, second, the importance of psychoanalysis for the subject of
materialist historiography (according to Horkheimers report to Adorno of

at a

April 1937).
Thus in principle at least Benjamin should have been able to work up inter-

in Elias work, since the relation between the social process and the &dquo;psychical&dquo;, which Elias speaks of in his first letter, was of importance at
precisely this time. When he nonetheless did not take up the offer to review
it, two reasons - in terms of the topic - were decisive. They can be deduced
est

directly and indirectly from Benjamins replies. First, the volume of historical
material presented in ?he Civilizing Process held the danger, as Elias himself

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52

noted in his first letter, of overwhelming the central argument. Second, the
books basic idea was so unusual that Benjamin was probably unable to
follow it, particularly since his reading appears not to have been very intensive. The history of the books reception has shown that he was not alone in
his limited preparedness to understand it.9 Elias book cut across comparable
works of the period.
For the author the question was not how social structures become embedded in the subject through familial socialization processes and determine the
subjects behaviour, a question that Fromm, and before him, in another
manner, Bernfeld and Reich, had made the topic of analytical social psychology. It was more one of establishing how the human psychical apparatus
changes in the same way as social conditions change, and thus from a longterm perspective is subjected to a similar lawlike order, without this development being either determined or able to be planned, as historical materialism
assumed. For this reason Elias could not be a Marxist.
The author expanded on this underlying methodological concept in both
his letters to Benjamin, but gave no indication of the result he came to.
Perhaps there would have been little point in doing so by letter, which is why
Elias suggested a conversation in person. But one can see that the core thesis
of the book is that the increasing social intertwinement in which individuals
are bound in the course of history has led to ever-stronger self-discipline and
affect control. Their cause lies on the political and social level, the result is
psychical and also social in nature. The manner in which people live with
each other changes; this is why their behaviour changes; this is why their consciousness and their emotional economy as a whole changes is what is
written in the second volume of The Civilizing Process.
Elias demonstrated this connection between the changes in social and
psychic structures with the transformation of table manners, sleeping and
eating habits, conversation rules, aggression, sexual behaviour and the attitude towards bodily needs. To this end he used etiquette manuals, lexicons
and literary texts and let the sources speak extensively for themselves. The
numerous examples are above all the medium which is to clarify the central
thesis. It is not spiritual, religious, or artistic phenomena that stand in the
foreground as products of human imagination or labour, but elementary
forms of behaviour. This is why Elias made a clear distinction in his book
between culture and civilization and vigorously rejected Benjamins view
that the work had a cultural-historical content. Already in his 1937 article
on Eduard Fuchs, Benjamin had polemically established the boundary
between cultural history and the historical-materialist conception of history.
He did not perceive how things really stood with Elias. For the author of The
Civilizing Process was concerned only with demonstrating an increasing
psychic and physical self-constraint among people over the centuries.
In the second part of his book Elias showed that this development was not

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53

possible without an increasing monopolization and division of functions at

the political level, which was brought about by state formation in the early
modern period. He also referred to this in his letter to Benjamin of 17 April
1938, but did not expand on its substance. This meant that like many reviewers Benjamin could not empathize with the organic connection between the
two parts and expressed views which occupied him but which had little to do
with the conception of the book. But the misunderstanding which Elias
tried to clear up in his second letter could no longer be eliminated, since Benjamin wanted to make his discussion rigidly dependent on particular presuppositions. They were absent in Elias case, so he had to take Benjamins
reply as a rejection of his request.
IV

Benjamin himself there were also personal grounds for his reaction to
Elias. When Elias letter reached him, he was working intensively on an
article on Baudelaire, which he had discussed with Horkheimer in April 1937
as a project to follow on from the Fuchs essay, instead of the suggested study
of the relationship between cultural history and historical materialism, with
respect to the significance of psychoanalysis for historiography. But in April
1938 not one word had been written, as he wrote in a letter to Scholem on
the 14th of the month. Nothing occupied him more in this period, as almost
all his letters indicate. Elias request came to him in the middle of a difficult
period. The article was part of Benjamins PassagenWerk, his great project on
the prehistory of modernity in the 19th century, which he worked on from
1929 to his death, a fragment of which constitutes Volume 5 of Ralph Tiedemanns excellent edition of his collected works.
Although he constantly came back to the project, Benjamin knew that he
could never properly bring it to fruition. This is why he removed the work
on Baudelaire from the conception. A book with the title Charles Baudelaire:
A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism was to contain the philosophy of
history. The Baudelaire article was then planned as a part of that book. It was
not completed. In order to work on the article in peace, Benjamin was forced
to leave Paris. In July 1938 he travelled to Skovsbostrand near Svendborg to
see Brecht, whom he had visited for longer periods in 1934 and 1936. The
departure date for the trip to Denmark was 12 June, the day of the second
letter to Elias; this emerges from his two-part letter to Scholem written on
the same day.
Like the trip, this double letter was also of existential significance. The first
part is over eight pages long, in which Benjamin discusses Max Brods 1937
biography of Kafka. It contained the sum of his engagement with Kafkas
work, which dated back to the mid-1920s and had begun to appear in print
For

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54

in 1931; it was also to appear as a review. The second letter of 12 June provides information on the background of his writings on Kafka. Scholem
referred to it in 1975 in his book Walter Benjamin - the History of a Friendship, but it was first printed in full in 1980 in his later correspondence with
Benjamin. The letter refers to ideas that Benjamin and Scholem exchanged in
February 1938 in Paris. Benjamin thought then, according to Scholem in his
personal report, that it would represent a great liberation for him in his work
to be able to be completely independent of the Institute for a longer period.
Thought was given to emigration to Israel. For financial reasons, Benjamin
hoped for a contract with Salman Schocken, who had published the sixvolume Kafka series edited by Max Brod. Scholem was to mediate the contact
with Schocken for a book on Kafka. A critique of Brods recently published
biography of Kafka was made part of the plan for the study. Nothing came
of the plan, since Schocken did not get involved. But Benjamin had also not
pursued its realization consistently, as his correspondence with Scholem
shows, although he completed the Kafka text and sent it on 12 June 1938.
Indeed, in the additional comments he wrote: To begin with, everything
must firstly take second place to my work on Baudelaire.
Benjamin was so occupied with his work on Baudelaire that he rejected not
only Elias offer, but also that of Scholem to meet him in Paris in the summer
of 1938. The editors of the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung, who had planned
to take the article, kept pressuring him, and Benjamin sent the not quite completed manuscript on 28 September from Copenhagen to New York. It was
not accepted and after a long correspondence, in the form of a reworking of
the Flaneur fragment, which Benjamin took on between late February and
late July 1939, it was published in the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung under
the titleCber einige Motive bei Baudelaire in 1940. For a number of reasons,
Elias request came at an unsuitable time.

Elias

to

Benjamin
1

University Street,
W.C.1 [London]
17.4.38

Honourable Herr Doktor,

I have taken the liberty of sending you a copy of the first volume of my
work Ueber den Prozess der Zivilisation under separate cover. Gisela
Freund wrote to me that she had spoken to you about it. I would be very
pleased - and it is rather my wish - to see the book reviewed by you in the
institutes

journal.

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55

I will say to you openly, that I have posed myself a rather considerable task
with this book. Behind all the many materials and examples, which perhaps
attract too much attention, but which were unavoidable if I was not to speak
only in generalities, stands the idea that we can never understand the relation
between the social process and the psychical as long as we see in the psychical only something static and unchangeable, as long as we do not also see
the psychical as in process. It leads nowhere, it seems to me, if from a
Marxist position one criticizes or opposes psychoanalysis or some other ahistorical form of psychology because of this or the other detail. Before us
stands the more positive task of making the rules of the historical change in
the psychical accessible to our understanding. This is the contribution which
this first volume seeks to make. Then it remains for us to investigate, step by
step, which social processes are the motors of this psychical change. That
takes place in the second volume, which is in press at the moment, although
for external reasons we will unfortunately have to wait some time before it

appears.
I cannot judge if I have succeeded in representing the problem I have posed
myself clearly and convincingly. I hope, after a Scandinavian lecture tour
which I am commencing now, to be able to pass through Paris, and I would
be very pleased if I then had the opportunity of speaking personally to you
about it. But because it appears that I will have to go to America in the
autumn, it would be doing me
review to appear before that.
In the meantime I am,

great favour if you could arrange for the

with best wishes

your
very sincere

Norbert Elias

[signature]
Benjamin to Elias
Paris,

13

May

1938

Very Honourable Herr Elias,

With thanks I acknowledge receipt of your work. I have read it with great
interest. The material you presented was unknown to me; it illustrates your
discussion very well.
If I have understood it correctly, you are initially concerned with an introduction to the problem. The general variability of the concept of civilization
will become clear to the reader of your work. At times the evidence which
you produce is extraordinarily gripping.
In relation to the underlying methodical question, which you develop on

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56

xvii, you will, as you have written to me, develop an answer to it in the
second volume of your work. You pose this question because you distance
yourself from historical relativism and keep in view an order in historical
change. Here it seems that for you the choice which presents itself is between
the idealist conception of history and that of dialectical materialism. I
presume that in the second volume you will take up a position in relation to
page

this methodical question.

It is the question which stands at the centre of my own interests. I would
prefer, before I review your book, to await the development of your position, since I am not very competent in relation to the pragmatic accomplishments of your work. There are those who know the cultural history of the
16th-18th centuries better than I do.
In my view there would be no barrier to my reviewing your book later if
the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung deals with the cultural-historical content
of your work with an interim reviewer. It would hardly need my encouragement ; otherwise I would gladly see it appear.
With best wishes
Your very sincere

[no signature, carbon copy]

Elias to
Dr Norbert Elias

Benjamin
1

University Street,
London WC. 1
3 June 38

Very Honourable Herr Doktor,

Thank you for your letter of 13 May and for the kind words about my
work. Forgive me for the delay in my reply. I was on a rather strenuous
lecture tour for six weeks and only now am I approaching settling down.
Let me come immediately to one of the central points of what you have
said to me. There is a misunderstanding: apart from the introductory comments, which you know, the second volume of my work contains as little by
way of methodological considerations as the first. As the first volume is
mainly concerned with particular concrete psychical processes, so the second
volume deals with the concrete social processes which set the psychical in
motion. It seems to me, that better than all methodological debates - of
which, I am sure in this respect you and I have very similar views, we have
had more than enough of in Germany - is practice, the concrete research
work which we are all dedicated to. And I am a little surprised to see that you
have doubts about my first volume in this respect. I would never have
believed it possible to see in it an example of the idealist conception of

history.

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57

I have, to my great satisfaction, seen on my Scandinavian trip that people

who read this book with no prejudice against me see immediately what my
primary concern is: I wanted to find a clear method and unambiguous
material which would overcome the hitherto dominant static conception of
psychical phenomena. Whoever, like you and I myself, never loses sight of
the picture of clearly structured social processes, cannot be satisfied with the
kind of static conception of the psychical which currently still predominates
in the most modern of psychological currents. Whatever one might understand by dialectic, this word strives to grasp the order, the structure, the
regularity of social changes. To show that the construction of the psychical
is subject to the same order, is the task of this first volume. This task has today
been recognized by very few people - including, for example, Erich Fromm
not to mention tackling it. This is the reason why I have turned to you with
the request for a review. I was sure that you are one of the people competent
to judge such a book. It is a misunderstanding if you believe that it is a work
of cultural history and cultural historians are particularly able to understand
it. There is already something in the distinction between civilization and
culture. And I have examples of how cultural historians, used to seeing the
essence of history in the sphere of the spirit and ideas, have a very limited
understanding of this attempt at a historical psychology, which discusses such
simple things as eating, nose-blowing and the most elementary human drives.
Above all I was not aiming - as is so often the case among cultural historians
at a simple collection of historical data, but at the demonstration of socialpsychological structures, from which it is more unequivocally possible than
ever to build the bridge to social structures.
So, once again: I would be very pleased if you could take the trouble to
review this volume of my work in the Zeitschriftfiir Sozialforschung. If you
would prefer not to do so, we can leave the matter with you. I have been out
of touch with Erich Fromm for some time. And you will understand that
under no circumstances would I want this book to be reviewed by an incom-

petent person.
I am

with warmest greetings

Your very sincere

Norbert Elias

[signature]
Benjamin to Elias
Paris XV, 10 Rue Dombasle

the 12th June 1938

Herr
Honourable
Doktor,
Very
Thank you very much for your detailed letter of 3rd June.

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58

Nothing would please me more than to be able to follow your train of

thought. But what one is to understand as social psychology is, in my view, to
be determined first on the basis of a social theory, which has made its primary
theme the opposition between classes - namely the form of exploitation of the
work of the majority by a minority predominating in the existing society.
Contributions to such a social theory, founded on the materialist method,
which differ from the so-called methodological studies, about which I share
your low opinion, we have not had a surplus of here in Germany, nor do we
have one today.
Not impossible, that my approach appears limited to you; but what I
produce, including a review, has exactly this as a precondition.
With the best greetings,
Your very sincere

[no signature, carbon copy]

Institut fr

Literaturzvissenschaft, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Translated by Robert Van Krieken
NOTES

For their assistance I wish to thank Gisèle Freund, Norbert Elias, Fritz Karger,
Walther Killy, Hermann Korte, Gershom Scholem, Rolf Tiedemann, Siegfried
Unseld, Manfred Wekwerth and the staff at the Literature Archive at the DDR
Academy of Arts in Berlin. Norbert Elias and Suhrkamp kindly gave permission to
publish the letters, which consist of typewritten originals from Elias and carbon
copies from Benjamin, and in which only apparent typing errors have been corrected.
1
2

Fittko (1982).
Scholem (1992).

3 See also Jay (1973), and Wiggershaus (1994).

4 Marcus (1964).
5 Karger (1977).
6 On the origins and reception of the book, see Korte

(1988).

reported on the relationship between the Mannheim circle and the institute
staff in his Adorno-prize speech: Elias and Lepenies (1977).

7 Elias

8 Elias (1994).
9 See Gleichman et al.

(1979 and 1984), especially the pieces by Goudsblom and

Rehberg.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Elias, N. (1994) The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

Elias, N and Lepenies, W. (1977) Zwei Reden [Two speeches]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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1998 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

59

Fittko, L. (1982) Der alte Benjamin [The old Benjamin], Merkur 403: 35-49.
Gleichmann, P., Goudsblom, J. and Korte, H., eds (1979) Materialen zu Norbert Elias
Zivilisationstheorie [Materials on Norbert Elias Theory of Civilization].
Frankfurt

am

Main:

Suhrkamp.

Gleichmann, P., Goudsblom, J. and Korte, H., eds (1984) Macht und Zivilisation:
Materialen zu Norbert Elias Zivilisationstheorie [Power and Civilization:
Materials on Norbert Elias Theory of Civilization], Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp.
Jay, M. (1973) The Dialectical Imagination. London: Heinemann.
Karger, F. (1977) Fata Libelli, in P. Gleichmann, J. Goudsblom and H. Korte (eds)
Human Figurations. Amsterdam: Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift.
Korte, H. (1988) Norbert Elias. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Marcus, T. (1964) Als jüdischer Verleger vor und nach 1933 in Deutschland [Being
a Jewish publisher before and after 1933 in Germany], Bulletin des Leo Baeck
Instituts 1: 138-53.

Scholem, G., ed. (1992) The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom
Scholem 1932-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wiggershaus, R. (1994) The Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Polity.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

(born in 1954) works at the Institut fur Literaturwissenschaft at the University of Stuttgart. He studied German and Political
Science in Braunschweig and Kiel, and gained his doctorate at Kiel in 1987.
His publications include: Hermen Bote: Braunschweiger Autor zwischen
Mittelalter und Neuzeit, edited with W. Wunderlich (1987), Bertolt Brechts
Aesthetik des Naiven (1989), Konstruktiver Fragmentarismus. Form und
Rezeption der Schriften Walter Benjamins (1998), as well as a number of
articles on literary and cultural history from the 16th to the 20th centuries.
DETLEV SCHOTTKER

Address: Institut fiir

Literaturwissenschaft, University of Stuttgart,

Germany.

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