ABSTRACT
Scene one. We open on a conversation between two friends, two writers from Germany, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin. The conversation took place in 1924 in a bar on the Italian island of Capri and lasted, Bloch recalls, ‘a September night, until the return of the fishing boats from the sea at dawn.’ 1 Benjamin would note later of his stay on Capri, which ended the following month: ‘I am convinced that to have lived for a long time on Capri gives you a claim on distant journeys, so strong is the belief of anyone who has long lived there that he has all the threads in his hand and that in the fullness of time everything he needs will come to him.’ 2 The particular thread that I want to draw out here is a slender one, and doubtless a fragile thing compared with the sort of tapestries that both Bloch and Benjamin will put together in later life. I trust, though, there is a virtue at the start of things in working in close-up like this. There will be journeys to come, distant enough I hope. The topic of the friends’ discussion this September night: a sort of literary folk tale that is familiar to them both called ‘Blond Eckbert,’ written over a hundred years earlier by the eighteenth-century author Ludwig Tieck. Bloch takes up the narrative in a postscript to his essay ‘Images of déjà vu’:
Here Berta, the wife of Eckbert, may be found narrating her own strange story about the old woman for whom she used to tend animals as a child. There was a little dog, as well as a songbird that each day laid an egg containing a pearl. The story does not proceed in a very moral fashion. Berta yearned to see the wider world, and so decided to run away. Weeping, she departed: she patted the dog and tied it inside the hut, then took the bird and a jarful of its pearls with her to the city. There she lived splendidly for a time, yet was compelled finally to strangle the bird, for its singing tormented her with feelings of remorse. She met Eckbert the knight, who became her husband; in his castle she lived happily and peacefully, though occasionally she was oppressed by thoughts of the abandoned hut and the old woman's fate. She told all this to Walter, a knight who was her husband's friend, one Autumn evening in Eckbert's castle. What is extraordinary in Tieck's fairy tale is Walter's response to Berta's confession. ‘Many thanks, noble lady,’ he says. ‘I can well imagine you beside your singing bird, and how you fed poor little Strohmian.’ Now Berta, in telling her story, had never mentioned the little dog's name; yet Walter speaks the name quite casually and matter-of-factly, as if he had seen the dog with his own eyes. That night Berta told her husband, ‘I was seized with great horror that a stranger should help me to remember the memory of my secrets.’ And the story continues in the same meandering style. It goes forward even while standing still and always comes back again to the interrupted situation, even in its final sentence: ‘Faint and bewildered, Eckbert heard the old woman speaking, the dog barking, and the bird repeating its song.’ 3
As Peter Krapp notes in his study of the history of the topic since Freud, déjà vu– the not uncommon experience we have when we recognize, or feel that we recognize in what is happening in the present, something of what has already happened, in the past– ‘exemplified for Bloch the popular “metaphysics” of his contemporaries.’ But for Bloch that was not, Krapp remarks, its most interesting aspect. 4 In fact, Bloch proposes Berta's situation as a special case; an example of what he calls ‘déjà vu of the other,’ although he will go on to insist that it is not because of a stranger that Berta has unlocked the memory of her secrets. The forgotten secret is all her own– except, of course, to the extent it is exposed here to the rest of us, passerby readers and lookers in, whoever might come upon Berta's tale and make something of it, to interpret as it were.