“Erdbeben von Lissabon,” GS, 7.1, 220–6. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
Broadcast on Radio Berlin, October 31, 1931, and on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on January 6, 1932. The Funkstunde announced the broadcast for October 31, 1931, from 3:20–3:40 pm (see Schiller-Lerg, Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 173). The Frankfurt broadcast was advertised in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung as taking place on January 6, 1932, with a variant title: “ ‘Das Erdbeben von Lissabon 1755’ [The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755], read by Dr. Walter Benjamin, Berlin.” The talk was the second of two broadcasts on the Youth Hour, from 3:15–4:00 pm.
1 In 1756, Kant wrote three essays on the subject of the earthquake, emphasizing the nature of its physical dynamics rather than theological justifications: “Von den Ursachen der Erderschütterungen bei Gelegenheit des Unglücks, welches die westliche Länder von Europa gegen das Ende des vorigen Jahres betroffen hat” (“On the Causes of Earthquakes, on the Occasion of the Calamity that Befell the Western Countries of Europe toward the End of Last Year”); “Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwürdigsten Vorfälle des Erdbebens, welches an dem Ende des 1755sten Jahres einen großen Teil der Erde erschüttert hat” (“History and Natural Description of the Most Noteworthy Occurrences of the Earthquake that Struck a Large Part of the Earth at the End of the Year 1755”); “Fortgesetzte Betrachtung der seit einiger Zeit wahrgenommenen Erderschütterungen” (“Continued Observations of the Terrestrial Convulsions that have been Perceived for Some Time”). See translations by Olaf Reinhardt in Kant, Naturai Science, ed. Eric Watkins, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
2 Benjamin borrows from an account of the earthquake by Rev. Charles Davy. For Davy’s text, see “The Earthquake at Lisbon,” in The Worlds Story: A History of the World in Story, Song and Art, ed. Eva March Tappan, vol. 5 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 618–28.
CHAPTER 25. Theater Fire in Canton
I have told you about the eruption of Vesuvius, which buried old Pompeii, and last time I told you about the earthquake that destroyed the capital of Portugal in the eighteenth century. Today I would like to talk about an event that took place in China almost 100 years ago. If I had simply wanted to tell you about any old catastrophe set in China, I could have — as you know all too well — chosen other, more recent incidents than this theater fire in Canton. You need only think about the battles that now fill the newspapers day after day or about last year’s floods of the Yangtze, about which we have far more detailed reports, naturally, than about this long-ago theater fire.1 But what matters to me is to speak about a subject through which you can really get to know the Chinese a little, and for that there’s nowhere better than a theater, perhaps. I don’t mean the plays that are performed, or the actors — them, too, but that will come later — but chiefly the audience and the space itself: the Chinese theater, which bears no resemblance to anything we imagine when we think of a theater. When a stranger draws near, he would believe himself to be anywhere but in front of a theater. He hears a formless din of drums, cymbals, and squeaking stringed instruments. Only after he has seen such a theater or heard one of the gramophone recordings of Chinese theater music does the European believe he knows what caterwauling is. If he then steps into the theater, he will feel like someone who enters a restaurant and first has to walk through a dirty kitchen: he will stumble upon a sort of laundry room in which four or five men stand bent over steaming tubs, washing hand towels. These towels play the biggest role in Chinese theater. People wipe off their face and hands with them before and after every cup of tea, every bowl of rice; servants are constantly taking the used towels out and carrying fresh ones in, often flinging them skillfully over the heads of the theater audience. Eating and drinking is rife during the performance, and that makes up for the lack of everything that provides us with comfort and a ceremonious atmosphere in a theater. The Chinese do not demand comfort, because they have none at home either. They come from their unheated apartments into the unheated theater, sit on wooden benches with their feet on flagstones, and it does not concern them in the slightest. Nor do they give a hoot about ceremony. That’s because they are much too great theater authorities not to demand the freedom to make their opinion of the performance known at any time. If they were to express it solely at the premiere — as we do here — then they would wait a long time, because there are plays in China that are presented over and over again for four or five hundred years, and even the newest are mostly versions of stories that everyone knows and has half-memorized in the form of novels, poems, or other plays. So ceremoniousness does not exist in the Chinese theater, and suspense doesn’t exist either, at least not with regard to the denouement of a plot.
Instead there is another sort of suspense, which we can best compare to what we feel when we see circus acrobats swinging on a trapeze, or jugglers balancing a whole stack of plates on a stick they perch on their nose. Actually, every Chinese actor must simultaneously be an acrobat and juggler and on top of that a dancer, singer, and fencer. You will understand why when I tell you that there are no sets in the Chinese theater. The actor not only has to play his role, but he must also act out the set. How does he do that? I will explain it to you. If he has to cross a threshold, for example, going through a door that is not there, he will lift his feet a little above the floor as though stepping over something. In contrast, slow steps while lifting his feet high, for example, indicate that he is going up a flight of stairs. Or if a general has to ascend a hill to observe a battle, then the actor who portrays him will climb on a chair. One can recognize a rider by the whip the actor holds in his hand. A mandarin being carried in a sedan-chair is portrayed by an actor who walks across the stage surrounded by four other actors, who walk with their backs bent, as if they were carrying a sedan chair. But if they suddenly make a jerky movement, it means that the mandarin has gotten down. Naturally, actors who have to be able to do so much have a long apprenticeship, usually almost seven years. During this time they learn not only singing, acrobatics, and all the rest but also the roles for about fifty plays, which they are expected to be able to perform at any time. This is necessary because it is rarely enough to perform just a single play. Instead, one scene is taken from one play, another from another, and they are all put together in a varied sequence, so that on a single evening there are often more than a dozen plays performed. On the other hand, a single play, if one wanted to perform it in its entirety, would often take two or three days, that’s how long they are. There are, however, some that are very short in which only one man performs, and I will now read you one of these. It is called “The Dream.” The speaker is an old man.
I would like to tell you a beautiful story. It is regrettable how unfair the sky is; it lets rain and snow fall down but no silver bars. Yesterday evening I was lying on my hearthside bed of clay; I tossed and turned and could not fall asleep. I lay awake from the first night-watch to the second and then again from the second until the third was sounded. As the third night-watch sounded, I had a dream. I dreamed of a treasure to the south of the village. So I took a spade and a hoe and went out into the field to dig up the treasure. I was really lucky; after a few strokes with the spade and hoe, I dug it up. I dug up a whole cellar of silver shoes; it was covered by a big mat of rushes. I lifted it up and looked under it. Oh, I had to laugh: there was a coral branch fifteen meters high, real red carnelian and white agate. Then I took seven to eight sacks of diamonds, six big baskets full of cat’s eye agates, thirty-three chiming clocks, sixty-four women’s watches, beautiful boots and caps, beautiful jackets and cloaks, beautiful new-fangled little bags, seventy-two gold bars and 33,333 silver shoes in addition. I had so much gold and silver, I didn’t know where I should put it. Should I buy land and build something to house it? But I was afraid of droughts and floods. Or should I open up a grain business? Then the mice could eat everything. Should I lend money and charge interest? There were no guarantors. Should I open up a pawn shop? I was afraid I would have to shell out money; what if the manager runs off with the money, where would I look for him? All those thousands of difficulties made me so irritated, I woke up from the irritation: it was only a dream! I had groped around the hearthside bed with both hands; while doing so I had touched the lighter — that was the silver shoes! Then I had touched the brass pipe: that was the gold bars! After groping here and there for quite a while, I came across a big scorpion with a green head, and it stung me so that I howled loudly.2