Benjamin Yearns For The Storyteller Of Old

Benjamin Yearns for the Storyteller of Old
In the Story Teller by Walter Benjamin, Benjamin believes a story should reveal life experiences, should teach, and that stories should, above all, be memorable. In addition, Benjamin believes that stories should be true. He prefers a story to a novel because a story speaks directly to a reader. Unfortunately, with the rise of the printing press, there was a decline in storytelling. The printing press caused the novel to dominate. As opposed to the novel, a story creates a more personal world for the reader. Benjamin believes that the storyteller upholds tradition. Only in a story does the speaker talk directly to the reader. In his essay, he believes that the only place to find validity is to recount
When soldiers came home from WWI, they found it difficult to communicate their experiences. Life became very fast paced and the unchanging lifestyle began to change quickly. Benjamin believed, “Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent- not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?” (Benjamin, 84). As a result, Benjamin saw the decline of storytelling. Before the war, people came together to discuss a deceased person’s life. Death touched every place in someone’s house and that “dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one..”(Benjamin, 93). He feels that in the modern world death has been hidden from view. Benjamin believes that it is important to tell stories about death so that the living will know that the gate to eternity for the deceased will finally be opened. In modern world, death is too private of a matter and for people to be better acquainted with it, stories must be written about
Benjamin believes that when a man’s life is about to end he becomes the most aware of himself and his life’s situation. In his last moments, “…Inside a man as his life comes to an end- unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it – suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying posses for the living around him” (Benjamin, 94). The speaker in Fugue of Death expresses his closeness to death continually. He speaks of the prisoners having “a grave in the clouds” (Celan, 321). He also states “death comes with eyes that are blue” (Celan, 321). The blue eyes refer to the Germans that are about to send the prisoners to the crematorium. Finally, the speaker refers to the “golden hair Maragrete” which pertains to the woman the Aryan loves and “your ashen hair Shulamith” continuing the reference to the death of the