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t h r e e  K i N D s  o F  r u i N :  
h e i D e G G e r , 
B e N J a M i N ,  s e B a l D
M a x  P e n s k y *
(1) stein und Zeit1
There is a strange moment in the great French sociologist Maurice 
halbwachs’ unfinished, posthumously published work, The Collective 
Memory. The topic is, as ever, the social nature of memory or the so-
ciological description of memory processes as irreducibly group-based. 
social groups generate memory-processes as part of their internal soli-
darity and as the external expression of their shared identity, and halb-
wachs, not unreasonably, suspected that for this reason all social groups 
maintained not just a temporal but a spatial memory-process, or better, 
a suite of memory routines that ramify through space and time, be-
tween individuals and groups, and further, between groups and mate-
rial objects.
halbwachs believed that a group’s extension in physical space – 
where and how the group situated itself, in a non-supervenient manner 
from its various individual members – played a constitutive role in how 
its individual members would re-member. This extension is not simply 
a matter of physically occupying a given space or series of spaces but of 
transforming and creating space through organized activity: building. 
and this process, halbwachs suggested, was dialectical: just as the en-
durance of the social group, its internal cohesion and external identity, 
was dependent on the stability of the groups’ spatiality, so too the physi-
cal space itself was in a real sense dependent on the enduring memories 
of the group that occupies it.
* state university of New york, Binghamton
1 i borrow this play on words from assmann, J. (1995), Stein und Zeit: Mensch und Gesellschaft 
im alten Ägypten. München: W. Fink Verlag.
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P o l i G r a F i
This suggestive hypothesis led halbwachs to suspect that urban 
groups may actually enact or be, rather than merely inhabit, the built 
urban environment. in other words, buildings are not expressions, sym-
bols, or repositories of collective memory, but the latter’s physical pro-
cess. The “stones of the city,” as halbwachs writes, are therefore not al-
legories for the stability of an urban population’s shared identity. in large 
measure, they simply are that identity.
This implies that buildings, as cases for memory, don’t merely pre-
serve collective memory for the series of organisms that are encased in 
them. rather, the buildings are those memories, and for this reason their 
durability and stability through time both holds the urban collective to-
gether, literally, and at the same time place that collective in a peculiar 
concentration of time, a social time where the endurance of stone over 
time, and through time, is both nature and history at once.
Buildings enact a dialectic of natural history, a discourse that i here 
borrow from the suggestive and compact essay on “The idea of Natural 
history” that Theodor W. adorno published in 1932. There adorno sug-
gested that the idea of natural history is best understood as a dialectical 
way of seeing, a construction of concepts which like a chemical elective 
affinity become volatile in one another’s presence and can, under suit-
able theoretical conditions, reverse polarity, such that nature, developed 
to the point of its most extreme significance, appears as the saturation of 
time – that is, as fully timely, hence historical being – where humanity 
as a historical phenomenon in turn appears under the sign of the his-
torical repetition of catastrophe, and therefore as mythically recursive 
and static, that is, as nature.2
Nature, for the appearance of timelessness, or resistance to the en-
croachment of historical time, is always in a real sense illusion only; his-
tory, for the built landscape stands opposed to the materiality of nature 
and yet at the same time is nothing other than that same nature. in its 
stone buildings, the urban collective can experience a genuinely dialecti-
cal relationship to their own temporality, since, as halbwachs writes, it
2 see: adorno, t.W. (1984), “The idea of Natural history,” (translated by robert hullot-
Kentor). Telos, no. 60, (summer 1984), pp. 111–124. For a discussion see: Pensky, M. (2004), 
“Natural history: The life and afterlife of a Concept in adorno,” Critical Horizons vol. 5, no.1 
(2004), pp. 227–238.
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t h r e e  K i N D s  o F  r u i N :  h e i D e G G e r ,  B e N J a M i N ,  s e B a l D
has no impression of change so long as streets and buildings remain the 
same. Few social formations are at once more stable and better guaranteed per-
manence…The nation may be prone to the most violent upheavals. The citizen 
goes out, reads the news, and mingles with groups discussing what has hap-
pened. The young must hurriedly defend the frontier. The government levies 
heavy taxes that must be paid…But all these troubles take place in a familiar 
setting that appears totally unaffected. Might it not be the contrast between 
the impassive stones and such disturbances, which convinces people that, after 
all, nothing has been lost, for walls and homes remain standing?3
Walls and homes did not remain standing. halbwachs himself did 
not experience the mass destruction of many of the cities of europe dur-
ing the second World War: arrested by Vichy officials after protesting 
the arrest and internment of his elderly Jewish mother- and father-in-
law, he was himself deported to Buchenwald where he died shortly be-
fore the war’s end. But his insight about the relationship between build-
ings, subjects, and collective memory is important for framing a range 
of questions concerning the ruin, rather than the stability, of buildings.
how does the ruined building come to articulate a distinctive mode 
of a dialectic relating nature and history – a natural history in which 
both terms depend upon, exacerbate, and ultimately interpenetrate one 
another? is there a mode of memory that is appropriate to the ruined 
building, released by or mobilized by the experience of former sites of 
human dwelling that have been evacuated, that stand now as forms of 
experience? how does one think about the natural history of the ruin?
These questions can draw on a long and well-established tradition 
in which the ruined building stands for, bears, a burden of signification 
for the observer who reconstructs it, so to speak, as a site for something 
other than dwelling or shelter. in this sense one could say that the his-
tory of the ruin as a meaning-bearing location is the history of social 
and cultural modernity. in an admirably concise recent history, for in-
stance, Brian Dillon traces the consistency in the history of attitudes to-
ward ruined classical sites, which as early as the first origins of cultural 
modernity in the late 14th century were already being reconstructed as 
hieroglyphs, open signifiers whose age, partially destroyed state, and 
3 halbwachs, M. (1980), The Collective Memory. New york: harper & row, p. 131.
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jagged and gapped history of transmission qualified them as shelters or 
cases for a wide range of indirect normative claims.4
a “secret language of gesture, line and ornament” could justify the 
dialectically subtle self-understanding and self-assertion of a newly con-
fident age precisely by comparing itself (unfavorably) to the pomp and 
massive majesty of classical architecture, with the crucial proviso that the 
age that inhabited the latter is vanished. as the ruin symbolizes the tran-
sience and temporality of building and living, it both threatens and of-
fers significance as a meditational object-lesson on the relation between 
social life and physical life. The ruin, to put it probably too preciously, is 
rune: a cipher or mark whose very enigmatic character qualifies it both 
for occult significance and as a sign of the constant threat of an insig-
nificant social world threatened at all moments with the omnipresence 
of guaranteed oblivion.
it was a short step from this renaissance fixation on the ruin as vis-
ible mark of a dialectic of meaning and meaninglessness to the baroque 
allegorical construction of the ruin as the physical embodiment of hu-
man vanity and the godforsakenness of earthly life. in both theater and 
the graphic arts, the moral-religious catechism of human vanity is set 
against the background of the ruins of pompous classical culture. ar-
chitectural stone, marble and granite, and the repertoire of decorative 
styles that embellish stone, disclose their true significance only once 
they are weathered, cracked, partial. and subsequent transformations 
of the semiotics of the architectural ruin kept, mutatis mutandis, this 
core function: the physical ruin is cleared, so to speak, by the intention 
of the subjective observer, the destroyed or unbuilt building is re-built, 
reconstructed, as a blank screen on which the various normative ambi-
tions of the observer can be projected.
While the status of the ruin as an allegorical site for moral catechism 
is most evident in the baroque preoccupation with human vanity and 
pride and its attendant relapse back into the godforsaken or abandoned 
scene of unredeemed nature, even the enlightenment continued, in 
a secularized manner, the allegorization of ruin. The ruin’s plasticity 
could allegorize both natural or man-made disasters and the omnipres-
4 Dillon, B. (2005), “Fragments from a history of ruin,” Cabinet, vol. 20 (Winter 2005).
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t h r e e  K i N D s  o F  r u i N :  h e i D e G G e r ,  B e N J a M i N ,  s e B a l D
ent threat of the evacuation of meaning from the landscape of human 
existence that such disasters threaten. sublime violence, again either 
human and historical (war, pestilence, famine) or natural (earthquake, 
volcano) are processes of creative destruction that offer ruins as sites of 
ambivalence, whose collective memory requires ongoing philosophical 
interpretation.
hence a dialectic of natural history constructs the image of the ruin 
as the “chronotope” in Bahktin’s sense, a spatio-temporal singularity 
which serves as a generative point for narrative construction and for 
the narrative work of collective memory. if, for instance, the narrative 
of guaranteed historical progress through the gradual historical victory 
of human technological control is vitiated through the repetition of di-
saster – a common enough trope in the enlightenment philosophes, just 
as much as in their splenetic critic, Voltaire – then the image of the ru-
ined city (lisbon, Pompeii, smyrna) destroyed by some sublime spasm 
of overwhelming violence, continues under changed terms to serve as 
the familiar catechism of human vanity and the return of nature to 
take revenge for the injuries done to it. But at the same time the ruin 
can also, without contradiction, operate as the mnemonic device that 
reminds enlightenment culture of the proximity of natural disaster or 
human folly, reminding it of the autonomous and contingent nature of 
its technical and moral progress, or serving as a concrete visual cue of 
the difference between european rationality, with its internal resources 
for control and stabilization of social antagonisms, and the calamities 
of vanished empires and their smashed cities, which had no such ratio 
to save them.5
in what follows i would like to trace three intertwined discourses 
that emerge when this narrative of ruin as cipher of moral catechism, 
or the ruin as manipulable allegory of natural history, is further trans-
formed by the anticipation, and then the memory, of the disastrous 
“urbicide” of the european city in World War ii.6 in the first, hei-
5 For a fuller discussion see: Pensky, M. (2010), ” Contributions to a Theory of storms: his-
torical Knowing and historical Progress in Kant and Benjamin,” The Philosophical Forum, vol. 
Xli, nos. 1 and 2 (spring/summer 2010), pp. 149–174.
6 i borrow this term from Mendieta, e. (2007), “The literature of urbicide: Friedrich, Nos-
sack, sebald, and Vonnegut,” Theory & Event, Vol. 10, no. 2 (2007).
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degger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” evokes a world without 
ruin and, for heidegger, without a specific kind of (urban) memory: 
heidegger’s postwar project, the re-pastoralization of Germany’s shat-
tered cities, seeks an exit from the dialectic of natural history by envel-
oping both poles of this dialectic within a space of thinking that is, in 
effect, “unruinable.” in Benjamin’s notes and sketches for the arcades 
Project, the ruin as the concrete image that emerges at the site of nature 
and history at their moment of maximum dialectical interpenetration is 
allowed or encouraged to present itself once the subjective intentional-
ity of the magisterial subject, the sovereign observer, is erased so far as 
possible from the site of ruin: this complex and frankly somewhat un-
hinged experimental methodology, so close ultimately to the intoxicat-
ing operations of surrealism, attempts to wrest the power of the image 
of the ruin from the experience of the big city – Paris, paradigmatically 
– even where or perhaps especially where no ruin is to be found. Final-
ly, the prose works of the German writer W.s. sebald present a version 
of the natural history of the ruin which, despite sebald’s extraordinary 
prose, in fact seeks to recuperate a discourse of the ruin as site of moral 
catechism that dates back well before the experiences, and concrete re-
mainders of experiences, he describes.
(2) totenbaum
When she returned to Germany in 1950, hannah arendt witnessed a 
peculiar behavior amongst the German citizens, coping with their shat-
tered cities a half decade after the war’s end. Picking their way through 
these peculiar urban areas where ruins and inhabited buildings coexisted 
together with a great number of constructions that were an odd combi-
nation of both, the inhabitants, arendt noticed, had taken to sending 
one another postcards of “churches and market squares, public buildings 
and bridges that no longer existed,”7 as though the cards and their im-
ages of an intact city could rectify or supplant the reality of the landscape 
that they had to occupy. For arendt, what was even more noteworthy 
7 safransky, r. (1998), Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (translated by ewald osers). 
Cambridge, Ma: harvard university Press, p. 362.
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t h r e e  K i N D s  o F  r u i N :  h e i D e G G e r ,  B e N J a M i N ,  s e B a l D
than this practice was the specific constellation of affects that seemed 
to accompany it: “The reality of destruction that surrounds every Ger-
man,” she later wrote of her visit, “is resolved in a brooding, though not 
very deeply rooted self-pity, which, however, vanishes rapidly when in 
some wide thoroughfares ugly little flat buildings, originating in some 
main street in america, are erected.” 8
even sixty years later the ubiquitous Fussgaengerzonen lined so of-
ten with “ugly little flat buildings” are a common enough sight in most 
German downtowns, and arendt understandably sees the proliferating 
architecture of the new american dominium as another kind of loss, an-
other infliction of a technological solution to a human catastrophe. on 
the other hand, though, her scorn at the satisfied reactions of Germans 
to the rapid americanization of their destroyed cities itself feeds from 
the kind of discourse of resentment and victimhood she also despises.
her trip in 1950 had been to visit Martin heidegger. The city of 
Freiburg (where Benjamin and sebald both trained as university stu-
dents) had been attacked by more than 300 lancaster heavy bombers 
on the night of November 27, 1944, and had much of its old city center 
damaged in the attack. arendt certainly would have seen downtown 
rubble piles there, as she passed through on her way to heidegger’s hut 
at todtnauberg. and whatever else might have transpired at that en-
counter, we can speculate that the two might have had occasion to talk 
about houses.
heidegger’s essay on “Bauen Wohnen Denken” was not published 
until 1954, but heidegger notes there that the essay had first been given 
as a lecture on august 5 1951, for a Darmstadt colloquium on “Man and 
space.”9 Perhaps not surprisingly, heidegger’s lecture offers a philosoph-
ical example of the sort of erasure of memory of destruction that sebald 
would condemn in postwar German literature. There appears to be no 
special urgency in the text to register the fact of physical destruction or 
its aftermath, which is simply absent; instead heidegger notes as a social 
fact requiring no further explanation the “current housing shortage,” 
8 arendt, h. “Besuch in Deutschland,” in: Zur Zeit, Politische Essays, 46. Quoted in: safran-
sky, r. (1998), p. 364.
9 heidegger, h. (1971), “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in: Poetry, Language, Thought (trans-
lated by albert hoftstadter). New york: harper & row.
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the technically adept response to which has generated housing but not 
dwelling. it is this humdrum set of social needs that heidegger addresses 
with his own more high-blown worries about the inhuman and alien-
ating aspect of the cheap and americanized housing architecture that 
West Germany, at least, was providing to address the shortage.
“on all sides we hear talk about the housing shortage, and with good rea-
son. Nor is there just talk: there is action too. We try to fill the need by provid-
ing houses, by promoting the building of houses, planning the whole architec-
tural enterprise. however hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening 
the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a 
lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older also than the increase 
of the earth’s population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real 
dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of 
dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.” [142]
such new construction, heidegger noted, certainly provided much-
needed shelter. But they were also houses impossible to dwell in: “to-
day’s houses may even be well-planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, 
open to air, light, and sun, but – do the houses in themselves hold any 
guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?” [145–6]
it’s not entirely clear from “Building Dwelling Thinking” why postwar 
residential urban architecture was undwellable for heidegger, though it 
seems plausible to suppose that much of the problem is simply the loca-
tion in an urban center, rather than any specific features of design and 
construction. But it’s also true that the very newness and sameness, the 
detachment from the historicity of a population in its landscape, made 
the Neubau inhabitable but undwellable, the latter implying for hei-
degger a specifically pastoral-agrarian mode of existence where the mode 
and means of residential construction exhibits manifest connections to 
the nurturing and cultivating work of a primary economy.
Building cultivates the intertwinement of human being with its man-
ifold surroundings. hence there is an implied antinomy, for heidegger, 
between building and construction – building is less about imposing 
human technical prowess through the medium of stone, wood or fabri-
cated material than it is the continual preserving, nurturing subsistence 
within a landscape that has always been there. Building in this sense may 
imply a desistence from the will to construction. Building is dwelling; 
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and dwelling is ‘the manner in which mortals are on the earth.” “Build-
ing as dwelling,” heidegger concludes, “unfolds into the building that 
cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.” [148]
This antinomy between building and constructing certainly implies 
a peculiar relationship to the phenomenon of the ruin. in one sense, 
certainly, “Building Dwelling Thinking” reacts to the urban ruin less by 
forgetting it than by enforcing a kind of mental hygiene where the ruin 
cannot be registered at all, though life in Freiburg in 1950 would cer-
tainly have made this mental hygiene difficult to practice.
structural stone was of course out of the question for new construc-
tion. as an economic fact stone building would be reserved for the re-
construction of historically significant cathedrals, churches and other 
public buildings, in cases where structural stones could be recovered and 
reassembled. in other cases the massive use of brick masonry for housing 
in German cities provided a kind of basic pattern of reconstructive labor 
for decades to come: the picking, sorting, and stacking of the millions of 
bricks left behind once the fires ignited by dropped incendiary ordnance 
had superheated mortar and caused the ubiquitous multistory masonry 
apartment blocks to collapse. (in The Rings of Saturn, W.G. sebald as-
cribes this particular childhood memory, the postwar city landscape as 
an endless plain of stack after stack of recovered and sorted brick, to 
Michael hamburger, but it must have been extraordinarily widespread 
for urban childhoods in both Germanies in the 1950s.10)
how can the erection of Neubau satisfy this duality of building, such 
that it is both cultivation and construction in a single act? heidegger of-
fers no hints on this subject, but implicit in his pastoralism is the prin-
ciple that there must be no ruins. one simple way to achieve this organic 
building principle is to avoid urban building entirely; another compat-
ible principle would be to eschew all manufactured building materials 
and construct principally from trees, that is, from wood. (heidegger’s 
example of a rural stone bridge that “gathers” the banks of the stream 
through the pastoral meadow is interesting here just because one cannot 
of course dwell in (or under) it.) and in fact heidegger’s pastoral ideal 
of the form of human habitation that satisfies all his positive criteria for 
10 sebald, W.G., The Rings of Saturn, p. 177.
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dwelling in “Building Dwelling Thinking” is the schwabian farmhouse, 
roughly 200 years old in heidegger’s own description, with wooden tim-
bers as the principle structural element, and plasterwork, stone, masonry 
and metal present if at all as (limited) design elements necessary for re-
inforcement or insulation or, one imagines, in a very limited sense, as 
ornament. “here,” heidegger writes, “the self-sufficiency of the power 
to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness 
into things, ordered the house.”
it placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, 
among the meadows close to the spring. it gave the wide overhanging shingle 
roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reach-
ing deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter 
nights. it did not forget the altar corner behind the communal table; it made 
room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the ‘tree of the 
dead’ – for that that is what is called a coffin there: the Totenbaum – and in 
this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character 
of their journey through time.” [160]
This is, one imagines, a house that cannot, will not be ruined or, in a 
sense, ever destroyed, since in its very essence it is no longer perceptible 
as an artificial object or imposition of technical expertise inserted into a 
landscape. each cozy farmhouse, like a nodule growing in and through 
its geological setting, is a site where – to use the terms of our subject-
matter – natural history has performed yet another of its inversions, ex-
truding a building that is neither exactly built in a conventional sense 
nor precisely “natural” in the way that, say, the geological features of its 
landscape are: the farmhouse combines – or ‘gathers’ — the polarity of 
nature and history into one focal point.
This natural history of the farmhouse threatens at every moment to 
lapse into sentimentality and kitsch, as heidegger himself understands. 
it is not and cannot be the answer to the social problem, the shortage 
of decent, affordable housing, but stands as a continuing rebuke to the 
framing of the question of the house as a technological question, since 
building more does not correlate to dwelling better. and perhaps it’s 
heidegger’s very willed blindness to the tidy rubble piles, the sorted 
stacks of blasted brick, or the empty facades of Freiburg’s old downtown 
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that permits him this older and broader view of the indifference point 
of a history of building and the traces of a fugitive call to live differently.
But that Totenbaum still bothers.
one takes heidegger’s point, of course, that wooden houses in which 
one dwells, in which one invites the unity of the Fourfold, of mortals 
and divinities, earth and sky, is also a site for the unification of organic 
life and the social enactment of death, a holism under one roof that ex-
presses the full range of integrative dimensions of pastoral existence that 
urban life, so susceptible to ruin, cannot make possible. it is nevertheless 
unnerving to envision heideggers’ un-ruinable farmhouse containing 
within itself its own Totenbaum, indeed being itself just such a Toten-
baum, an organic growth, a wooden capsule, consisting of an indefinite 
series of Totenbaueme, like nested dolls or a series of nested cases or etuis 
enclosing or encapsulating the indefinite, indeed indifferentiated lives 
of the inhabitants, who surrender their individuality in this fantasy of 
pastoral fulfillment as readily, and as completely, as any odyssean sailor 
threatened at every cove with the overwhelming mythical power of un-
mastered nature.
The strangeness of the word itself needs to be registered, certainly, as 
well, since heidegger is careful to make its regionalism a point of pride. 
“tree of the dead” is what a coffin is known as, in these parts. This is 
peculiar. Certainly an archaeologist of early central and northern eu-
ropean prehistory would be familiar with the relatively rare and brief 
but scientifically interesting practice of tree burial, in which the trunk 
of a large tree, usually an oak, was carefully hollowed to fashion a neat 
capsule for the burial of a chieftain, princess, or other high-ranking 
corpse. Decorative burial objects tend to be found in the rare cases (pun 
intended) where tree burials are discovered more or less intact; more-
over, the tannins of the oak can have a powerful preservative effect on 
the body, especially on the skin, which is gradually stained to a striking, 
glossy obsidian black.
Why this bronze-age burial practice should have been etymologi-
cally preserved in the swabian dialect, where elsewhere the word, like 
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the practice, was long since lost, is yet another natural-historical nodule 
growing, benignly one supposes, in or on the farmhouse floor.11
But why heidegger’s entire essay seems to me at least to come to re-
volve precisely around this focal point, this single word Totenbaum, is 
less a matter of etymological contingency and has to do with the heart 
of the matter of natural history. Words are natural history, certainly, 
in that moment where their otherwise contingent genealogies disclose 
a glimpse into a mode of human memory that otherwise remains oc-
cluded. heidegger’s essay teases the words Bauen, Wohnen, Denken to 
generate a glimpse of an alternative history of the natural stuff of build-
ings from out of the heart of a ruined present.
i choose instead to tease at his unwitting candidate for the “way 
of seeing” or way of remembering that is natural history: Totenbaum, 
whose cracks offer a glimpse of a human history older by far than all 
three of these newcomer words. The will to encapsulate and to make 
of the world one’s own etui, the capacity to see the tree as at once the 
source of life and the material for the ebbing and denial of life: isn’t there 
in this glimpse also a faint memory of that first tree of life, from which 
the divinities, lice-infested and hooting with alarm and lust, heidegger’s 
own african ancestors, first descended, and from where they began their 
long, long walk, each band no doubt believing itself autochthonous 
but nevertheless proceeding at a stately fifty kilometers per generation 
both east and West, until they had covered the distance from turkana 
to Pelau, olduvai to tierra del Fuego, leaving in their wake nothing at 
all, except perhaps the midden cairns of empty shells of whelks, mus-
sels and clams in their thousands, marker piles of calciferous etuis sta-
tioned with such inadvertent precision that archaeologists can predict 
with confidence where the next one will be found on the archaic route 
along vanished coastlines.
11 on this dialectical fact i thank Dennis J. schmidt for his incomparable expertise: see: Kluge 
(2002), Etymologisches Woerterbuch des deutschen Spraches. Berlin: Gruyter, p. 625: “Neben ihm 
[sarg] haelt sich im suedwesten totenbaum als heimisches Volkswort, daneben totenruhe.”
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(4) la Vie dans l’etui
in a way far more manifest than heidegger, Walter Benjamin certain-
ly devoted a good deal of his later thought to the question of buildings 
and their quiddity – of empty and abandoned buildings, of buildings as 
capsules and mausoleums, time machines, and unwitting or involuntary 
vessels for a host of human remembering, dreaming, hoping and fearing.
Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk is of course a primary site for reflec-
tions of this kind. like halbwachs, Benjamin did not live to see the 
industrial demolition of entire urban centers through aerial bombard-
ment, though one can speculate that the experience of air war against a 
civilian population in spain was sufficient grounds for the inference that 
the coming war would entail such large-scale destruction; one moving 
entry in Benjamin’s Parisian notes is a citation from a 1938 work by the 
French philosopher Pierre-Maxime schuhl, who wrote of the use of air 
attacks in the spanish Civil War in his 1938 topical work, Machinisme 
et philosophie. “The bombers remind us of what leonardo da Vinci ex-
pected of man in flight: that he was to ascend to the skies ‘in order to 
seek snow on the mountaintops and bring it back to the city to spread 
on the sweltering streets in summer.”12
Mining the collective memory for visions of a Paris that evoke both 
the uncanny reminder of the archaic in its architecture as well as the 
presentiment of destruction is a central theme of the arcades Project, a 
core part of the revelation of the dominion of myth in urban design and 
building practices. Visions of Paris abandoned, depopulated, menschen-
leer, run through the notes for the Passagenwerk like a kind of reverse 
ariadne’s thread, describing another form of ruination that forms the 
counterpoint to that of threatened, impending devastation. unruined, 
Paris appears as unlikely, even as an impossible object – how could such 
a mass of delicate stone and glass have failed to be weathered to noth-
ing or blown to bits?
This very glimpse of the unruined city provokes the same train of 
reflections as the brooding contemplation of ruin itself: the city, encod-
12 Benjamin, W. (1999), The Arcades Project (translated by howard eiland and Kevin Mclaugh-
lin). Cambridge, Ma: harvard university Press, p. 486.
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ing human history, lapses into a vision of nature instead, its close streets 
turning to a maze of warrens, capillary passages with no rational tax-
onomy, medieval and renaissance buildings, with their crusts of stone 
embellishment, appear as fossils of impossible antediluvian beasts, the 
city in its very built complexity loses the look of the human altogether 
and begins to appear hive-like, an excrescence of cells, housing for a 
writhing mass of creatures.
For Benjamin some cities, most notably Naples, have preserved this 
abjectly fascinating tension in which the experience of the big city is in-
distinguishable from the glimpse of human beings in their stone cases 
reverting back to animal life.13 in Naples [the ‘new city’] archaicisms 
are literally the architectural basis for a specific mode of deeply physical 
existence – the fusion of archaic and capitalist modes forces its citizens 
into a range of creative, parasitic and parodic adaptations to proximity 
and scarcity, a sort of continuous virtuoso improvisation that he surely 
could have observed in virtually any post-colonial world city as well. 
above all the remarkable publicity of material existence struck Benja-
min, that quintessential child of the hermetically sealed bourgeois in-
terieur, as fascinating, both compelling and repelling.
The porosity of physical life – here i am thinking of Julia Kristeva’s 
observations of the closeness of abjection and love – is the threat of the 
loss of individuation through the disclosure of the permeability of the 
membrane separating self and other, self and not-self. in Naples Benja-
min observes that this porosity is not a metaphor. it is also a feature of 
urban architecture where the inadequacy of regular maintenance over a 
long period of time results in a honeycomb of cells, each with unplanned 
and uncontrollable openings and passages to one another, that simulta-
neously make each cell in at least potential communication with all oth-
ers, and also opens all cells to the exterior that their interconnectedness 
first creates, to the street as public sphere, as ongoing political theater.
This is not the labyrinth demystified by the destruction of urban 
blocks and the creation of broad avenues, as Benjamin meticulously 
records the hausmannization of Paris. instead, Naples – dirty, danger-
13 see Benjamin, W. (2004) “Naples,” in: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926, (ed. by Marcus 
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings). Cambridge, Ma: harvard university Press, pp. 414–421.
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ous, diseased, poor, and in a kind of stasis of ongoing ruination – stays 
precisely the same, evokes the specter of natural timelessness, precisely 
by remaining poised precisely at the tipping point of irrecoverable social 
and physical dysfunction. it is physically composed neither of interior 
nor of exterior, but entirely – thrillingly, revoltingly – of the spaces be-
tween. (in this sense Naples becomes one polar extremity of the archi-
tecture of urban social life; the other pole, Moscow, is therefore exactly 
the anti-labyrinth, where the violent imposition of willed history on the 
old city yields up the huge public square, devoid of life, like the recla-
mation of the human habitation by a kind of political taiga, a public 
sphere with nothing in it.)
When it comes to Benjamin’s true urban fascination, however, the 
distance separating Paris from all other cities becomes apparent. unlike 
Naples, certainly, is Paris’s remarkable, indeed staggering wealth, and 
the sheer span of centuries in which regional and national wealth has 
concentrated in one tightly delimited physical space. This has concen-
trated spirit and stone as well, a very great deal of both, and explains 
in part why it is that Paris can appear at once so profoundly fragile and 
indestructible.
unlike planned capitals like Washington D.C. and Berlin, whose rec-
tilinear grids and rational architecture emanated from a specific set of 
convictions regarding urban life, urban services and amenities, and ur-
ban politics, Paris was an ancient city that had received wave after wave 
of new initiatives for social policy and social control. The result, Benja-
min perceives, is a remarkable and remarkably tense synthesis of rational 
agency, of historical self-confidence, and at the same time a suppressed 
but constantly perceptible substrate of mythic nature whose incessant 
breaches through the membrane that separates nature and history re-
sult in the kinds of disturbances, of unlikely objects, both political and 
material, that the arcades Project took as its primary object of study.
The processes of architectural transformation, the ruins of Paris, are 
both fantastic and expressions of the historical domination of nature, 
which has been exiled to a determinate number of strictly delimited 
quarters and precincts, most of them vertically rather than horizontally 
mapped. The Paris of the triumph of human reason sits snugly like a 
cap upon a massive and pressurized reservoir of exiled, disciplined, and 
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deeply unruly nature, which, if it could, would erupt and geyser through 
every porous opening in every Parisian street and boulevard it could. Be-
low the streets lie literally miles of passages, tunnels, crypts, catacombs, 
dripping caverns, cul-de-sacs filled with ossuaries and secret burials.
Natural history appears as the image of the city poised at a delicate 
equilibrium point, balancing forces that could at any moment blow it 
to smithereens. Benjamin of course draws here on the longer enlighten-
ment discourse that sees the looming threat of urban destruction by un-
controllable natural processes as indistinguishable from, indeed merging 
with, the uncontrollable force of the urban mob. and just as the en-
lightenment philosophes had settled on a small number of paradigmatic 
cases to illustrate this dialectic – Pompeii, lisbon – so Benjamin de-
scribes the fantastic and largely hidden pressures that form Paris’s lapi-
dary buildings as a kind of Indifferenzpunkt between nature and history: 
seismic, volcanic, uncontrollable, deeply angry, beyond argument. as 
Benjamin puts it,
“Paris is a counterpart in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the geo-
graphic order: a menacing, hazardous massif, an ever-active hotbed of revolu-
tion. But just as the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava that cover 
them, have been transformed into paradisal orchards, so the lava of revolution 
provides uniquely fertile ground for the blossoming of art, festivity, fashion.”14
The arcades trace their way across the unstable surface of this three-
dimensional seismic field. at the moment in which they are poised to 
vanish as victims of the next wave of architectural reform, the arcades 
appear simultaneously as history and nature. as history, certainly, since 
the arcades are expressions of the rational, progressive will to take con-
trol of an oppressive built urban environment, cutting through buttes 
of medieval buildings to open new routes through the urban labyrinth; 
lined with fashionable shops, and covered from inclement weather by 
large glass panes, they are a new technology of the conscious provision 
of urban porosity, a kind of controlled destruction.
But they are nature too, since the latest and most up-to-date urban 
architectural and commercial design discloses the emergence of the ar-
14 The Arcades Project, p. 83.
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chaic, as various unplanned consequences of its design, or the relation 
of the design to larger social and economic forces, reverse to form the 
grounds for the design’s obsolescence. in the case of the arcades, the ear-
liest use of cast iron and glass as structural elements created new urban 
spaces at mid-century, commercial venues that quickly became intensely 
popular gathering places for the display of new industrial commodities, 
new fashion and couture, and the self-presentation of new social classes. 
(at one point Benjamin records the brief craze during the 1840s for pet 
tortoises, on a lead of velvet ribbon, whose – very stately – walks in the 
arcades allowed their owners a slow-motion display of their own fash-
ionable dress.)
But the same use of new design and construction methods and ma-
terials inadvertently creates something else: a space which, with its flick-
ering gas lighting, dim filtered sunlight seeping in desultorily from the 
thick glass panes suspended above, its murmuring crowds of over-stim-
ulated pedestrian shoppers strolling its lengths, uncannily replicates 
something archaic, even aquatic, poised at the brink of reversion to a 
pre-human form of conscious life. The arcades replicate a very primal 
etui, in other words, both womb and cave. They both promise and 
threaten the mythical loss of self that lies at the heart of all urban mem-
ory, and therefore both entice and terrify. Their destruction during the 
second half of the 19th century, even in Benjamin’s own observations, 
comes as something of a relief, even if the ruler-straight boulevards and 
wide-open, over-large squares of Baron haussmann betray the core of 
violence in the rational dream of urban planning.
The Parisian arcades make visible the image of Paris as ruined even in 
its uncanny survival. They are perhaps the ultimate and richest example 
of the etui, the human case, and in this sense Benjamin’s fascination 
with etuis of all kinds, and in particular with the imprint of the van-
ished inhabitant of the etui that survives in ghostly imprint on its plush 
inner lining, becomes less peculiar, and more moving. empty cases are 
the true ruins.
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(4) Kartenspiel
W.G. sebald seems to have taken the sentiment that halbwachs ex-
pressed very much to heart: if the stones of the city in their enduring 
forms provide containers or cases for the collective memory of groups, 
then the ruins of these containers – buildings that have had the living 
contents expelled from them, or which have been blown to smithereens 
by high-explosive ordnance and incendiary sticks, dropped with indus-
trial efficiency from miles above in the atmosphere – do not simply ac-
complish the opposite of social memory. ruins do not correspond to 
the withdrawal of memory but to its utter transformation. Much of 
sebald’s prose, written in notable haste and urgency in the space of a 
decade, attempts to mobilize the tools of minute observation, microl-
ogy, to register the varieties of alchemical transformations of memory 
that can be produced by smashed stone. in this effort, he places himself 
– whether consciously or not, i cannot tell – at the precise dialectical 
tension point between heidegger’s effort to erase the very possibility of 
ruin from the material practice of building, and Benjamin’s attempt to 
develop a form of seeing that is exquisitely sensitive to the ruin every-
where, even in (especially in) urban milieux that have survived the pro-
cess of physical destruction.
let me begin with a passage from a short address that sebald deliv-
ered very shortly before his death, a childhood memory that, like many 
others, may be playful and misleading, but provides for us a beginning 
point. speaking at the opening ceremony of the stuttgart Literaturhaus, 
sebald recounts how, as a child growing up in the late 1940s and 1950s in 
the remote and deeply rural allgau region, he had no firsthand knowl-
edge of the destruction of Germany’s cities. The provincial village of his 
childhood seemed, in a halbwachsian manner, eternal. But the village 
was reachable by post, and as heidegger was writing “Bauen Wohnen 
Denken,” the fractured and largely silent sebald family acquired a swap-
ping card game called Cities Quartet.
“have you got oldenburg, we asked, have you got Wuppertal, have you 
got Worms? i learned to read from these names, which i had never heard be-
fore. i remember that it was a very long time before i could imagine anything 
about these cities, so different did they sound from the local place-names of 
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Kranzegg, Jungholz, and unterjoch, except the places shown on the cards in 
the game: the giant roland, the Porta Nigra, Cologne Cathedral, the Crane 
Gate in Danzig, the fine houses around a large square in Breslau.”15
Card images of a Germany both physically intact and politically un-
divided: the game, sebald claims, “marked not only the beginning of 
my career as a reader but the start of my passion for geography, which 
emerged soon after i began at school: a delight in topography that be-
came increasingly compulsive as my life went on and to which i have 
devoted endless hours bending over atlases and brochures of every kind.”
if arendt’s fragmentary reminiscence is to be trusted, then sebald’s 
inauguration into literacy by cards of intact cities was part of a far larg-
er, more general reaction, even as the kind of legibility – such a central 
term for Benjamin too, of course – he derived from this early exposure 
differed in method and morals so profoundly from the displaced popu-
lation of Germany’s ruined cities, mailing one another their postcards 
of the city that had once stood on the very spot. But natural history, 
among other things, is a viewpoint that disdains the stability of the dis-
tinction between memory and forgetting. if the postwar worthies that 
both arendt and later sebald castigate for their self-administered general 
anesthesia paper over the reality of their ruined cities with postcards real 
and metaphysical, then sebald, too, develops a kind of lifelong reading 
that will also depend on them.
in fact reading the series of works that comprise the remarkable pro-
ductive flowering of sebald’s hurried decade of writing – Vertigo, The 
Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz – it’s impossible to avoid the 
sense that those Cities Quartet cards never left his famous knapsack; that 
he ‘learned to read’ in a more powerful, pervasive, and involved sense 
than the familiar boundaries of what counts as Prosa.
open any of these books, of course, and you will find ruined build-
ings: abandoned towns being reclaimed inexorably by the sea; forgotten 
grand country estates which have not so much withstood or defeated 
time and age but have been forgotten by time entirely, preserving mate-
rial remnants of lost historical epochs to no clear purpose; dreary for-
15 sebald, W.G. (2005), “an attempt at restitution,” in: Campo Santo (translated by anthea 
Bell). New york: random house, p.198.
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tifications saturated with the memory of human malice and pain; de-
populated and pointless clumps and clots of houses. all these structures 
are both drained of human life and filled to bursting with melancholy 
significance. each of them means – and in this way sebald both observes 
the process in which nature takes its slow revenge against humans’ will 
to impose lasting significance on their landscape, while simultaneously 
undoing this very observation, reversing it, in the very act of deriving 
meaning from abject and abandoned encasements by seeing them as, 
by transforming them as, ciphers for a specific form of moral catechism.
The utopian cards of intact cities guide the way as surely as any Bor-
gesian map would, directing sebald’s rambles with an unerring magnetic 
north: walk until you find that structure which, its life and purpose hav-
ing ebbed and withdrawn, now conforms to a predetermined suite of 
cognitive and affective correspondences which permit the imposition 
of the legible signs of a larger story of the futility of human efforts to 
live decently with one another, to please ourselves without becoming 
monsters.
Many of the abandoned structures that seem to draw sebald so pow-
erfully, and whose stages of decay are so carefully, even lovingly cata-
logued, are clearly only capable of generating the melancholic effects 
that sebald himself brings to his planned encounter with them. This 
allegoresis of the evacuated and crumbling building, in its repetition, 
can in many of sebald’s works evoke the suspicion of a kind of penny-
in-the-slot. Where heidegger consciously effaces the ruin through the 
evocation of an alternative historicity, and where Benjamin is fascinated 
by the uncontrollable productivity of the ruin in its proximity to crea-
turely nature, sebald’s emotional repertoire – see ruin, become rumi-
native and sad – evinces a rote simplicity that is often disguised by the 
pellucid elegance of his prose.
as simon Ward has observed, many ruin-stories in sebald’s prose 
evoke the familiar specter of a depopulated world, not just a world in 
which physical objects radiate unintended and undesired meanings once 
their human contents have ebbed.16 The constructed nature of the ruin 
16 Ward, s. (2004), “ruins and Poetics in the Works of W.G. sebald”, in: long, J.J. and White-
head, a. (eds.), W.G. Sebald – A Critical Companion. seattle: university of Washington Press.
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– its status as the outcome of a specific epistemic process with a series 
of discrete steps – involves not only the recording of the physical status 
of a built object, but also its careful preparation: the ruin is invariably 
abandoned and empty, object-like, which rules out in advance the po-
rosity of the relation between observed structure and observing narra-
tor, assuring the stability and predictability of the cognitive and affective 
valences that the narrator attaches to the weathered stone or shattered 
façade. This fixity of meaning is the true legibility, the true Ruinenwert, 
of sebald’s gloomy insights, which revert back to the familiar precincts 
of a longer historical discourse of the mirror-like and open signification 
structure of the ruin as an empty vessel to contain and reflect the inten-
tions of the self-reflecting subject.
The descriptions of cities like Jerusalem in The Emigrants, or the 
soon-to-be-abandoned seaside villages of east anglia such as Dunwich, 
lowestoft and orfordness in The Rings of Saturn, describe a process of 
natural history in which the city slowly succumbs to entropic processes 
that draw life and meaning from the dead stone, leaving empty husks in 
the way of the pilgrim that serve as hieroglyphs, ciphers prepared to take 
on the projection of subjective meaning. This is the return, in pastoral 
terms, of the ‘antinomy of the allegorical’ that Benjamin had already 
described in the Origin of the German Play of Mourning, where the very 
meaninglessness of godforsaken nature is rescued, resignified in its very 
lack of significance by the subjective intention of the allegorist, who can 
take no satisfaction in this legibility of ruin, since it only discloses what 
he knew he would find there.
But in a way profoundly unlike Benjamin’s urban flanerie, which was 
an aesthetic of willed self-loss, sebald’s wandering narrators are trying, 
with a desperation so horrible they are no longer able even to name or 
speak it, to go home. each creased card of intact cities offers a model 
of legibility that the world’s landscape can never live up to, and which 
offer no rest and no stopping place; these narrators are driven by some-
thing entirely distinct from the cartographic obsession sebald describes 
as a young child, a memory that is surely on some level intentionally 
untrustworthy.
This specific appropriation – or interruption, as i believe – of the 
dialectic of natural history is most vivid if we think of some of the more 
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extended treatments of ruin in sebald’s masterpiece, Austerlitz, where 
sebald encounters his model ruin: the fortress-concentration camp-me-
morial site of Breendonk, where the story effectively both begins and 
ends.
Breendonk is a building of extravagant, in fact of virtually sublime 
ugliness, a kind of comprehensive hideousness that the narrator (pre-
sumably sebald) describes in lavish detail. its ugliness is transcendent: 
Breendonk is a physically repulsive object whose appearance – one 
might say pathetically – mirrors the concentration of a century of hu-
man cruelty and suffering that saturate its walls, which take on the un-
canny aspect of some long-repressed collective nightmare. These walls, 
to the narrator, seem to transmogrify into an ur-ancient, impossible 
survivor of the pre-human era, “a low concrete mass, rounded at all its 
outer edges and giving the gruesome impression of something hunched 
and misshapen: the broad back of a monster, i thought, risen from this 
Flemish soil like a whale from the deep.”17
For the cartographo-maniacal narrator, the sheer planlessness of 
Breendonk, its confused mass of half-finished or over-built walls, bas-
tions, and ramparts, blurs the boundary between nature and history: 
once again, the building as ruin evokes the specter of an unstable and 
hence abject consignment of human history to natural disaster:
“i found myself unable to connect [Breendonk] with anything shaped by 
human civilization, or even with the silent relics of our prehistory and early 
history. and the longer i looked at it, the more often it forced me, i felt, to 
lower my eyes, the less comprehensible it seemed to become. Covered in places 
by open ulcers with the raw crushed stone erupting from them, encrusted by 
guano-like droppings and calciferous streaks, the fort was a monolithic, mon-
strous incarnation of ugliness and blind violence.” [21]
studying its confusing architectural plan later, the narrator is even 
more struck by the building’s resemblance to a horrible living or for-
merly living thing, with weeping malevolent eyes and attenuated limbs, 
gazing back at him evilly from the printed plan, which appeared to him 
as “the anatomical blueprint of some alien and crab-like creature.” [23]
17 sebald, W.G. (2001), Austerlitz (translated by anthea Bell). New york: random house, p. 
20.
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Breendonk fortress, as sebald’s narrator notes, was reopened in 1947 
as a national memorial and museum of the Belgian resistance; it has 
been left unchanged as far as feasible from its wartime condition, in-
cluding the implements used by the wartime inmates – the narrator 
is particularly struck by the fleet of crudely made, disturbingly large 
wooden wheelbarrows, with which the prisoners were obliged to move 
uncounted thousands of tons of earth and rock. Glancing through the 
rest of the exhibits, the narrator contemplates the mess hall of the ss 
guards: “i could well imagine the sight of these good fathers and duti-
ful sons from Vilsbiburg and Fuhlsbuettel, from the Black Forest and 
the Bavarian alps, sitting here when they came off duty to play cards 
or write letters to their loved ones at home. after all, i had lived among 
them until my twentieth year.” [23]
Passages like this one would require far more unpacking than i can 
offer here. a few remarks will be enough: what sebald encounters at 
Breendonk is certainly a ruin that conforms in every particular to a 
mode of experience in which the distrusted utopia of intact existence – 
the cards, again – serves to predetermine that, and how, the landscape 
of human history, in its decrepitude, will present itself in a kind of pre-
established harmony with the subjective intention to endow it with 
meaning in the form of a moral catechism. What Breendonk as ruin 
signifies is in other words itself the subject of a not especially disguised 
triumph of intention, in which the force-field of natural history is de-
fused, and ruin itself is, in a deeply curious but unmistakable way, reha-
bilitated, just as Breendonk is transformed from what it was to what it 
was not precisely by doing as little to it as possible in its changed status 
as memorial site.
The historical narrative that forms the genealogical core of Breen-
donk’s abject ugliness cannot be explained solely in terms of its history 
as a prison, since it was designed as a part of a chain of fortifications 
to protect the Belgian frontier, requiring the use of building materials 
and design – poured concrete, heaped earth – that all but guaranteed 
its close resemblance to an enormous natural growth, an architectural 
tumor. This form of military architecture, like the larger comprehensive 
vision of defensive strategy of which it was one part, had been rendered 
strategically obsolete and technically useless even before the fortress had 
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been completed shortly after the turn of the 20th century, serving only 
to concentrate and immobilize large numbers of men and quantities 
of military materiel and supplies precisely where open terrain and rail 
travel had already put a strategic and tactical premium on maximum 
mobility. it is as though the fortress, useless from its inception, had been 
decreed from its birth to be used for the wrong purpose – as a prison and 
torture chamber for Belgian resistors to the German occupying forces, 
as well as for remnants of Belgium’s Jewish community.
eric santner notes the continuity between this story – the fortress 
builders trapped by their own fortification – and that of Dunwich on 
the east anglian coast, where the extensive fortifications the inhabit-
ants of the town erected to protect it from the encroaching sea ended 
up generating the very inundation that their imposition of technological 
power was meant to ward off. santner calls this the “essential paradox of 
natural history” in sebald’s work: nature, implacably and with a divine 
and righteous violence, takes its revenge on the vanity of humanity’s 
enframing, its technological hubris.18
Well, yes and perhaps also no. What santner sees as an essential para-
dox is also a prime candidate for the specific mechanism whereby sebald 
artificially – that is, by the legerdemain of authorial, subjective intention 
on the otherwise mute materiel – interrupts a dialectic of natural his-
tory in which both elements, as adorno had put it, developed to their 
point of maximum dialectical tension, reverse polarity and go over into 
their other.
But Breendonk is not a dialectical image where nature and history 
are developed to their indifference point. it is a visual, indeed an over-
poweringly over-determined and unmissable moral allegory for human 
vanitas, and it is only by prematurely arresting the movement of para-
dox that sebald’s narrator forbids himself the melancholy reflection that 
would, in what i’d be tempted to call the natural order of things, fol-
low: the hideousness of the museum as museum, the vanity of making 
museums at all, that is, the futility of memory, its fugitive, traitorous, 
18 santner, e.l. (2006), On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: university of 
Chicago Press, p. 108.
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exhausting refusal to stay on message, to conform its ceaseless produc-
tivity to a consistent acceptable moral conclusion.
But this next step – one Benjamin seems to have taken with terrifying 
ease, like breathing or walking down a street, is one that sebald, with 
his own cargo of historical grief and his own powerful albeit occluded 
epistemology, cannot, or will not, take. i blame those cards.