The City as Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin

and the Traces of the Detective

Carlo Salzani

Theorie des Kriminalromans

In 1930 Benjamin published in the Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung a
short piece titled Kriminalromane, auf Reisen (Crime Novels, on Travel).
Starting with the observation that people do not usually bring their own books
to read in trains but buy new ones in the stations, Benjamin wonders why crime
novels are particularly suitable for this kind of journey. Entering a railroad station, writes Benjamin, is like entering the middle of a gigantomachy between
the gods of the railroads and those of the station, so the modern traveler must
pay his or her offertory to the divinities of modernity, in a dark feeling of
making something which will please the gods of the railway (GS, 4.1:381).1
1. All references to Benjamins works are made parenthetically in the text. All references to The
Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), are to the convolute number. For the other
works, references are provided both to the German text of the Gesammelte Schriften (Collected
Writings), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser, 7 vols. in 15 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 197289), or the Gesammelte Briefe (Collected Letters), ed. Christoph Gdde and Henri
Lonitz, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 19952000) (hereafter cited as GS and GB, respectively), and to the English translation of the Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W.
Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 19962003), and
The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 19101940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno,
trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
(hereafter cited as SW and C, respectively). Where no English translation is available, as for
Kriminalromane, auf Reisen or part of the correspondence, I use my own.
New German Critique 100, Vol. 34, No. 1, Winter 2007
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2006-022 2007 by New German Critique, Inc.

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These divinities are the god of the steam, the naiads of the smoke, and the
demons of the stucco; a railroad station, a cathedral of modernity (GS, 4.1:381),
is populated, Benjamin had learned from the surrealists, by myth; and the city
dwellerin this case the train travelermust forge his or her way through
it as if in the primeval forest. A train journey is a succession of mythic trials and dangers, from the anxiety of being too late to the solitude of the
compartment, from the fear of missing a connection to the horror of the
unknown lobby (GS, 4.1:381). The easiest way to free the mind from this series
of fears, writes Benjamin, is to provoke another fear, which will anesthetize
the first: The anesthesia of a fear through another one is his [the travelers]
salvation. Between the fresh cut pages of the crime novel he looks for the
idle, as it were, virginal apprehensions [Angst], which could help him to get
over the archaic fear of the journey (GS, 4.1:381). The Kriminalroman thus
constitutes a momentary escape from the anxieties of modern life. In the
station-as-cathedral of modernity, we want to thank, concludes Benjamin,
the mobile and gaudily colored altars, and the minister of the new, of the
absence of spirit and of the sensational, which allow us, for a couple of hours,
to envelop ourselves in the protective scarf of fictitious excitement (GS,
4.1:38283).2
Benjamins taste for crime and detective novels is well known.3 Less
known is perhaps the fact that he courted the idea of writing a crime novel:
2. Pierre Missac argues that the travelers anxieties are probably Benjamins own anxieties for
the deteriorating political and social situation of Weimar Germany: Just as he needed to escape
from his anxiety, counterpart to fascination, about the train journey . . . so the detective novel is in
some sense an antidote to obsession with the increasing dangers now that Hitler has arrived on the
scene and new confl icts are in the offing (Walter Benjamins Passages, trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995], 5859).
3. From a few sources we can get an idea of what Benjamin read and admired: Scholem writes
that Benjamin was very fond of reading mystery novels, particularly the German translations
brought out by a Stuttgart publisher, of American and French detective classics like those of Maurice [sic] A. K. Green, Emile Gaboriau (Monsieur Lecoq), andwhen he was in MunichMaurice
Leblancs stories about Arsne Lupin, the gentleman burglar. Later he read a great deal by the
Swedish author Frank Heller, and in the thirties he added the books of Georges Simenon (Walter
Benjamin: The History of a Friendship [London: Faber and Faber, 1982], 32). In Kriminalromane,
auf Reisen, Benjamin gives a list of authors, characters, and works: the Dane Sven Elvestad
(18841934) and his character Asbjrn Krag; the Swede Frank Heller (a.k.a. Martin Gunnar Serner,
18861947); the Briton Wilkie Collins (182489); the Czech-Austrian Leo Perutz (18821957); the
Frenchman Gaston Leroux (18681927), specifically Le fantme de lopra and Le parfum de la
dame en noir; Arthur Conan Doyles (18591930) Sherlock Holmes; and the American Anna Katherine Green (18461935), specifically Behind Closed Doors and The Affair Next Door (GS,
4.1:38182). As early as 1920 Benjamin gives a list of guten Kriminalromanen in a letter to Scholem: Greens Affair Next Door, Behind Closed Doors, and Filigree Ball; Elvestads Der Mann der
die Stadt plnderte and Die zwei und die Dame; Gaboriaus (183273) Monsieur Lecoq; Lerouxs

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in a 1933 letter from Ibiza to Gretel Karplus he mentioned a project of a

Kriminalroman, of which he was sketching scenes, motifs and tricks for
future consideration (GB, 4:207); in the same year, he wrote again to Karplus
from Paris about his discussions with Bertolt Brecht on the Theorie des
Kriminalromans, which perhaps will be followed one day by an experimental undertaking (GB, 4:310).4 In this particular area, he was at one with his
time, for such an interest in detective stories and the figure of the detective
was arguably part of the zeitgeist of the 1920s: Siegfried Kracauer wrote a
book-length study of the detective novel, Der Detektiv-Roman: Ein Philosophischer Traktat; in France Rgis Messac published a thick book on the influence of scientific progress on detective fiction, Le detective novel et linfluence de la pense scientifique in 1929, from which Benjamin himself transcribed
many quotations.5
In Benjamins corpus, references to the figure of the detective are multiple but usually go no farther than a hint or suggestion. Apart from Kriminalromane, auf Reisen, no other piece of writing is dedicated exclusively to the
Le fantme de lopra and Le mystre de la chamber jaune; Lawrence L. Lynchs Schlingen und
Netze; August Gottlieb Meiners (17531807) Platanenallee No. 14; E. Balmer and W. M. Harys
Feine Fden; Arnold Bennetts (18671931) Grand Babylon Hotel; and Alfred Kubins (18771959)
Die andere Seite (GB, 2:1045). From a couple of letters to Kracauer of 1926 and 1928, we know
that he read G. K. Chestertons (18741936) Man Who Knew Too Much and Club of Queer Trades
(which Kracauer reviewed for the Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung [GB, 3:147, 342]). In the
1930s Georges Simenon (190389), an author of worthy detective novels (GB, 4:2089), is the
main reference in the correspondence, where Benjamin mentions the novels Les suicids (GB,
4:539, 4:541, 5:28), Le locataire (GB, 5:28, 271, 276), Les Pitard (GB, 5:231, 271, 276), Lvad (GB,
5:271, 276), and La Marie du Port (GB, 6:329); but Agatha Christies (18901976) Mystery of the
Blue Train and the French mystery author Pierre Vry (19001960) are also mentioned (GB, 5:28,
37). In a 1937 letter to Willi Bredel, Benjamin includes a study on Simenon in a proposal for a
series of Pariser Briefe, which were in fact never written (GB, 5:516).
4. For the planned detective novel (or series of novels), see Materialen zu einem Kriminalroman, in GS, 7.2:84651. In Brechts Nachla, the notes for Kriminalromanen go under the title of
Tatsachenreihe, of which one episode follows a schema in Benjamins Materialen (Werke, vol. 17
[Berlin: Aufbau; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989], 44355).
5. Whereas Messacs book is a constant reference in The Arcades Project, there is no trace of
Kracauers study. In fact, Kracauer wrote Der Detektiv-Roman between 1922 and 1925 but never
published it; only the chapter Hotelhalle was later included in Das Ornament der Masse (1963).
The full study was published only posthumously (Schriften, ed. Karsten Witte, vol. 1 [Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1971], 103204). In a letter to Kracauer of March 1924 (thus before the completion
of the work), Benjamin writes that he is curious (gespannt) about Kracauers Detective Analysis
(GB, 2:430); he was thus acquainted with at least a part of it, and the two possibly discussed it. But no
other reference to this work appears in the correspondence between the two, and therefore an influence of Kracauer on Benjamins Theorie des Kriminalromans is rather unlikely. On the other hand,
Kracauers study is a phenomenological analysis of the metamorphoses of the ratio, the systematic
scientific-industrial thought, with the dissolution of piety in bourgeois society and the relationship
between kitsch and will of power, and thus diverges from Benjamins interest in the genre.

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figure of the detective or the detective novel. Other references can be found
scattered throughout his work, from One-Way Street to the late notes of The
Arcades Project, basically in relation to Poe and Baudelaire, but also to the
motifs of the flneur, the bourgeois interior, and the trace. If these few inferences cannot be considered either whimsical or superficial, they are nonetheless marginal and dispersed and therefore do not add up to a Theorie des
Kriminalromans. Indeed, critical attention to this figure in Benjamin rarely
goes farther than a nod to its existence, so that, to date, only a few articlelength studies focus on it specifically. Nevertheless, the detective can be analyzed as a coherent and consistent figure in Benjamins work, even though its
fictitious cohesiveness and unity result from the work a posteriori of the
commentator. I propose to connect it with the motif of the trace, to broaden
its range and give it fuller meaning within Benjamins theoretical project.
I first analyze Benjamins quasi-sociological account of the birth and
development of the detective story in the nineteenth century as another phantasmagoric description of the city. I then connect this description to the phenomenon of the city crowd and the anxieties and fears it provokes. After
comparing the detective and the flneur, I relate the figure of the detective to
Benjamins theory of the trace, thus stressing the political importance of the
detective pursuit. I conclude by giving an account of the historian as detective and of the city as crime scene.
The Phantasmagoria of Parisian Life
Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm,
continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far
and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild
lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of
mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

In The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire Benjamin writes: No

matter what trace the flneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a
crime (GS, 1.2:543; SW, 4:22). The city, initially a delightful intrieur for the
flneur, a spectacle of excitement and intoxication, is depicted here as crime
scene. Benjamin argues that the literary genre of the detective story snoops
into the dark side of the metropolis, transforming it into a place of danger,
fear, and angst. Even to the flneur, the urban native, supposedly perfectly at
ease in the metropolitan environment, the city has become strange and
every bed hazardous (J72,3). In his Little History of Photography, Benjamin observes that it is no accident that [Eugne] Atgets photographs have

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been likened to those of a crime scene. But isnt every square inch of our cities
a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isnt it the task of the photographer
descendant of the augurs and haruspicesto reveal guilt and to point out the
guilty in his pictures? (GS, 2.1:385; SW, 2:527). The sacred ground of flnerie
(M2a,1), the place the flneur considered his house, the street, is portrayed in
this new account as inhospitable, fearsome, dangerous.
The detective story developed in France in the mid-nineteenth century
as a substitute for an earlier urban literature, the physiologies. In these, the
flneur-as-journalist described urban types, giving a sense of intelligibility
and familiarity to the urban environment, which Benjamin judged highly
phantasmagoric. The phantasmagoria of the flneur, he writes in The Arcades
Project, is the pretension to read from faces the profession, the ancestry, the
character (M6,6). The goal of the physiologies had been to alleviate the panic
caused by the overwhelming new reality of the city, and in this they ultimately
failed because the urban environment always resists interpretation and description. Unlike the physiologies, the detective story plays with this sense of unfamiliarity, incomprehensibility, and anxiety and so exacerbates fear of the urban
environment. As a genre it was more successful: it satisfied the bourgeois
obsession with the threat to order and propriety in a time of political and
social turmoil. As Tom McDonough writes, Threat haunted the bourgeois
imaginary as a concatenation of all those forcesfrom ghetto uprising to the
more diffuse spread of a counterculture with its rejection of normative models of social behaviourthat threatened the middle-class hold over the city.
Yet even greater than these political fears, and to a considerable extent acting
as a mask for them, was the social anxiety that dominated the urban imaginary of this class: a fear of crime.6 This fear derives from the bourgeois obsession with law and order, ideological security, and political immobility.7 Benjamin writes that in times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator,
everybody will be in the position of having to play detective (GS, 1.2:54243;
SW, 4:21). The description is politically charged: bourgeois society always
feels under attack; political crisis, social crisis, ideological terror are its permanent state of existence; therefore we always play detectiveand read detective fiction.
The literary-ideological trope for the city thus becomes the jungle, for,
like the jungle, the primeval forest, and the wilderness, the modern city is a site
of danger and adventures, its citizen either hunter or victim. In the bourgeois
6. Tom McDonough, The Crimes of the Flneur, October, no. 102 (2002): 116.
7. Ernest Mandel, A Marxist Interpretation of the Crime Story, in Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Woodstock, VT: Countryman, 1988), 210.

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imagination the city is turned into a landscape, which threat, danger, and vice
transform into a hunting ground. As Benjamin notes in A Berlin Chronicle,
Only those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which
they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me (GS, 6:488;
SW, 2:612). Confronted with this social reality, the flneur is transformed from
a philosophical stroller into a werewolf, a hunter, a savage, and the experience of the metropolis is depicted as adventure. Many of Benjamins entries
in The Arcades Project refer to the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, which
portray the North American savage roaming and hunting in the wilderness.
These images of the forest and the savage are transposed to the urban setting
and contribute to the experience of the city as adventure and the subsequent
creation of the detective story: Owing to the influence of Cooper, it becomes
possible for the novelist in an urban setting to give scope to the experiences
of a hunter. This has a bearing on the rise of the detective story (M11a,6). A
quotation from Baudelaires Fuses, annotated by Benjamin in The Arcades
Project, summarizes this description of the city: Man . . . is always . . . in a
state of savagery. What are the perils of jungle and prairie compared to the
daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether a man embraces his dupe
on the boulevard, or spears his prey in unknown forests, is he not . . . the most
highly perfected beast of prey? (M14,3).
This romanticization of the city is, for Benjamin, no less phantasmagoric than the operation of domestication attempted by the physiologies.
Picturing the city as wilderness is a way to escape the fundamental boredom
and repetitiveness of capitalist modernity, to evade the claustrophobic limits
of a highly regulated society.8 Crime-as-adventure thus provides a fictitious
escape route: Poe, Alexandre Dumas, and Eugne Sue transform the city into
a place of unnameable dangers, menacing shadows, and evil lurking in every
door, that is, an exciting place. This escape is merely imaginary, generated
by, and in turn producing, a self-deception, a childish intoxication that hides
the social, political, and economic reality of capitalist modernity.9 The individual, annulled in the crowd and living a life of repetition, boredom, and
spleen, recovers in the detective story what Graeme Gilloch calls a heroic
8. Gavin Lambert, The Dangerous Edge, in Winks, Detective Fiction, 49.
9. Benjamin quotes from Roger Caillois in The Arcades Project: Elements of intoxication at
work in the detective novel. . . . The characters of the childish imagination and a prevailing artificiality hold sway over this strangely vivid world. Nothing happens here that is not long premeditated; nothing corresponds to appearances. Rather, each thing has been prepared for use at the right
moment by the omnipotent hero who wields power over it. We recognize in all this the Paris of the
serial instalments of Fantmas (G15,5).

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sense of the self. Here, intrepid figures perform heroic deeds, either of sublime courage or of magnificent infamy, in tales that exalt everyday life as a
heroic struggle for survival. Baudelaire would call it the heroism of modern
life. Gilloch acutely notes, however, that the precarious character of civilization was strictly for harmless consumption. There is no social critique, no
sociological analysis of crime or poverty, no political concern for the revolutionary potentiality of the mass: the villains, the criminals are always aristocratic and often gentlemen, who seek, according to Gilloch, the challenge
and excitement of crime for its own sake, not merely for pecuniary benefit.10
The detective novel is thus, for Benjamin, part of the phantasmagoria of modern life: if the traces the flneur follows inevitably lead to a crime, then this
is an indication of how the detective story, regardless of its sober calculations,
also participates in the phantasmagoria of Parisian life. It does not yet glorify
the criminal, though it does glorify his adversaries and, above all, the hunting
grounds where they pursue him (GS, 1.2:543; SW, 4:22).
The Hiding Place of Modernity
An essential element in the development of the detective story, writes Benjamin, is the quintessentially modern phenomenon of the crowd. In various
passages and notes he argues that at the origin of the detective story lies the
possibility for the criminal to hide amid the population of the big city. In
The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, for example, he writes: Here
the masses appear as the asylum that shields an asocial person from his persecutors. Of all the menacing aspects of the masses, this one became apparent first. It lies at the origin of the detective story (GS, 1.2:542; SW, 4:21).11
The crowd is a threatening phenomenon because the asocial and the criminal may hide in the urban multitude. Unlike the physiologies, in which the
crowd was depicted as a harmless and amusing spectacle, the detective story
describes it as the asylum for the reprobate and the proscript (M16,3), in
which the criminal vanishes and at any moment one is in danger of encountering a bloodthirsty villain in the street. The flneur, who in the physiologies
disinterestedly enjoyed the colorful life of the swarming boulevard, is phantasmagorically turned into the detective, who searches the menacing urban
10. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity,
1996), 141.
11. This observation is repeated in several passages. In The Arcades Project: The masses in
Baudelaire . . . they efface all traces of the individual: they are the newest asylum for the reprobate
and the proscript (M16,3). In a letter to Max Horkheimer on April 16, 1938: The crowd . . . is the
outcasts latest place of asylum (GB, 6:6566; C, 557).

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masses for a trace of the criminal. The phantasmagoria of the detective story
lies in the assumption of the detectives ability to follow the criminals traces
in the crowdashiding place: the flneur-as-detective, McDonough notes,
becomes an instance of social control that can alleviate the bourgeois fear of
the crowd.12
Nevertheless, the crowd obliterates the traces not only of the criminal
but of the individual in general. The masses, writes Benjamin, efface all
traces of the individual (M16,3). It is therefore a hiding place because in it
all traces are lost, a fact that is a double source of anxiety and alienation.
Georg Simmel, whose analysis of metropolitan modernity was seminal for Benjamins generation, wrote that the deepest problems of modern life derive
from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality
of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of technique of life.13 The detectives work can
therefore also be read as a reassuring rescue of individual traces from the
anonymity of the masses. John Carey, for example, argues that the detectives
function is to disperse the fears of overwhelming anonymity that the urban
mass brought.14 Both readings, of the detective-as-rescuer of the individual
and as an instance of social control, are based on the same premise, that the
original social content of the detective story focused on the obliteration of the
individuals traces in the big-city crowd (GS, 1.2:546; SW, 4:23). The bourgeois fear of anonymity is balanced by the necessity of the criminalbut also
of the poor, the bohemian, those living at the fringe of society and legalityof
hiding from the panoptical power of the state apparatus. The crowd, argues
Gilloch, becomes the hiding place of modernity, the haunt of the bohemian
and the fugitive.15
The dialectic between the desire to escape the anonymity of the crowd
and the necessity to hide within it corresponds to the dialectic of anxiety and
desire the crowd inspires. For Benjamin, the description of the crowd finds
profound, acute, and contradictory formulation in Baudelaire, whose flneur
embraces the crowd in a kind of erotic encounter with the other. But Benjamins primary reference for the description of the horror and excitement of
the crowd is Poe: Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the
big-city crowd aroused in those who first observed it. For Poe, it has some12. McDonough, Crimes of the Flneur, 105.
13. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed.
and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 409.
14. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary
Intelligentsia, 18801932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 8.
15. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, 142.

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thing barbaric about it; discipline barely manages to tame it; the appearance of the London crowd as Poe describes it is as gloomy and fitful as the
light of the gas lamps overhead (GS, 1.2:629, 625; SW, 4:327, 325). One of
Poes stories provides Benjamin with the perfect example of the collapse of
the flneur into the crowd: The case in which the flneur completely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on
the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness, was fixed
for the first time and forever afterward by Poe in his story The Man of the
Crowd (M1,6). McDonough argues that the flneur-detective collapses into
the man of the crowd, who is dragged toward the other by a pathological, and
therefore criminal, passion. The flneur-as-criminologist, as instance of panoptical observation, thus becomes indistinguishable from the badaud, lhomme
de foules, the asocial: pursuer and pursued lose their polarities, and the desire
for the other becomes criminal. For Benjamin, then,
Poes famous tale The Man of the Crowd is something like an X-ray of a
detective story. It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents.
Only the armature remains: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man
who manages to walk through London in such a way that he always remains
in the middle of the crowd. This unknown man is the flneur. . . . To Poe the
flneur was, above all, someone who does not feel comfortable in his own
company. This is why he seeks out the crowd; the reason he hides in it is
probably close at hand. Poe purposely blurs the difference between the asocial person and the flneur. The harder a man is to find, the more suspicious
he becomes. (GS, 1.2:550; SW, 4:27)

Poes description of the crowd and the street summarizes the fundamental
motifs of modernity, but his narration surpasses Baudelaires erotic fusion with
the crowd. At the beginning of The Man of the Crowd the narrator behaves
like the flneur-physiognomist, reading on the faces of the passersby the history of long years.16 But when he spots the old man, he encounters an absolute idiosyncrasy, a face that cannot be read, which explains the incipit of
the tale: There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.17
The old man represents the reality of the crowd, which can never be truly
16. Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd, in The Complete Tales and Poems (London:
Penguin, 1982), 478.
17. Poe, Man of the Crowd, 478, 475. The whole passage reads: It was well said of a certain
German book that er lasst sich nicht lesenit does not permit itself to be read. There are some
secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. . . . Now and then, alas, the conscience of man
takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the
essence of all crime is undivulged.

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read. Jonathan Elmer makes the same point: The tale narrates the collapse
of these two poles, for it is the narrators inability to withstand trying to read
the (man of the) crowd that causes him to plunge into its very circulation. He
cannot read the crowd and he cannot stop trying to do so; he cannot be alone
and he cannot cease from being so.18 The impossibility of communion with
the crowd, and of escaping the crowd, makes up the drama of modernity. The
result is that the man of the crowd, in his unreadability, becomes suspicious:
everyone is a criminal in the crowd.
The Uses of Observation
Turning the flneur into the detective entails the social legitimation of
flnerie. Benjamin writes that if the flneur is thus turned into an unwilling
detective, it does him a lot of good socially, for it legitimates his idleness. His
indolence is only apparent, for behind this indolence there is the watchfulness
of an observer who does not take his eyes off a miscreant. Thus, the detective
sees rather wide areas opening up to his self-esteem. . . . He catches things
in flight; this enables him to dream that he is like an artist (GS, 1.2:543;
SW, 4:22).19 Rob Shields argues that the emergence of the detective novel is
tied to the social justification of the labor time of journalists and writers of
feuilletons, who, like the flneur, put their observations . . . for sale on the
market.20 Ill at ease with the idleness of the flneur, capitalist society triumphs
over his formal resistance by imposing a productive label on the activity of
observation. In utilitarian society, the flneurs power of observation is put
to use and becomes the productive work of the detective, thereby receiving
social approval.
The common trait of flneur and detective is thus their power of observation. Following Benjamin, many have drawn the parallel: James V. Werner, for example, highlights the resemblances between the flneur and Poes
Dupin, pointing out how both pay minute attention to details regarding facial
features, expressions, and body language; how both present a connection with
some form of wealth and aristocracy and a snobbish rejection of produc18. Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 172.
19. The same formulation is repeated in The Arcades Project: Preformed in the figure of the
flneur is that of the detective. The flneur required a social legitimation of his habitus. It suited
him very well to see his indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the
riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight
(M13a,2).
20. Rob Shields, Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamins Notes on Flnerie, in The Flneur, ed.
Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), 63.

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tive and socially valuable labor; how both exhibit isolation and detachment
from society.21 The eye of the stroller may be casual, and that of the detective purposeful, but both need to be simultaneously wide-ranging and deeply
penetrating. Both flneur and detective derive a subtle pleasure from detecting
the truth of the street, and both demonstrate a thorough pedestrian connoisseurship. The method of both is the acute attention to whatever occurs in the
street and incessant obsession with images and the pursuit of traces in the city
crowd; both wish to uncover the mysteries of the city. Moreover, both are able
to conjugate attentiveness to detail, a certain absentmindedness and distance
from the outer world, and the confidence of the idler in the power of chance.22
An entry to The Arcades Project reads:
The experiences [Erfahrungen] of one who attends to a trace result only very
remotely from any work activity, or are cut off from such a procedure altogether. (Not for nothing do we speak of fortune hunting.) They have no
sequence and no system. They are a product of chance, and have about them
the essential interminability that distinguishes the preferred obligations of
the idler. The fundamentally unfinishable collection of things worth knowing, whose utility depends on chance, has its prototype in study. (m2,1)

Through its connection with observation, the detective story is related to the
optical devices of modernity, especially photography and film. A Little History of Photography relates the development of the camera to that of a new,
scientific mode of observation: it brings things closer for inspection, discovers unknown images, reveals the secrets of realityin a word, it discloses
the optical unconscious of which Benjamin speaks in the Work of Art essay.
The camera is getting smaller and smaller, writes Benjamin, ever readier
to capture fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative mechanisms in the beholder (GS, 2.1:385; SW, 2:527). Similarly, the
detective follows traces, and the detective story, with its attention to details,
brings to light what was hidden. Both camera and detective story thereby
21. James V. Werner, The Detective Gaze: Edgar A. Poe, the Flneur, and the Physiognomy of
Crime, American Transcendental Quarterly 15 (2001): 10.
22. In The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire Benjamin writes: An important trait of
the real-life Baudelairethat is, of the man committed to his workhas been omitted from this
portrayal: his absentmindedness.In the flneur, the joy of watching prevails over all. It can concentrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective. Or it can stagnate in the rubbernecker;
then the flneur has turned into a badaud. The revealing representations of the big city have come
from neither. They are the work of those who have traversed the city absently, as it were, lost in
thought or worry (GS, 1.2:572; SW, 4:41).

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problematize the relation between inner and outer, on which bourgeois

society is based. This is the argument of Tom Gunnings study of Benjamins
optical detective. Drawing a parallel between Poes Dupin and Benjamins
detective, Gunning argues that the detective method inverts and complicates
the relationships between hidden and uncovered, deep and superficial,
visible and invisible, simple and complex, inner and outer, so
that the boundaries between these apparently opposed categories become fluid
under the detectives gaze. Therefore, he concludes, the detective story activates the complex dialectical optics of modernity, an optics based not only on
the visual mastery of surveillance but also on the uncanny experience of transformed vision, glimpsing a presence where it is not, a space where it does not
belong, and triggering a frisson of possible recognition.23
Observation, detection, chance: all add up to the question of method,
which for Benjamin is the core of the detective story.24 The method of detection is similar to that of the flneur: through flnerie and observation the detective constructs, as Shields argues, a social physiognomy of the street.25
Flnerie, writes Benjamin, gives the individual the best prospects for playing the detective (GS, 1.2:543; SW, 4:21). Nevertheless, the physiognomies of
the first half of the nineteenth century failed in describing the modern city,
because they were unable to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon of the
crowd and its dark shades. If we identify the flneurs method with the physiognomic method, then the detective can also be seen as an opposition to, or,
better, an evolution from, this method. And the detective story can be considered an evolution of the physiognomies, able to account for the anxieties of the
city. As Benjamin notes, the insufficiency of flnerie led to an eventual collapsing of the flneur into the badaud. The distance the flneur-as-physiognomist
claims to maintain from the crowd, and from others, disappears in the Second
Empire as the flneur collapses into the criminal and every distinction between
pursuer and pursued is annulled. This is why Poes Man of the Crowd is an
X-ray or, better, a model for the detective story.26 The detectives observation is
thus an evolution and an improvement upon that of the flneur-physiognomist.
23. Tom Gunning, The Exterior as Intrieur: Benjamins Optical Detective, boundary 2 30,
no. 1 (2003): 127. Werners argument is very similar (cf. Detective Gaze, 1319).
24. Cf., e.g., The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire (GS, 1.2:546; SW, 4:23) and The
Arcades Project (M12a,1).
25. Shields, Fancy Footwork, 63.
26. Or, even better, as Patricia Merivale argues, for what has been called the metaphysical
detective story, in which the triadic multiplicity of detective, criminal, and victim is reduced to a
solipsistic unity (Gumshoe Gothics: Poes the Man of the Crowd and His Followers, in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale
and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999], 107).

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177

Dana Brand points out that The Man of the Crowd was written before the
Dupin stories and argues therefore that it is not an X-ray but an embryo
of the detective story. In the representation of the city, the detectives method
supersedes the flneurs method, being both more adequate to the new experience of the crowd and more complex and detailed than the physiognomies.
Poe, with his descriptions of crime, incommunicability, anxiety, violence, and
solitude, invented a new genre and new models for reading and consuming
the modern city.27
Theory of the Trace
The man who hasnt signed anything, who left no picture,
Who was not there, who said nothing:
How can they catch him?
Erase the traces.
Bertolt Brecht, Lesebuch fr Stdtebewohner
(Reader for City Dwellers)

Benjamins theory of the detective comprises the dialectic between, on the

one hand, the analysis of the detective story as another phantasmagoric representation of the city and, on the other, the work of the detectives method as
a sign of modernity and a progressive political tool. I pursue this second path
a little farther, connecting the figure of the detective to Benjamins theory
of the trace (Theorie der Spur). The connection is explicit in his notes, even
though it seems marginal and has therefore not been investigated. The theory
of the trace remains at the state of intuition, scattered in notes to The Arcades
Projectmainly, but not only, in convolute I, The Interior, the Traceand
a few other pieces of writing. It is related to the theory of the intrieur, to
the analysis of the panoptical state, and, finally, to the revolutionary potentiality of modern architecture.
To dwell means to leave traces, writes Benjamin, and the preferred
site of these leavings is the bourgeois interior. In the 1935 expos Paris, the
Capital of the Nineteenth Century, he wrote that the interior is not just the
universe but also the tui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave
traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars,
27. Cf. Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 79. Benjamin himself distinguishes between the
flneur-as-physiognomist and the detective: One can speak, in certain respects, of a contribution
made by the physiologies to detective fiction. Only, it must be borne in mind that the combinative
procedure of the detective stands opposed here to an empirical approach that is modelled on the
methods of Vidocq, and that betrays its relation to the physiologies precisely through the Jackal in
Les Mohicans de Paris (d14a,4).

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Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these . . . the traces of the
inhabitant are imprinted in the interior (GS, 5.1:53; SW, 3:39).28 In stamping
his or her mark inside the bourgeois apartment, the owner transforms it into
a museum for posterity; the bourgeois individual is at home only when surrounded by his or her own traces. In fact, Benjamin notes, the privilege to
leave traces is almost a bourgeois monopoly; plush is the material in which
traces are left especially easily (I5,2). Benjamin refers to Poes Philosophy
of Furniture as a seminal account of this phenomenon: Enter the detective
story, which pursues these traces. Poe, in his Philosophy of Furniture as well
as in his detective fiction, shows himself to be the first physiognomist of the
domestic interior. The criminals in early detective novels are neither gentlemen nor apaches [sic], but private citizens of the middle class (GS, 5.1:53;
SW, 3:39). The reference to Poe is not fortuitous: the detective story remains
the only adequate description of the bourgeois interior and its horror. The
traces the bourgeois leaves there are the traces of a crime, the apartment as
claustrophobic and horrifying as a crime scene, the interior itself a dead
space. Benjamin makes the connection between bourgeois interior and the
detective story explicit as early as the piece in One-Way Street called Manorially Furnished Ten-Room Apartment:
The furniture style of the second half of the nineteenth century has received
its only adequate description, and analysis, in a certain type of detective
novel at the dynamic centre of which stands the horror of apartments. The
arrangement of the furniture is at the same time the site plan of deadly traps,
and the suite of rooms prescribes the path of the fleeing victim. . . . The
bourgeois interior of the 1860s to the 1890s . . . fittingly houses only the

28. In To Live without Leaving Traces (GS, 4.1:427; SW, 2:7012), and, with almost the same
words, in Experience and Poverty, Benjamin reiterates this concept: If you enter a bourgeois
room of the 1880s, for all the coziness it radiates, the strongest impression you receive may well
be, Youve no business here. And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no spot
on which the owner has not left his markthe ornaments on the mantelpiece, the antimacassars
on the armchairs, the transparencies in the windows, the screen in front of the fire. A neat phrase
by Brecht helps us out here: Erase the traces! is the refrain in the first poem of his Lesebuch fr
Stdtebewohner. Here in the bourgeois room, the opposite behaviour became the norm. And conversely, the intrieur forces the inhabitant to adopt the greatest possible number of habitshabits
that do more justice to the interior he is living in than to himself. This is understood by everyone
who is familiar with the absurd attitude of the inhabitants of such plush apartments when something broke. Even their way of showing their annoyanceand this affect, which is gradually starting to die out, was one that they could produce with great virtuositywas above all the reaction
of a person who felt that someone had obliterated the traces of his days on earth (GS, 2.1:217;
SW, 2:734).

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179

corpse. On this sofa the aunt cannot but be murdered. The soulless luxury
of the furnishings becomes true comfort only in the presence of a dead
body. (GS, 4.1:8889; SW, 1:44647)

The bourgeois apartment is thus a dead space, soulless and lifeless, built as a
trap and inhabited by corpses, from which any living thing is expelled, annihilated, or murdered by the cult of lifeless and ageless commodities.29 The
dream of permanence in commodity culture perpetuates the phantasmagoria
of modernity and, as such, is as intoxicating as hashish.30
Though the bourgeois proprietor stamps every object with his or her
mark, he or she conceals these traces from others. The bourgeois private
sphere is therefore a fortress against the interference of public life. Heiner
Weidmann notes that the keeping of the trace is at the same time also its
covering. The bourgeois, like the asocial, erases the traces, even as he or she
preserves them; what the owner rescues for him- or herself, he or she conceals from the others. The cult of the trace is also simultaneous to the disappearing of the trace. The bourgeois, like the asocial, erases the trace because
in modernity an increasingly strict and firm net of control has been spread
over private life. Examples include the official numbering of houses or the
use of photography as a police identification procedure. As Weidmann writes,
A new way of preserving the traces immediately regains control of the disappearing of traces.31 Benjamin himself observed that since the French Revolution the administrative apparatus has strived to multiply the traces of the
individual in an instance of panoptical control.32 He writes that
29. Gilloch argues that the bourgeois interior is the space of dying, but without the body, it is
not so much a space of death as a dead space: The interior becomes ageless, the sense of bourgeois security that emanated from the middle-class home stemming from timelessness, from the
denial of transience. The space of death, the murder, simultaneously becomes that of immortality,
of permanence (Myth and Metropolis, 8182).
30. An entry in The Arcades Project refers to this intoxication as satanic, connecting the intoxication of interior with modernity as the time of hell (S1,5): Nineteenth-century domestic interior.
The space disguises itselfputs on, like an alluring creature, the costumes of moods. . . . In the end,
things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes
beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal.
Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois cozinessa mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent
the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream. . . . To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spiders web,
in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry (I2,6).
31. Heiner Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: Die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei
Walter Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 1992), 108.
32. An entry of The Arcades Project reads: Multiplication of traces through the modern
administrative apparatus. Balzac draws attention to this: Do your utmost, hapless Frenchwomen,

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Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

the invention of photography was a turning point in the history of this process. It was no less significant for criminology than the invention of the
printing press was for literature. Photography made it possible for the first
time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being. The
detective story came into being when this most decisive of all conquests of
a persons incognito had been accomplished. Since that time, there has
been no end to the efforts to capture [dingfest machen] a man in his speech
and actions. (GS, 1.2:550; SW, 4:27)

Personal traces thus become incriminating clues, dangerous evidence in the

hands of the detective-as-spy. To erase the traces, as Brecht writes, becomes a
necessity not only for those who are illegal but for everyone, since everyone
is a sort of criminal.33
Modern architecture further complicates the theory of the trace. If to
live means to leave traces, as Benjamin writes, then modern architecture seems
to connote a paradox: it uses as construction materials glass and steel, on
which it is impossible to leave traces. Its motto is thus to live without leaving
traces. The idea of transparency seems dominant in the modernist architecture of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and the Bauhaus, which projected and
built constructions whose materials and lines declared war on everything the
nineteenth-century bourgeois interior had stood for: secrecy, possession,
accumulation, collection. In Experience and Poverty Benjamin writes that
objects made of glass have no aura. Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets.
It is also the enemy of possession (GS, 2.1:217; SW, 2:734). Transparency
annuls the opposition between interior and exterior, walls of glass do not protect the inner space, and the functionality of modern lines declares war on the
nineteenth-century plush. As Weidmann notes, The private sphere, the proprietors biotope, appears now destroyed in the new houses, which exhibit the
to remain unknown, to weave the very least little romance in the midst of a civilization which takes
note, on public squares, of the hour when every hackney cab comes and goes; which counts every
letter and stamps them twice, at the exact time they are posted and at the time they are delivered;
which numbers the houses . . . ; which ere long will have every acre of land, down to the smallest
holdings . . . , laid down on the broad sheets of a surveya giants task, by command of a giant.
Balzac, Modeste Mignon (I6a,4).
33. In Commentary on Poems by Brecht, Benjamin notes: Erase the traces: A rule for those
who are illegal (GS, 2.2:556; SW, 4:233). On the one hand, the poor and the bohme are not
allowed to leave traces; on the other, though, they are pursued by a panoptical state that, at the same
time, tries to control them and obliterate their existence. Therefore the rule in the First Poem,
Erase the traces! can be completed by the reader of the Ninth: Its better than having them erased
for you (GS, 2.2:560; SW, 4:327).

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181

inmates as in a theatre and prevent the collection and the accumulation of

objects.34 The antibourgeois potentialities of avant-garde architecture are
embraced as revolutionary by Benjamin, at least in this piece of writing: a
new poverty is necessary to disrupt the bourgeois world and its obsession
with traces, marks, and possession; a new poverty is the tool to erase the
traces of the capitalist-consumerist modes of production-accumulation and
to redesign new ways of living. In To Live without Leaving Traces Benjamin writes: This is what has now been achieved by the new architects, with
their glass and steel: they have created rooms in which it is hard to leave
traces. It follows from the foregoing, Scheerbart declared a good twenty
years ago, that we can surely talk about a culture of glass. The new glassmilieu will transform humanity utterly. And now it remains only to be wished
that the new glass-culture will not encounter too many enemies (GS, 4.1:428;
SW, 2:7012).35
Trace and Aura
Objects made of glass have no aura (GS, 2.1:217; SW, 2:734). Is this because
no trace can be left on them? How, then, are trace and aura related? From the
above quotation, it might be inferred that where no trace can be left, no aura
can be found. But the relation between trace and aura is more complex, articulated, and, at times, apparently contradictory. They are bound together, since
aura comes from the unique existence of an object that bears the mark of the
history to which the work has been subject (GS, 7.1:352; SW, 3:103); aura is
thus the result of the transmission of traces as an instance of tradition. Benjamin, however, explicitly counterposes the two. In an entry to The Arcades
Project he writes: Trace and aura. The trace is appearance of a nearness,
however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we
gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us (M16a,4).
The problem revolves around the concept of tradition, its conservation, cancellation, or rewriting, and our relation with it.
The argument can be introduced through the commodity. The commodity is auratic insofar as it bears no traces of its production. In this case,
aura and traces are opposed. Terry Eagleton argues that, like the flneur or
34. Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel, 1056.
35. Almost the same words are repeated in Experience and Poverty (GS, 2.1:21718; SW,
2:734).

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the baroque emblem, the commodity is a decontextualized fragment, polyvalent and empty. Its significance lies in the social relations of production,
but it obliterates the traces of this production and floats, like the baroque
allegory, in a polyvalence of meanings. The commodity receives and displays the traces only of other commodities, in a vicious circularity Eagleton calls ambiguity: Hollowed to the empty receptacle of traces of other
traces, without a particle of autonomous matter in its economic make-up,
the commodity is an orphaned nonentity with nothing to call its own. . . . The
process of commodity exchange is infinitely metonymic: each commodity is
defined only by its displacement of another, constituted only by the endless
circulation of the trace that is the mechanism of its movement.36 The
detective, whose job it is to follow traces, becomes in this context a possible
instance for reconstructing the condition of production from the collection
of evidence or traces of social relations in commodities. Benjamins detective becomes thus an archaeologist, and the traces he follows are the fossils
of industrial glaciation: these fossilized traces can be read on the surfaces of
surviving objects, the fossils of the ur-commodity revealing in their afterlives the truth content of production.37 The reference to the figure of the
detective is important, because obliterating the traces of the social relations
of production is a crime. The capitalist mode of production as a whole is criminal, and it tries to erase the traces of its crime in the commodity. A progressive detective fiction could be used to show this, and this is the aim,
writes Benjamin, of Brechts Threepenny Novel:
Brecht is concerned with politics; he makes visible the element of crime
hidden in every business enterprise. Bourgeois legality and crimethese
are, by the rules of the crime novel, opposites. Brechts procedure consists
in retaining the highly developed technique of the crime novel but neutralizing its rules. This crime novel depicts the actual relation between bourgeois legality and crime. The latter is shown to be a special case of exploitation sanctioned by the former. (GS, 3:44748; SW, 3:89)

The auratic object, writes Eagleton, continually rewrites its own history to
expel the traces of its ruptured, heterogeneous past (WB, 33). Like the commodity, which expels the traces of the social relations of production, the
36. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin; or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso,
1981), 29. Hereafter cited as WB.
37. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 56, 211.

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183

auratic object constructs the authority of an origin by erasing, expelling, and

rewriting its traces. Aura as authenticity and authority imposes a fictitious tradition (a path of traces) that is the victors tradition. This is the aura
the bourgeois proprietor attempts to impose on the commodified intrieur of
plush: the trace is reinscribed, modified, falsified. The trace, then, argues
Eagleton, belongs in one sense with the aura, either as its petrified physical
residue or . . . the unconscious track (WB, 32). The authenticity and
authority of a thing are the essence not only of what is transmitted but also
of the modes of its transmission. The revolutionary potentialities of mechanical reproduction lie in its expunging such Ersatz aura in a cheerful act of
revolutionary violence, which, according to Eagleton, will blast out of history the apocalyptic empty space within which the new may germinate
(WB, 31).
The personification of this purifying violence is the destructive character. In The Destructive Character, published in 1931 in the Frankfurter
Zeitung, Benjamin sketches a sort of personal parallel of the revolutionary
work of mechanical reproduction: as the technology of reproduction detaches
the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition (GS, 7.1:353; SW, 3:104),
so the destructive character, destroying, rejuvenates, because it clears away
the traces of our own age (GS, 4.1:397; SW, 2:541; emphasis added). The
destructive character is the revolutionary force that clears away the phantasmagoria of the bourgeois interior and of the bourgeois obsession for leaving
traces of proprietorship: The destructive character is the enemy of the tuiman. The tui-man looks for comfort, and the case [Gehuse] is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on
the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.
The destructive character gets rid of auratic tradition, of those traces the
bourgeois can only leave in plush; what exists he reduces to rubblenot
for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it (GS,
4.1:39798; SW, 2:54142). The shattering of tradition, the liquidation of the
value of tradition in the cultural heritage (GS, 7.1:35354; SW, 3:104), must
ensure the rediscovery of the tracesthose erased and obliterated by the victors traditionof a different history.
Therefore the erasure, preservation, or revival of traces is, as Eagleton
insists, a fundamental political practice. The object is but a palimpsest, on
which every generation leaves a new set of scars and traces, which are thus
what marks the objects historicity, the elements of the production process
that, in still clinging to the object, help defetishize it. The traces inscribed on

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Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

an objects body, writes Eagleton, are the web that undoes its self-identity,
the mesh of consumptional modes in which it has been variously caught
(WB, 31). The decision to erase or preserve the trace depends on the nature
of the trace itself: the auratic trace takes possession of us, whereas if we
clear superstructural tradition out of the way and rescue the traces of a different history, of the tradition of the oppressed, we gain possession of the
thing (M16a,4). The figure of the detective thus becomes complementary to
the destructive character: in rescuing and redeeming the traces of a shattered
past and a lost tradition, the detective becomes a metaphor for the materialist
historian.
The Historian as Detective
Benjamin convincingly argues that the detective story developed in the second half of the nineteenth century as a part of the phantasmagoria of modernity. Depicting the city as a place of danger and adventure, it played with the
fears and anxieties of bourgeois society, which likes to indulge in the feeling
of an ideological terror. Yet it also romanticized the dull existence of the city
dweller and rescuedalbeit only fictionallythe sense of individuality and
singularity that modernity has lost in the labyrinth of the crowd. Benjamin,
interested in the detectives peculiar gifts for observation, explicitly relates
the figure to the new optical technologies of modernity. That the detective
story developed in a certain way is thus related to a zeitgeist involved in an
optical revolution, with a peculiar interest in vision and visibility. Gunnings
and Werners studies pursue this argument no farther than the detectives
optical dimension. I have been arguing that the figure of the detective in
Benjamin acquires a fuller meaning if related to the theory of the trace. Pursuing the traces the bourgeois proprietor imprints in his or her objects as a
mark of ownership, the detective unveils the crime and death residing at the
center of the bourgeois interior; snooping after the traces the panoptical state
tries to multiply to control private life, the detective becomes a spy in the
capitalist complot; finally, losing these traces in a twentieth century marked
by glass-and-steel architecture and serialized reproduction of art and commodities, the detective reveals the revolutionary possibilities that must be
looked for in the avant-garde.
The revolutionary action of mechanical reproduction and of the destructive character has to be counterbalanced and completed by the activity of
research and preservation of the materialist historian-as-detective, whose
task is not to erase the traces (the destructive character has done this for

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him or her) but to recover and reconstitute them. As Pierre Missac points out,
to destroy or to shatter is not to annihilateto return to dust soon dispersed
by the winds of historybut rather to unsettle, to break into pieces.38 Amid
these broken pieces, these shattered ruins of the official history, the materialist detective, like the hunter or the archaeologist, tries to follow the
trail [Spur] of the past (H1a,1). Detection is the method of the flneur, the
ragpicker, the archaeologist, and the historian, who search for clues among
dead data. Readingor rather reconstructingthe traces of a shattered
tradition, the tradition of the oppressed, is the redemptive activity of this
alternative figure of detective, who, in David Frisbys words, seeks to bring
insignificant details and seemingly fortuitous events into a meaningful
constellation.39
For Benjamin, the citys surface is double layered: in the asphalt over
which the flneur passes, his steps awaken an echo (GS, 4.1:238; SW, 3:354),
the echo of the past. The space winks at the flneur (M1a,3): along his route
the palimpsest of the street becomes alive, and images from the past throw the
flneur-as-detective into a state of anamnestic intoxication (M1,5). The specter of the past haunts the present, the ghosts of the past await resuscitation;
the flneur-as-detective, following the traces of forgotten histories, discovering what is hidden in the city, awakens the dead. The historians work is similar to that of the detective because these traces are hidden and obscure, incomprehensible like hieroglyphs.40 Under the detectives acute observation, the
traces reveal the past in a flash of light, which illuminates what was in the dark,
but risks disappearing if we do not recognize it. As Benjamin writes in On
the Concept of History, history withdraws, and the image of the past always
threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended
in that image (GS, 1.2:695; SW, 4:391). History, as Eduardo Cadava points
out, is always on the verge of disappearing, without disappearing.41 The possibility of history is bound to the survival of its traces and to our ability to read
them, and the task of the historian-as-detective is thus to bring these traces to
legibility in the time of danger.
38. Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin: From Rupture to Shipwreck, trans. Victoria Bridges et
al., in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1988), 214.
39. David Frisby, The Flneur in Social Theory, in Tester, Flneur, 99.
40. Angelika Rauch, Cultures Hieroglyph in Benjamin and Novalis: A Matter of Feeling,
Germanic Review 71, no. 4 (1996): 254.
41. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 11.

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The metaphor that connects the historian with the detective is well
worn by now: the methods and tools are similar, and Benjamin is not alone
either in his time or in oursin his taste for detective novels, as a growing
literature suggests.42 Robin W. Winks, as one example among many, writes
that the historian must collect, interpret, and then explain his evidence by
methods which are not greatly different from those techniques employed by
the detective, or at least by the detective of fiction.43 In this sense, Benjamin
himself has been often related to the figure of the detective. He was a great
collector of traces, as Mike Featherstone points out: he collected the scraps of
urban life such as handbills, tickets, photographs, advertisements, diaries,
newspaper cuttings. He followed the principle of citation in which the mute bits
and pieces of urban life were asked to speak for themselves.44 His researches
in the archives and in the labyrinth of the Bibliothque Nationale emblematize
the dangerous and obscure pursuit of the explorer of texts and the adventurer
of libraries.
What this literature fails to emphasize, though, is the fact that the historian has to work as a detective because what he or she has to uncover in the
past is a series of crimes. This is surely Benjamins intent when he asks: But
isnt every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit?
Isnt the task of the photographerdescendant of the augurs and haruspicesto reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures? (GS, 2.1:385;
SW, 2:527). This passage is echoed and completed in the Work of Art
essay, when Benjamin again refers to Atgets disturbing photographs: Photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical trial [Prozess]. This
constitutes their hidden political significance (GS, 7.1:361; SW, 3:108). For
Benjamin, history is a catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage (GS, 1.2:697; SW, 4:392), a never-ending series of crimes, injustice, murders. And, as in a detective novel, the traces, as Ernest Mandel writes, have
to be discovered because tracks have been covered.45 These traces are the
evidence in the historical trial, and therefore the work of the historian-as42. See, e.g., Michael J. Arrato Gavrish, The Historian as Detective: An Introduction to Historical Methodology, Social Education 59, no. 3 (1995): 15153; Cushing Strout, The Historian
and the Detective, Partisan Review 61 (1994): 66674; Robin W. Winks, ed., The Historian as
Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Winks, Modus Operandi: An
Excursion into Detective Fiction (Boston: Godine, 1982); and Winks, The Historian as Detective, in Winks, Detective Fiction, 24250.
43. Winks, Historian as Detective, 242.
44. Mike Featherstone, The Flneur, the City, and Virtual Public Life, Urban Studies 35
(1998): 909.
45. Mandel, Marxist Interpretation, 211.

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detective is eminently political. The historian thus shares with the detective
not only method and technique, the sharp eye and deductive power, the diligent search and acute intuition, but also the gloomy expectation of discovering a corpse, the sense of danger and precariousness of being in the dark, the
awareness of fighting powerful and merciless enemies, and the iron determinacy of discovering the murderer.46

46. The evolution of detective fiction took, though, a different direction: parallel and opposed
to Dupins model (from Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and Christie to the hardboiled figures
of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler), a different model evolved on the blueprint of The
Man of the Crowd, the metaphysical or antidetective story (Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov,
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Paul Auster). In this different account of detection, victim, pursuer, and pursued are the same person, and detection results in a quest for identity.
This second model became predominant in the development of the genre and transformed it from a
popular lowbrow consumer good into a highly intellectualized and refined postmodern allegory. In
this model all the traces lead inward, in a quest for identity that is always open-ended or failed and
that has been related specifically to the crisis of the modern order. This project of detection does
away with crime, truth, justice, right, or wrong and thus also with any reference to history and
politics: the space of the city implodes and is reduced to a play of mirrors in which the other disappears and the protagonist (or the author) contemplates his or her own image; the crimes of history
(and history as such) fall into oblivion; the detective works no longer as an allegory of the historian.
From a Benjaminian point of view, what remains when the historical-political component recedes
is a phantasmagoricthat is, ahistorical and self-indulgentromanticization of the self. For introductory readings see Merivale and Sweeney, Detecting Texts; Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective:
The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984); and Ralph Willett, The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).