*UNLOCKED* The Walter Benjamin Escape Town

Hi everybody, it's Dan here with a short introduction to this episode that began life on our Patreon about the Walter Benjamin Escape Town, a crazy project, quite frankly, from 2019 that was designed in homage to the late great philosopher writer, I think, Hashish Mokar Walter Benjamin, which I think got several things wrong along the way as you'll hear in the episode. It's an episode that Kashan and I enjoyed a great deal with huge fans of Walter Benjamin, his work on memory and history underscores a lot of what we do and the way that we approach cultural and material history and tat. He was a man that loved tat himself, great deal about the aura surrounding particular objects. But yeah, this is an episode that takes us from the ball pit bars of Shoreditch to the small town of Paul Booh in Catalonia, where Walter Benjamin tragically lost his life in 1940. It's an episode in which we talk about gentrification, about the experience economy, about what it means when factories turned into escape rooms or other kind of infantilising projects. But it's also left over the loss of laughs and joy, and we're not clear margins throughout, I'm pleased to say. And it's an episode we're really fond of, so I hope you enjoy. I also want to just take this opportunity to say that thank you to all of our patrons who've been supporting us in making custom objects over the last year. It's only £4 a month to subscribe and you get these free bonus episodes. We'll be back with a brand new episode for our patrons and for everybody on the main feed very soon, about spooky season and pumpkin season and what fall/autumn/the harvest means to us in the 21st century. But until then, please enjoy this episode and do support us on our page and if you can afford to, you will get those free episodes. It's only £4 a month. And if you can't then don't worry, we're going to keep making episodes for everybody free to air on your regular podcast feed as well. Either way, do leave us a review, tell a friend, tweet about us, join us on Instagram or Twitter or just yeah, tell a mate on WhatsApp. Love you lots, for me and Cash, take care, bye. [Music] Hello and welcome to another episode of Curse.ex. My name is Dan Hencox. I am a journalist, author and enjoyer of Caspacho and other cold soups. And my name is Dr Cashety and I am an Ursula historian and a full-time bather. Bather? Big fan of a bave. Yeah it's warm, it is warm. It's hot and the window is closed. Yeah. But the things we do for optimal sound production quality. But it's okay because we're having a party. We are having a party. Let's click. Cheers. This is to a man we like to call Walter Benjamin except when we call him Walter Benjamin. What daddy? All right Cash. The late. You usually call him daddy not me. If not on air, Cash, come on. Is it hot at you up on air? He did, absolutely. What would Benjamin it would be his 130th birthday today which would make him the oldest man in the world. Raise all sorts of other questions about history that I'm sure he'd love to ask him. Can you imagine him at a hundred thirty? What would his memory? How would his sort of you know the imperative shaping his memory of time, place and people and politics change when he was 130? Actually, long term memory is supposed to get better as you go. Like a tree. You can't have waited yesterday but you remember the lunch you had in 1974. Right. I just feel like Walter Benjamin would be so homogeneally. He was pretty much there as a man in his 30s from what I've read. He was an audio man. Exactly. The reason we're talking about Walter Benjamin and Tosie again is not just because he is the main subject of this episode. He is not all of his life and work because you'd need several pull-car series in which to do that. But prompted by a particularly cursed object that is well it could sort of contain to him. If you haven't listened to cursed objects before and you're somehow hearing this on our Patreon or you're hearing it later on our main feed, cursed objects is a podcast in which we take on cultural studies and kind of popular history with an eye to the objects that sort of explain that history. So we're material culture based. Yeah, we are. We are. Not plant based material culture based. Exactly. I mean, I'm plant based sometimes but today I'm material culture. Yeah, I try to be confused at the end. I actually eat margarine. Oh, don't eat margarine. Oh my god. Yeah, that's. Apologies to all of you that eat margarine. Oh, I spent so much my childhood eating margarine and you know both my mother and I had the same realization much later that like butter is actually better for you. Yeah. You wasted your years. I know. I know. I've been eating butter by the fistful as I do now. I'm like in a basis. Sorry, yeah. That was not my most delicate and phrasing. So on cursed objects, we take a different object every week. The reason more so Benjamin is sort of like just the sort of god figure like looming above a lot of what we do here is because he was very into cursed objects himself. The Arcades project is one of the like his you know arguably his masterwork involved walking through the arcades of early 20th century Paris and sort of trying to read history what I guess later came to be called sociology, the culture of ordinary life, the kind of behaviors of ordinary life through objects and often objects that have been thrown away. In fact particularly he was interested in objects that have been discarded that had fallen out of fashion. You know, the Parisian arcades when he was writing about them were not in their first flush of youth. They were the equivalent of the decaying shopping mall of the 21st century. You know when you go into somewhere like well RAP, elephant and castle shopping centre because it closed down now but similar sort of vibe of like here are here were the desires of a population as mediated through good soul for profit and these goods are not not really wanted anymore. You know and that's and that's what we do right actually like we were interested in in the objects that everyday folks leave behind we are one balls ultimately. You are special able to be your football team. You want to get into football but yes you know one ball till I die. We know we're here. Yeah we are. I have many photos with Hayden the one ball in his Wimbledon care. I'm very proud of them all. Anyway. The themes today because I think you could take a water benzerian episode in a million different directions we're going to try and keep it just a few hundred thousand in the interest of like six inkness. Lucky listener. Yeah exactly we're going to be still a six ink today. The things we want to talk about today are sort of themselves quite right wide ranging but they sort of speak to like the heritage industry, the experiential economy which is like doing stuff as an experience. You know when you see those like gift packages for going in a hot air balloon or like you know learn how to sew your own tree or that sort of thing but also immersive theatre, the gamifying of cities, escape rooms specifically and the sort of infantilization of social life that you see through like oh here's a ball pit in in shortage for like young professionals because young professionals can't just sort of sit and have a drink anymore. They've got to actually be playing darts or like going on a I don't know like a space hopper or something while they're doing it like yeah. We're all very good. We're all very good. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like we're both like very much in agreement that like I don't want to fucking play ping pong with you. I just want to celebrate Walter Benjamin's birthday with you in my room recording an episode of Curst of Jets. Is that so much? Exactly so try to make me play board games. So try to make me play Splat the Rat. Splat the Rat before your time. This is like pre-intimate. Yeah it's like from a summer fates exactly. Splat the Rat bars if you have a visit to short it recently. Are all the rage they're just that's all right. They're not but they could be plausibly. So yeah we're going to we're going to talk about sort of I mean you know the episode title is The Walter Benjamin Escape Room. As you about to find out that's not a joke that is a real thing and we're about to find out why that's so horrible but first today's Curst object the object that I brought in today is a postcard it's a bit matter because it is a postcard displaying an action figure a Walter Benjamin action figure that doesn't actually exist. The postcard does. Right, okay. action figure does not. So like some artists who clearly into the great sort of 20th century philosophers and I think 19th as well, did a bunch of like, joky sort of action figure kits for people like Nietzsche and Spinoza and Walter Benjamin and Adorno. And the Walter Benjamin action figure that again does not exist because this is a very confusingly matter episode. But that's what Benjamin would have wanted. It is. He would have loved the matter, I think. I think you're right. Like is this, you know, and also like this is just an image now that's being reproduced. So it sort of speaks to some of the stuff into, you know, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Another very interesting and seminal Walter Benjamin essay, which we've discussed on other episodes and probably will continue to do. The Walter Benjamin action figure includes apparently a library card and a notebook, a copy of the arcade's project, his masterwork, a pair of rolled socks, eight mechanically reproduced sounds. Obviously, we don't know what they are because this object, this is actually, it doesn't actually exist, but it was an idea that someone had. And a hidden button on the base, which makes him light up with an aura effect, which is a nice touch. When did we talk about the aura? Do we want to point listeners to another episode? We spoke about the aura in our episode on religious iconography. We did. Yeah, religious tat. Religious tat, that's right. That was great. I think that one of his sounds would just be like a sigh. That's such a great suggestion. What would also Benjamin sounds? We just like, yeah, get back to us listeners. I'm sure you've heard of us. And I sort of a despair. Just a sound of despair. I know I wanted to despair when I heard about the Walter Benjamin escape. Right. So this was news that broke in 2019. And it broke on Christmas Eve, which is sort of like almost numerological kind of synchronicity of like significant dates and significant moments that really, I think fits somehow with Walter Benjamin's philosophy. Like, there's a lot of synchronicity that goes on here. And the fact that it should be on the eve of this day, a great celebration that they announce something. So, her ventures as a Walter Benjamin escape me feels apt somehow. You know, it's apt as well. It feels synchronious and appropriate that we had already decided to record an episode today. And it was only latterly that Kasha discovered it was Walter Benjamin's birthday. Like, how did you even work that out? Like, someone tweeted about it. Oh, I see. Right. And you're like, oh my god, that's so weird. Another Walter Benjamin. Those moments of synchronicity where you're like, that's so weird. That makes that makes that certain amount of sense almost if it's guided in the stars. It's quite a, is a vibe you get into the more you read Walter Benjamin's work? Yeah. I do feel a little bit like this episode's going to be peppered with me being like, would Ben's never would have loved that. Well, I mean, we're both wearing our WWWB bracelets. So, D, I've missed a D down. So, so yeah, on the 24th of December 2019, a news broke of a 24 hour Walter Benjamin escape town, which was called Port Bue 1940. Port Bue is a town just over the Spanish border or in Spain in Catalonia, just over the border from France, just right in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I'm just going to read from the article in English, the only one in English that reported on this, which is the one that we all exploded with like just, yeah, rage and just like dismay and on wee basically. What the article said was this musician, notable musician and a former local counselor, Francesc Dittor-Libere set up an escape town and experienced similar to an escape room but lasting almost 24 hours and including accommodation, dinner and breakfast. The game was set in night or would be set in 1940 and the aim is to escape Port Bue, this town and this boat and just in Catalonia and help Walter Benjamin to do so as well, helping him escape the mid-Frankoists and Nazis who were coming for him. Walter Benjamin was Jewish significantly. The price including, I mean, he was Jewish, he was also like a Marxist intellectual who had been in turn already at this point by the Nazis, he was on the run from the Nazis and illegally escaped into technically neutral Spain, which was run by Franco at that point, but with the idea that he could then go on and escape to America with his life. So this game, this like experiential game where you're like, you're not sitting around a board game table if you don't know what sort of an escape room is, it's a thing that's cropped up in cities across the west in the last few years. It's essentially like the Crystal Maze if anyone's older off to remember that TV program where you have to like complete some tasks and get out using kind of collaborative methods in your brain and possibly your body to sort of jump over things. Well, you or you like do like puzzles right? So you're in like a room and then there's like you've got to complete this task and then this task again you can get to the clock against the clock and then you can get into the next room and it's quite like space, it can be quite space dense in the sense that like all you need is three rooms or four rooms and then that is enough need to move from one space to the next, the next, right? So it feels like there's a lot of pressure tasks, things to do, but actually it's not like you need a vast amount of space which really suits in cities where space is absolutely. Yeah and it's I mean the rise of the experiential economy is something that I think is really fascinating and how that kind of speaks the fact that cities don't make things anymore and that people are bored with just going out and you know people with disposable incomes who can afford to live in cities need new forms of entertainment. People don't just want to sit and pubs like lean you and they can't want to bend you in. I know it's tragic, but they need to read more philosophy. They need to go to like an app like to watch back to the future part too but do so like in a fucking spaceship or something like that you know while people while like Michael J. Fox like talks then lie or something. You know as as as a casual warned we are going to be quite imaginative. They know but not entirely we're going to try and see if there's some redemptive blessed tendency in all these things but for now. What Benjamin would have proved just saying? Yeah he would have to look for the good in the bad and so on. This water Benjamin escape town prompted such uproar because I know probably should have mentioned this already like in escaping from the not in attempting to escape from the Nazis water Benjamin with two other people and he's already very a very weak man who's like physically like being quite broken by internment by the Nazis already in France managed to get as far as the must say and the border needs to keep going because the occupation of France is you know making it ever more dangerous for people who are both Jewish and also people who are on the you know Marxist left and he's both of these things as well as you know sort of prominent as well as a prominent critic you know an intellectual the sort of person the Nazis would very much like to wipe out. He walks over this actually quite short walk through the mountains the which is now being christened the Caminoe water Benjamin like the part the water Benjamin path through the mountains. I've looked into doing like I'm going to do this at some point which raises its own questions in a way like I'm game of fighting his fucking you know perilous attempt to escape from the Nazis Benjamin and his you know his two compatriots who were trying to escape into Spain so that they could not be you know put the centre of concentration camp make it to Port-Bouh they have to walk through the night but Benjamin's so sort of feeble at this point that like it takes two attempts to do a fairly you know it's like five or six hours I think to walk through the mountains obviously trying not to get caught by border guards makes it to Port-Bouh they check into a hotel that night they it seems that they got the news that they're going to be turned over the Spanish authorities have found them and they're going to send them back to France and therefore probably to his certain death and he takes I think it's a cyanide pill some kind of poison that he's packed with him a lot of the a lot of the people refugees who were on the run from the Nazis this point took poison with them to avoid you know a fate worse than death in a very college if you if you consider it that and so so what Benjamin takes his own life in Port-Bouh the horrendous irony the the way that like synchronicity and co-incidence works against him in this moment is that they had just changed the laws like he as far as I remember reading about this if he derived in Spain one day earlier he would have been given leave to remain there and he would have been able to stay and sail on to America if they derived one day later the same would have been true but there was a series of changing regulations going on that basically meant that they arrived in Port-Bouh in Spain in Catalonia and were like like the jig is up we are we are done for he took his own life it's extremely extremely horrible and sad that he felt necessary to do so given that he actually probably could have been okay and and and made it to the you know the safety of like an allied country of to the US so to turn that into a 24 hour immersive experience that costs I think it says 145 to 190 euros per person for groups of up to six people is extremely bloody tasteless because what it's saying is like let's let's make it into a game I mean it's a step away from having the Anne Frank escape room basically right it's you know here is someone who died essentially because of you know the Nazi conquest of of Western Europe and you know felt it necessary to take so in life turning that into a game is is beyond obscene what happened next after the 24th of December 2019 was that everyone kicked off a huge fuss about it they realized it was horrendously offensive and like starting and the idea was just like shut down basically I mean we'll and cancelled the people that were going to do it were like, have we completely misjudged this? Oh, we have. Sorry, like, slow retreat out into the hedge. Basically, Homer Simpson style. You know, it wasn't, I think I remember when we were sharing this on Twitter at the end of 2019, it was just everyone was in complete consternation that they'd think that was an appropriate thing to do. I think we want to move on from that though and talk about sort of why this idea jords so much and why on one level, like, maybe it does fit with something that Walter Ben, like, like trying looking at, trying to look at it from a forgiving point of view and sort of remembering that Walter Benjamin's work was so often about cities, about towns, about public space, about the streets and the squares, about what happened outside the domestic space, the way that people interact with each other in the real material world. And, you know, maybe like the word gamifying is almost always used perjuratively, but like, he, you know, he was not a philosopher, he was a philosopher whose work was like not always basing the abstract, but really based in the real world, he was interested in the real world in like the material world of objects and of space, public space and in buildings and in fashion and in objects and tangible things. Okay, so I kind of want to offer some thoughts, right, on that specifically. So I think that there is something going on and like, I know that this is my classic, I'm just putting the politics of and then a word, right? But there is, there is a politics, there is a politics of commemoration at work here that underpins why we feel both affronted, but also basically how we look at this as an event, right? So, so there is a walk in like a round, a round pub, right? There is a walk that you can go on where you download an app and you can follow this trail that you mentioned earlier and you said that you wanted to go on it. I have a friend who has been on it many times, that falls into the category of commemoration, right? That is like how do you think about the movements and the intentions of all spend men, right? During that moment, that is a way of using space and using history and context as a way of understanding or thinking about a specific traumatic past in history, right? And it's not just that he was a philosopher, it's also that he was a victim of the Holocaust, right? That is the kind of duality hit, right? And I think that something like an escape room or an escape town, I think the idea of game of firing is really crucial here because it takes away a specific type of engagement and replaces it with a very different type. It's not, yeah, I totally see what you mean. And I think it's really good and youthful to think about it in terms of what different types of commemoration look like from, you know, and this is something that you cash out like an expert in and have worked with the Holocaust Educational Trust at a great length and stuff, that, you know, there's such a range of different ways of being in a space and engaging in sort of either an active commemoration or just like learning, you know, head of historical education, and that can range from standing in front of a statue, trying to read a plaque and trying to understand and often actually, you know, the recent kind of controversies over things like the Edward Colston statue. Often you don't really learn much at all about who that person was or what they did. It'll probably just say some dates when it was put up and who the artist was to this whole range of rather more involved. Yeah, like, broadly in historical research, we're thinking more about like, affective engagement, so like, how people engage in an emotional way with like, practices of commemoration. So like, and how those practices change. So before you would go to something like the Senatar for maybe it'd be more formulaic and structural, whereas like more recently you're seeing more intimate personal and artistic kind of renderings of forms of commemoration. So the kind of sea of poppies that was at the Tower of London, that kind of strikes, strikes, jumps to my mind, you know, that was then also exported around the UK in different guises. This idea of like cascading poppies is a way of. Did they move it around the country, sorry, I didn't realise it? No, I mean, it wasn't, that in and of itself I don't think was moved around, but that style of having buildings, I know when I was in Belfast, there was, although the poppy means something very different, kind of in a sectarian way, in Northern Ireland, but there is certainly a kind of more of an emphasis on like, experiential commemoration, especially as we move further away from events, right? So we try to engage more in an emotional way. So this is what I've mentioned another time, you know, the Temple of Relevance Paradise, I've written about about how we. I love the way it's the old term. T.O.P. Yeah. About how when we move further away from events, but they're still really important to like a national type of commemoration, how we still make those histories engaging. So like the First World War, for example, is so far removed from us now, you cannot imagine what life was like during that time. It is, you know, like a hundred years ago. It's so different. Life was so different. So how do we still make that relevant if it's important as a national story that the nation, however that might be defined and described, still thinks that's important? And I think I'm just going to like offer some thoughts here that like with the water Benjamin Escaped Town, and for example, maybe in contrast with the walk, right, is that with the water Benjamin Escaped Town, I think, okay, so broadly. The problem's levity, right? It's like it's automatically suggesting this isn't about sombre reflection. I think that's why people take events, right? And rather, this should be fun. I mean, if it's about affect, those two contrasting emotions are like, yeah, like a sombre nurse versus a jollyty. Well, I think there's a really careful tension between when is a history so far a way that we can play in it. And these are debates that really were shaped by the 1980s. So in the 1980s, you see this, you know, we've spoken about this in our Bees Sad and Share Up episode. There was this explosion of experiential history in what we now would think of as like heritage sites, although that is a really amorphous word that like captures so many different things, right? But what can I give us an example of, Sarah, I know what you mean, but the like the blitz experience, the pelvic viking centre, they're kind of examples of trying to take people back in time, right? So, you're using smells and sounds and so on and so on. Yeah, and you know, like the bench would shake when the bon falls and that kind of thing. So, you know, there was a real emphasis during that time on trying to experience particular pasts as a way of both kind of teaching as educating, but really trying to get people to engage with specific pasts. And I think often people feel like, I mean, look, this is why I'm interested in it, right? Because there is a tension here between how we learn about the past and also what are the appropriate ways of learning about it. Because a lot of people in museums, for example, behind the blitz experience or your, your victim viking centre will say, okay, but people aren't going to pick up a book or they're very rarely going to engage with it, but we're inspiring an engagement with history, right? I mean, to be fair, a lot of these experiences are more sophisticated now, obviously, than they were in the 1980s. A lot of them fell out of favour as well. So, like the blitz experience doesn't exist anymore. You know, a lot of this was like really quite dominant in terms of how people understood the past for a while. But for me, I think what I find really fascinating about this is that I think it demarcates a very specific type of engagement with a very specific type of history. So, if you, and it kind of asks the question, whose histories can we play with? Can we cause play? And whose histories can we not? And I think that, you know, I'm not asking that and a kind of Jordan Peterson like, oh, right, so you can be a prostitute in the 18th century if you're Jack the Ripper's victim, but you can't be Walter Benjamin. I'm not talking about power dynamics necessarily here. What I'm talking about is the fact that specifically in Europe, I think, around the time of the millennium, right? There was a shift in collective memory in terms of how Europe came together as a space as an ideological place, right? How do you tie together all of these nations that have historically tried to murder each other and also try to murder its Jewish population? Sorry, you think this happened around the time of the millennium? 100% yeah, in terms of because that was when. That's when the euro comes in. There was a real emphasis on how you get these, because there was also an emphasis on EU expansion during that time. Well, not EU expansion, but it was the fall of communism, fall of the Soviet bloc. And suddenly there are all of these nations who are just like on the edge of what was then considered Europe, you know, now Eastern Europe, who wants to join, but a requisite, a kind of prerequisite of that was a, I mean, Tony Jardt uses the phrase that the Holocaust was a European entry ticket. So it's super evocative phrase and I'm not getting at here that it's not just about acceptance of the Holocaust, it's about the idea that like there was personal culpability among all of the people of Europe for perpetrating the Holocaust, and only it was like a collective unifying memory. So for example, they, that you couldn't use, you couldn't use the end of colonialism, the end of empire, because it hadn't really ended, because it's still pursued in near colonialism. That's not to say that anti-Semitism hadn't, hadn't and doesn't continue, doesn't still exist, right? What it's saying is that during the 90s, specifically, it was a usable past by which to create a kind of shared collective geopolitical identity. The Holocaust. Yeah, it was not just the Holocaust, but uniting against the Holocaust. Right. And it was also during a time of the Rwandan genocide. - Yeah. - Genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo. And you know, there was a real sense that something must be done to stop this, to stop the murder of people. - Well, also, I mean, yeah, if you have like contemporary genocides occurring in the 1990s, which you do, then looking back and saying, I thought we said never again, essentially. - Essentially, yeah, exactly that. - We said never again, what do we say for here? And I'll see, I think Europe's relationship with the war and the now former Yugoslavia, in particular, like, you know, there's a sense of like, there's a land war in Europe again, there's massacres going on in Europe again. What was this all about? You know, what was the post-1945 settlement about the formation of the United Nations and eventually the European Union? - But I think that that's what's kind of, I think that's kind of what's underpinning some of the response, I think maybe to the Walter Benjamin escape town, is that not only was he a famous philosopher, but I think the fact that there is still a very important usable past, which is a uniting against the Holocaust, against genocide, makes this a past that we cannot cause play in because it is simply too barbaric, too present, too important, to just cause play, right? Whereas I think that a lot of people don't necessarily see that in other parts. I think that's a good thing. - I think it's important. - Let's think of some country, for example, like, I mean, these may be hypothetical because they're off of my head, so apologies, but like, it's hard to imagine in say the UK, anyone objecting to a cowboys and Indian sort of experience. - Right, there we go. - Some, I think some people rightly would, because they'd be like, oh, you're talking about the massacre of like native peoples of, you know, the North American continent over a sustained period. - By doing those histories of changing, and I think that's really important. - Yeah, absolutely. - That like in America, I think there is more of a kind of awareness about like, you can't just do cowboys and Indians because actually it demarcates like mass genocide and murder, right? - Yeah, and there's no laws. - Yeah. - Right, so obviously when we were children, you and I, growing up in London, it was absolutely, what was part of the playground? - Yeah. - And, you know, we'd watch, well, I'd certainly watch on TV like, cowboys and Indians type TV shows, I probably wouldn't even be called now. That was like a big part of my childhood, like, you know, it's not your idea that that would be controversial. That wouldn't be a suitable subject for cosplay the Wild West in the air commas. - It's a good seam absurd, right? - 'Cause I've been thinking about this, shout out again, like Nick Bano for like, his amazing Twitter feed that I just think is brilliant. But he put up something really recently that was about a hotel, I think it was a hotel that had been used, no, sorry, it was a courthouse that had prisons in it, jails, that had been used as a hotel for a number of years. But then it actually turned out that the home office, fairly recently, had started housing refugees, who it was, I think, maybe processing for detention. - And now possibly deport deportation. - Yeah, deportation. - Or manner of like horrible, murky things that like so many people were saying this is traumatizing for a lot of the people that are living there or that you have housed there. And I've been thinking about that case, why is that so uncomfortable, right? It's a repurposing of space, surely that all spaces space in London, space is tight, but it's not about that, it's because it's-- - Building some meaning, man. - Exactly, and because it feels so close. And not only does it feel close, but it's crazy to think that for a number of years, people were cosplaying as prisoners. And then actually people who were being deported, as but essentially if you're being deported, you are a prisoner because you're illegal, right? In the eyes of the law, even though you shouldn't be. So it's like one of these uneasy slippages, I think, between these things. - Yeah, I mean, I think it really is worth saying that like, without getting put in my psychodrography hat on, 'cause I have left it, I have-- (laughing) Like there is obviously like a great resonance in meaning that's contained within buildings, within spaces, you know, there is a reason why it feels uncomfortable to walk around Canary Wharf around the areas that, you know, slave rebellions happened and were crushed and suppressed and see that some of these buildings are a) the same buildings and they are being named after the people that were the major slave traders and c) there is a fucking statue right in front of them of one of those slave traders, honoring him as a great botanist or whatever, see our houseplant episode, more of that sort of thing. But, you know, the way that particular spaces are used for sort of commercial purposes. Like, I think something we should do at some point is actually track all of the escape rooms in London and see what buildings they used to it. I think I'll be a really interesting little project in itself actually. The rise of these things is interesting in its own right, but I think it's significant that it's often industrial buildings that are used for this sort of thing. I have just come from this evening to c) to record something called a Dream Machine, which is an alcohol and drug-free psychedelic immersive experience. How's it in the form of Woolwich Market, which is this, you know, cavernous, great building and I really felt very appropriate for what we were according today to be part of the experiential economy. I mean, I said I was free. I don't know where they got their funding from, but it's the sort of thing that is cropping up in our cities more and more. And to come back to the example of the Walter Benjamin escape town, they wouldn't have done that anywhere else. Like it wouldn't have made any sense to it. It seems like an obvious thing to say. But Portboo now carries this resonance of being the place where Walter Benjamin very tragically took his own life, where he had this glimmer of sort of, you know, possible redemption and escape and did not was not able to seize it through the most extraordinary, like, existentially bad luck, essentially, because as I said before, you know, very nearly. You've been a day earlier, a day later, probably would have been OK. But like the way that Portboo, I've been to Portboo before, and you know, there's a wonderful memorial to Walter Benjamin there. There are things like this. There is the trail through the mountains to get there. There's a bunch of, there's an annual conference, I think, as well. Like that space, that physical space of the very small town of Portboo is now sort of infused with meaning that has been lent to it by Walter Benjamin's, you know, very tragic demise there. And it's fascinating to me how physical spaces, it could be a building, it could be a whole town, can take on so much meaning through those history, through any kind of history, really. But in this case, it's the history of one man. And the Holocaust is a tragedy that affected many, many, and somehow his, I think his case is particularly striking not so much because he is a very important, what's a very important philosopher, but because he's sort of somehow emblematic of the tragedy of those that were killed in the Holocaust. - 100%. - You know, like, and he was sort of an example of many, you know, clearly a unique man in many ways, very grumpy and sort of carotomy and had a unique form of Marxism that philosophy post-grads this day, continued to try and unpick. It sort of continues to be an amorphous sort of constellation of ideas that's very hard to pin down, which is what makes it interesting to try and tackle at the same time. - I guess what I think is really important in this instance is the fact that like, what do you do in a city that faces, that suddenly, that not, maybe not suddenly, but finds itself with a kind of stream of tourists, a tourist industry, but maybe no one to fill it. Maybe also no Jewish people that understand the nuances of Holocaust history. How do you, and for people who aren't Jewish perhaps, it's just some philosopher who died in the past. How do you, what do you do if you're that town, right? I think that's how. - They have embraced it. - Like, I think this is, I think this is how the nuance of like what happened during that time is lost, and you end up things like a water Benjamin escape town or someone proposing that, because they don't understand the nuances of him losing his life and him being emblematic, one Holocaust victim is emblematic of all Holocaust victims. Because every single person was a person, not just a number, you know? It wasn't just six million. It was, it's not like, it's not that you think our six million what a huge, like whenever I teach students about this, six million feels like such an unapproachable number because it's so big, how do you imagine it? Every single person of that six million was one person with hopes, dreams, aspirations, thoughts, feelings, and so learning about the life and times of one of them is, you know, is a good start, but it has to be in it. It's understood as, you know, that person had their own individual characteristics, which are not just being one of the most extraordinary writers and thinkers of the 20th century, but like being a bit of a grump who was always quite ill, you know, like, that those mundane aspects of his life are sort of important as well somehow, you know? His, you know, his suffering isn't any more tragic because he was a great writer. - So like for context, in the 1980s, there was pretty much no commemoration of the Holocaust in the UK. There was like maybe one or two things on TV, like Kitty goes to Auschwitz with this Holocaust survivor, but like more broadly, there was a very small memorial in Hyde Park, even getting that there was really, really challenging, but then it was really only until, you know, till like the 90s with Schindler's list, but also actually I do think it's about this coming together of Europe, right, together like under the European Union. That really shifted the way that we think about the Holocaust in the UK specifically. And I think in a really important way, like in the UK, like often we've gone like, that wasn't our war. We fought the good war against the Nazis. Oh, we did that, you know, like, we did that to help out Jewish people, which actually is not true at all. It was literally just to defend Britain's empire. Right. It was not in any consideration. But often it was framed as something, and I'm using air quotes here that happened over there, you know, it happened over in like Europe. We like Britain was like, you know, a bastion of like, I've not, not anti-Semitism. A liberal tolerance, yeah. Liberal tolerance. There we go. And actually Tony Kushner wrote a book called The Liberal Imagination, the Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, which is all about how in the UK specifically conversations about the nature of the Holocaust that it actually did happen to Jewish people were avoided. And actually more generally, it was like, oh, this thing that happened in the camps wasn't it sad? There was very little specific mention, or like real public acceptance of the fact that Jewish people were murdered. That the Holocaust was about Jewish people. That's why you're off. And anyway, which is extraordinary. No, it's not so much. I mean, I'm going to go on a tangent. I know. This is my history. Yeah, yeah. No, it's really important. I just think I want to tip in and say that I find it very shocking that I didn't know how different or lacking, like Holocaust memorialization, commemoration was prior to, you're saying, sort of broadly, the '90s. Because you assume it's about age, whatever, like if I'd been an adult in that period, obviously, I'd know, but you assume that the way things are, probably the way things have been for some time, with a lot of things, right? I think if we've got any listeners who are in their early 20s or late teens, they would be well forgiven for assuming that the Poppy mania that we see every November, people getting furious about New Street is not wearing poppies, like cars with like, lorries with like the world's biggest Poppy on, like really sort of extravagant to put displays and so on. That wasn't the case even 15 years ago, right? Like, you and I know this, because we all remember from our childhoods and stuff. But it's very easy to, you assume that sort of these things are done the way they always have been done, and that's often not the case, basically. Yeah. And it takes a certain type of shift in, yeah, sort of, I guess, general consciousness slash various political imperatives, but for these things to start to shift somewhat. And I do think there's an irony here, though, like, in talking about the Holocaust in this way, because like, Walter Benjamin had such a difficult and ambivalent relationship with Judea, right? And that was actually like, you know, it is kind of part of the Nazi lens that anyone who was, who they regarded as Jewish, right? Even if you didn't identify as Jewish yourself, was then treated in relation to that personhood, to that person with density, right? So it's so weird even talking about, I don't know, like Walter Benjamin in the context of his Judaism, when we know that he has such a complex relationship with how he understood himself. Absolutely. But that's what, you know, Nazi race science is essentially, like, it's that sort of essentialism, isn't it? Yeah, this is an absolute space about fun, but this is quite deep, isn't it? I think I also want to say about the sort of escape room complex that does reveal something about our cities, which I think we've, you know, touched on briefly. Our towns and cities that like, in a post-industrial economy, that everything is becoming ever more gamified. Like, you familiar with the theatre company, Punch Drunk? Yeah, I think so, not really, though. So they, I weirdly end up doing one of the first ever interviews with them when I was at the South London press, because they just graduated from uni, like I had. And we're putting on like, King Lear in a warehouse for some reason, like that kind of thing that sort of now seems cliché, but they made it cliché. I mean, they didn't invent, like, immersive theatre, but they certainly are the most famous company for it in this country by a very long way. And their projects have got ever more ambitious, ever more absurd. And just, I mean, just like the secret cinema ones, that, you know, I think, as far as they know, anyway, started fairly small, and each time it gets more expensive, they bring in more people, they need a site that's the same, the size of barking to do it, and like, you know, it's a never sort of grand experience. We're instinctively, if I may speak for you as well, cash, like, come urgently about these sort of, these projects and stuff, whether they're entwined in like heritage and difficult histories or not, whether they're just like, entwined in the history of back to the future, which, let's face it, is not a difficult history. It's a very interesting one. Wow, we should do back to the future, actually, I shouldn't really like-- - In history, and a part of the future. - Yeah, it's a great film about-- - Might be my fly. - About memory and fate and stuff. - A scientist? - Sure, yeah, yeah, a bit of it a little bit. - A bit of a tear. - But I guess, I just want to say about cities that, yeah, the growth of those sort of things that are squarely targeted at, you know, rich young professionals, with supposed-wing calm, is sort of depressing, but at the same time, I don't want to be that clamor-jun and dismiss this stuff out of hand. I don't want to dismiss the gamifying of the city out of hand, something the water Benjamin himself was fascinated in and sort of prompted a lot of situation and stuff was sort of, you know, the idea of the flanner, who is, you know, a French word for an archetype of somebody who wonders sort of freely, and not bound by, like, capitalism, basically, not like just walking on the same path to your train, to your job, which you hate, and then back to the train to via the shop supermarket, back home every day, on the same path, but wandering freely in the city, probably quite an impoverished artistic person is partly archetype. It's also something that, like, Tweet's put in there in their Twitter bios, unfortunately, as it's like, I'm a flanner. But like, it is a fun thing to be. It is being in a new place, or discovering a place in new for the first time, by bringing kind of joy to the city, and, you know, Benjamin influenced the situation in the midst of 1960s France, so great deal. And they were very interested in games, and in the idea of, like, making the city into a site of fun, rather than just a reproduction of capital for the benefits of the very rich, you know, to sort of anti-work philosophy, as well, as opposed, and partly wants to love all of these projects, you know, maybe not the water bench in this cake room, but, like, you know, some of the other ones, like, why shouldn't we just, why shouldn't we turn, like, a factory that probably caused a lot of people a lot of misery for a very long time, because they had to work fucking horribly long hours, and were at risk of being crushed by heavy machinery, or having, you know, legs amputated, inhaling horrible fumes. That factory is now a place that those people's grandchildren couldn't, like, go and have some fun. Then maybe that's actually something we should fucking embrace, you know, like, doesn't mean that they're all the problems that gone from our society, or that we should forget, the people that worked in that factory, and the suffering that they went through, or that we shouldn't understand the way that kind of, particularly, X industrial areas of cities, often get turned into these spaces, like, you know, telling me, and it's just, it's the story of how Capsas have been involved. We don't make things in Britain anymore. We sell experiences. We sell experiences instead, you know, like. - I get, so, in preparation for this episode, I was going through, I've got this box of, like, all of my treasured things. - Yeah. - And actually, in that box was. It was this. Do you remember when we went to that lecture at this Jutl Hall Foundation? - Oh, yeah. - It was really rubbish. - Oh, my goodness, so bad. - And it was so weirdly self-indulgent. - It was really frustrating, and both of us wanted to love it. I've actually got the, like, little flyer from that stone. - Oh, no way. - Yeah. But I actually, I dug into the box because I was trying to find this thing that a really good friend of mine got from Port-au. I've just got here in my pocket, and I'm really. I'm desperate to share you. - Wow, what is this? - So it's a matchbox, right? But on the matchbox, it says. - That's the War Benjamin Memorial, I can see you. - Yeah, it's the War Benjamin, it's by Danny Carr-Ravan, and it's Passage's homage to a War Benjamin Port-au. So, let you can open it. Open the little cigarette, like the little matchbox. - It looks like a matchbox, like an old-school matchbox. - Oh. - And then it's like a little folded thing, and you can pull it out, and it's just like pictures of like, we're like, with like, "Water Benjamin quotes throughout." - Oh my God, that's so lovely. - It is so nice. - We're not reading to raise our knowledge, but to raise ourselves from a Berlin childhoods. - Just like if you ever wanted a little matchbox, a matchbox of a bunch of benches. - So beautiful, one lovely little thing. - It's not curse enough to be the cursed object, 'cause it's so phenomenal. - No, it's like a blessed object. It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless. Well, I mean, that's very relevant to what we're discussing today, as so much of his work is, actually. We haven't really talked about what's been doing the work, a great deal, because, as I said at the beginning, we'd be here all week. Like, you know, you need a series for each sort of work, almost, but that idea of like, rescuing the forgotten, the, marginalized, the people who didn't have voices, the people who did not get to stamp their authority or their narrative on kind of the telling of a particular bit of history is extremely relevant to this idea of a water bench in the escape room because paradoxically he's a famous philosopher who you can buy loads of tat on red bubble with his face on for some reason, but also like he was someone that most of his life, you know, he had a privilege upbringing and then for most of the rest of his adult life suffered and died a very horrible and as it and completely unnecessary death at the age of 40 something I think wasn't he? There's actually this relates, this wonderful object that cash has just handed to me and reminds me of one of the other objects I was considering is today's cursed object actually, which is it's a money box, which is obviously a thing that I don't know, I haven't really thought about the idea of a money box since I was a child and I had a piggy bank, but it's basically a piggy bank and on it is a quote from from Walter Benjamin, so it says and that quote it's literally like imagine a large queue with a slot in the top to put your coins in and it says very clearly on it quote, "history is written by the victors" on the quote, "Walter Benjamin" or "Huyford Walter Benjamin" he didn't say that it is a quote from someone who was fascinated by the idea of quotations and works tirelessly and with just unparalleled innovation insight and clarity of like of thought about history and about what the role of winners and the model and he didn't fucking say it, he didn't say it and it's a quote that's often attributed to Winston Churchill who also didn't say it and sometimes to George Orwell who also didn't say it like apparently it's yeah it's not it's not generally known I think he said it, it's an aphorism right, it is used to it and by the victors, it is basically the point, it's a good summary of the point he makes at extraordinary length and extraordinary fashion in Theses on the philosophy of history which is effectively about you know the march, the victors march of history being the way that history is are normally told and that like loads of people joining this great procession, he's always uses these incredible metaphors, this procession where they're carrying like these torches and banners at the march of the victorious but he never actually said history is written by the way, and the fact that you can get it as a money box is just like particularly commodify this ridiculous thing that is sort of fake completely on authentic and yet weirdly does speak to something about his work in a way as well, oh my god yeah maybe that should have been the cast object but it's certainly cursed out but then so's the action figure for a man that wrote so much about material culture, bless you got Walter Benjamin and Happy Birthday. I'm birthday Walt. So I think I mean I think that's enough and about the Walter Benjamin escape room, escape town even, we are going to escape from this podcast recording. To the pub? Yeah we've gamified our Friday night and I think I'm confident we're both going to win. Thank you so much for listening as ever. It's been a wild chaotic journey as Walter Benjamin would have hoped I think from which we dealt with a lot of the series quite deep stuff but also like some quite light-eyed at least off as well at the same time as how else could you possibly address an idea as ridiculous as Walter Benjamin escape town? I feel like this is our commemoration. This is our marking and it's all about how people do it and like for me and you like I think to be able to like record this podcast on this day. It feels really special. It's 130th birthday man. It's a round number. It's even hang out with you on this day because like I think that like Walter Benjamin's towns have to stick together because like you know he was a weird dude and like but he was an amazing dude that's it. He was a weird dude but he was an amazing dude. A little hyphen quotation, "cashity" you can get that on a money box. It will be on our Patreon soon as a free item. It's amazing. It's a major way not as amazing as him but we're both quite weird. This is an amazing. Maybe not as much as them but you know it's just like you know in our own way and I just yeah it just means a lot so thanks everyone for listening to us. Yeah we really appreciate it and we will be producing more episodes for both the main feed and the patreon feed. Thanks for supporting us and yeah let any pals know about if you enjoyed it and you think anyone else needs to know about the Stella work that Benjamin Walter. He's had one beer. This one's one beer. So I get a really emotional about me. That famous moment. It's all the emotions. It is. Thanks for listening guys. Love you guys. Bye. (upbeat music) (gentle music)