Misunderstanding Kitsch: Walter Benjamin's "Traumkitsch" (1925), Max Ernst' Protosurrealist Collages, and Old-fashioned Children's Illustrations

Abstract

This essay establishes the centrality of Max Ernst’s untitled protosurrealist frontispiece collage for Paul Éluard’s Répétitions in Walter Benjamin’s thinking on surrealism, kitsch, and the outmoded. Benjamin wrote about Ernst’s frontispiece collage in his 1925 sketch, “Traumkitsch” (pub. 1927). I argue that Benjamin’s “dream kitsch” is a form of counter-kitsch meant to unravel capitalist bourgeois social control and conditioning, as influenced by André Breton’s discussion of unrestricted language and the process of relearning in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. The fact that a reproduction of Ernst’s collage was also included in the third and final installment of Benjamin’s 1929 essay in Die literarische Welt, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” demonstrates that Ernst’s frontispiece encapsulated his special interest for old-fashioned children’s book illustrations. As I show, Benjamin’s fixation on Ernst’s image results in an early formulation of redemptive modes of relationality in modern life inspired by childhood experience.