2023-11-24 15:51:33
Literature Cannabis legalization
“Very deep hashish depression”
Status: 24.11.2023 | Reading time: 3 minutes
“Time and space demands” of the drug: Walter Benjamin
Quelle: picture alliance / brandstaetter images/Austrian Archives
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The Bundestag wants to legalize cannabis – and is discussing THC upper limits and cultivation associations that should be called “social clubs”. But stoners were never social. This is shown in an unusual text by the great thinker (and hashish consumer) Walter Benjamin.
“Very deep hashish depression,” noted Walter Benjamin on 7/8. June 1930: “Feeling intensely in love with G. Excessively abandoned in my armchair.” The recording could have been used as a warning at the Bundestag’s most recent hearing on the Cannabis Act (CanG). Conversely, one could quote from a letter to Horkheimer dated February 7, 1938, where Benjamin emphasizes “how deeply certain forces are conspired by the intoxication of reason and its struggle for freedom.” Unfortunately, it was all about 200-meter distance rules, THC caps and cultivation associations that are supposed to be called “social clubs” – as if socially incompatible phlegm wasn’t the stoner’s most notorious trait.
Benjamin also created a monument to her: with his story “Myslowitz – Braunschweig – Marseille”, published in 1930. The story is based on his autobiographical essay “Hashish in Marseille,” but embellishes the experience into the fictional story of a painter named Eduard Scherlinger. He inherited a “small fortune” and promptly traveled to France; the money was supposed to grow in the custody account of a private bank. Their junior boss promises to contact you by telegraph “if a favorable conversion opportunity arises.” For authorization purposes, the name “Braunschweiger” is agreed upon as the “password” on the reply letter.
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On a July day in Marseille, Scherlinger took hashish “around seven in the evening” and, when the effect took three quarters of an hour to take effect, he became “suspicious of the quality of the drug”. Then there is a knock on the hotel room door, a dispatch messenger appears with the offer to “buy 1000 Royal Dutch Friday first course”. Since the main post office is open until midnight, the painter sets off, worried that he might “forget the agreed password” while drunk. On the way he feels ravenous, enters a pastry shop to buy “a bar of chocolate” and notices from the “high throne chairs” that he is standing in a hairdressing salon and has confused the wigs in the shop window with “Baumkuchen”.
Under the “clock moon”
Now the “time and space demands” of the drug come into play: In the main square, Scherlinger freezes when he sees the post office with its “clock moon”, in which he mysteriously sees “the Myslowitz high school” with its school clock: “I sank into this image “, found no reason anymore.” Having forgotten his intention, the hero sits down in a bar and, when he lifts the cup to his mouth and smells the “beguiling scent of coffee”, recognizes “the wrinkles of burnus” in his beach pants and in his sun-tanned hand “a brown, Ethiopian one”. Suddenly the meaning of his bank password becomes clear to him: “I saw myself sitting there, brown and silent: Braunschweiger.“
While the enlightened man “smiling endlessly with pity” thinks of the real people of Braunschweig, “who live miserably in their little central German town without knowing anything about the magical powers that their name has placed in them,” they ring “like a choir in solemn confirmation with theirs “All the church towers of Marseille strike midnight.”
The post office closes, the “sensational bull market in Royal Dutch”, which the “Mittagspapiers” report on the following day, goes unused along with the millions in profits. However, it remains unlikely that legalization of cannabis will lead to a boom in such stunning literature.
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