In 1936, the same year he wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin published another essay no less prophetic: “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” At first glance, it is about a forgotten Russian writer. In truth, it is about the fate of humanity in the modern age — about how the stories we tell reveal the shape of our collective soul.
The Silence of Experience
Benjamin opens with a diagnosis: people no longer tell stories. The art of storytelling, he writes, is “coming to an end.” Why? Because the modern world has lost the kind of experience that stories once transmitted. He distinguishes between two forms of experience. Erfahrung is deep, cumulative, and communal — the wisdom that grows from living and is passed from mouth to mouth. Erlebnis, by contrast, is fleeting, private, and unshared — the momentary shock of sensation that defines modern life.
For centuries, storytelling turned experience into meaning. A tale told by a sailor, a traveler, or an artisan condensed life into a form others could inherit. But with the rise of industrial labor, mass media, and war, experience became fragmented. People returned from the battlefields of World War I “poorer in communicable experience.” What could be said, Benjamin suggests, when the world itself had lost coherence?
The Storyteller vs. the Novelist
Benjamin contrasts the storyteller with the modern novelist. The storyteller speaks within a community; the novelist writes for the solitude of the reader. The storyteller knows death — not as an abstraction but as the horizon that gives life meaning. The novelist knows isolation. In the novel, the reader follows a life from beginning to end; in the story, something essential is left unsaid, suspended like wisdom between generations.
The decline of storytelling thus signals more than a literary change. It marks a transformation in the structure of human experience: from shared wisdom to private existence, from narrative to information. Where the story once offered counsel, the newspaper delivers “explanations.” But explanations, Benjamin warns, never touch the depth of experience.
The Return of the Unspeakable
Yet, as always with Benjamin, loss is never final. The disappearance of storytelling might also prepare the ground for a new form of expression. In modern literature — in Kafka’s parables, for instance — silence itself becomes a mode of communication. The incommunicable replaces the told story; meaning hides in the gap between words. What dies as folklore may return as philosophy.
Wisdom in an Age of Noise
Benjamin’s lament is also an ethical appeal. To recover storytelling is to recover the capacity to listen — to be transformed by another’s experience. In a world saturated by data, his distinction between information and wisdom sounds newly radical. Information demands nothing of us; wisdom asks us to change.
For Benjamin, the true storyteller is not extinct but waiting — perhaps in every act of attention that resists the speed of the present. Every time we pause long enough to listen, we reclaim a fragment of Erfahrung: the ancient promise that human experience, however broken, can still be shared.
More on Benjamin: