Professional Documents
Culture Documents
the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. Walter Benjamin was a boy of fragile health and so in 1905
the family sent him to Hermann-Lietz-Schule Haubinda,
a boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, for two
years; in 1907, having returned to Berlin, he resumed his
schooling at the Kaiser Friedrich School.[3]
In 1912, at the age of twenty, he enrolled at the University
of Freiburg, but, at summer semesters end, returned to
Berlin, then matriculated into the University of Berlin,
to continue studying philosophy. Here Benjamin had his
rst exposure to the ideas of Zionism, which had not been
part of his liberal upbringing. This exposure gave him
occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning
of Judaism. Benjamin distanced himself from political
and nationalist Zionism, instead developing in his own
thinking what he called a kind of cultural Zionism
an attitude which recognized and promoted Judaism and
Jewish values. In Benjamins formulation his Jewishness
meant a commitment to the furtherance of European culture. Benjamin expressed My life experience led me to
this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of
the spiritually active ... For Judaism is to me in no sense
an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and
representative of the spiritual. This was a position that
Benjamin largely held lifelong.[4]
Criticism in German Romanticism). Later, unable to support himself and family, he returned to Berlin and resided
with his parents. In 1921 he published the essay Kritik
der Gewalt (The Critique of Violence). At this time Benjamin rst became socially acquainted with Leo Strauss,
and would remain an admirer of Strauss and of his work
throughout his life.[6][7][8]
1.2
Career
LIFE
Scholem in Berlin, for the last time, and considered emigrating from Continental Europe (Germany) to Palestine. In 1928, he and Dora separated (they divorced two
years later, in 1930); in the same year he published Einbahnstrae (One-Way Street), and a revision of his habilitation dissertation Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels
(The Origin of German Tragic Drama). In 1929 Berlin,
Asja Lcis, then assistant to Bertolt Brecht, socially presented the intellectuals to each other. In that time, he also
briey embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg.
In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler's assumption of the oce of Chancellor of Germany, Walter
Benjamin left Germany for the Spanish island of Ibiza for
some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered killing himself. Perceiving the socio-political and
cultural signicance of the Reichstag re (27 February
1933) as the de facto Nazi assumption of full power in
Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution
of the Jews, he moved to Paris, but, before doing so, he
sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertolt Brechts house,
and at Sanremo, where his ex-wife Dora lived.
3
als, refugees there from Germany; he befriended Hannah
Arendt, novelist Hermann Hesse, and composer Kurt
Weill. In 1936, a rst version of The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction (L'uvre d'art l'poque
de sa reproduction mchanise) was published, in French,
by Max Horkheimer in the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung
journal of the Institute for Social Research.
In 1937 Benjamin worked on Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the Arcades Project manuscript), and joined the
College of Sociology. In 1938 he paid a last visit to
Bertolt Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile,
the Nazi Rgime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Benjamin was arrested by the French government and incarcerated for
three months in a prison camp near Nevers, in central
Burgundy.
2 Thought
Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor
Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded
by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno
and Horkheimer, even from their New York City residence. The competing inuencesBrechts Marxism,
Walter Benjamins grave in Portbou. The epitaph in German, reAdornos critical theory, Gerschom Scholems Jewish
peated in Catalan, quotes from Section 7 of Theses on the Philosophy of History: There is no document of culture which is mysticismwere central to his work, although their
philosophic dierences remained unresolved. Moreover,
not at the same time a document of barbarism
the critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of
Returning to Paris in January 1940, he wrote ber den Benjamins writings ows dynamically among those three
Begri der Geschichte (On the Concept of History, later intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposipublished as Theses on the Philosophy of History). As tion; the exemplary synthesis is Theses on the Philosophy
the Wehrmacht defeated the French defence, on 13 June, of History.
Benjamin and his sister ed Paris to the town of Lourdes,
a day before the Germans entered Paris (14 June 1940),
with orders to arrest him at his at. In August, he ob- 2.1 Theses on the Philosophy of History
tained a travel visa to the US that Max Horkheimer had
negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin Main article: Theses on the Philosophy of History
planned to travel to the US from neutral Portugal, which
he expected to reach via fascist Spain, then ostensibly a Theses on the Philosophy of History is often cited as Benneutral country.
jamins last complete work, having been completed, acThe historical record indicates that he safely crossed the cording to Adorno, in the spring of 1940. The Institute
FrenchSpanish border and arrived at the coastal town for Social Research, which had relocated to New York,
of Portbou, in Catalonia. The Franco government had published Theses in Benjamins memory in 1942. Marcancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish po- garet Cohen writes in the Cambridge Companion to Wallice to return such persons to France, including the Jew- ter Benjamin:
ish refugee group Benjamin had joined. It was told by
the Spanish police that it would be deported back to
France, which would have destroyed Benjamins plans to
2 THOUGHT
which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would
like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole
what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer
close them. The storm irresistibly propels him
into the future to which his back is turned,
while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
The nal paragraph about the Jewish quest for the
Messiah provides a harrowing nal point to Benjamins
work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the ght between humanity and nihilism. He
brings up the interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, to
try to determine the year when the Messiah would come
into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews
indierent to the future for every second of time was the
strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
2.2
Paul Klee's 1920 painting Angelus Novus, which Benjamin compared to the angel of history
praxis in dark times, inspired by the kabbalistic precept that the work of the holy man is
an activity known as tikkun. According to the
kabbalah, Gods attributes were once held in
vessels whose glass was contaminated by the
presence of evil and these vessels had consequently shattered, disseminating their contents
to the four corners of the earth. Tikkun was the
process of collecting the scattered fragments in
the hopes of once more piecing them together.
Benjamin fused tikkun with the Surrealist notion that liberation would come through releasing repressed collective material, to produce
his celebrated account of the revolutionary historiographer, who sought to grab hold of elided
memories as they sparked to view at moments
of present danger.
The Passagenwerk (Arcades Project, 192740), was Walter Benjamins nal, incomplete book about Parisian city
life in the 19th century, especially about the Passages
couverts de Paris the covered passages that extended the
culture of nerie (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather made nerie infeasible in the boulevards and streets proper.
5
The Arcades Project, in its current form, brings together a
massive collection of notes which Benjamin led together
over the course of thirteen years, from 1927 to 1940.[16]
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936)
2.4
Writing style
Susan Sontag said that in Walter Benjamins writing, sentences did not originate ordinarily, do not progress into
one another, and delineate no obvious line of reasoning,
as if each sentence had to say everything, before the
inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject
before his eyes, a freeze-frame baroque style of writing and cogitation. His major essays seem to end just
in time, before they self-destruct.[17] The diculty of
Benjamins writing style is essential to his philosophical
project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, his goal in later works was to use intertexts to reveal
aspects of the past that cannot, and should not, be understood within greater, monolithic constructs of historical
understanding.
Walter Benjamins writings identify him as a modernist
for whom the philosophic merges with the literary: logical philosophic reasoning cannot account for all experience, especially not for self-representation via art. He
presented his stylistic concerns in The Task of the Translator, wherein he posits that a literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of
the original text. Moreover, in the deformed text, otherwise hidden aspects of the original, source-language text
are elucidated, while previously obvious aspects become
unreadable. Such translational mortication of the source
text is productive; when placed in a specic constellation
of works and ideas, newly revealed anities, between historical objects, appear and are productive of philosophical truth.
His work The Task of the Translator was later commented The successor society was registered in Karlsruhe (Gerby the French translation scholar Antoine Berman (L'ge many); Chairman of the Board of Directors was Bernd
Witte, an internationally recognized Benjamin scholar
de la traduction).
and Professor of Modern German Literature in Dsseldorf (Germany). Its members come from 19 countries,
both within and beyond Europe and represents an inter3 Works
national forum for discourse. The Society supported research endeavors devoted to the creative and visionary
Among Walter Benjamins works are:
potential of Benjamins works and their view of 20th century modernism. Special emphasis had been placed upon
Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence, 1921)
strengthening academic ties to Latin America and Eastern
and Central Europe.[20] The society conducts conferences
Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethes Elective
and exhibitions, as well as interdisciplinary and intermeAnities, 1922)
dial events, at regular intervals and dierent European
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of venues:
German Tragic Drama, 1928)
Barcelona Conference September 2000
Einbahnstrae (One Way Street, 1928)
Walter-Benjamin-Evening at Berlin November
Karl Kraus (1931 in the Frankfurter Zeitung)
2001
7
Walter-Benjamin-Evening at Karlsruhe January
2003
Rome Conference November 2003
Zurich Conference October 2004
Paris Conference June 2005
Dsseldorf Conference June 2005
Dsseldorf Conference November 2005
Antwerpen Conference May 2006
Vienna Conference March 2007[21]
REFERENCES
Commemoration
plaque
for
Walter
Benjamin,
Berlin-
[9] Jane O. Newman, Benjamins Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque, Cornell University Press, 2011, p.
28: "...university ocials in Frankfurt recommended that
Benjamin withdraw the work from consideration as his
Habilitation.
A commemorative plaque is located by the residence where Benjamin lived in Berlin during the
years 19301933: (Prinzregentenstrae 66, Berlin[10] Moscow Diary
Wilmersdorf). Close by Kurfrstendamm, in the district
of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, a town square created [11] Jay, Martin The Dialectical Imagination: A History of
the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research
by Hans Kollho in 2001 was named Walter-Benjamin[22]
19231950.
Platz.
See also
Gertrud Kolmar
Michael Heller
Angelus Novus
References
[1] Walter Benjamin, Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1936: The uniqueness of a
work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the
[12] Leslie, Esther (2000). Benjamins Finale. Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism. Modern European
Thinkers. Pluto Press. p. 215. ISBN 978-0-7453-15683. Retrieved August 28, 2009.
[13] Lester, David (2005). Suicide to Escape Capture:
Cases. Suicide and the Holocaust. Nova Publishers. p.
74. ISBN 978-1-59454-427-9. Retrieved August 28,
2009.
[14] Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while eeing
France, [Koestler] borrowed suicide pills from Walter
Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it
seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn't
die. Anne Applebaum, "Did The Death Of Communism
Take Koestler And Other Literary Figures With It?" Huington Post, 28 March 2010, URL retrieved 15 March
2012.
8.2
Secondary literature
Further reading
8.1
Primary literature
8 FURTHER READING
de Man, Paul. (1986). "'Conclusions: Walter Benjamins 'Task of the Translator'", in The Resistance
to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. pp. 73105. ISBN 0-8166-1294-3
Eiland, Howard and Michael W. Jennings. (2014).
Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780-674-05186-7
Ferris, David S., ed. (1996). Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions. Stanford: Stanford University
Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-2569-9 (cloth) ISBN
978-0-8047-2570-5 (paper)
Perrier, Florent, ed., Palmier, Jean-Michel (Author), Marc Jimenez (Preface). (2006) Walter Benjamin. Le chionnier, l'Ange et le Petit Bossu. Paris:
Klincksieck. ISBN 978-2-252-03591-7
Pignotti, Sandro (2009): Walter Benjamin Judentum und Literatur. Tradition, Ursprung, Lehre mit
einer kurzen Geschichte des Zionismus. Rombach,
Freiburg ISBN 978-3-7930-9547-7
Jacobs, Carol. (1999). In the Language of Walter Benjamin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
ISBN 978-0-8018-6031-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-08018-6669-2 (paper)
Lwy, Michael. (2005). Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamins 'On the Concept of History.' Trans.
Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso.
Scheurmann, Konrad (1994) Passages Dani Karavan: An Environment in Remembrance of Walter Benjamin Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Bonn:
AsKI e.V. ISBN 3-930370-01-8
9
Scholem, Gershom. (2003). Walter Benjamin: The
Story of a Friendship. Trans. Harry Zohn. New
York: New York Review Books. ISBN 1-59017032-6
Steinberg, Michael P., ed. (1996). Walter Benjamin
and the Demands of History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-3135-7 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8014-8257-1 (paper)
Steiner, Uwe. (2010). Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought. Trans. Michael
Winkler. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-77221-9
Taussig, Michael. (2006). Walter Benjamins Grave.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780-226-79004-6.
Weber, Samuel. (2008). Benjamins -abilities.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN
0-674-02837-6 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-04606-4 (paper)
Witte, Bernd. (1996). Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Verso. ISBN 978-185984-967-5
Wizisla, Erdmut. 2009. Walter Benjamin and
Bertolt Brecht The Story of a Friendship. Translated by Christine Shuttleworth. London / New
Haven: Libris / Yale University Press. ISBN 9781-870352-78-9 [Contains a complete translation
of the newly discovered Minutes of the meetings
around the putative journal Krise und Kritik (1931)].
Wolin, Richard, Telos 43, An Aesthetic of Redemption: Benjamins Path to Trauerspiel. New York: Telos Press Ltd., Spring 1980. (Telos Press).
Wolin, Richard, Telos 53, The Benjamin-Congress:
Frankfurt (July 13, 1982). New York: Telos Press
Ltd., Fall 1982. (Telos Press).
Urbich, Jan (2011). Darstellung bei Walter Benjamin. Die 'Erkenntniskritische Vorrede' im Kontext sthetischer Darstellungstheorien der Moderne, Berlin: De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11026515-6
External links
Works by Walter Benjamin at Open Library
Works by or about Walter Benjamin in libraries
(WorldCat catalog)
Walter Benjamin, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
The Arcades
10
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10.1
10.2
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