Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and the Jewish mysticism of Gershom Scholem.

As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas of Jewish mysticism with historical materialism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to Marxist philosophy and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated texts written by Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire, and Benjamin's essay The Task of the Translator is one of the best-known texts on the theory of translation.

[edit] Early life

Benjamin was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. He was brother-in-law to Hilde Benjamin.

[edit] Work

His most important writings were:

• Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe's Elective Affinities / 1922),
• Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama [Mourning Play] / 1928),
• Einbahnstraße (One Way Street / 1928),
• Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction / 1936),
• Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900 / 1950, published posthumously),
• Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History / Theses on the Philosophy of History) / 1939, published posthumously).
• Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire / 1938)

Benjamin corresponded extensively with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht and occasionally received funding from the Frankfurt School under Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's direction, even after this had moved to New York City. The competing influences of Brecht's Marxism (and secondarily Adorno's critical theory) and the Jewish mysticism of his friend Gerschom Scholem were central to Benjamin's work, though he never completely resolved their differences. The essay "On the Concept of History" (often referred to as the "Theses on the Philosophy of History"), among Benjamin's last works, is the closest approach to such a synthesis, and along with the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" (more commonly printed in English under the title "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"), are among the most often read of his texts, certainly among the more accessible.

In the ninth thesis of the essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Benjamin, inspired by a Paul Klee painting called Angelus Novus in his possession, poetically describes the course of human history as a path of accumulating destruction which "the angel" views with horror but from which he cannot turn away. His "Angel of History" would later inspire Tony Kushner's angels in his work Angels in America. Benjamin focused on epistemology, theory of language, allegory, and the philosophy of history. Furthermore, he wrote essays on Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust and Brecht.

[edit] Arcades Project

Benjamin's final, unfinished work, known as the Passagenwerk or Arcades Project, was to be an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the roofed outdoor "arcades" which created the city's distinctive street life and culture of flânerie. It has been posthumously edited and published in its unfinished form.

[edit] Trauerspiel

Benjamin's most lengthy completed work is his Habilitation dissertation, the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama by John Osborne). In this study, at once forbiddingly theoretical and painstakingly empirical, Benjamin analyses Reformation-era German politics and culture through the Trauerspiel genre of the 16th-17th century.

There are two main strands to this project: first, a robust distinction between the forms of tragedy and Trauerspiel, and second, a lengthy discussion of the seemingly inferior relation of allegory to symbolism. On the first line of thought, tragedy and Trauerspiel differ in their conception of time: the tragedy is eschatological insofar as its plot leads to a defined end-point, where characters and stories reach a fatalistic resolution; whereas the Trauerspiel takes place only in space, time stretches out forever towards the promised but undisclosed Last Judgment, so characters are therefore paralysed from all action and can only wait - thus there is no resolution and no sense of time passing. This element derives from Benjamin's interest in Jewish mysticism, which represents a substrand in the book, whereby the Jewish consciousness is arrested by the inability to speak the true name of the Divine and abandoned by a God they cannot have true knowledge of. On the second line of thought, the Trauerspiel proceeds through allegory since the stories are always representations of something outside themselves, but, says Benjamin, the allegory ultimately fails because it depends for meaning upon another object or idea - an object or idea that is not present or whose meaning is eternally deferred in the Trauerspiel.

Benjamin's view of the Trauerspiel is summed up in the quotation "The baroque knows no eschatology and for that very reason it has no mechanism by which it gathers all earthly things in together and exalts them before consigning them to their end" (p. 66). It is this view that links the Jewish mystical element to the analysis of tragedy and the study of contemporary Germany.

In a changing political climate, Benjamin hoped that this book would relate to the German belief in political and historical progress by showing its absolute futility, just as in the Trauerspiel. Instead, the massive complexity and profound obscurity of the book meant that it fell on largely deaf ears. When submitted as a Habilitation thesis (a higher degree in the German academic system that, after a PhD, gives legal authority to teach in a university), Benjamin's supervisor claimed it was unreadable and refused to award the degree, thus Benjamin was never allowed to teach in a university again. Even Benjamin's theoretical allies, such as Max Horkheimer, found the work impenetrable.

[edit] Criticism

Benjamin's style can be both intriguing and involved: Susan Sontag remarked that in Benjamin's texts, sentences do not seem to generate in the ordinary way; they do not lead gently into one another, and do not even create an obvious line of reasoning but stand as if each "had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes", a writing and thinking style she calls "freeze-frame baroque". Half-jestingly, Sontag concludes that "his major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct" <ref>Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, p. 129.</ref>. Though she didn't have a full overview of the Arcades Project when she wrote this, it certainly applies to that work as well, and it seems obvious that Benjamin found it hard to solidify his wanderings in the 19th century and beyond into a unified, clear theory.

Moreover, even a quick read of Benjamin makes it clear that (like Adorno) he was antagonistic of the idea that writing should have an denotative relation to what it is overtly about. As such, he write himself into a modernist in which the philosophical merges with the literary: through logical argumentation philosophical reasoning cannot account for all experience, especially those which concern self-representation through artistic medium.

His concern about style are further exemplified in his essay The Task of the Translatorwhere he openly claims that any literary translation will be imbued with some necessary misreadings and that a fight is always waged with the original text, which cannot be restored in the new realization through a foreign language; this points obliquely towards Derrida.

[edit] Death

Benjamin probably committed suicide in Portbou at the Spanish-French border, attempting to escape from the Nazis. The circumstances of his death are unclear. He appeared to be ill when he arrived in Portbou, having crossed a wild part of the Pyrenees in refugee fashion, and the party he was with were told they would be denied passage across the border, which would have been a step towards freedom (Benjamin's ultimate goal was the USA). While staying in the Hotel de Francia he took some morphine pills and he died in the night of 27/28 September 1940. The fact that he was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery would indicate that it was not announced as a suicide. The other persons in his party were allowed passage the next day, and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. A manuscript copy of Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" was passed to Adorno by Hannah Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, and was subsequently published by the Institute for Social Research (temporarily relocated in New York) in 1942.

One way of interpreting these facts is that though the entire group of travellers was stopped, Benjamin was in fact the main target. As an emigrant Jew, a radical writer who had made close friends with Brecht and Adorno, and a fierce critic of Nazism he would have been well-known to the Gestapo and it's a well documented fact that the Spanish border police were cooperative with the Germans. Once he was dead, following this interpretation, there would be no point in holding back the others (who did not know Benjamin). Benjamin certainly was aware that he was risking his life both if he went south or if he stayed behind in Paris; the latter meant certain death and probably torture at the hands of the Gestapo. It does not seem that he was using any forged identity papers when attempting to cross into Spain, and this would make it easier for the border police to identify him. In all probability Benjamin did not know people who were in the more advanced escape business, and his portliness and distinctive face made it hard for him to disguise himself anyway.

A completed manuscript which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. Some critics speculate that it was his Arcades Project in a final form; this is very unlikely as the author's plans for the work had changed in the wake of Adorno's criticisms in 1938, and it seems clear that the work was flowing over its containing limits in his last years. As the last finished piece of work we have from Benjamin, the Theses on the Philosophy of History (noted above) is often cited; Adorno claimed this had been written in the spring of 1940, weeks before the Germans invaded France. While this is not completely certain, it is clearly one of his last works, and the final paragraph, about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a harrowing final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight 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 indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter".

[edit] Legacy

Since the appearance of his Schriften in 1955, 15 years after his death, Benjamin's work has been the subject of numerous books and essays.

[edit] Bibliography

• The Arcades Project. ISBN 0-674-00802-2<ref>German original: Das Passagen-Werk, 3 volumes, ed by Rolf Tiedemann, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1983; also includes some correspondence with Adorno and others relating to the work)</ref>
• Berlin Childhood Around 1900. ISBN 0-674-02222-X
• Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet In The Era Of High Capitalism. ISBN 0-902308-94-7
• The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940. ISBN 0-226-04237-5
• The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. ISBN 0-674-17415-1
• Illuminations. ISBN 0-8052-0241-2
• Moscow Diary. ISBN 0-674-58744-8
• One Way Street and Other Writings. ISBN 0-86091-836-X
• Reflections. ISBN 0-8052-0802-X
• On Hashish. ISBN 0-674-02221-1
• The Origin of German Tragic Drama. ISBN 0-86091-837-8
• Selected Writings in four volumes, from Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-94585-9 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-674-94586-7 (vol. 2), ISBN 0-674-00896-0 (vol. 3), ISBN 0-674-01076-0 (vol. 4)
• Understanding Brecht. ISBN 0-902308-99-8

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Jennings, Michael Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism ISBN 0-8014-2006-7
• Leslie, Esther Walter Benjamin, Overpowering Conformism Pluto Press, London 2001 ISBN 0-7453-1568-2
• Witte, Bernd; Translated by Rolleston, James Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography ISBN 0-8143-2017-1

[edit] External links

• Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate
• Benjamin: On the Concept of History
• The Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft. In English and German.
• Who Killed Walter Benjamin?, a documentary film about the circumstances of Benjamin's death
• ShadowTime, an opera on the life of Walter Benjamin, music by Brian Ferneyhough, libretto by Charles Bernstein.
• Trilectic- The Lives of Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis set to music.
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• Head Rush: How drug experiments illuminated Walter Benjamin's thinking, Michael Berk, nextbook, May 16, 2006
• The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext
• Fragments of the Passagenwerk: The Arcades Project, Giles Peaker
• The Dialectics of Allegoresis: Historical Materialism in Benjamin's Illuminations, John Parker

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