Everything about Walter Benjamin totally explained
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (
July 15,
1892 –
September 27,
1940) was a
German-
Jewish
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
Jewish mysticism as presented by
Gershom Scholem.
As a
sociological and
cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from
historical materialism,
German idealism, and
Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was a novel contribution to
western philosophy,
Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated
Charles Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens and
Marcel Proust's famous novel,
In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays
The Task of the Translator and
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility. Influenced by
Bachofen, Benjamin gave the name "auratic perception" to the aesthetic faculty through which civilization would recover a lost appreciation of myth.
Life
Walter Benjamin was born in
Berlin on July 15, 1892 into a wealthy
Jewish family. His father was a banker in Paris and later went to Berlin and became an antiques trader. He was the eldest of three children of Emil Benjamin and Pauline Schönflies Benjamin: Walter (1892-1940), Georg (1895-1943) and Dora (1901-1946). In 1902 Walter was enrolled at
Kaiser Friedrich Schule, in
Berlin Charlottenburg, concluding his secondary studies only ten years later. The boy had a fragile physical condition and so, in 1905, he was sent by his parents to a country boarding school in
Thuringia, where he spent two years. In 1907 he returned to Berlin and to the
Kaiser Friedrich Gymnasium.
Benjamin enrolled at
Albert Ludwigs University in
Freiburg in 1912, but at the end of the summer semester returned again to Berlin and enrolled at
Friedrich Wilhelm University to continue his studies of philosophy. Benjamin became president of the
Freie Studentenschaft, and began to write essays arguing for the need of educational and general cultural change . Failing the re-election in that student's association, Benjamin again took up studies in Freiburg, attending the lectures of
Heinrich Rickert. After visits to
Paris and
Italy he returned to Berlin.
In 1914
World War I started, opposing Germany against France. Benjamin began translating with great care and interest the French poet
Charles Baudelaire. The following year he moved to
Munich, continuing his studies at
Ludwig Maximilians University, where he met
Rainer Maria Rilke and
Gershom Scholem. His lifetime friendship with Scholem was due not only to the very fact they both were Jewish but, above all, to their shared interest in art. The same year Benjamin wrote a paper on the German poet
Friedrich Hölderlin.
He married Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner) (1890-1964) in 1917 and moved to the
University of Bern (where he first met
Ernst Bloch), and the following year they'd a son, Stefan Rafael (1918-1972). In 1919 Benjamin earned his
Ph.D. cum laude with the essay
The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. They returned to Berlin, to live with Benjamin's parents, because of financial problems. Walter and Dora separated in 1928, and the next year he moved to the
University of Heidelberg where he tried an academic career.
The
Institute for Social Research (
Frankfurt School) was founded in 1923. Benjamin met
Theodor Adorno and became a friend of
Georg Lukács (whose
The Theory of the Novel, published in 1920, strongly influenced him). The economic crisis in
Germany caused his father to have serious difficulties in continuing the financial support he gave to Benjamin. At the end of 1923 his best friend, Gershom Scholem, emigrated to Mandatory
Palestine (which had been occupied by the
British Army during World War I). In the following years Scholem tried to persuade Benjamin to join him.
Benjamin's paper "
Goethe's Elective Affinities" was published by
Hugo von Hoffmansthal in the magazine
Neue Deutsche Beiträge in 1924. Together with Ernst Bloch, Benjamin spent several months in the Italian island of
Capri, writing his
habilitation thesis, on
The Origin of German Tragic Drama. There he first met
Asja Lacis, a
Bolshevik Latvian actress living in
Moscow. She would remain an important and lasting intellectual and erotic influence on him.
A year later,
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (
Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels) was rejected by the
Frankfurt University, effectively closing the door to an academic career for the 33 year old scholar. Together with Franz Hessel (1880-1941), he translated the first volumes of the novel
In Search of Lost Time, by
Marcel Proust. The next year Benjamin began writing for the German newspapers
Frankurter Zeitung and
Die Literarische Welt, so he could afford living several months in
Paris. His father died in 1926 and, in December, Benjamin travelled to
Moscow to meet Asja Lacis, but found her sick in a sanatorium .
He started his monumental and unfinished
The Arcades Project in 1927, working on it until his death. The same year he met Gershom Scholem for the last time in Berlin, and considered moving to Palestine. In 1928 Benjamin published
One-Way Street and
The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In 1929, he was introduced to
Bertold Brecht by Asja Lacis, then Brecht's assistant, in Berlin.
After two years of separation, Benjamin was divorced from his wife in 1930. Avoiding the repressive activities of the
Nazi Party and the
SA, in 1932 he spent several months on the Spanish island of
Ibiza. Then, moved to
Nice, where he planned to commit suicide. With the
Reichstag fire, in 1933,
Adolf Hitler became the
Führer and his dictatorship started the
persecution of the Jews. Benjamin sought shelter in
Svendborg, at Bertold Brecht's, and
Sanremo, where his ex-wife lived, before moving to Paris.
His financial situation got worse. Benjamin collaborated with
Max Horkheimer and received some funds from the
Institute for Social Research, which had relocated to
New York. He met other German intellectual and artist refugees in Paris and became friend of
Hannah Arendt,
Hermann Hesse and
Kurt Weill. In 1936
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was first published in French by Max Horkheimer (
L'Œuvre d'Art à l'Époque de sa Reproductibilité Technique), in the Institute for Social Research's journal (
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung).
In 1937 Benjamin worked on his book
The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, met
Georges Bataille, and joined the
College of Sociology. In 1938 he paid a last visit to Bertold Brecht in
Denmark. Hitler removed the German citizenship from Jews and Benjamin was incarcerated for three months in a camp near
Nevers.
Returning to Paris in January 1940, he wrote his
Theses on the Philosophy of History. In June, the
Wehrmacht broke the French defense. Benjamin flew to
Lourdes with his sister, one day before the Germans entered Paris. In August, he obtained a visa to the
United States, which had been negotiated by Max Horkheimer. Attempting to elude the
Gestapo, Benjamin failed to reach
Portugal (officially a neutral country) through
Spain, on his way to the United States. Apparently, he took his own life on September 27, 1940 at
Portbou, a border town in the
Pyrenees,
Catalonia, swallowing an overdose of
morphine compound, after the group of Jewish refugees he joined was intercepted by the Spanish Police . However, many details of his last days remain unclear and there's a fair amount of speculation, including the theory that he was murdered by Stalinist agents (read more about his
Death, below).
Works
Among Benjamin's most important works were the following:
- Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence / 1921).
- Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe's Elective Affinities / 1922).
- Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama [MourningPlay] / 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 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. On the other hand, some later critics, such as
Paul de Man, have argued that Benjamin's writings dynamically flow between these different traditions in order to create a kind of internal critique out of their juxtaposition. "On the Concept of History" (often referred to as the "Theses on the Philosophy of History"), among Benjamin's last works, is, according to some readers, the closest approach to such a synthesis.
The following is Benjamin's ninth thesis from the essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History":
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he's about to move away from something he's fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling 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 in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a 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 Origin of German Tragic Drama
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.
The project begins with a lengthy "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" in which Benjamin sets out the philosophical stakes of his work: the combination and elaboration of parts of the Platonic theory of ideas, the Hegelian historical sublation, and the Leibnizian monad. Encapsulating the one within the other, Benjamin gives the Platonic form a historical instantiation, but only in the sense that it's monadic. Within aesthetic objects of study, there's contained the monad of its historical development, and when this monad is placed within a constellation of other objects, it reveals to the scholar the historical development of the idea. Thus, in the
Trauerspiel itself, what appears to be an ahistorical accumulation of fragments is instead already in some sense historical.
Within the main text itself, there are two main divisions: first, a distinction between tragedy and
Trauerspiel, where Benjamin clears away the interpretations that precede his work, and second, a lengthy discussion of the relation of allegory to symbolism and the way in which allegory might open onto his modified platonic notion of the idea. In the first section, Benjamin notes that 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's no resolution and no sense of time passing. In short, in
Trauerspiel, time is spatialized. Part of what makes
Trauerspiele so inscrutable is that their relationship to history is only ever allegorical, in the sense that the play presents fragments and broken shards of history without narrativizing them, as we're accustomed to seeing in most plays. These fragments, when placed on the stage, rather than maintaining a denotative relationship to history, where history is told, the spatial constellation of these fragments reveals a true idea of history. Benjamin's book constantly performs this constellating of monads, presaging in dependent clauses what will be said more fully later, itself constantly reaching back to earlier sections of the book. Benjamin's project, then, is most famously summed up very early in the book, writing, "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).
In a changing political climate, Benjamin hoped that this book would relate to the German belief in political and historical progress by showing the absolute futility of raw historicism, just as in the
Trauerspiel the resuscitation of historical objects and facts is absolutely impossible. 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), Professor Schultz of Frankfurt University found it inappropriate for his own department of "Germanistik" (the department of German Language and Literature), and passed it off to the department of aesthetics (philosophy of art). The readers in that department called it an "incomprehensible morass" and the university recommended that Benjamin withdraw the thesis in order to avoid the embarrassment of a public rejection. After some consideration, Benjamin did so.
The 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.
Benjamin's style
Susan Sontag once remarked that, in Benjamin's texts, sentences don't seem to generate in the ordinary way; they don't lead gently into one another, and don't create an obvious line of reasoning. Instead, it's as if each sentence "had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes", a style of writing and thinking Sontag calls "freeze-frame baroque." Sontag writes that "his major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct." Though Sontag didn't have a full overview of the
Arcades Project when she wrote this, her comments apply to that work as well. The difficulty of Benjamin's style can be understood as an essential part of his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, Benjamin's goal in much of his later work was less to articulate a coherent position than to use varied intertexts to reveal aspects of the past that can't and shouldn't be understood within larger, monolithic constructs of historical understanding (the so-called "
grand narrative").
Through his writings Benjamin identifies himself as a modernist for whom the philosophical merges with the literary: logic-based philosophical reasoning can't account for all experience, and especially not for self-representation through artistic mediums.
His concerns regarding style are exemplified in his essay
The Task of the Translator, in which he argues that any literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text. In the deformed text, otherwise hidden aspects of the original are elucidated, while formerly obvious aspects become unreadable. Benjamin considers this mortification of the text productive; when placed in a specific constellation of works and ideas, newly revealed affinities between historical objects appear and are productive of philosophical truth.
Death
Benjamin may have 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'd be denied passage across the border, which would have been a step towards freedom (Benjamin's ultimate goal was the United States). While staying in the
Hotel de Francia, he apparently took some
morphine pills and died on 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 his death wasn't 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 "On the Concept 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'd 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 didn't know Benjamin). Benjamin certainly was aware that he was risking his life whether he went south or stayed behind in Paris; the latter meant certain death and probably torture at the hands of the Gestapo. It doesn't 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 didn't 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 hasn't 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've 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 isn't completely certain, it's 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 didn't make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."
An alternative theory of his death considers the possibility that Benjamin was actually murdered by Stalinist agents. He might have earned his place on Stalin's hitlist by the fact that his last book
Theses on the Philosophy of History has been read as an analysis of the failures of Stalinism. The lost manuscript could well have been an elaboration of his criticism of Stalinism and its loss not so much an accident as the very cause for the murder.
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. His essay
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is considered a seminal text, of particular importance to those studying humanities and is often quoted for its relevance to musicology, for example in the books of Michael Chanan. Its prescience is more easily felt in the twenty-first century in which mechanical reproduction has increased far beyond the scope of what Benjamin could have imagined. His writings on modernism are valued for being so illuminating and precise at a time when much confusion and derision surrounded the movement and have gone on to set the tone for a more recent generation of critics who continue to unravel the threads of modernism using his example.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Walter Benjamin'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://walter_benjamin.totallyexplained.com">Walter Benjamin Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
