Walter Benjamin

In popular culture and left-wing journalism he often appears as an exemplar whose experience is representative of the tragedy of German Jewish intellectuals under Nazi Germany.

Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked that "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction".

He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative relationships with thinkers and cultural figures such as playwright Bertolt Brecht (friend), Martin Buber (an early impresario in his career), Nazi constitutionalist Carl Schmitt (a rival), and many others. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though his friendship with her flowered in Paris after she separated from Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.

Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a critic included essays on Kafka, Baudelaire, Goethe, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, Trauerspiel and translation theory. He translated the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin died during his flight into exile at Portbou on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Having remained in Europe until it was too late, as Cynthia Ozick puts it, Benjamin took his own life to avoid being murdered as a Jew. "Impressed and shaken by his death, the Spanish authorities allowed Benjamin's companions to continue their travel" into Spain, by which route they were able to escape the Third Reich.

Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown. Some German readers and academics encountered Benjamin after his Complete Works began to be released by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1955, but global acclaim came to him when his works were translated into English and introduced to a reading public in the Anglosphere by Arendt in 1968.

Life

Early life and education

Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, then the capital of the German Empire. Walter's father, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who had relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader and art dealer; marrying Pauline Schönflies. He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks.

Walter's uncle, William Stern, was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ). He also had a cousin, Günther Anders, a German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist who studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Through his mother, Walter's great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld.

In 1901, the eight-year-old Walter was enrolled at the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. In his youth, Walter was of fragile health and so in 1905 the family sent him to Hermann-Lietz-Schule Haubinda, part of the German rural boarding school movement in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in 1907, having returned to Berlin, he resumed his schooling at the Kaiser Friedrich School.

In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg, but at the summer semester's end, he returned to Berlin and matriculated at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin to continue studying philosophy. There, Benjamin had his first exposure to Zionism, which had not been part of his liberal upbringing. This 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 that recognized and promoted Judaism and Jewish ethics. In Benjamin's formulation, his Jewishness meant a commitment to the furtherance of European culture. He wrote: "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 Benjamin largely held throughout his life.

It was as a speaker and debater in the milieu of the Gustav Wyneken's German Youth Movement that Benjamin was first encountered by Gershom Scholem and later Martin Buber, although he had parted ways with the youth group before they had become properly acquainted. Elected president of the Freie Studentenschaft (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change while working alongside Wyneken at the legendary and controversial youth magazine Der Anfang (The beginning), that was banned in all schools in Bavaria. Wyneken's thesis that a new youth must pave the way for revolutionary cultural change became the main theme of all of Benjamin's publications at that time. When he was not reelected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg to study, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert; at that time he traveled to France and Italy.

Benjamin's attempt to volunteer for service at the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was rejected by the army. He later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription, allowing him to continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Charles Baudelaire. His conspicuous refuge in Switzerland on dubious medical grounds was a likely factor in his ongoing challenges in obtaining academic employment after the war.

The next year, 1915, Benjamin moved to Munich and continued his schooling at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Scholem; the latter became a lifelong friend. Intensive discussions with Scholem about Judaism and Jewish mysticism gave the impetus for the 1916 text (surviving as a manuscript) Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen ("On Language as Such and on the Language of Man"), which, as Benjamin said to Scholem, "has an immanent relationship to Judaism and to the first chapter of the Genesis". In that period, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin.

In 1917 Benjamin transferred to the University of Bern; there he met Ernst Bloch, and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner), whom he married. They had a son, Stefan Rafael, in 1918. In 1919 Benjamin earned his PhD summa cum laude with the dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism).

For his postdoctoral thesis in 1920, Benjamin hit upon an idea very similar to the thesis proposed by Martin Heidegger in the latter's own postdoctoral project (Duns Scotus: Theory of Categories and Meaning). Wolfram Eilenberger writes that Benjamin's plan was "to legitimize [his theory of language] with reference to a largely forgotten tradition [found in the archaic writings of Duns Scotus], and to strike the sparks of systematization from the apparent disjunct among modern, logical, and analytical linguistic philosophy and medieval speculations on language that fell under the heading of theology". After Scholem sympathetically informed his friend that his interest in the concept had been pre-empted by Heidegger's earlier publication, Benjamin seemed to have derived a lifelong antagonism toward the rival philosopher whose major insights, over the course of both of their careers, sometimes overlapped and sometimes conflicted with Benjamin's.

Later, unable to support himself and family, Benjamin returned to Berlin and resided with his parents. In 1921 he published the essay "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Toward the Critique of Violence"). At this time Benjamin first became socially acquainted with Leo Strauss, and he remained an admirer of Strauss and his work throughout his life.

Friendships

Starting in adolescence, in a trend of episodic behavior that was to remain true throughout his life, Benjamin was a maven within an important community during a critically important historical period: the left-intelligentsia of interwar Berlin and Paris. Acquaintance with Walter Benjamin was a connecting thread for a variety of major figures in metaphysics, philosophy, theology, the visual arts, theater, literature, radio, politics and various other domains. Benjamin happened to be present on the outskirts of many of the most important events within the intellectual ferment of the interwar-period in Weimar Germany and interpreted those events in his writing.

He was in the crowd at the conference where Kurt Gödel first described the incompleteness theorem. He once took a class on the Maya civilization from Rainer Maria Rilke. He attended the same seminar as Heidegger at Freiburg in the summer of 1913 when both men were still university students: concepts first encountered there influenced their thought for the remainder of their careers. He was an early draft script reader, comrade, favorable critic and promoter as well as a frequent house-guest of writer and theater director Bertolt Brecht. Martin Buber took an interest in Benjamin, but Benjamin declined to contribute to Buber's journal because it was too esoteric. Nevertheless, Buber financed Benjamin's trip to Moscow and promoted his career in other ways. Buber commissioned Benjamin to write an article for his Die Kreatur, though Benjamin missed his deadline for the delivery of this piece by several years.

Benjamin was a close colleague of Ernst Bloch while Bloch was writing the Spirit of Utopia and maintained a relationship with him until the late 20's that Bloch later described as "almost too close." An untitled scrap omitted from Benjamin's book review of Bloch's Spirit of Utopia which remained unpublished during Benjamin's lifetime (later anthologized under the title "Theologico-Political Fragment") is now perhaps better remembered than the larger work it cites as an authority for its mystical reflections. It was Bloch's commission that inspired Benjamin's work on the theory of categories, according to Scholem. This was to be a consequential theme throughout his career.

One of Benjamin's high-school best friends (also a German Jew) killed himself using gas at the outbreak of the first World War; another was one of the Jewish Liaisons who took Nazi diplomats on a tour of Palestine. This happened while the Third Reich was preparing the European Zionists to believe that Europe's Jews would be forcibly emigrated from the Reich, to deflect attention from the looming possibility of mass extermination. Scholem, Benjamin's oldest friend, and the sole executor of his literary estate, would resurrect the canonical books of the Kabbalah from private libraries and ancient document dumps called Genizah. These were created when the books flooded into Mandatory Palestine during the period leading up to, coinciding with, and immediately following the Holocaust.

Career

In 1923, when the Institute for Social Research was founded, later to become home to the Frankfurt School, Benjamin published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens. At this time he became acquainted with Theodor W. Adorno and befriended György Lukács, whose The Theory of the Novel (1920) influenced him. Meanwhile, hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic after the war made it difficult for Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his son's family. At the end of 1923 Scholem emigrated to Palestine; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Benjamin (and family) to follow him.

In 1924 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in the Neue Deutsche Beiträge magazine, published Benjamin's "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" ("Goethe's Elective Affinities"), about Goethe's third novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). According to literary critic Burkhardt Lindner, the essay forms the "third major philosophical-aesthetic treatise of the early work" alongside the PhD dissertation and the habilitation thesis. It has often been linked to the breakup of his marriage; the dedication to Julia Cohn, whom he had courted in vain at the time, suggests this. According to Hannah Arendt, this essay ruined Benjamin's only chance of a university career. Benjamin's Goethe monograph is partly a meditation on the form 'free-love' that the Benjamins were experimenting with in their marriage at this time, amongst other things. But this was only tangential to the issue that led to the controversy to which Arendt refers. His mistake (per Arendt) was killing a sacred cow from amongst the academic establishment. As so often in Benjamin's writings, his study of Goethe's Elective Affinities was marked by polemics and the theme of his assault in this work concerned Friedrich Gundolf's Goethe book. Gundolf was the most prominent and able academic member of the George-Kreis – a cult of post-symbolist, romantic nationalist poets with a mystically conservative, medievalist bent. Elsewhere, in the anonymity of his private epistolary writings, Benjamin explicitly points out how (regardless of the ultimate horror, withdrawal and rejection with which members of the circle greeted the Nazi regime) this group's commitment to particular archaic styles anticipated the aesthetics of fascism.

Later that year Benjamin and Bloch resided on the Italian island of Capri; Benjamin wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) as a habilitation thesis meant to qualify him as a tenured university professor in Germany.

At Bloch's suggestion, he read Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923). He also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis, then residing in Moscow; he became her lover and she was a lasting intellectual influence on him.

A year later, in 1925, Benjamin withdrew The Origin of German Tragic Drama as his possible qualification for the habilitation teaching credential at the University of Frankfurt am Main, fearing its possible rejection. The work was a study in which he sought to "save" the category of allegory. It proved too unorthodox and abstruse for its examiners, who included prominent members of the humanities faculty, such as Hans Cornelius. Max Horkheimer also sat on the panel of examiners who rejected Benjamin's thesis. Horkheimer later served as both patron and promoter of Benjamin's work at the Institute for Social Research and is best remembered as the co-author of Benjamin's closest disciple Theodor Adorno's magnum opus, the Dialectic of the Enlightenment (a book which cribs heavily from Benjamin's unpublished, esoteric writings in many of its most important passages). In the case of Benjamin's habilitation, however, Horkheimer presents a united front with Cornelius and Professor Schultz in asking Benjamin to withdraw his application for the habilitation to avoid disgrace on the occasion of the examination. That is to say: His committee informed him that he will not be accepted as an academic instructor in the German university system.

A diagram of the internecine dynamics of Benjamin's habilitation committee's rejection of his work bear recollection here, as they determine something of the character of his later career and ultimate legacy. Hans Cornelius had been Adorno's mentor in the institutional context of the university, whereas once Adorno started actually teaching as a professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main, he devoted his seminars to Benjamin's rejected work. Adorno's 1931 and 1932 seminars, delivered at the University of Frankfurt am Main, devoted themselves to a close reading of The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Adorno was still teaching this class on The Origin of German Tragic Drama during the winter semester that Adolf Hitler came to power, although at that time it was not listed in the course catalog – whereas Adorno's academic mentor Cornelius, who had rejected this thesis, is today remembered primarily because of his rejection of Benjamin's habilitation. Max Horkheimer becomes a footnote to the career of Benjamin's apprentice. Schultz – the other member of Benjamin's committee who seems to have directed him to the subject of Baroque drama in the first place, only to reject the thesis that derived from this recommendation – is virtually altogether forgotten. The episode in the history of the German academy is immortalized in the bon mot, "One cannot habilitate intellect."

This failure resulted in his father's refusal to continue to support him financially, so that Benjamin was forced to make ends meet as a professional critic and occasional translator. Working with Franz Hessel he translated the first volumes of Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Literarische Welt (The Literary World); that paid enough for him to reside in Paris for some months. In December 1926, the year his father died, Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Lācis and found her ill in a sanatorium.

During his stay in Moscow, he was asked by the editorial board of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to write an article on Goethe. Benjamin's article was ultimately rejected, with reviewer Anatoly Lunacharsky (then the People's Commissar of Education) characterizing it as "non-encyclopedic", and only a small part of the text prepared by Benjamin was included in the encyclopedia. During Benjamin's lifetime, the article was not published in its entirety. A Russian translation of the article was published in the Russian edition of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in 1996.

In 1927, he began Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), his uncompleted magnum opus, a study of 19th-century Parisian life. The same year, he saw Scholem in Berlin, for the last time, and considered emigrating from Germany to Palestine. In 1928, he and Dora separated (they divorced two years later, in 1930); in the same year he published Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street), and a revision of his habilitation thesis Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama). In 1929 Berlin, Lācis, then an assistant to Bertolt Brecht, socially presented the intellectuals to each other. In that time, Benjamin also briefly embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at Heidelberg University.

Exile and death

In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler's assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany, Benjamin left Germany temporarily for the Spanish island of Ibiza where he stayed for some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered suicide. Identifying the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933 and its aftermath as marking the de facto Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, he permanently left Germany in September. After seeking shelter in Svendborg, Denmark, at Bertolt Brecht's house, and at Sanremo, Italy, where his ex-wife Dora lived, he moved to Paris.

As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Horkheimer, and received funds from the Institute for Social Research, later going permanently into exile. In Paris, he met other refugee German artists and intellectuals, befriending Arendt, novelist Hermann Hesse, and composer Kurt Weill. In 1936, a first version of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (originally written in German in 1935) was published in French ("L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée") by Horkheimer in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung journal of the Institute for Social Research. It was a critique of the authenticity of mass-produced art; he wrote that a mechanically produced copy of an artwork can be taken somewhere the original could never have gone, arguing that the presence of the original is "prerequisite to the concept of authenticity".

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 (which he would criticize for its "pre-fascist aestheticism"). In 1938 he paid his last visit to Brecht in Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi régime had stripped German Jews of their citizenship; now stateless, Benjamin was arrested by the French government and incarcerated for three months in a prison camp near Nevers.

Returning to Paris in January 1940, he drafted "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" ("On the Concept of History", later published as "Theses on the Philosophy of History"). While the Wehrmacht was pushing back the French Army, on 13 June Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to Lourdes, just a day before the Germans entered the capital with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the United States that Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin planned to travel to the US from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via Francoist Spain, then ostensibly a neutral country.

The historical record indicates that he safely crossed the French–Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou in Catalonia on 25 September 1940. The Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish refugee group Benjamin had joined. They were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France the next day, which would have thwarted Benjamin's plans to travel to the US. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Benjamin overdosed on morphine tablets that night while staying at the Hotel de Francia; the official Portbou register records 26 September as his date of death. Benjamin, unknown to anyone in Portbou, was buried in a common grave in the municipal cemetery, along with nameless refugees, homeless people, and unidentified bodies. Benjamin's colleague Arthur Koestler, also fleeing Europe, attempted suicide by taking some of the morphine tablets, but survived. Benjamin's brother Georg was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942.

The others in his party were allowed passage the next day, possibly because Benjamin's suicide had shocked the Spanish officials, and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, passed the manuscript of Theses to Adorno. Another completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered.