JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

BENJAMIN, WALTER (1892–1940), German philosopher
and literary critic. Born in Berlin, Benjamin attended Haubinda,
a country educational establishment, where he met the
radical school reformer Gustav Wyneken. From 1910 to 1914
Benjamin took an active part in the youth movement influenced
by Wyneken and was for some time the students’ president
at Berlin University. He published his first articles under
the pseudonym Ardor in Der Anfang edited by Wyneken.
In 1915 Benjamin broke off with Wyneken and his movement
because of their acceptance of World War I. Benjamin studied
philosophy in Freiburg, Berlin, Munich, and Berne. He
returned to Germany in 1920 and lived there till 1933. His
thesis written to obtain the qualification to teach aesthetics
and history of literature at the university in Frankfurt was
not accepted. Today, however, this work on the origin of the
German drama (Berlin, 1928) is regarded as one of the most
important philosophical interpretations of this field. In 1929
Benjamin joined Bertold Brecht (Versuche ueber Brecht, 1966),
with whose ideas he identified himself to a large extent. Benjamin
felt his Jewishness intensely and had for several years
toyed with the idea of going to Palestine. When the Nazis
came to power he first went to the Balearic Isles and then to
Paris. At the outbreak of World War II he was interned as a
German citizen, but was released in November 1939. He fled
to the south of France and, with a group of refugees, crossed
the Spanish border. When the police chief of the border town
Port-Bou threatened to send them back to France, Benjamin
took his own life.
Between 1914 and 1924, he did not publish much. Then
he wrote a long essay, Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften (publ.
by H. v. Hofmannsthal in Neue deutsche Beitraege, 1924–25; in
book form 1964), and continued his intensive activity as essayist
and literary critic, especially in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Literarische
Welt, and Die Gesellschaft. During his lifetime, Benjamin
published only two books: a volume of philosophical
aphorisms Einbahnstrasse (Berlin, 1928), and, during the Nazi
era, under the pseudonym Detlev Holz, Deutsche Menschen,
eine Folge von Briefen (Lucerne, 1936), an annotated collection
of 25 letters from 1783–1883), in which he discussed the flowering
and the first decadence of German bourgeois culture.
The first collection of his writings appeared posthumously in
1955 (Schriften, 2 vols., Frankfurt), edited by Theodore Adorno
who had always stressed Benjamin’s importance as a philosopher.
Illuminationen (1961; Illuminations, 1969), Angelus Novus
(1966), Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit
(1963), Staedtebilder (1963), and Zur Kritik der
Gewalt (1965) contain more of his essays, some taken from his
literary legacy. G. Scholem and Th. Adorno published a selection
of his correspondence (2 vols., 1966).
Benjamin is considered as the most important critic in
the German language between the two wars, and his importance
is growing. His thought, formed by Kant and the religious-philosophical
current, had been metaphysically oriented
in the beginning. Later, especially from 1930 on, Benjamin
showed an inclination toward Marxism, whose ideas he, how-
benjamin, walter
ever, interpreted in a highly personal way. Benjamin considered
himself as a philosophical commentator of important
literary events, stressing especially historical, philosophical,
linguistic, and social motives. Intellectually, he was extremely
independent, a fact felt in everything he wrote, even in the
short book reviews. His concentrated prose makes him difficult
to read. He had a strong poetic streak, expressed clearly
in his Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (first published
in Frankfurt, 1950). Benjamin was also important as a translator,
especially of French literature, which attracted him
deeply. He translated from Baudelaire (Tableaux Parisiens,
1923), several volumes of Proust (1927–30), and several novels
by M. Jouhandeau.
[Gershom Scholem]
It was Gershom *Scholem who quoted the following remark
by his friend Walter Benjamin: “Whenever I will find my
own philosophy, it will be somehow a philosophy of Judaism”
(“Wenn ich einmal meine Philosophie haben werde, so wird
es irgendwie eine Philosophie des Judentums sein”). Scholem
wished to point to Benjamin’s hidden commentary on Judaism
when he dealt with the philosophical question of language
and translation (since Benjamin’s early Essay Über die Sprache
überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen, 1916), the question
of a philosophy of history (e.g., in Benjamin’s theses which
promote a messianic philosophy of history), and also when he
discussed German-Jewish writers like Karl Kraus and Franz
Kafka (cf. Benjamin/Scholem, Benjamin über Kafka, 1980).
In his philosophical as well as in his critical works Benjamin
remains ambivalent, however: On the one hand he avoids
the construction of Jewish or even less Zionist perspectives,
on the other hand he engages in a subtextual and also critical
dialogue with Judaism and Zionism, his philosophical starting
point being the Neo-Kantianism of Hermann *Cohen,
his early letters to Ludwig Strauß and, from summer 1916, his
friendship with Scholem. Both Scholem and Benjamin agreed
in taking a critical attitude towards assimilation as well as towards
Buber’s type of cultural Zionism and his legitimization
of war during the World War I period. But whereas Scholem
found a clear Zionist alternative, Benjamin placed himself
intellectually between universal Judaism and Marxism. And
whereas – after the failure of Benjamin to qualify as a teacher
in 1925 at the University of Frankfurt with his thesis Der Ursprung
des deutschen Trauerspiels – Scholem tried to convince
him to come to Jerusalem between 1926 and 1930, Benjamin
became inspired by the syndicalist French thinker Georges
Sorel, the communist Asja Lacis, whom he met in Capri 1924
and in Moscow 1926, and approached the Frankfurter Institut
für Sozialforschung and later on Bert Brecht, whom he joined
in his Danish exile in 1934.
Already in the last years of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin
moved to Paris, “the capital of the 19th century,” where he
also spent the most time after March 1933. Here (in the Paris
National library) he worked on an encyclopaedic historiographical
project on the modernity of Paris in the 19th century,
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 359