(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

ON BENJAMIN, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND NEVER USING THE WORD “I” 151
IV.1:396; “now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting,” SW
3:492). We can read Benjamin’s disappearance as a loss — one exceeded
only by a life cut short in 1940 while fleeing from the Nazis — but we
will remember that this is not an elegy. Rather, I would suggest that it is
an invitation, and moreover a challenge, to search for Benjamin within his
pages even without any assurance that we will ever truly find him there.
Notes
1
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=
45978899, accessed 15 Mar. 2008.
2
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Best Known Works of Oscar
Wilde (New York: Wise, n.d.), 107.
3
Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. James Rolleston
(Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1997), 11.
4
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin und sein Engel (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1983), 163. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
5
For a highly influential reading of myth and thresholds, see Winfried Menninghaus,
Schwellenkunde: Walter Benjamins Passage des Mythos (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1986).
6
Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry
Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia, 1992), 2:238, 234. Translation of Noten
zur Literatur. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1974), 589, 583.
7
Anja Lemke, Gedächtnisräume des Selbst: Walter Benjamins “Berliner Kindheit
um neunzehnhundert” (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 13.
8
Heinz Brüggemann, Walter Benjamin über Spiel, Farbe und Phantasie (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 270.
9
Walter Benjamin Archiv, ed., Walter Benjamins Archive (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2006), 77.
10
Eric Downing, After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and
the Tradition of Bildung (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2006), 187.
11
Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, 26 Sept. 1932, in Gershom
Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York: Schockem,
1988), 190. Translation of Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1975).
12
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin und sein Engel, 174.
13
See Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography
(Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2000).
14
See Chronology for publication dates in vols. 2 and 3 of Selected Writings.
15
Werner Hamacher, “The Word Wolke — If It Is One,” in Benjamin’s Ground:
New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit, MI: Wayne State
UP, 1988), 175.