(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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MARC DE WILDE
counter these totalitarian ideologies, Benjamin set out to design a radically
different kind of politics that, instead of instrumentalizing the past
for present purposes, understood itself to be in the service of preceding
generations. It was based not only on the pragmatic view that a present
politics would remain self-critical as long as it reflected on mistakes made
in the past but also on a deeper, theological conviction: the task of a present
politics was to “save” or redeem the past from oblivion.
In the mid-1920s Benjamin considered joining the German Communist
Party (KPD). He believed it was the only political movement
capable of defeating Fascism. More particularly, he thought it could
counter the Fascist tendency to aestheticize politics. In the course of the
1930s, however, news of the Moscow trials prompted him to express
doubts concerning Communism’s political reality in a letter to Max
Horkheimer: “Ich verfolge die Ereignisse in Rußland natürlich sehr
aufmerksam. Und mir scheint, ich bin nicht der einzige, der mit seinem
Latein zuende ist” (Naturally I am following the events in Russia very
closely. And it seems to me I am not the only one who has run out of
answers). 2 At first Benjamin seemed unwilling to give up the hope he
had invested in Communism; as late as 1938 he could still see “die Sowjetunion
. . . als Agentin unserer Interessen in einem künftigen Kriege
wie in der Verzögerung dieses Krieges” (GB 5:148; the Soviet Union as
the agent of our interests in a future war or in the postponement of such
a war). But that same year the continuous flow of reports on the Stalinist
purges forced him to reconsider his earlier appraisal of Communism,
reflecting on its possible affinity with National Socialism instead. He
thus came to believe that “die schlechtesten Elemente der KP mit den
skrupellosesten des Nationalsozialismus kommunizierten” (“the worst
elements of the Communist Party resonated with the most unscrupulous
ones of National-Socialism”), the worst being the sadism present in
the “Expropriierung der Expropriateure” (“expropriation of the expropriators”),
which was not unlike the sadism Hitler applied to the Jews
(GS VI:540; SW 4:159).
On 19 August 1939, the Soviet Union entered into a trade agreement
with the Third Reich, followed five days later by a non-aggression
pact to which a secret appendix on the partition of Eastern Europe was
added. To Benjamin the news came as a shock, the echo of which can be
heard in his most famous work, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“On
the Concept of History”), put in writing a few months later, in the winter
of 1939–40. Reading the theses to his fellow refugee, the Jewish author
Soma Morgenstern, Benjamin claimed he had written them as an “Antwort
auf diesen Pakt” (“answer to this pact).” 3 According to the tenth
thesis, they sought, “in einem Augenblick, da die Politiker, auf die die
Gegner des Faschismus gehofft hatten, am Boden liegen und ihre Niederlage
mit dem Verrat an der eigenen Sache bekräftigen, das politische