(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

INTRODUCTION: BENJAMIN’S ACTUALITY
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is the reader’s sense of going astray and getting lost in the labyrinth of
textual signifiers more frustrating and yet more profoundly satisfying than
in Benjamin’s case. Thus it seems that Benjamin’s actuality today is not
a natural given, not something that can or should be taken for granted.
Instead, it may be the uneven and unsteady index of a continual process
marked by fashionable appropriation as well as by serious interrogation, by
market forces, and by genuine interest. Benjamin’s actuality seems real and
phantasmagoric at the same time, an ambivalent phenomenon that requires
continual self-reflection and self-critique. But for all its achievements and
drawbacks, Benjamin’s actuality seems to restore posthumously at least
some aspects of the leading reputation as a critic that Benjamin aspired to
but was prevented from achieving fully by the circumstances of his life.
Let us therefore recapitulate some of its bare facts. 15 Walter Bendix
Schoenflies Benjamin was born on 15 July 1892 as the oldest of three
children of Emil Benjamin, an art dealer and investor, and his wife Pauline,
née Schoenflies. He grew up in the upper-bourgeois milieu of the
largely assimilated Jewish population of Berlin during the economic boom
years of the Gründerzeit. Rebelling against his father’s expectations that
he pursue a “respectable” bourgeois life, he also detested the authoritarian
stuffiness and scholarly pedantry of the school and university life of his
days. As a result, Benjamin was active in the progressive Free School Community
and the Free Student Movement, advocating a non-hierarchical
community in the service of intellectual freedom and “pure spirit,” but
soon became disillusioned with nationalistic tendencies in the movement
and the support of the First World War by one of their leaders, Benjamin’s
former teacher Gustav Wyneken. After studying in Freiburg im Breisgau,
Berlin, and Munich, Benjamin, who had married Dora Sophie Pollak in
1917, moved to Bern, where he received his doctorate with a dissertation
titled Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The
Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, 1918–19). Perhaps the
most important essay of these early years is his interpretation of Goethe’s
novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1921–22). Despite
his reservations against its institutional limitations, Benjamin considered
pursuing a formal university career, but his plans were dramatically cut
short in 1925, when his Habilitation thesis (the prerequisite for attaining
a professorial position), titled Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The
Origin of the German Mourning Play) was rejected because his supervisor
found the language of its daring combination of metaphysical speculation
and philological exegesis utterly incomprehensible.
A restless traveler throughout his life (Paris, Capri, Naples, Spain,
Riga, Moscow, Norway, Ibiza, and so on), Benjamin now embarked on a
rootless life as a freelance literary critic, book reviewer, translator (Proust,
Baudelaire, Aragon, and others), and radio broadcaster. Although constantly
plagued by financial problems and personal difficulties (divorce,