(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

INTRODUCTION: BENJAMIN’S ACTUALITY
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which Benjamin’s legacy may come to fruition. In a recent essay on the
possibilities and limitations of actualizing Benjamin’s theory of art, Peter
Bürger has proposed that our era may not be the one in which Benjamin’s
thoughts can attain a higher degree of actuality than in their own time. 22
In Bürger’s opinion, the May 1968 uprisings in Paris, when students
and workers appropriated surrealist calls for the integration of imagination
and desire into political reality, may have been the last Benjaminian
“now-time” to date. At that critical moment, surrealist theory, Bürger
believes, did attain a higher degree of actuality than it had achieved in the
1920s, when the first surrealist manifesto was written. He maintains that
no such past is in sight that could be redeemed in our own time, because
a comprehensive perspective on how to rescue a segment of tradition
seems to be shrinking. Bürger’s example is the faithfully reconstructed
Frauenkirche in Dresden. For him, this famous centerpiece of Dresden’s
celebrated Baroque panorama appears like an isolated monument within
Socialist prefabricated housing complexes and the clumsy 1990s architecture
surrounding it. Although he concedes that the church (which was
financed by a huge popular fund-raising initiative) has promoted a sense
of social collectivity among the population, he denies that it is the spirit of
the Baroque that has contributed to this collective identity formulation.
Bürger’s pessimistic position rests largely on his assumption that Benjamin
lived at a time when, in the organic growth through history of cities
like Paris, the experience of tradition as a lived reality could still be taken
for granted. It was precisely this ubiquitous presence of genuine tradition,
Bürger argues, that allowed Benjamin to propose radical breaks with the
past. By contrast, he contends, our own time has lost this sense of a lived
tradition. Instead of detecting a period of the past whose analysis would
really enlighten the present, cultural studies, unable to resist political
interference in educational institutions and capitalism’s commodification
of culture, has lost its faith in the power of tradition and instead appropriates
its objects arbitrarily. Consequently, Bürger doubts that the entire
oeuvre of Benjamin, in all its diversity and contradictions, can be incorporated
into our present; rather, only selected motifs of this thought may be
taken up and continued. Thus Benjamin’s methodological reflections, for
instance his theoretical analysis of the historicity of auratic art, may promote
new ways of thinking about culture. Bürger appeals to the academic
establishment to face this dire situation in order to regain a concept of
tradition that allows for a new, meaningful engagement with works of
the past. He concludes rather vaguely with the unanswered question of
how Benjamin, an advocate of historical rupture who nonetheless thinks
in terms of a lived tradition, might have responded to our petty-minded
attitude (“Kleinmütigkeit”). 23
Bürger’s ambivalence toward Benjamin’s actualization, it seems to
me, stands on shaky feet. Problematically equating a meaningful attitude