(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

INTRODUCTION: BENJAMIN’S ACTUALITY
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through a catastrophic world that stands in the wake of Auschwitz as if
under the ethereal influence of Saturn.
Wolfgang Bock offers a detailed reading of Benjamin’s avant-garde collection
Einbahnstraße, which was published in the same year as his Trauerspiel
book, 1928, explaining it as a montage of literary programs, surrealistic
associations, reports of dreams and drug-inspired experiments, dramatic
scenes of daily life, travel-diary inscriptions, and so on. Although the text
breaks with traditional narrative forms and explores the influence of media
on (written) culture, Bock argues that Benjamin’s modernist aesthetics is
far removed from a simplified preoccupation with the new media of the
Internet: hypertext, virtual reality scenarios, and digital communication.
Bernd Witte focuses on Benjamin’s reflections on literature as a medium
of collective memory and political experience. He connects Einbahnstraße
with Benjamin’s Erzähler essay on the loss of oral storytelling in the age of
the modern novel and his interpretation of Baudelaire as the representative
of the loss of poetic experience in the shock-like encounters of informationdominated
modernity. Witte inscribes Benjamin’s media reflections into
our telematic age, proposing that the computer’s merging of text, image,
and sound may yield a new pedagogy of reading and writing that integrates
the technological possibilities available today.
Like other contributors to this volume, Lutz Koepnick warns against
an uncritical use of Benjamin’s theory of aura and technological reproduction
for the sake of theorizing new media today. Nevertheless, his essay
upholds the viability of Benjamin’s writings as a compelling model of how
to think about the relationship between technological change, the aesthetic,
and how media engage the user’s body. For a case study, Koepnick
compares Benjamin’s theories with today’s computer-driven animation
techniques such as rotoscoping and their impact on the mediation of corporeality
on and beyond the screen.
Eric Jarosinski finds that Benjamin’s autobiographical texts stage many
of the key concerns he articulates elsewhere, including the status of the subject
in modernity, the interpolation of past and present, and the interplay of
technology and experience. Jarosinski reconstructs the complex changes
from “Berliner Chronik” (“A Berlin Chronicle”) to “Berliner Kindheit
um 1900” (“Berlin Childhood around 1900”), exemplified, for instance,
by the shift from the digging hand of the archaeologist to the hovering
eye resembling a movie camera. Connecting these images to the figure of
the book collector in Benjamin’s essay “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus”
(“Unpacking My Library”), Jarosinski insists that in following Benjamin’s
excavations of his life, we are forced to rethink our own critical categories,
theoretical assumptions, and representational modes.
Next to the childhood texts, perhaps the greatest product of Benjamin’s
years of exile is the Passagen-Werk, whose conceptual structure
Karl Ivan Solibakke analyzes from synchronic and diachronic perspectives,