"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that is is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge-unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable."
-Walter Benjamin, 1940
from the Weekly Standard:
The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin
The famed critical theorist is widely believed to have committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Was he actually murdered by Stalin's agents.
Jun 11, 2001, Vol. 6, No. 37 • By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ
...His friend and admirer Hannah Arendt called Benjamin "probably the most peculiar Marxist ever." A connoisseur of esthetics more than an economic determinist, he wrote outside the rigid strictures of the Marxist canon. While his associates Theodor W. Adorno and Bertolt Brecht embraced Stalinism (the former ambivalently, the latter enthusiastically), Benjamin was more interested in the artistic radicalism of the French Surrealists. His essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" has been read by legions of university students; but the last major work verifiably his, an essay entitled "Theses on the Philosophy of History" written just months before he died, represents something more important: one of the most insightful analyses of the failure of Marxism ever produced...
...Benjamin died at a hotel in the Catalan town of Portbou in late September 1940, having just crossed the Pyrenees on foot from France with several companions. A manuscript he reportedly carried with him to the end has disappeared. Thus, his death—in Franco’s Spain, as he fled the Nazi invasion of France—is held to epitomize the destruction of the modern intellect by fascism. Yet a careful analysis of the evidence points toward a different conclusion—that Walter Benjamin was murdered by Soviet agents... -link
new in German Lit:
The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940
Gershom Scholem, ed.
Harvard, 1992
838 B4682cs
An impassioned glimpse into the death throes of the German-Jewish tradition can be gleaned from the correspondence between Walter Benjamin, the great literary-social critic who lived in exile in Paris, and Gershom Scholem, scholar of the Jewish mystical tradition who migrated to Palestine in 1923. These close friends might seem totally dissimilar: Benjamin was a Marxist, comrade of Brecht, Scholem a Zionist who found in the Kabbalah the seeds for an anarchist spiritual renewal of Judaism. Yet both exiles sought divine sparks in profound texts and the ruptures of history. Their dialogue on Kafka is instructive: for Benjamin, the Czech writer was a prophet of planetary annihilation, while Scholem read Kafka as a latter-day Jewish gnostic commentator on divine judgment. The letters end in early 1940, a few months before Benjamin fled to the Spanish border and committed suicide. -publisher
Benjamin in the catalog