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Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brechts Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamins theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamins life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamins continued relevance for our times.
[...]... leading to his rescue Walter Benjamin in a letter to Gerhard Scholem dated April 17, 1931 Often an era most clearly brands with its seal those who have been least influenced by it, who have been most remote from it, and who therefore have suffered most So it was with Proust, with Kafka, with Karl Kraus, and with Benjamin His gestures and the way he held his head when listening and talking; the way he... non-Jewish perspective becomes apparent when one reads in one of Benjamin’s essays what Brecht said about Karl Kraus: “When the age died by its own hand, he was that hand” (Schriften II, 174) For the Jews of that generation (Kafka and Moritz Goldstein were but ten years older than Benjamin) the available forms of rebellion were Zionism and Communism, and it is noteworthy that their fathers often condemned the... language and gesture To be sure, we have some difficulty today in understanding these problems or taking them seriously, especially since it is so tempting to misinterpret and dismiss them as mere reaction to an anti-Semitic milieu and thus as an expression of self-hatred But nothing could be more misleading when dealing with men of the human stature and intellectual rank of Kafka, Kraus, and Benjamin... (Briefe II, 683), and the only reason it did not cost him his friendship with Scholem was Scholem’s abiding loyalty and admirable generosity in all matters concerning his friend Both Adomo and Scholem blamed Brecht’s “disastrous influence”5 (Scholem) for Benjamin’s clearly undialectic usage of Marxian categories and his determined break with all metaphysics; and the trouble was that Benjamin, usually... of existing social and political conditions and took into account the totality of political and spiritual traditions For Benjamin, at any rate, this question of the past and of tradition as such was decisive, and precisely in the sense in which Scholem, warning his friend against the dangers to his thinking inherent in Marxism, posed it, albeit without being aware of the problem Benjamin, he wrote,... connect the great boulevards and offer protection from inclement weather exerted such an enormous fascination over Benjamin that he referred to his projected major work on the nineteenth century and its capital simply as “The Arcades” {Passagenarbeit); and these passageways are indeed like a symbol of Paris, because they clearly are inside and outside at the same time and thus represent its true nature... “at once advancing and tarrying, a strange mixture of both.”10 It was the walk of a flaneur, and it was so striking because, like the dandy and the snob, the fldneur had his home in the nineteenth century, an age of security in which children of upper-middle-class families were assured of an income without having to work, so that they had no reason to hurry And just as the city taught Benjamin fldnerie,... written and printed word and were, above all, surrounded by books, were neither obliged nor willing to write and read professionally, in order to earn a living Unlike the class of the intellectuals, who offer their services either to the state as experts, specialists, and officials, or to society for diversion and instruction, the hommes de lettres always strove to keep aloof from both the state and society... practice as to reality, and to him this reality manifested itself most directly in the proverbs and idioms of everyday language “Proverbs are a school of crude thinking,” he writes in the same context; and the art of taking proverbial and idiomatic speech literally enabled Benjamin—as it did Kafka, in whom figures of speech are often clearly discernible as a source of inspiration and furnish the key to... hen he says that next to Proust, Benjamin felt the closest personal affinity with Kafka among contemporary authors, and undoubtedly Benjamin had the “field of ruins and the disaster area” of his own work in mind when he wrote that “an understanding of [Kafka’s] production involves, among other things, the simple recognition that he was a failure” (Briefe II, 614) What Benjamin said of Kafka with such . for Benjamin: it was his best defense against despair. There still is no better one. Introduction Walter Benjamin: i892-i940 I. THE HUNCHBACK Fama, that much-coveted goddess, has many faces, and. uncommercial and unprofitable, has now come in Germany to the name and work of Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish writer who was known, but not famous, as contributor to magazines and literary. recommend Walter Benjamin as a literary critic and essayist as it would have been misleading to recommend Kafka in 1924 as a short-story writer and novelist. To describe adequately his work and him