Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1976

Keywords

Walter Benjamin, German Authors (20th century), Criticism and interpretation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Comparative Literature

First Advisor

Frederick Garber

Second Advisor

Robert O. Weiss

Third Advisor

Melvin Leiman

Abstract

Rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo Walter Benjamin committed suicide on September 27, 1940. Yet it can be argued that it is still too early to write a truly comprehensive study of his work. He belongs among those whom Nietzsche called “posthumously born.”

At the time of his death he was practically unknown outside a small circle of friends, most of whom—with the notable exceptions of Gershom Scholem and Bertolt Brecht—were connected with the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung.

As Hannah Arendt has pointed out in her study, Benjamin was followed by bad luck all his life. His attempt to gain a position at a German university failed. Magazines and publishing houses folded just as they were about to publish his essays and books. Even after his death unfortunate circumstances prevented Benjamin’s manuscripts from reaching the public. This is why it is still difficult to write with absolute certainty on his work. We must wait until the Suhrkamp edition of his work is completed.

In 1940 Benjamin’s manuscripts were scattered all over the world and, for obvious reasons, nobody had much time to think about them for the next five years. The fragments of his most ambitious work—Das Passagenwerk—were left with Georges Bataille in Paris; other manuscripts were with Scholem in Palestine or with Theodor H. Adorno in the U.S.A. Luckily it seems as if most of them have been saved and will in due time appear in the Gesammelte Schriften which still has not reached the Passagenwerk.

In this dissertation, therefore, I shall not give a synoptic view of the entire Benjamin corpus, partly because such an undertaking would involve a study of several hundred pages, partly for reasons stated above. Instead I shall concentrate upon his career as a literary critic and investigate how he supported his ambition: "d'être considéré comme le premier critique de la littérature allemande. La difficulté c'est que, depuis plus de cinquante ans, la critique littéraire en Allemagne n'est plus considérée comme un genre sérieux. Se faire une situation dans la critique, cela, au fond, veut dire: la recréer comme genre" (Briefe, ed. Scholem and Adorno, p. 505). I shall focus on his methods as a literary critic and show the development from his earliest essays with their speculative and metaphysical perspective to his last writings where he attempts to synthesize a metaphysical perspective with a Marxist-materialistic conception of art, i.e., art as production rather than art as creation. I believe, however, that Benjamin's oeuvre possesses a fundamental unity under the surface and that his late writings cannot be fully understood without a background provided by Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik and Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Nor can his literary criticism be treated in absolute isolation. Both philosophical essays such as Schicksal und Charakter and autobiographical works such as Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert shed light on his literary essays. Indeed, all that Benjamin wrote, no matter in what genre, is informed by the same spirit.

As a preliminary to the themes just outlined, I shall give a brief survey of what the most important critics have written on Benjamin as well as a sketch of the current Benjamin debate in Germany where critics belonging to what is usually called the New Left try to make Benjamin look a convinced communist, which he was, who wrote the appropriate literary criticism, which he did not. If nothing else, these leftist essays will point out the contradictions inherent in Benjamin’s thought and teach any aspiring critic how futile it is to label Benjamin, be it as hard-core Marxist, Jewish mystic, or as an adherent to Critical Theory as it was practiced by the members of the Frankfurt Institut in the 1930s. All these “ideologies” are present in Benjamin’s work; any attempt to reconcile them would imply a distortion or even dismissal of an important part of his work. As far as I can see, there is no theory of literary criticism which can account for both Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels and Der Autor als Produzent.

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