From the issue dated April 18, 1997
Translation of Walter Benjamin's Works May Add to His Impact
By Peter Monaghan
The name Walter Benjamin resounds through contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Over the past two decades, many academic disciplines have made use of the early-20th-century German intellectual and his wide-ranging notions about the arts and how they reflect culture.
"His influence has leapt from area to area," says Marcus Bullock, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. "It started off with people in German studies of one sort or another. Very quickly philosophy picked him up, then art history, and recently architecture." Film and cultural studies also figure prominently on that list. "He's a person with an enormous fund of ideas that stimulate people to develop their own lines of thought."
The extent of Benjamin's influence on academe in the English-speaking world is curious, since relatively little of his work has been translated into English. Researchers unable to read the German originals have used two collections of essays edited by Hannah Arendt, Benjamin's cousin by marriage: Illuminations (1969) and Reflections (1982).
"Never have so many essays been written about so few articles by so major a thinker," quips Michael W. Jennings, a Benjamin authority and an associate professor of German at Princeton University.
Dr. Jennings, Dr. Bullock, and several other researchers and translators are now rectifying that situation together with Harvard University Press, which recently issued the first of a projected four-volume series of English translations of virtually all of Benjamin's writings -- some 3,000 pages in all.
Dr. Jennings, the author of Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Cornell University Press, 1987), is general editor of the project. He and Dr. Bullock co-edited the first volume of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, which presents essays, reviews, treatises, and fragments written from 1913 to 1926. Among the Harvard project's achievements, they hope, will be to lay an even better base for Benjamin's reputation as an influential precursor to studies of film and other forms of popular culture.
For Dr. Jennings, the appearance of the first volume marks the culmination of a fascination with Benjamin that began during his graduate studies, when he read Benjamin's essay on Franz Kafka. "I found it enigmatic, refractory," he says. "I had little idea what was going on for long stretches of the essay, but it spoke to me in a way little other critical writing had."
Dr. Jennings and Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at the Harvard press, have worked for 14 years to produce the series. "When I came to Harvard in 1984," Dr. Waters says, "it seemed to me that a lot of the work in literary theory I was doing at the University of Minnesota Press was leading me back to Walter Benjamin. I kept getting the sense that this person needed to be done -- and he couldn't be done in a small way."
Dr. Waters would need translators, advisers on contested words and phrases, and an editorial board to inspect every word. He gathered testimony from scholars to make his case to the press's faculty board. As the project grew, he encountered delays in obtaining rights from Benjamin's German publisher and difficulty in finding funds for the project. Support came from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the George Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust of New York, which supports research, particularly on European Jewish culture. (Benjamin was Jewish.)
With that help, he says, "I feel like our edition is finally getting Benjamin to America."
The first volume begins with Benjamin as the 21-year-old president of a radical youth group in imperial Germany. By its end, 13 years later, Benjamin is an established figure in the intellectual life of Weimar Germany. The writings show him to have been, variously, a youthful idealist, an aesthete, a literary critic, and a political theorist.
His career would prove neither easy nor typical for an academic. His writing did not fit in any one academic category, but resided in the spaces between literary criticism and philosophy, informed by an elusive, mystical view of the nature of language, thought, art, and culture.
Although he would emerge as an influential Marxist thinker, his fit with that school was often uncomfortable. "Commonly, on many subjects, Benjamin has such a sensitive grasp of the consequences of ideas that he equivocates, I think very beautifully," says Dr. Bullock.
Daniel Bell, a professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard, was among the scholars Mr. Waters enlisted to encourage the press to undertake the project. Dr. Bell says Benjamin's thought, though it featured at times a subtle Marxism, also accommodated "the temptations of Judaism." The various movements that interested Benjamin were often at odds -- Marxism, for instance, had no time for religion -- but he found ways to mine and refine parts of them into a rich view of culture, Dr. Bell says.
In the 1930s, Nazism drove Benjamin out of Germany, to Paris. In 1940, at age 48, while trying to reach safety in the United States, he was detained while crossing from occupied France into Spain. He committed suicide rather than be captured by the Gestapo.
"The complexity of Benjamin's thought is very extraordinary, and the problem is that most people read only one side of him," says Charles Rosen, a noted concert pianist and music scholar.
Dr. Rosen, who has written studies of Classicism, Romanticism, and other movements in music with literary counterparts in which Benjamin took great interest, is the author of a highly regarded 1977 essay, "The Ruins of Walter Benjamin." It suggests that Benjamin's greatest contributions were at once grand and subtly inflected, such as his argument that literary or artistic criticism is immanent in works of art. Critics could develop their understanding by paying attention to the ideas about art within the works themselves, he said. "Essentially, this was, with one stroke, to turn criticism from an act of judgment into an act of understanding," Dr. Rosen writes.
Another key concept in Benjamin's work is his theory of the "aura" of artistic works, which Dr. Rosen describes as "the traces of history that guarantee the authenticity and uniqueness" of a work of art.
According to Dr. Bell, Benjamin adapted this idea from cabalism, Jewish mystical theosophy.
Benjamin's most-cited work in the United States is "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in which he proposed his theory of the aura and wondered whether mass production, as in film and photography, would degrade art.
The essay, says Wisconsin's Dr. Bullock, "is enormously influential, even though there's not much agreement on where Benjamin comes down." It is" generally read as a strong endorsement of the political importance of film. Yet his position is quite complex."
The essay can also serve as a test case for the extent of Benjamin's influence, suggests Miriam Hansen, a professor of English and director of the film-studies center at the University of Chicago.
His major insight into aesthetic experience -- that it would be fundamentally altered by the advent of film and photography, of art as mechanical reproduction -- remains relevant today, she says. "The cinema that Benjamin depicts doesn't exist as it did," she adds, but Benjamin's perceptions can throw light on the technologies that have emerged since he died, such as television and digital media. "The culture has finally caught up with Benjamin," she says.
Like Mr. Marcus, however, she warns that the reception of Benjamin's ideas in the United States has often distorted his place in the history of German thought. "The influence of an intellectual figure is always a rather haphazard and arbitrary affair," she says. While Benjamin and such other figures as Theodor Adorno get much of the limelight in discussions of photography, film, and mass culture, they do not hold a monopoly on the subjects, says Dr. Hansen. She is writing a book about the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist intellectuals, in which she will highlight the contributions of another German theorist, Siegfried Kracauer.
Even so, Benjamin authorities say his influence in the United States is likely to grow with Harvard's release next year of the second volume in its series, The Arcades Project, a 1,100-page translation of Passagen-Werk, the unfinished masterwork of his Paris years.
The title refers to the Paris Arcades of the 1850s, a precursor of the shopping mall. Benjamin viewed the activities in the Arcades -- new modes of mercantilism, transportation, monumental architecture, and social relations, along with prostitution -- as metaphors. The work was, says Dr. Jennings, "a really breathtaking array of theorizing on the rise of capitalism and modernity."
The Arcades Project will be followed, in 1999 and 2000, by two more volumes of selected writings.
Although Harvard's Dr. Bell argues that several other thinkers should get the same treatment Benjamin is receiving, he doubts that many will. "All the publishing houses, the academic ones, are under pressure for books to pay their own way. Publishing today is with a beggar's bowl in hand.
"And you can't send Benjamin on a book tour."
Copyright © 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
