The Topicality of Walter Benjamin

BRAD EVANS: For those of us who remain deeply concerned with understanding the worst episodes in human history, the life and work of Walter Benjamin still appear all too resonant. This in part has something to do with the tragedy of what he came to represent, along with the undoubted brilliance of his insight and challenges to political dogmatism. What is it about Benjamin that captures your attention as an author and critic?

JAMES MARTEL: I think that Benjamin has never been as relevant to questions of politics as he is today with the exception of his own lifetime. As I read him, Benjamin offers one of the best explanations both for the ongoing resilience of capitalism, despite all of its predations and all the instability that it creates, as well as the connection between fascism and liberalism that we are seeing being expressed today. He also offers, I think, the best way to understand how to address our contemporary moment and how to resist and upend capitalism, liberalism, and fascism all round.

In my view, Benjamin’s understanding of what he calls mythic violence is the key to understanding all of these questions. Mythic violence is Benjamin’s term for the way that illicit economic and political power has asserted itself over all human life, projecting a form of authority out into the world that then becomes accepted as reality itself. It is mythic because there is no true or ontological basis for the powers of liberalism and capitalism; its right to rule is self-proclaimed and then naturalized so that it becomes seen as fated and inevitable. It is violent because, without a genuine basis for its authority, mythic violence must endlessly strike out, killing and hurting over and over again to establish its power and even its reality.

In describing mythic violence, I think it’s very important to remember that this doesn’t always refer to actual physical violence per se. The German term that we translate into English as “violence” in Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” is gewalt, a word that may be better translated as force or projection. This is important because it shows first of all that a lot of what Benjamin calls mythic violence is not actually always literally violent (although, as already noted, literal violence is a critical part of what does). Mythic instantiations such as that are violent in a much deeper sense with physical violence being only the ultimate and last resort in their arsenal. But it is also important to note that Benjamin is not against responding to mythic violence with an answering form of physical violence at times. In the “Critique of Violence,” he tells us that even so seemingly clear a commandment as “thou shalt not kill” does not mean that we can never kill. It means, as he tells us, that we must struggle with the meaning of that commandment both separately and together and at times ignore or abandon it (that is to say to commit violence but in a way that sits squarely on our own shoulders, in a way that can’t be pawned off as “following orders” or obeying dictates from God or some other transcendent form of authority).

If we keep these two things in mind (that the state and capitalism are not always physically violent and that the resistance to these things can itself be violent at times) it helps to specify what Benjamin means in terms of a critique of and resistance to modern forms of mythic violence. The key thing to resist is not physical violence per se but rather projections of some kind of external source of authority (whether it is God or gods, nature or some mystical origins) which become the basis for illicit and anxious — hence often physically violent — forms of control.

BE : What seems important to recognize here is how these categories, most notably concerning our allegiance to the mythical order of things, are applicable to both leftist and conservative ideologies, which history shows can author the most extreme violence.

JM : For Benjamin, without an understanding and critique of mythic violence, any would-be vanquisher of capitalism and liberalism will swiftly become co-opted into the very same political and economic forms that it opposes, ultimately replacing one form of mythic violence with another. In Benjamin’s view, the left itself is far from immune from projections of authority (and anxious and violent ones at that). Even so, there is a key difference between the left and the right for Benjamin insofar as the right is based on nothing but mythic projection, projections about racial purity, ancient (false) forms of authority and hierarchies and so on, whereas the left tends to seek to denaturalize these relationships for the sake of a different and better form of political life. Benjamin speaks of a political and aesthetic form that is “useless for the purposes of fascism,” which means that it does not allow for the sedimentation of mythic projections. Instead of such projections, Benjamin looks to local and episodic forms of collective decision making, akin to what he calls “pure means” (that is to say, forms of politics that are not related to ends or teleologies which are invariably mythic).

Such a political form would indeed be useless for the right insofar as it denies and undermines precisely what the right is based on even as it is useful for a left that sought to discern political forms that do not reproduce mythic violence. This discerning mechanism, one that allows us to distinguish between what is mythic and what is not, determining what comes from false projections onto externalities and what comes from within our own communities, is, I think, the key political insight that Benjamin offers us for our own time.

BE : While he wasn’t the first to ask what makes humans violent toward each other, we owe it to Benjamin for raising in union the two most pressing of all questions. Namely — “what time are we living in”? And “how can we develop a critique of violence adequate to these times”? What do these two questions say to you in the context of his legacy?

JM : I think we are living in a time when the contradictions of mythic violence are perhaps especially legible in a way that has not been the case since Benjamin’s own time. More precisely, these contradictions are more visible in the West and the North; even in the richest and whitest of communities, the conflation between fascism and liberalism, the violence that undergirds both systems, has become particularly evident even to those who would prefer not to be reminded of this. In much of the Global South and in communities of color and poor communities within the West and the North as well, that violence has always been plainly visible (and by design).

In my view, Benjamin helps to explain why the neoliberal order seems to be collapsing into a fascist one. For Benjamin, liberalism and fascism are not as distinct as they are usually considered to be (at least by liberals and fascists!). It’s not that liberals and fascists are somehow in secret league with one another; they don’t have to be for the homeostasic nature of the systems of mythic violence to function. All that is required is the common mythic form itself and the deep anxieties that this produces in the system. As the inequalities fomented by neoliberalism become increasingly apparent, a turn to more violence (and thus fascism) is required to keep the core capitalist center of mythic violence protected and intact.

Clearly, we live in very scary times, but from a Benjaminian perspective this is also a time of tremendous potential for a revived radical left politics. One of the first things you get taught in a political science department (my own discipline) is that authority weakens the more you have to demonstrate the violence that underlies it. If you have to resort to outright violence, that is a sign that the fabric of reality that Benjamin calls the “phantasmagoria” is unraveling and is no longer doing the job of producing political and economic quiescence.

This is where the opportunity for radical change comes into play. For Benjamin, even as liberalism gives way to fascism, the vulnerability of mythic systems becomes that much more exposed. The need to resort to physical violence, and, perhaps just as critically, the need for those subjected to such violence to respond with terror and awe instead of defiance becomes that much more central to the perpetuation of mythic violence. The exposure of this vulnerability may be the reason that we are seeing an increasing refusal on the part of political subjects in our time to obey or even recognize these powers as such. Today we are seeing outbursts of resistance all over the world to mythic and neoliberal power. In Lebanon, Iraq, France, the UK, Bolivia, Chile, Hong Kong, and so many other places, resistance is growing even as repression and state violence are growing in equal measures (as Benjamin would predict).

BE : I am reminded here of Arendt’s insistence that violence and power are qualitatively different. Whilst I do find some of this analysis too deterministic, from what you say it is important to remember the reason why totalitarian systems require so much violence is that they ultimately cannot persuade people to follow their systems of empowerment. And in this regard, totalitarian systems are marked not by their absolute power but rather by how precarious they really are when it comes to their durability. Does this resonate with the types of potentiality in Benjamin?

JM : Yes, I think one of the most important things that Benjamin has to tell us is that fascism, for all of its terrifying appearance, is always and inherently on the brink of collapse. That is to say, that fascism is trapped by its own violence, forced to turn to a greater and greater degree of violence as it continually seeks to ground and reground itself. Usually when we think of a very violent and powerful system, we think that it is utterly in control of the situation and that it only collapses, if ever, by virtue of some externality (kind of the way that the combined force of the Allies in World War II ended fascism, at least for a moment). Yet, fascism in some sense does not even need external enemies because it bears its own vulnerability within itself. I’m not saying that a fascist regime can’t last for a very long time — Franco’s regime lasted for four decades after all — but rather that fascism’s requirement for a display of its violence (and just as importantly, as I was saying before, the requirement that its violence be received in a way that supports rather than undermines its political authority) means that it only survives from moment to moment; each moment could be its end. It could vanish in an instant because its power is entirely mythic and not based on any collective decisions. (Even though it always clothes itself in a relationship to “the people”; for this reason, I think that “populism” is not the right name for what we are experiencing in our own time. I would not call this populism but maybe something more like mythic groupthink, which is something very different and actually maybe the opposite of something that is inherent in a collective.)

I agree that Arendt’s distinction between violence and power has its limitations but I think it might be helpful here to think about the difference between what Benjamin calls (mythic) violence and nonviolence (with the latter corresponding roughly to Arendt’s notion of power). If nonviolence for Benjamin is marked by a refusal of externalities, then we can see that it actually has a far more stable basis than fascism does. Again, this does not mean that moments of nonviolence have a longer shelf life than fascist moments do. History tends to show the opposite; the real expressions of collective power have tended to be short lived indeed. Yet this lack of duration does not itself mean that nonviolent political moments are always doomed to short forms of duration. I think that in this case, the situation is the direct opposite of fascism: while fascism is internally unstable (because mythic) and doesn’t require an external threat to end (although those do help, of course), with nonviolence, the internal form is very stable because it comes out of actual collective forms of decision, which are made without recourse to externalities like racial purity, ancient history, or the like. It is in fact only externalities that can bring it to an end. Unfortunately those externalities are all too readily found; the creation of a nonviolent society seems to always bring a fascist response. (At this point, even a liberal regime, recognizing the threat that nonviolence poses to its markets, will turn into a fascist regime until the “emergency” is dealt with.)

This sounds like bad news, but I think that in the long run nonviolence may have the stronger hand. Arendt’s notion that power is always stronger than violence is very important here. As she informs us, in a clash between nonviolence and violence (recalling yet again that nonviolence for Benjamin does not always mean that it refrains from actual violence; maybe that is one big difference between him and Arendt), nonviolence will win every time. That is precisely why mythic violence is always frantically trying to assert its own existence, why liberal regimes readily give way to fascist ones, why the state must always kill no matter how benign it appears (or desires) to be. But in a way, mythic violence is the one facing an uphill battle; it has vulnerabilities that nonviolent forms do not have; all it has in the end is its own violence, and that cannot be counted on to produce its desired results in every single instance that it finds itself confronted by a nonviolent alternative.

BE : Returning to his most celebrated essay, “Critique of Violence,” while appreciating its theoretical richness, I am still nevertheless troubled by the way various scholars simply take its key terms and comport them into the 21st century as if the logics and rules for power and violence remained the same. What do you think is required in updating the critique?

JM : That is such an important question. I think that Benjamin must be held in his own time even as he speaks to ours. If not, such a juxtaposition threatens to lose that critical distinction that for Benjamin is the basis for why the thought or materiality of one period of time can disrupt another (and vice versa). If we make Benjamin into a 21st-century thinker, then we are making him into something that he is not, and in so doing, the critical perspective that he offers us is lost as well. One example of what you are talking about that I already touched on comes from a failure to understand what Benjamin means by violence in his “Critique.” (I think a related failure is to misunderstand what he means by nonviolence too.) Another example is to think that any number of actions constitute a General Strike, which for Benjamin takes very specific — and nonviolent — form.

Perhaps an even better example is the question of what constitutes what Benjamin calls “divine violence.” He describes divine violence in the “Critique” as a way for God to reject the fetishism and mythic violence that is often projected onto or attributed to divine sources. For Benjamin, divine violence does not create new laws and truths but merely acts to remove false ones. In my view — and I’ll admit that this is hardly a settled point — it is crucial to distinguish between divine violence and any form of human agency. As I see it, if human beings themselves can be said to engage in divine violence, then that defeats the whole purpose of exposing what is mythic and what is not. If people can be said to act as agents of God, then that simply reproduces mythic violence in a new guise. (How would you know when they are acting on God’s behalf and when they are not?) Benjamin himself really muddies this distinction in the “Critique,” offering that some human activities, including education, may constitute acts of divine violence. For this reason, some thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek have offered that when the poor rise up and attack the rich they are acting as agents of divine violence. I think this is a big mistake. What I’d say instead is that people act in the wake of an opening that divine violence produces. Divine violence is, in this account, what offers human beings a chance to act in ways that are not constituted by mythic violence, that is to say, to act in ways that are nonviolent. The General Strike is an example of such nonviolence, a way to say no to the entire apparatus of mythic violence.

Despite the fact that we must, as you suggest, keep Benjamin’s concepts distinct from those of our own time, I think that there is a huge benefit in connecting his time with our own and thinking alongside him. For me, Benjamin has helped me to see the big picture even if I use different terms than he does to describe our contemporary political moment. The name that I would give to the projections from mythic externalities is archism, a basis for much of our political and economic structures today. The name that I would give to non-mythic and collective nonviolent practices is anarchism (a term that Benjamin himself often uses although he tended to call himself a communist). In my opinion, to speak of archism helps us to avoid the mistake of thinking that the state is the only form of mythic violence that matters. (If it were, then taking over the state would end the predations of mythic violence. Yet, as we have seen in history, such a takeover generally leads to a mere change in rulers.) To speak of anarchism offers us a way to think of a collective and widespread form of resistance that is not merely utopian but is already extant. In fact, I would say that for Benjamin, anarchism is a widespread practice, a form of political nonviolence that archism sits atop, claiming credit for the support and possibility of political forms that in reality it only predates and parasitizes.

BE : In conclusion, I am taken by the already extant forms of resistance you allude to here. Despite the pessimism of the types, then as now, what I still find in Benjamin is the idea that people will resist what is patently intolerable and will try to retain something of the human despite the desperate weight of historical persecution. If Benjamin offers us a single lesson moving forward, what do you think this demands from us?

JM : I think that more than offering us something, Benjamin actually takes away one of the great conceits that allows us to remain ensconced in mythic violence, namely the idea that “there is no alternative.” This notion, akin to what Benjamin himself calls “left melancholia,” is a kind of self-defeatism that allows leftists and those who are against violence the comfort of thinking that there really isn’t anything that they can do, that leftist attempts to avoid violence all produce results that are no less violent than fascism and that therefore we must perforce make our peace with capitalism and just do the best we can. What Benjamin shows us, I think, is not only that a nonviolent life is possible, but that it exists all around us. We are actually engaged in it already. In his view, nonviolence is just another name for daily life, for the infinite decisions, agreements, arguments, and resolutions that we all make with one another each and every day and without any recourse to law or the state. This is what I like to call the anarchist life that we are already living. Nonviolence, then, is not some pie-in-the-sky utopia but an ongoing presence that we always have recourse too. We do not need to destroy everything and then start over. Rather we must remove the parasitic and mythic overlord that rules us through its violence and its lies. The greatest deception that mythic violence has ever pulled over on us is the notion (popularized by novels like Lord of the Flies) that if the state or other archist forms were to remove themselves from our life, we would all be stabbing one another within minutes. Benjamin shows us that it is the state itself, the veritable fox guarding the henhouse, that is the source of violence in our life. We may respond to it with various acts of violence of our own, but that is only to repeat the way that we are enmeshed in a violent and mythic order.

If I thought that nothing that I did could ever lead to things being better or different then I would probably be entitled to engage in a bit of left melancholia, to sigh over how awful capitalism is and romanticize the various failed leftist assaults on capitalism’s reign. But if I knew, as Benjamin informs us, that capitalism was far more vulnerable than I thought, that I lived amid an entire network of mutually nonviolent collectivity (however much it was overlaid with echoes of state and other forms of mythic violence) then the onus is on me to actually do something about it.

I so admire the courage and clearheadedness that Benjamin displays in his last essay, “On the Concept of History.” This was written in 1940, the year of his death and a year that fascism was literally coming down all around him. Rather than allow himself into being terrified into quiescence, at the (fascist) end of history, Benjamin wrote an essay where he understood time itself as defeating the linearity of history and the sense that fascism is fated and cannot be resisted. I don’t think we are today quite where the world was when Benjamin wrote that essay, although that depends, once again, on who and where we are talking about, but we are clearly getting closer to this situation on a global scale. I hope that we can demonstrate the same resolve in our time that Benjamin showed in his. Even in the heart of fascism, he saw its true colors, its vulnerabilities, and the fact that it was never as powerful as it seemed. He was able to see mythic violence for what it is even when it ended up costing him his life. If he could do that in the face of Hitler, I hope we can do the same in the face of Trump and Johnson and the like and whomever, or whatever, is to come next.

Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Walter Benjamin Today.  Brad Evans interviews James Martel. Los Angeles Review of Books , February  3, 2020.

When Hannah Ahrendt  escaped the Gurs internment camp in the middle of June 1940, she did not go to Marseilles to find her husband Heinrich Blücher — she went to Lourdes to find Walter Benjamin. For nearly two weeks they played chess from morning to night, talked, and read whatever papers they could find.

Arendt and Benjamin met in exile in Paris in 1933 through her first husband, Günther Anders, who was a distant cousin of Benjamin’s. They would frequent a café on the rue Soufflot to talk politics and philosophy with Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Zweig. And while Arendt’s marriage to Anders didn’t last, her friendship with Benjamin grew and flourished during the war years.

Arendt hesitated leaving Benjamin in Lourdes. She knew he was in a wobbly state of mind, anxious about the future, talking about suicide. Benjamin feared being interned again, and he had difficulty imagining life in the United States. Arendt wrote to Gershom Scholem that the “war immediately terrified him beyond all measure” and “[h]is horror at America was indescribable.” His strained relationship with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) left him in a state of financial precarity. The tenuous flow of correspondence conducted through networks of friends and letters (when they arrived) complicated matters more, leaving one dependent upon time itself. Benjamin, already an anxious man, stopped going out and “was living in constant panic.”

When Benjamin was released from the Clos St. Joseph internment camp in Nevers in the spring of 1940, he returned to Paris for a brief period before fleeing to Lourdes around June 14, en route to Marseilles. It was during this time that he wrote what would become his final work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” or as it is also translated, “On the Concept of History.”

The “Theses,” a collection of philosophical fragments on historicism and historical materialism, were originally written on the backs of colorful envelopes — green, yellow, orange, blue, cream. The cramped passages in tiny script illustrate the conditions of exile: he is saving space because he is short on paper. As a text, the “Theses” marry Benjamin’s interests in Marxism and theology, reflecting on temporality and the possibility of a weak messianism to interrupt the flow of empty homogeneous, capitalist time. The most famous fragment, which lies at the heart of the work, was inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which Benjamin purchased in 1921, and which inspired a birthday gift from Scholem: a poem titled “Greetings from the Angelus on July 15.” The painting accompanied Benjamin for some 20 years of his life, and, as he describes it, pictures the angel of history being blown backward into the future by the forces of progress piling ruins at his feet.

The stack of empty envelopes, now tucked away in a manila folder in Hannah Arendt’s archive at the Library of Congress, bear Benjamin’s last work and final Paris address — 10, rue Dombasle, Paris 15e. They were written for a future he would never know. As Benjamin writes in one thesis: There is no document of civilization, that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Theses 1–3. Photograph by Samantha Hill. Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

The documents of Walter Benjamin’s death are plural. What information we have about his final days comes from Lisa Fittko and Henny Gurland (Erich Fromm’s wife), who led a small group of refugees through the Pyrenees to Portbou, a common route of escape for refugees at the time. Fittko describes how Benjamin had to walk for 10 minutes, then rest for a minute, given his poor health. He carried only a leather attaché case, which contained his most valuable papers. Upon arriving in Portbou on the night of September 26, 1940, they were told at the police station that the Spanish border had been closed, and that without French exit papers they would be returned and sent to camps. That night, Walter Benjamin took a lethal dose of morphine. Gurland was the last person to see him alive, and this is important, because she wrote what essentially became his will. According to her, Benjamin died on September 27. The Spanish doctor’s death certificate declares that Benjamin died from a cerebral hemorrhage on September 26 (perhaps an attempt to cover up the suicide). The municipal certificate shows that he was buried on September 27. Another burial record is dated September 28. Hannah Arendt writes to Gershom Scholem that Benjamin died on September 29.

We will never know what happened to Walter Benjamin, or his leather attaché case, but we do know (in part) what happened with his final work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

The afterlife of Benjamin’s “Theses” is embroiled in turmoil. Benjamin was anxious about the publication of his papers, and he was doubly anxious that the Institute would edit his work and publish it in the United States without his approval. Arendt was anxious that Adorno and Horkheimer would censor Benjamin’s work. Adorno was anxious that Arendt would try to publish Benjamin’s work without his consent. Scholem was anxious that Adorno wouldn’t publish Benjamin’s work at all.

Before Benjamin’s death, he dispersed his papers widely among his friends: Scholem had most of Benjamin’s essays in Palestine; Georges Bataille was hiding the Arcades Project, among other papers, and the Klee painting in the French National Library where he worked; Gretel Adorno had a number of writings in New York; and Arendt had copies of Benjamin’s literary and philosophical essays. These and other copies were hand-transcribed by Benjamin himself.

A few months after Benjamin’s suicide, Arendt and Blücher made their way from Marseilles to Portbou to Lisbon. As they sailed to New York in the spring of 1941, they read the “Theses” aloud to their fellow passengers. And a couple days after arriving in New York, Arendt took a suitcase with Benjamin’s work to Adorno and Horkheimer at West 117th Street. She left Benjamin’s papers with the Institute, but refused to hand over her copy of the “Theses.” She made them make copies instead.

From Arendt’s correspondence, it’s clear that she never quite believed Benjamin entrusted the execution of his literary estate to Adorno. At the very least, she never trusted Adorno to actually publish Benjamin’s papers. This is complicated by the fact that Benjamin left no real will, or if he did, it was lost. The instruction to give his papers to Adorno comes secondhand through Gurland, who claimed that she felt it necessary to destroy Benjamin’s final message, a suicide note of sorts. As we have it, she rewrote Benjamin’s last letter from memory and passed it on. The five sentences read:

      “In a situation presenting no way out, I have no other choice but to make an end of it. It is in a small village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life will come to a close [va s’achever].

I ask you to transmit my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to him the situation in which I find myself. There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write. “”

The last letter Benjamin sent Adorno is dated August 2, 1940, and chronicles his anxieties about his papers:

        “I spoke to Felizitas [Gretel Adorno] about the complete uncertainty in which I find myself concerning my writings. (I have relatively less reason to fear for the papers devoted to the Arcades than for the others.) As you know, however, things are such that my personal situation is no better than that of my writings …”

In all of Benjamin’s fretfulness about his papers, there is no request in this letter that Adorno publish his work. In fact, quite the opposite. He goes on to write: “The complete uncertainty about what the next day and even the next hour will bring has dominated my existence for many weeks,” which is followed by this admonition:

            “I hope that I have thus far given you the impression of maintaining my composure even in difficult moments. Do not think that this has changed. But I cannot close my eyes to the dangerous nature of the situation. I fear that those who have been able to extricate themselves from it will have to be reckoned with one day.”

Benjamin’s final letter to Arendt, written August 9, 1940, from Lourdes, concerns his exit papers and decision to head to Marseilles, where he would need to collect his papers for emigration. He mentions his “deep anguish” about the fate of his manuscripts and notes that he has had little contact from friends, but that he is keeping his spirits up by reading. On September 20, Benjamin, Arendt, and Blücher were reunited in Marseille. On September 25 or 26, Benjamin left for Portbou.

Benjamin had seen Theodor and Gretel Adorno for the last time in December 1938 in San Remo, Italy, before their departure to New York. During their days in San Remo, they talked about their respective work. Adorno shared his In Search of Wagner with Benjamin, and Benjamin discussed transforming his Baudelaire project with Adorno. (Adorno would later use this meeting to argue to Arendt that Benjamin had entrusted him with his work because he knew it best.)

Postcard from Walter Benjamin to Hannah Arendt, dated August 20, 1937. Hannah Arendt Collection, Bard College, Stevenson Library. Photograph by Samantha Hill.

After his visit with Adorno, Benjamin returned to Paris. During the winter of 1938–1939 he had frequent meetings with Arendt. A circle of German émigrés had formed around them, as one of Benjamin’s biographers describes it, and they held regular discussions in Benjamin’s apartment. In exile, Arendt, not Adorno, had become Benjamin’s primary interlocutor. That February, Scholem arrived in Paris on his way to New York and visited with Arendt and Benjamin. And it was these conversations with Arendt about Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism that most informed “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” When Benjamin finished the “Theses” in late April, early May 1940, he sent a copy to Gretel in New York, with a note:

    “The war and the constellation that brought it about led me to take down a few thoughts which I can say that I have kept with me, indeed kept from myself, for nigh on twenty years. […] Even today, I am handing them to you more as a bouquet of whispering grasses, gathered on reflective walks, than a collection of theses.”

Who ought execute Benjamin’s literary estate, then, is not clear from his final correspondence. From reading his letters, it appears that he was closer to Gretel Adorno than Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and even Arendt. Gurland’s secondhand note is presumably authentic, but we can never know. What we do know is that everyone has tried to claim Benjamin since his death, and the struggle among Arendt, Adorno, and Scholem to publish the “Theses,” among other works, led to an open air of suspicion and masked hostility.

A few weeks after arriving in New York, Arendt moved to Massachusetts to live with an American family as an au pair so she could learn English. While there, she received word from the Institute that they had misplaced a couple of Benjamin’s writings that were in the suitcase she had delivered. Which ones? We don’t know. But Arendt did not believe that they had been lost. She believed that Adorno intentionally misplaced them so that he would not have to publish them. She saw it as an act of censorship, a continuation of Adorno’s mistreatment of Benjamin’s work since the so-called Baudelaire controversy, in which Adorno had critiqued and rejected Benjamin’s Baudelaire essay for not being Marxist or dialectical enough. She wrote to Blücher on August 2, 1941:

       “This morning I received the enclosed letter of doom. I am quite distraught at the chutzpa and the naïve effrontery of writing something like that to me. But that’s the least of the problems. I take it that the group of bastards is of the same opinion and that they will simply suppress the manuscript. It’s quite a stroke luck in the circumstances that I have the manuscript. After all, I was obligated to give it to them, knowing that Benji had sent them a copy which never arrived. Snubby [Arendt’s pet name for Blücher], please, please, say something. I’m all alone and so horribly desperate and frightened because they do not seem to be willing to print it. And so terribly furious that I could murder the whole lot of them. If only one could write to Palestine, maybe Scholem could have it properly published with Schocken [Verlag] — who, N.B., is in New York. But I’d have to know first if the stupid asses are not going to take it. And, bastards that they are, they will never give me a straight answer. They’ll just keep stringing us along. We certainly won’t be able to lecture them on loyalty to a dead friend. They’ll avenge themselves, the way Benji basically avenged himself by writing this.”

It would not be an understatement to say Arendt hated Adorno. After meeting him in Frankfurt in the 1920s, she remarked: That one will never come in my house! Her dislike was personal and political. She blamed Adorno for her first husband’s failed habilitation, thought he had strong-armed Benjamin into rewriting his Baudelaire essay, and found the Freudo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School to be transparently ideological. Since the early 1930s, Benjamin’s stipend from the Institute for Social Research was his primary source of income. Around 1935, Benjamin met with Friedrich Pollock, who agreed to double his monthly stipend from 500 francs to 1,000 francs to write The Paris Arcades. A few years later in 1938, and a couple months after Adorno rejected Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire, he received a letter from Max Horkheimer informing him that his stipend would likely be canceled because of the financial circumstances of the Institute. Benjamin was plunged into one depression after the next at the hands of Adorno and Horkheimer, and Arendt saw the “misplaced papers” as a continuation of Benjamin’s mistreatment by the Institute for Social Research.

This is the backdrop of Arendt’s letter to Blücher. Similarly, she wrote to Scholem shortly after arriving in the United States: “I can’t get a word out of Wiesengrund [Adorno]. I talked to him when he was here, but after he left for California he hasn’t mentioned it again. You know what I think about these gentlemen…” Arendt spared no word talking about the “bastards.” 

It took nearly two years after Benjamin’s death for Adorno and Horkheimer to publish something, and even then it was Gretel Adorno who did the work. In 1942, Gretel produced a limited-edition mimeograph of Benjamin’s writings, titled Walter Benjamin zum Gedächtnis (In Memory of Walter Benjamin). It took five more years for Benjamin’s “Theses” to appear in print in the journal Les Temps modernes — and five more for a two-volume selection of his collected writings to be published by Suhrkamp Verlag.

When Arendt received her copy of the 1942 mimeograph in the mail, she was furious. The somber tomb of pale typescript was sandwiched between two sheets of black construction paper. Not only did Adorno and Horkheimer fail to publish Benjamin’s work properly, but they did not even bother to bind it. She exclaimed to Scholem:

       “I’m writing in a rush just to let you know that the Institute has published a mimeographed volume in memory of Benjamin, which wasn’t even bound when they send it out. The only thing you’ll find in it from his literary estate is his “Historical-Philosophical Theses,” which I had brought with me. What I very much fear is that this will be it, and all the rest of his work they’ll bury away in the archives. It was a little more difficult for them to do it with the “Theses” because so many people knew about it, and because I was the one who gave it to them in the first place. As for the rest of the volume, there is an essay by Horkheimer and one by Adorno.”

Arendt edited her copy with a blue marker, and made an interlinear translation of part of the famous Angelus Novus fragment:

   “unremittingly ruin on ruin piles

and lands there at his feet. He wishes he could stay

to rouse the dead and to join together the fragments. But a

wind blown from paradise got caught in his wings

and is so strong that the angel can no more

close them. This wind drives him unsparingly in the future

so that he turns his back while the pile of ruin before him

towers to the skies. What we call progress is this wind.”

“Walter Benjamin zum Gedächtnis,” 1942 Mimeograph, Angelus Novus thesis. Hannah Arendt Collection at Stevenson Library, Bard College. Photography by Samantha Hill.

The “Theses” stood at the center of Arendt and Adorno’s dispute about the publication of Benjamin’s work, because Arendt retained her copy. Part of the controversy appears to stem from the fact that Arendt didn’t know Benjamin wrote as many as six copies of the “Theses” — entrusting one to Gretel Adorno — though she was aware that he had told many people about them.

In 1947, Adorno heard a rumor that Arendt was publishing Benjamin’s works without his permission and wrote to remind her that Benjamin had entrusted him with the publication of his papers. Adorno adds that he understood the “philosophical landscape” of Benjamin’s work better than anyone because of their discussions in San Remo:

 “I have heard from several sources that Schocken Verlag is planning [an] edition of Benjamin’s writings, and Ms. Maier has now informed me that the plan falls to your responsibility. I hardly have to tell you how I would welcome such [an] edition. Perhaps it is not unimportant for the plan for you to know that Walter Benjamin has entrusted me with his entire literary estate, and that just now the manuscripts of the Arcades Project that were hidden in Paris during the war, and that probably contain the most important theoretical designs of his late work, have arrived in New York and are being kept there until there is an absolutely safe way for me to receive the irreplaceable material. I myself have in my possession the parts of Benjamin’s archive  that he carried with him.

When I saw Benjamin for the last time, in January 1938 in San Remo, it was agreed between us that I should give a more comprehensive picture of his philosophical intentions. It seems to me that the execution of this plan, which we had discussed in detail, is not merely the fulfillment of a binding duty, but I also believe that I am not immodest if I regard myself as [more] qualified for the task than anyone else, both because of my intimate familiarity with Benjamin’s intellectual landscape and because of the central consistency of our philosophy. Perhaps the edition would provide the opportunity to realize that plan.”

Arendt and Scholem were skeptical that Adorno had actually acquired the Arcades Project from Bataille. And we know now that not all of them were delivered, since some remained hidden until the 1980s when they were discovered by accident in the French National Library by Giorgio Agamben. Still, there was not much that Arendt or Scholem could do. Adorno published the two-volume edition of Benjamin’s writings with Suhrkamp Verlag in 1955.

Dissatisfied with the German editions and committed to the afterlife Benjamin’s work, Arendt set out to publish two new volumes of Benjamin’s essays, what would become Illuminations and Reflections. When she began working on the first English-language edition in the spring of 1967, she wrote to Adorno, because she noticed some “variants” between her copy of the “Theses” and the German editions he had published. She was concerned that there were some “not insignificant” changes in the “Theses” in the German publications, including an entirely new fragment, thesis VII. She asked him if he had other versions and if so if he knew which he’d worked from in order to produce the 1942 mimeograph. Adorno responded by saying that there were a number of copies of the “Theses” that had been sent to him from multiple places. He deferred and said that the text was under the custody of Gretel, and offered Arendt Gretel’s list of noted manuscript variants. He added that the two-volume edition of writings was “provisional” and “does not satisfy scholarly philological claims.”

Arendt hadn’t seen the other versions of the theses, and, combined with her dislike and distrust of Adorno, she questioned the veracity of his German volumes. In fact, Benjamin wrote out the “Theses” several times, making minor, and sometimes major, adjustments. Notably, looking at Arendt’s copy and the published versions of the “Theses,” the Angelus Novus fragment numbers vary. Benjamin rearranged them, edited them, and added new fragments before he sent them to Gretel. In addition to Arendt’s copy and Gretel’s copy, one draft was sent to Dora Benjamin, and copies were sent to Scholem in Palestine and Theodor Adorno in New York, which never arrived. Benjamin also translated the “Theses” into French.

On the list of corrections that Adorno sent Arendt, one clear variant stands out. Materialist is substituted for dialectic. This would constitute a significant philosophical difference. A dialectician would attend to the movement of history itself, whereas a historical materialist would attend to the materiality of history in order to reject the Marxist conception of fluid movement. The difference, in short, is the glaring difference between Adorno and Benjamin — the difference at the heart of their argument over Baudelaire. Adorno criticized Benjamin for not being dialectical enough, and Benjamin thought Adorno’s insistence on dialectics rejected materialism in favor of ideology. Benjamin was interested in looking at the images of the past, not the movement of the past as a whole. Looking through the various versions of the “Theses” this variant appears only once — in Dora Benjamin’s copy, which is presumably the version Gretel was typing from since she changed historical back to materialist.

Arendt and Adorno’s correspondence continued for six letters, and includes a discussion of Adorno’s decision not to publish Benjamin’s Baudelaire work, even after Benjamin’s death. Arendt thanked Adorno for his response, offered to send him another copy of the “Theses” she had, and remarked that it was lamentable that Adorno failed to include the original Baudelaire essay, since it was “toto coelo different.” Arendt’s implication was that it was the original, not the version Adorno made him write. Adorno responded by saying that he didn’t print the Baudelaire essay because it was a different part of the Baudelaire work, and that he was considering publishing it given the controversy around the two volumes. He added: “[T]his text did not seem to me to do justice to the tremendous claim that objectively emanates from Benjamin’s conception.” Arendt responded by calling into question Adorno’s objection:

  “ I knew from the letter and also from Benjamin himself that the original Baudelaire essay was very different from the later published one, and I think I have also understood your objections, although I never read the manuscript; at any rate, I do not remember.

You write of a controversy connected with the two-volume edition of letters, of which here, naturally, I know nothing. I may have written that I’m about to write about Benjamin for the first time, naturally also using the letters. I hope very much that I do not get into a controversy, no matter on which side. I highly appreciate your introduction to the essays, but I still do not have the same image of Benjamin as you. It could happen that neither you nor Sholem [sic] will be satisfied with me.”

At the end of Illuminations, Arendt offers an editor’s note, and comments on the variations in the “Theses”:

    “The translation of the text follows the two-volume German edition of Benjamin’s writings which, under the title Schriften, was edited and introduced by Theodor W. Adorno[.] […] Professor Adorno points out in his Introduction that it is not definitive: in the few instances where the original manuscripts could be consulted, it turned out that Benjamin’s handwriting was difficult to read, and as for the typescripts and printed newspaper or magazine copies, they “unquestionably contain numerous errors.” In the only case in which I was able to compare the original manuscript with the printed text, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which Benjamin gave me shortly before his death, I found many important variants. “

When Hannah Arendt sat down to write her introduction for Illuminations, she wrote it in German and had it translated into English by Harry Zohn, who was translating Benjamin’s work for the volume. She was concerned about Benjamin’s legacy, and because he had given her his papers to safeguard in friendship, she also felt a responsibility to make sure that they were published.

In the end, it was Arendt, not Adorno and the Frankfurt School, that introduced Benjamin to the English-speaking world. But more importantly, Benjamin’s friends were able to keep his work alive. In his final thesis, he writes:

     “We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”

We cannot turn back to see the future, but we can look back to Walter Benjamin’s works, in order to think about our present moment. The fragments that remain of the “Theses,” of the Arcades, the numerous biographies that try to constellate his final days, will never be complete. Somehow this disjointed historiography fits Benjamin’s own mode of critical thinking: pausing for breath, we must continuously return in a roundabout way to the object of contemplation. Benjamin’s life and work are to be returned to, without telos. And much work still needs to be done to ensure Benjamin’s legacy — works to be translated and published, stories to be told.

Walter Benjamin’s Last Work. By Samantha Rose Hill. Los Angeles Review of Books , December  9, 2019.