The Wonderful World of Walter Benjamin
80 years after his passing, he is still one of the most influential philosophers ever.
Our son’s name is Benjamin.
After Walter Benjamin.
That is not a joke. Walter seemed a bit old. Benjamin, on the other hand, had something youthful, playfully. Now, you may be asking yourself, ‘What? Who is this, Walter Benjamin? And why do you name your son after him?’
Well, it has its reasons.
The German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is one of European modernity's foremost eyewitnesses. Together with his comrades Bertolt Brecht and Lásló Moholy-Nagy, he reshaped an avant-garde realism, a new way of seeing and understanding the things in life. This literary critic is often cited with Theodor Adorno or Max Horkheimer (a friend of his), the most important representatives of the Frankfurter Schule.
But Benjamin remained a misfit.
A storm, a paradise
Benjamin’s ideas about the city, youth, technology, literature, and history played an important role in the transition from modernism to postmodernism at the turn of the century.
His name is still very popular and influential in literary criticism, philosophy, theology, history, and art history. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was an exceptionally widely read author.
I often think about him and his ideas. Especially tomorrow. It will be exactly 80 years ago, on September 26, that he tragically came to his end.
At the start of the Second World War, in June 1940, the Germans took Paris. Benjamin dwelt a time in the French capital. Throughout his life, this philosophical nomad traveled from city to city, from village to village, but always with Berlin as its home base.
Anyway, in Paris, he got to know and got close with well-known figures such as German philosopher Hannah Arendt and German writer Herman Hesse.
Due to the German invasion, he fled with his sister to the south of France, the Lourdes' pilgrimage site. Because of his Jewishness, he was under arrest. Max Horkheimer obtained him a visa to travel to the United States. He had his hopes up.
In normal circumstances, this had to work. He thought, if he went through neutral Portugal, he would have a clear passage to the United States. With a group of other Jewish refugees, he found himself just across the Spanish border on September 25, 1940.
But then, the French-Spanish border closed.
Franco’s police made it clear to the group that they would arrest them. They would be handed over to the Nazis the next morning, they said. Would. So Benjamin took fate into his own hands. In a hotel in Portbou, Catalonia, he overdosed on morphine on September 26, 1940, and committed suicide.
In a letter to Henry Gurland & Theodor Adorno, he wrote: In a situation with no way out, I have no other choice. My life will end in a little village in the Pyrenees where nobody knows me. I ask you to pass on my thoughts to my friend Adorno and explain the position I found myself in. I do not have enough time to write all the letters I would like to have written.
The next day the border just opened again—an absolute tragedy.
The storm Benjamin was ready for the philosophical paradise.
The city, the flaneur
When I studied philosophy a few years ago, a professor of mine told us, students, what philosophers do: “A philosopher,” he stated, “is someone who comes in, asks a bunch of questions about something, and then kicks off again.” It is then up to other scientists from other disciplines to formulate solid answers.
However, Benjamin is one of those thinkers who, while you are reading him, requires some puzzling, because he demands through his answers some elasticity. Each question involves an explanation, and each answers a question.
He is perhaps not a sexy name like René Descartes, Aristotle, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is always practical to make your point with a well-aimed Nietzsche quote. With Benjamin, it is a bit more challenging, precisely because of his cryptical style. However, it doesn’t make him less appealing.
Eighty years after his death, he still shows us ways to create new forms of the world today. It is important when it is tempting to look away or assume that know everything, seen and disclosed everything, or discussed everything. His view of the world is still extremely relevant.
For instance, Walter Benjamin teaches us how you can experience city-life. His works on urban life read like a traveling urban circus. He wrote excerpts and notes about Paris, Berlin, Marseilles, Moscow, and Naples. They were often philosophical reflections, aphorisms about literature, life, art, and work.
The idea of city life has an important place in his thinking. His descriptions of the Arcades, his ideas about Charles Baudelaire, the flaneur (Paris die Hauptstadt des 19. Jahrhunderts), or his view on the drowning Weimar republic can be extrapolated to urban gadgets in 2020 (Einbahnstraße).
Kafka and Marx
Benjamin's oeuvre is prominently displayed here in our bookcase. Hopefully, one day, Benjamin (my son) will later enjoy Benjamin (the philosopher) as much as I did. No pressure, son. I do hope that Benjamin (my son) will be able to experience his hometown (wherever that may be) in a completely different way, thanks to Benjamin (the philosopher).
But what makes Benjamin (the philosopher) so attractive (Benjamin, the son, is so attractive because of his beautiful mother, of course)? Well, Walter Benjamin wrote about absolutely everything.
He mixed surrealism, German Romanticism, Jewish mysticism, literary criticism, advertising slogans, and Marxism with revealing a new world in the flourishing urban landscape of the new modern Europe.
He often wrote about subjects that were not so obvious. About hash. About the radio and film. About strolling. About road signs. About children's stories. About gambling. About pornography. About photo montages. About his youth. About Kafka. About toys. About dreams. About history. About progress. You name it.
He was an unparalleled intellectual omnivore. That’s what I love about him.
Every sentence he eagerly wrote beholds a philosophical repertoire. Every question contains an answer that makes you question things again. Benjamin is like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, but a bit more obscure.
The nature of his work conceals the systematic core of philosophy itself: doubt. Eternal doubt. That ancient Socratic method. Benjamin was Jewish. But he was not a radical Zionist.
Marxism inspired him, but he saw the Russian Revolution as a failure. Benjamin was always on the move. He was at home everywhere and nowhere. Philosophical as nomadic.
Choices, and making them, are an essential aspect of his work. We often witness this ourselves. In our identity, in who we are, in what we want, in how we foresee our given path. Life‘s pathway is full of essential choices. And coincidence.
Art and Technology
Sometimes I wonder how Benjamin (the philosopher) would look at a phenomenon like the internet. What would he think, for instance, about the like-button? Would he like it? I don’t think so. It might be somehow in what one of his French heirs, Jean Baudrillard, would write about it.
Everything is simulacra! We feel nothing! We only experience. For Benjamin, a world of difference. You only endure things. You don’t share them. This sort of alienation reminds me of what Karl Marx wrote about workers in production processes.
The more connected we are to each other, the more disconnected we feel as individuals. It is a clear echo of what Marx meant with his theory of alienation.
Because, yes, let’s be honest: how hard do you like something?
His most influential work, which is still reprinted today, is the in 1936 written ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’
This critical yet hopeful essay on the role of technology in our lives often serves as a guide for those who question new technologies, technological gadgets (like the smartphone), and its impact on our daily lives. This usually includes a wide range of subjects, from television to the Internet, from nanotechnology to automation, from ICQ to TikTok.
Impermanence, triviality, and banality: these are fundamental notions in his work. Every day a person experiences something. Benjamin asks himself the question of how genuine experience can be?
That is an immensely important question.
These days, we continuously take pictures, make videos all the time, and ceaselessly add content to our social media.
Especially when you observe that more and more people worldwide will be living in dense urban areas, by 2050, 80% of the world’s population will live in cities.
When you see how many goods our consumer society produces, we want a new fashion every season, a new smartphone every year. We use, misuse, and consume the resources on our planet for humanities (economic) good. The world looks more and more like the devices we replace.
But we can not replace our planet. That’s a vast and significant issue. The annual heatwaves, wildfires, shrinking of ice caps, and massive droughts worldwide are our witnesses to that. Climate change will be a world-altering confrontation.
Benjamin wanted to create a consciousness for the masses. The mass-man saw in his time the light. Taylorism had its heyday. Industry and mass-production bloomed, especially after the First World War and before the Second World War. New York skyrocketed in its building-hunger. The bustling metropolis as the center of the world.
Next to that, substantial social power-struggle was taking place. Often, politics had no answer for the social needs of the working class. It made the masses desolated, disillusioned, and angry—the mass-man radicalized. In Italy, Germany, Spain (where a coup d’etat took place).
In Benjamins Germany, the failed Weimar Republic left a nasty taste. It is a sentiment dangerously see today in 2020 in the US. The United States gets somewhat compared to the crumbling Weimar Republic.
Not entirely unjustified.
A few things we see are happening worldwide. Look at the sometimes grimly images of the worldwide protests from furious #BlackLivesMatter-protests to the yellow vests fighting with the police in Paris, from fierce Trump-supporters to the rebellious Extinction Rebellion-activism. Not to mention the rise of China as the dominant world power and climate change.
Something is going on.
Benjamin (my son) will grow up in a densely urbanized world, a changing world because of climate change, a world where technology will play a dominant role. In this world, everything and everyone everywhere is always connected. That is precisely why he needs a good guide that can help him question such developments in a critical, investigative, and different way than the ‘normal.’
We, as loyal parents, will assist him.
But Benjamin (the philosopher) can help Benjamin (the son) out with these questions.
