Volume 13, Number 11 · December 18, 1969
The Incomparable Benjamin
By Frank Kermode
Illuminations. Essays and Reflections
by Walter Benjamin, edited and with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn
Schocken, 278 pp., $2.45 (paper)
Walter Benjamin was born in 1892. He killed himself in 1940 when he was refused permission to cross from France into Spain in order to take ship from Lisbon to the United States, where he would have joined his émigré associates Adorno and Horkheimer at the Institute of Social Research in New York. He was of that Jewish class in which it was normal for fathers who had made a success in the world of business to support their sons in the life of independent scholarship, and although his father happened not to wish to do this Benjamin nevertheless pursued such a life, intending to make himself the best German critic. Miss Arendt, in her Introduction to this book, emphasizes the peculiarity of such Jewish intellectuals; they administered, as Moritz Goldstein remarked, 'the intellectual property of a people which denied them the right and the ability to do so,' and because there was very little in their own lives to connect them with the religion or manners of their fathers they were often as much at odds with the Jewish as with the larger community.
Review, 4050 words
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