Volume 42, Number 9 · May 25, 1995
The Riddle of Walter Benjamin
By Mark Lilla
The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940
edited and annotated by Gershom Scholem, by Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Manfred Jacobson, translated by Evelyn Jacobson
University of Chicago Press, 651 pp., $45.00
In 1968 Hannah Arendt edited Illuminations, the first collection of essays by Walter Benjamin to appear in English. At that time little was known about Benjamin outside Germany, except that he was a talented and idiosyncratic literary critic who had committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. The essays Arendt selected for Illuminations primarily reflected his literary achievements. Most of the volume consists of dense ruminations on Kafka, Baudelaire, Proust, Brecht, and Leskov, and it includes a charming essay on book collecting. Only the last two essays, on the mechanical reproduction of art works and on the philosophy of history, give any clue to Benjamin's more profound philosophical ambitions.
Review, 8070 words
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