Mythmaking in the Humanities

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), after having become well-known beyond the circle of his friends and their students for the first time in the sixties, was soon raised to the status of a leading figure among Western intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, an evaluation still valid and duly justified by both content and form of his œuvre. His writings exhibit rigorous philosophical reflection as well as poetical power and show a concentration on the aphoristic and minimal comparable only to the prose writing of Kafka. But Kafka was able to transform the spell of authority and violence, which still runs through most of Benjamin's lines and fascinates not a few of his readers, into an almost compulsive discipline through writing and a daily mimicry of working as a surveyor in an insurance company. One is inclined to label both aspects as dreary virtues which Benjamin was apparently free from. Benjamin's life history, too, was increasingly considered to contribute to his posthumous fame. His life was regarded as the exemplary fate of a political and, at the same time, learned activist, who was powerless against the malign spirit of the bureaucratic rigidity of the German universities and who sided with the oppressed proletariat. He finally killed himself when his attempt to escape to Spain at Port Bou, in order to avoid being caught and transported to a death camp by the Nazis or their collaborators, was thwarted by the stubborness of the local police. In her introduction to a collection of Benjamin's essays, Hannah Arendt characterized both his death and his entire life as an ongoing and seemingly unbreakable chain of "clumsiness and misfortune" (reprinted in H.Arendt, Men in Dark Times (1970), 159). It looks as ifand Benjamin thought so himself a spell had been cast on him as in a fairy tale.