The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940. Walter Benjamin

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940


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ISBN: 0226042375,9780226042374 | 674 pages | 34 Mb

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The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940 Walter Benjamin
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From Library Journal

Drawing on sources as disparate as Jewish mysticism and Marxism, Benjamin (1892- 1940) created one of the 20th century's most distinguished bodies of literary and cultural criticism. While much of his correspondence to editor Scholem has appeared in English before, this collection offers newly translated letters to Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, Martin Buber, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Horkheimer, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodor Adorno, and others. Although these letters tell us virtually nothing about the trying times that afflicted and tragically shortened Benjamin's life (he committed suicide while fleeing German-occupied France), they are filled with the erudite and heady intellectual atmosphere that so completely absorbed this unique and creative mind. For both lay readers and specialists.
Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Demanding yet eloquent and immensely rewarding personal documents of one of the century's leading literary and aesthetic critics. It's the grimmest of ironies that one of the earliest letters here should find the young philosopher standing metaphorically ``at a border crossing''--for Benjamin would end his life by his own despairing hand at a Spanish frontier post in 1940, his entry barred as he fled the advancing Nazi armies. Yet that image of the perpetual traveler on the threshold well suits the writer portrayed in these letters: equally a self-professed materialist devoted to the modern age and a bibliophile immersed in the literary past; close to many circles--Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Brecht's literary collective, Gershom Scholem's Zionism (the three men were among his correspondents, as well)--yet fully a member of none; a voracious consumer of the world yet always something of an outsider. The most bleakly memorable section here is the letters- -almost half the total--recording Benjamin's long and lonely years of exile, beginning with Hitler's seizure of power and ending with his own death. Here Benjamin faces up to his own uncertain prospects, as the material means for his work--living space, even the writing paper he coveted--dwindle and vanish. Constantly changing postmarks bear witness to his peripatetic and increasingly desperate search for refuge; above all, he bears witness to his growing sense of emotional and intellectual isolation. Yet he sets to his work, ``the shelter I step beneath when the weather grows rough outside,'' to recover something from the very culture whose collapse is about to engulf him--a quixotic venture that nevertheless compels our admiration. Unfortunately, this volume--simply a translation, with no new editorial apparatus, of the 30-year-old German edition--is a little unforgiving on the general reader: It's a shame the publisher hasn't supplied more biographical, historical, and cultural context to encourage nonspecialists to make Benjamin's fascinating acquaintance. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.



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