Walter Ben­jamin

Pub­lisher’s Introduction

“Walter Ben­jamin emerged from the head-on col­lision of an ide­al­istic youth movement and the First World War, which Ben­jamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck scarred yet deter­mined “to be con­sidered as the prin­cipal critic of German lit­er­ature.” But the scene, as he found it, was dom­i­nated by “tal­ented fakes,” so—to use his words—“only a ter­rorist cam­paign would I suffice” to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the first phase of that cam­paign, cul­mi­nating with “One Way Street,” one of the most sig­nif­icant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against con­formism, homo­geneity, and gen­tri­fi­cation of all life into a new world order, Ben­jamin made the word his sword. Volume I of the Selected Writings [which con­tains “Cri­tique of Vio­lence”] brings together essays long and short, aca­demic trea­tises, reviews, frag­ments, and pri­vately cir­cu­lated pro­nounce­ments. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been trans­lated into English. The con­tents begin in 1913, when Ben­jamin, as an under­graduate in imperial Germany, was pres­ident of a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already begun, with his explo­rations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany’s most influ­ential journals. The volume includes a number of his most important works, including “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin,” “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” “The Concept of Crit­icism in German Roman­ticism,” “The Task of the Trans­lator,” and “One Way Street.” He is as com­pelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children’s books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the phi­losophy of lan­guage, sym­bolic logic, or epis­te­mology. We meet Ben­jamin the youthful ide­alist, the sober moralist, the political the­orist, the exper­i­men­talist, the trans­lator, and, above all, the virtual king of crit­icism, with his mag­is­terial expo­sition of the basic problems of aes­thetics. Benjamin’s sen­tences provoke us to return to them again and again, luring us as though with the promise of some final rev­e­lation that is always being post­poned. He is by turns fierce and tender, melan­choly and ebul­lient; he is at once clas­si­cally rooted, even archaic, in his explo­rations of the human psyche and the world of things, and strik­ingly pro­gressive in his attitude toward society and what he likes to call the organs of the col­lective (its archi­tec­tures, fashions, sign­boards). Throughout, he dis­plays a far-sighted urgency, judging the present on the basis of pos­sible futures. And he is gifted with a keen sense of humor. Mys­te­rious though he may some­times be (his Latvian love, Asia Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another planet), Ben­jamin remains perhaps the most con­sis­tently sur­prising and chal­lenging of critical writers.”