9—
In Memory of Walter Benjamin:
The Integrity of the Intellectual

By Leo Lowenthal

Walter Benjamin ends his essay on surrealism with the image of "an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds."^[1] The essay appeared in 1929 and bore the subtitle "The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia." I can hardly find a better way to express the feelings that accompanied my preparation of these remarks in memory of Benjamin. As I studied his work once again, it seemed

[1] Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism," in Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund F. N. Jephcott (New York, 1978), p. 192.

indeed as if a clock were incessantly sounding an alarm: Benjamin's immediacy today set off uninterrupted shocks in my mind and demanded constant alertness.

Although I begin my lecture with similarities that link Benjamin and myself both biographically and intellectually, I am quite conscious that by drawing such parallels I may appear to be equating myself with him. This is not my intention. Being only eight years his junior, I might be tempted to overestimate the value of mere survival and thus see things with which I myself am associated as more important than they are in the context of the fate experienced by a generation of German and German-Jewish intellectuals. When I speak of the past, that is, of Benjamin's oeuvre and the memory of his person, this past becomes entirely present. Benjamin's fundamental themes—and it is not by coincidence that I mentioned his essay on surrealism first—have accompanied me throughout my life.

While the mere fact of outliving someone cannot alone legitimize a memorial address, I do not feel too uncomfortable with my task. In the relationship Benjamin and I had—direct or indirect—there was no discord. Elsewhere, I have spoken out with indignation against insinuations from some quarters concerning allegedly humiliating dependence and intellectual suppression in Benjamin's dealings with the Institute of Social Research. Gershom Scholem, who was to speak to you today, no longer lives. In his memory, I would like to read a few words from his long letter to Benjamin dated November 6 and 8, 1938. Scholem mentions a visit to our Institute in New York, and he reports: "I think the people of the institute have every reason to frame you in gold, even if only in secret. In our brief but harmless encounters, I had the impression that people like Marcuse and Lowenthal realize this as well." There could never be any doubt on that score.

The extent of my involvement with Benjamin's publications in our Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung is meticulously documented in the

notes to his collected works. I will refer here to just one episode regarding his essay "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," published posthumously by Rolf Tiedemann in 1969.^[2] As managing editor of the journal, my main concern was to publish this essay—part of a planned book on Baudelaire belonging to the Arcades Project—as soon as possible. There were repeated delays, owing in part to Benjamin himself and in part to the complex correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin. On August 3, 1938, Gretel Adorno wrote to Benjamin from the Adornos' vacation address: "And now to the most important matter, to Baudelaire. Leo Lowenthal was visiting us here for a couple of days when your letter arrived. We thought it best to show him your letter right away. Lowenthal was beside himself [about the delay] and declard that he absolutely must have the essay for the next issue."^[3]

Then, when the essay arrived, Adorno and I had an argument, which I lost. In a letter to Benjamin dated November 10, 1938, Adorno wrote: "The plan is now to print the second chapter ("The Flâneur ") in full and the third ("Modernism") in part. Leo Lowenthal in particular supports this emphatically. I myself am unambiguously opposed to it."^[4] At that point—and this played a role in the subsequent attacks on Adorno—the essay was not accepted for publication, undoubtedly through Adorno's influence.

He presented his objections bluntly, as the correspondence between him and Benjamin shows. Although Adorno's criticism up-

[2] This essay can be found in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1969); and in English translation in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973).

[3] Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 5 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1972–1982), vol. 1, pt. 3, pp. 1084–85.

[4] Adorno to Benjamin, November 10, 1938; quoted in Theodor W. Adorno, Über Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), p. 142. Also in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1098.

set him at first, Benjamin did put it to use very productively. On the basis of the revision suggested by Adorno, a new, independent essay emerged, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," which we published in 1939, in the last German-language volume of the journal. In his essay, Benjamin explicitly connected his themes of the crisis of aura and the loss of experience, which he had treated separately in his "Storyteller" and "Work of Art" essays.^[5] This decisive shift of emphasis in turn gives the first Baudelaire essay, whose publication I had supported, a weight of its own.

No one who is familiar with the German intelligentsia in the Weimar Republic and in exile will be surprised to learn that my circle of friends and acquaintances overlapped extensively with Benjamin's, among them Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Ernst Bloch and Kracauer, Horkheimer and Lukács, Buber and Rosenzweig. These names also signify both definite identity and confrontation, for example in early relations with the Jüdische Lehrhaus initiated by Buber and Rosenzweig. There was another almost tragicomic parallel between our two biographies: Benjamin's Habilitation [qualification as lecturer] for the University of Frankfurt in 1925 was rejected on the basis of objections by German philology professor Franz Schultz and could not be rescued, even by the intervention of Hans Cornelius, philosopher and teacher of Horkheimer and Adorno. A year later the same thing happened to me. In 1926 my Habilitation as well—it was in the philosophy department—was prevented by Schultz in his capacity as dean, although Cornelius supported it most warmly.

As far as I remember, I did not yet know Benjamin personally in 1925, although the themes of our work already overlapped at

[5] All three essays can be found in English in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968). The last two also appear in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 2.

important points. Benjamin was greatly interested in Franz von Baader, whose religious philosophy of redemptive mysticism and solidarity with society's lowest classes is evident in Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History."^[6] I wrote my dissertation in 1923 on Baader's philosophy of society. Today I gather from Benjamin's review of David Baumgart's biography of Baader,^[7] and from his correspondence with Scholem,^[8] that the vanguard position of this conservative, Catholic philosopher of religion—particularly his political morality and his affinity to those who suffer in this world, to the Proletärs, as he called them—had similarly attracted us both. Although at the time I was very radical politically, I did with a clear conscience write my dissertation about a conservative thinker. It strikes me as an additional confirmation that Benjamin had also been engrossed in this man's writings.

Another more important convergence of our intellectual interests lies in the unyielding critique he conducted in 1931 of the enterprise of literary history and criticism. My first essay in the first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1932 had borne the title "On the Social Situation of Literature." It passed judgment in its own way on the then-reigning university and literary establishment with its apolitical, lebensphilosophischen, and ultimately reactionary categories. It is hardly a coincidence that these same philologists whom Benjamin had taken to task were not treated gently in my essay either. I am ashamed to admit that I was not then familiar with Benjamin's essay, which had appeared in Die literarische Welt .^[9] Otherwise I would certainly have cited it positively,

[6] In Benjamin, Illuminations, and Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 2.

[7] Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, pp. 304ff.

[8] Briefwechsel Walter Benjamin–Gerschom Scholem, 1933–1940 (Frankfurt am Main, 1980).

[9] Walter Benjamin, "Literaturgeschichte und Literaturwissenschaft," Die literarische Welt 7, no. 16 (April 17, 1931); also in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, pp. 283ff.

if not considered my own essay superfluous. Benjamin was quite familiar with my later socioliterary work. I know for example that he was at first hardly enthusiastic about my essay on Knut Hamsun, in which I analyzed Hamsun's novels as anticipations of fascist mentality. But he did appreciate my study on the reception of Dostoevsky in Germany. In these and other studies, I had essentially begun to formulate the now familiar questions of reception theory and Wirkungsgeschichte [the history of effects], admittedly with clear emphasis on the critique of ideology. That coincided with Benjamin's interests. He wrote to me from Denmark on July 1, 1934:

In the few days since my arrival in Denmark, the study of your Dostoevsky essay was my first undertaking. For a variety of reasons it has been extremely productive for me, above all because after your preliminary reference to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, I now have before me a kind of reception history that is precise and in its precision—as far as I know—entirely new. Until now such attempts have never gotten beyond a history of the literary material because a sensible formulation of the essential questions was lacking. An early and interesting venture, which admittedly has little to do with your observations, would be Julian Hirsch's "Genesis of Fame," with which you are probably familiar. In many ways, Hirsch never gets beyond the schematic. In your work one is dealing with the concrete historical situation. One is, however, surprised to learn just how contemporary the historical situation is in which the reception of Dostoevsky has taken place. This surprise gives the reader—if I may infer from myself to others—the impulse that sets his own thinking into motion. . . . A certain continuity of class history right through the world war has been made visible for Germany, as has its mythic apotheosis in the aura of cruelty. In addition, illumination came for me from a remote source, falling all the more revealingly on figures and trends from which literary history's

usual point of view was able to derive but little. I found that the discourses on naturalism confirmed what you had intimated to me in Paris; they met with my unqualified agreement. What you say about Zola is particularly interesting. . . . To what extent has this German reception of Dostoevsky done justice to his work? Is it not possible to imagine any other based on him, in other words, is Gorky's the last word on this subject? For me, since I have not read Dostoevsky for a long time, these questions are presently more open than they seem to be for you. I could imagine that, in the very folds of the work into which your psychoanalytical observations lead, elements can be found that the petitbourgeois way of thinking was unable to assimilate.

My essay on C. F. Meyer and his reception as ideologue of the German national grande bourgeoisie appeared to Benjamin of some importance in another context as well. In his efforts to have an article about our Institute in New York published in the culturally conservative émigré journal Maßund Wert, it occurred to Benjamin to stress the aesthetic contributions as politically unthreatening and yet secretly to point out their political significance to those who knew how to read between the lines.As he informed Horkheimer on December 6, 1937, he wanted to try to introduce, through the back door so to speak, the radical critique of the present that informed the Zeitschrift . He wrote, "The closest we might come to it [the sphere of actuality] would be to approach it in aesthetic disguise, i.e., by way of Lowenthal's studies on the German reception of Dostoevsky and on the writings of C. F. Meyer."^[10]

But the most profound contact between Benjamin and myself lay in our shared fascination with the dichotomy, which has never been resolved and indeed resists resolution, between political, secu-

[10] Benjamin to Horkheimer, December 6, 1937; in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 682.

larized radicalism and messianic utopia—this thinking culminated in Benjamin's concept of Jetztzeit [now-time], which was intended to explode the homogeneous continuum of history and the notion of unending progress.^[11] In this messianic-Marxist dilemma, I am wholly on Benjamin's side; even more, I am his pupil. Like him, I initially came into close contact with the idea of the complementarity of religious and social motives through Hermann Cohen's school in Marburg; but also just like Benjamin, I later realized that the way of Hermann Cohen's neo-Kantianism leads into a bad infinity.

The Jewish assimilation into the liberal philosophical tradition (with or without socialist bias) was all the more futile because intellectual liberality remained something foreign in Germany. Just as the German university and later the fascist state drove him away, Benjamin was from the outset never at peace with the institutions of the cultural establishment. Was it prophetic instinct that the school desk, the first institution he confronted, suggested to him the law that would govern his life? In the section "Winter's Morning" from his book A Berlin Childhood Around Nineteen Hundred , he writes: "There [in school], once I made contact with my desk, the whole tiredness, which seemed to have vanished, returned tenfold. And with it the wish to be able to sleep my fill. I must have wished that wish a thousand times, and later it was actually fulfilled. But it was a long time before I recognized that fulfillment in the fact that my every hope for a position and a steady income had been in vain."^[12]

In a letter to Scholem dated June 12, 1938, Benjamin says of Kafka: "In order to do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and

[11] For a good account of Benjamin's complicated concept of Jetztzeit , see Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York, 1982), pp. 48ff.

[12] Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1950), p. 38; also in Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 248.

its peculiar beauty, one must never forget: it is the figure of one who has failed."^[13] These words apply to Benjamin himself, not only in the tragic sense that he took his life when he was not yet fifty years old (is this his childhood wish to sleep his fill being tragically fulfilled?), but also in the more positive sense that in Benjamin's life and in his work the suffering of the species—of which he spoke in his most significant book—is constantly reproduced. It is impossible to determine—and it makes no difference today—to what extent Benjamin consciously or half-consciously brought about his failure and to what extent it was determined by the historical space in which he had to live. World War I, inflation, expulsion, exile, and internment in France—these facts outline the historical context clearly enough. But his integrity as an intellectual remains decisive in the motif of failure. He was never really able to decide on a bourgeois profession. The educated bourgeoisie, and even the less well educated, could have asked maliciously: what in fact was Benjamin's profession? Even the attempts he made in this direction are not really believable; perhaps he did not quite believe in them himself. He certainly did not follow his father's wish that he establish himself in the business world. His Habilitation was turned down, he never held a steady position as editor for the Frankfurter Zeitung or for any publisher, and finally an attempt to secure a position at the University of Jerusalem went awry. The thought of leaving, by the way, was never without ambivalence for him. And so from 1933 on, he repeatedly promised Scholem that he would move to Jerusalem, and he repeatedly put off going. He stayed in France until the last minute. In his letters to Adorno and to Horkheimer, it becomes clear that he conceived of the Arcades Project as a commitment that could be brought to completion only in Europe, in fact only in Paris. Would the only refuge he seemed once to have decided upon, the home that beckoned, namely membership in the Institute of Social Research, the emigration to the United States that had been

[13] Briefwechsel Benjamin–Scholem , p. 273.

planned to the last detail, the move in with the rest of us in New York, would that have been a satisfactory solution for him? He did not live to see it. What a cruel allegory of failure!

Were there a Benjaminian fate, it would be that of the radical intellectuals of the Weimar Republic and that which followed. He himself was most aware, not only in terms of his own person, but also in his theoretical-political analysis of the intellectual, that there was no such thing as "free-floating" intellect—an idealized concept fashionable at the time in Karl Mannheim's coinage; no such thing as the so-called classless intellectual; no such thing as the "organic" intellectual à la Gramsci; nor even any such thing as the so-called intelligentsia (a word Benjamin thoroughly disliked). He knew that, in a bitter sense, the intellectual is homeless. As a German intellectual, he experienced that homelessness firsthand and paid tribute to France, in whose intellectualism he trusted. In a brief note in the Literarische Welt in 1927, he said the following about the French Association of Friends of the New Russia: "The problematic situation of the intellectual, which leads him to question his own right to exist while at the same time society denies him the means of existence, is virtually unknown in France. The artists and authors are perhaps not any better off than their German colleagues, but their prestige remains untouched. In a word, they know the condition of floating. But in Germany, soon no one will be able to last whose position [as an intellectual] is not generally visible."^[14] In his programmatic essays about French intellectuals—for example, in the essay on surrealism cited above or in the article first printed in our journal, "On the Current Social Position of the French Author"^[15] —Benjamin criticized attempts to restore to in-

[14] Walter Benjamin, "Verein der Freunde des neuen Rußland—in Frankreich," in Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 486.

[15] Walter Benjamin, "Zur gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Standort des französischen Schriftstellers," Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 3, no. 1 (1934): 54–73.

tellectuals an independent status without commitment, stressing by contrast experiences of radical politicization. One must grasp the paradoxical definitions together: "untouched" and "largely visible." The latter points to the necessity of taking a political stand, the former to maintaining the integrity of the intellectual. In the crisis, the intellectual remains "untouched" in his integrity when, instead of withdrawing into the ivory tower of timeless values, he takes a stand.

"Untouched" in the sense of noli me tangere is a fitting word for Benjamin's social stance as an intellectual. His urbanity concealed a willfulness of commitment that used even his urbanity as a weapon. In the genteel elegance of his manner and his epistolary style, Benjamin let his readers know that lines had been drawn, lines that would not allow an infringement on his integrity. He had to pay for that. The intellectual marketplace in both Western and Eastern Europe understood Benjamin's intentions precisely. The Frankfurter Zeitung , in spite of its liberality and the occasional hospitality it showed the avant-garde, refused to publish the polemic essay "Left Melancholy,"^[16] in which Benjamin settled accounts with pseudo-radicals. For him, their radicalism was nothing more than "leftist theater" for the consumption of the educated bourgeoisie, who used this radicalism-by-proxy to put distance between themselves and society's real political and moral problems whenever they paid their conscience-money—which committed them to nothing at all—at the box office and the book store. Benjamin received similar treatment from the other side as well: the truncation—tantamount to rejection—by the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of his marvelous Goethe essay,^[17] the genuine radicalism of

[16] Walter Benjamin, "Linke Melancholie: Zu Erich Kästners Gedichtbuch," Die Gesellschaft 8, no. 1 (1931): 181–84; also in Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 3, pp. 279ff.

[17] Walter Benjamin, "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften," Neue Deutsche Beiträge 2, no. 2 (January 1925).

which was unbearable to the manipulative Soviet cultural policy, speaks volumes.

Was he a pariah? The ragpicker (no one wants to "touch" him), about whom Benjamin has a good bit to say, especially in the Baudelaire essay, knows no disguise, plays no roles. The ragpicker is as he is, stigmatized and yet independent. What he has given up, and what society would not allow him, is mimicry, playing up to the stronger of opposing forces, to those who dominate in society. Mimicry is, as I see it, one of the most perceptive categories for categorizing what is phony, false—false consciousness, false politics, cowardly attempts to find cover. Just think of that passage in his review of Kästner's volume of poetry, which sparked his essay "Left Melancholy," in which Benjamin in a single breath pinions both the feudal mimicry of the lieutenant in the Imperial Austrian Reserves and the "proletarian" mimicry of the disintegrating "leftist" intellectual: the reserve lieutenant of the bourgeoisie, crushed after World War I, who finds a futile resurrection in the Nazi empire; the leftist melancholic who fetches his tidy fees from the bourgeois press while trying to secure the sympathies of radicals internationally, and who ultimately disappears quite helplessly in the witch's cauldron of the 1930s—these are far removed from the failure of Benjamin with his Angelus Novus–like view of the ruins of history. Benjamin remains on the side of marginality, of negativity; he remains the figure on the fringe who refuses to take part. With his persistence in saying no—the "salt of refusal," as he called it in his essay on Stefan George^[18] —he becomes what I am tempted to call the esoteric figure of the intellectual. Most of what has been said about the definition of the intellectual—sociologically, anthropologically, and in terms of cultural politics—amounts to nothing before the figure of Benjamin, who is exactly what intellect should be: independence in a self-imposed exile. Hence every attempt to

[18] Walter Benjamin, "Rückblick auf Stefan George," in Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 3, p. 397.

reduce him to a formula in order to fit him into someone's convenient set of categories, rushing to label him messianic or Jewish or Marxist or surrealist, was bound to fail. To use a fitting expression of W. Martin Lüdke's, what remains is the "difference," the idiosyncratic, the endless searching; what remains is the unrelenting, sorrowful gaze.

That can be seen precisely in his essay about Karl Kraus.^[19] In less than flattering terms, Kraus rejected the essay as a psychological portrait of himself. In reality, though, Benjamin's essay is autobiographically inspired: it is testimony for marginal existence and against mimicry; it is testimony of the relentlessness of the ever-watchful court of judgment, of the daily Last Judgment. What a shame Karl Kraus did not understand it.

The following words on Kraus appear in that essay: "Kraus accuses the law in its substance, not its effect. His charge is the betrayal of justice by law."^[20] The linguistic tensions between Recht [right] and Gerechtigkeit [justice], Recht and Gericht [court], that perpetually convening "Last Judgment," are decisive for Benjamin. Perhaps I can make that clearer with two quotes. The first is Schiller's sentence, which has been quoted to death: "World history is the world's court of judgment." The other is by Ibsen: "Writing means holding a day of judgment, judgment over oneself." Neither Schiller's nor Ibsen's formulations could have been acceptable to Benjamin, for they are overcome dialectically. If history is the world's court of judgment (and Hegel agrees that it is), then the victors have not only won the spoils, but they have also declared themselves on the right side of the law. In Benjamin's great formulation, "History has always been written by the victors." Schiller's bourgeois idealism, according to which the world court will have the final word, but only as an "idea," has always been reconcilable—tragically, as

[19] Walter Benjamin, "Karl Kraus," in Reflections .

[20] Ibid., p. 255.

they say—with the continued existence of bourgeois society. And that is what Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse mean with their concept of affirmative culture. Surely Ibsen's phrase about holding a day of judgment is an indictment against the ideology of the individual in individualistic, bourgeois society. But since he assigns to writing and to the writer a role in which the writer preempts truly autonomous human existence, and thereby the passive observer or reader as recipient of his guilt appears to be redeemed with him, the monadic isolation of class society is neither converted nor overcome in revolutionary form.

Burkhardt Lindner, to whom I showed a first draft of this paper, wrote me, adding:

Benjamin's use of "court" stands in radical rejection of "right" (law). He criticizes so-called positive right as a rationalization for dominance and violence; it lays claim to justice only erroneously. Justice must be applied to the individual, to the particular. Justice is the messianic emergence or the purifying, profane power of revolutions. Correspondingly, Benjamin also rejects the notion of world history as world court. Only the revolutionary interruption of history or the messianic cessation of history can disrupt the repressive continuum and pass judgment over what has been.

In the concept of "court of judgment" of which Benjamin becomes the advocate, the motifs of political radicalism and historical materialism are combined with the messianic element of Judaism. This constellation of political radicalism, messianism, and Judaism is characteristic of Benjamin. In the volume of material on his theses "On the Concept of History,"^[21] one finds passages like this: "Each moment is a moment of judgment upon certain moments that pre-

[21] See Materialien zu Benjamins Thesen "Über den Begriff der Geschichte," ed. Peter Bulthaup (Frankfurt am Main, 1975).

ceded it." Or this: "Without some sort of test of a classless society, the past is nothing more than a jumbled collection of facts. To that extent, every conception of the present participates in the conception of the Final Judgment."

At this point, I would like to return once more to the association between Walter Benjamin and the representatives of Critical Theory. Sometimes it even extended to similarities in formulation. As an example, in Horkheimer's programmatic article "Traditional and Critical Theory," published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1937, these words occur: "The intellectual is satisfied to proclaim with reverent admiration the creative strength of the proletariat and find satisfaction in adapting himself to it and in canonizing it. He fails to see that such an evasion of theoretical effort (which the passivity of his own thinking spares him) and of temporary opposition to the masses (which active theoretical effort on his part might force upon him) only makes the masses blinder and weaker than they need be."^[22] Nearly ten years earlier, in 1929, Benjamin had written: "The intellectual adopts a mimicry of proletarian existence without this linking him in the least with the working class. By doing so, he tries to reach the illusory goal of standing above the classes, especially to be sure that he is outside the bourgeois class." And later, in his 1938 essay about our Institute in Mab und Wert, he cites that passage from Horkheimer's essay, adding: "The imperial nimbus in which the expectants of the millennium have cloaked themselves cannot be dissipated by the deification of the proletariat. This insight anticipates the concern of a critical theory of society."^[23]

[22] Max Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," in Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell et al. (New York, 1972), p. 214.

[23] Walter Benjamin, "Ein deutsches Institut freier Forschung," in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 522.

Benjamin, like the rest of us, had to go through the painful process of recovering, theoretically and emotionally, from the disappointments dealt us by the history of the Soviet republic and the Communist movement from the mid-twenties on. As I formulated it once before, we felt that we had not abandoned the revolution, but rather that the revolution had abandoned us. Thus arose the disastrous situation of which Jörg Drews speaks in a review of the Benjamin-Scholem correspondence: "The cruel dilemma, namely through what categories and by means of which future-directed group the antifascist intellectual might find orientation, was the central problem for Benjamin after 1930."^[24] It was the central problem for all of us.

Here it once again becomes clear why Benjamin's original confidence in Marburg neo-Kantianism, which attempted to unite Kant's moral system with a socialist conception of progress, ultimately had to be disappointed. Because I underwent a similar development myself about ten years later, I am particularly moved even today by what Benjamin says about that. There is a passage in the drafts of the theses "On the Concept of History," from which I quoted before, in which Benjamin connects the critique of neo-Kantianism with his critique of social democratic thought—linking them in the concept of endless progress, the ultimately quietist attitude of the average socialist. By contrast, Benjamin holds up his certainty of the always-waiting presence of the messianic spark:

In the notion of the classless society, Marx secularized the notion of the messianic age. And that was good. The trouble arises in that social democratic thought raised that notion to an "ideal." That ideal was defined in the neo-Kantian teaching as an "endless task." And this teaching was the school philoso-

[24] Jörg Drews, "Katastrophen Abgerungen: Zum Briefwechsel Zwischen Benjamin und Scholem," Süddeutsche Zeitung 194 (August 8, 1980).

phy of the Social Democratic Party. . . . Once the classless society was defined as an endless task, then the empty and homogeneous future was transformed, so to speak, into an anteroom in which one could wait more or less sanguinely for the appearance of the revolutionary age. In reality there is not a single moment that does not carry with it its own revolutionary opportunity.^[25]

Benjamin had already spoken of the necessity of overcoming neo-Kantianism in his significant short review, dated 1929, called "Books That Have Stayed Alive."^[26] He cites History and Class Consciousness by Lukács, among others, and about Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption he says: "A system of Jewish theology. As remarkable as the work itself is its genesis in the trenches of Macedonia. Victorious incursion of Hegelian dialectic into Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason ."

Here we come once more to the third element I spoke of, which joins the messianic and the political: the Jewish. Some of us long denied its essential role in our development. In retrospect, this must be corrected. After all, Benjamin in his time and I in mine came into contact with positive Jewish influences as a result of our protest against our parents—Benjamin through his encounter with Scholem, I through the friendship of the charismatic Rabbi Nobel, the Buber-Rosenzweig circle, and the Jüdische Lehrhaus, which later became important for Benjamin as well.

The utopian-messianic motif, which is deeply rooted in Jewish metaphysics and mysticism, played a significant role for Benjamin, surely also for Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, and for myself. In his later years, when he ventured—a bit too far for my taste—into

[25] Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 1231.

[26] Walter Benjamin, "Bücher die lebendig geblieben sind," Die literarische Welt 5, no. 20 (May 17, 1929).

concrete religious symbolism, Horkheimer frequently said (and on this point I agree with him completely) that the Jewish doctrine that the name of God may not be spoken or even written should be adhered to. The name of God is not yet fulfilled, and perhaps it will never be fulfilled; nor is it for us to determine if, when, and how it will be fulfilled for those who come after us. I believe that the essential thing about practical socialism that so shocked us is the idea that one is permitted to plan for someone else. The notion of something perhaps unattainable, perhaps unnameable, but which holds the messianic hope of fulfillment—I suppose this idea is very Jewish; it is certainly a motif in my thinking, and I suppose it was for my friends as well—but quite certainly it was for Benjamin a shining example of the irrevocable commitment to hope that remains with us "just for the sake of the hopeless."

In the sixth of his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin writes: "Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious."^[27] Now that the edition of Benjamin's collected works is completed, the publishing house and the group responsible for it can collectively regard themselves as the writers of Benjamin's history. It will remain a concern to all of us, especially the younger generation, to defend from the enemy his gift to us (and Benjamin never made that easy for us—which is a gift as well). The enemy comes in many guises, such as the paltry accusation that the appearance of a classic-type edition is a burial ceremony that puts Benjamin firmly and finally into his coffin—and we all know that, particularly in Germany, although a classic may mean hours of nostalgic leisure-reading, it also means ritual quoting and being forgotten. Yet the philosopher of a negative theology, the architect

[27] Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, p. 255.

of history as ruins in temporal and atemporal space, the thinker of the contradiction (whether intentionally or not, he himself is not free of contradictions), the traveler on Hegel's path of positive negation, is entirely safe from the fate of a German classic. This fate cannot touch Benjamin, and indeed, he has already survived the enemy.