Translation of Walter Benjamin's Works

[Warren S. Goldstein]

Dear Frankfurt School List,

Thought some of you might be interested in this article from the Chronicle of 
Higher Education.  

Sincerely,

Warren Goldstein

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The Chronicle of Higher Education 
Date: April 18, 1997 
Section: Research & Publishing 
Page: A16

Translation of Walter Benjamin's Works May Add to His
Impact

By Peter Monaghan 

The name Walter Benjamin resounds through contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Over the
past two decades, many academic disciplines have made use of the early-20th-century German
intellectual and his wide-ranging notions about the arts and how they reflect culture. 

"His influence has leapt from area to area," says Marcus Bullock, a professor of comparative
literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. "It started off with people in German studies
of one sort or another. Very quickly philosophy picked him up, then art history, and recently
architecture." Film and cultural studies also figure prominently on that list. "He's a person with an
enormous fund of ideas that stimulate people to develop their own lines of thought." 

The extent of Benjamin's influence on academe in the English-speaking world is curious, since
relatively little of his work has been translated into English. Researchers unable to read the German
originals have used two collections of essays edited by Hannah Arendt, Benjamin's cousin by
marriage: Illuminations (1969) and Reflections (1982). 

"Never have so many essays been written about so few articles by so major a thinker," quips
Michael W. Jennings, a Benjamin authority and an associate professor of German at Princeton
University. 

Dr. Jennings, Dr. Bullock, and several other researchers and translators are now rectifying that
situation together with Harvard University Press, which recently issued the first of a projected
four-volume series of English translations of virtually all of Benjamin's writings -- some 3,000 pages
in all. 

Dr. Jennings, the author of Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism
(Cornell University Press, 1987), is general editor of the project. He and Dr. Bullock co-edited the
first volume of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, which presents essays, reviews, treatises, and
fragments written from 1913 to 1926. Among the Harvard project's achievements, they hope, will
be to lay an even better base for Benjamin's reputation as an influential precursor to studies of film
and other forms of popular culture. 

For Dr. Jennings, the appearance of the first volume marks the culmination of a fascination with
Benjamin that began during his graduate studies, when he read Benjamin's essay on Franz Kafka. "I
found it enigmatic, refractory," he says. "I had little idea what was going on for long stretches of the
essay, but it spoke to me in a way little other critical writing had." 

Dr. Jennings and Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at the Harvard press, have
worked for 14 years to produce the series. "When I came to Harvard in 1984," Dr. Waters says, "it
seemed to me that a lot of the work in literary theory I was doing at the University of Minnesota
Press was leading me back to Walter Benjamin. I kept getting the sense that this person needed to
be done -- and he couldn't be done in a small way." 

Dr. Waters would need translators, advisers on contested words and phrases, and an editorial
board to inspect every word. He gathered testimony from scholars to make his case to the press's
faculty board. As the project grew, he encountered delays in obtaining rights from Benjamin's
German publisher and difficulty in finding funds for the project. Support came from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the George Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust of New
York, which supports research, particularly on European Jewish culture. (Benjamin was Jewish.) 

With that help, he says, "I feel like our edition is finally getting Benjamin to America." 

The first volume begins with Benjamin as the 21-year-old president of a radical youth group in
imperial Germany. By its end, 13 years later, Benjamin is an established figure in the intellectual life
of Weimar Germany. The writings show him to have been, variously, a youthful idealist, an aesthete,
a literary critic, and a political theorist. 

His career would prove neither easy nor typical for an academic. His writing did not fit in any one
academic category, but resided in the spaces between literary criticism and philosophy, informed by
an elusive, mystical view of the nature of language, thought, art, and culture. 

Although he would emerge as an influential Marxist thinker, his fit with that school was often
uncomfortable. "Commonly, on many subjects, Benjamin has such a sensitive grasp of the
consequences of ideas that he equivocates, I think very beautifully," says Dr. Bullock. 

Daniel Bell, a professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard, was among the scholars Mr. Waters
enlisted to encourage the press to undertake the project. Dr. Bell says Benjamin's thought, though it
featured at times a subtle Marxism, also accommodated "the temptations of Judaism." The various
movements that interested Benjamin were often at odds -- Marxism, for instance, had no time for
religion -- but he found ways to mine and refine parts of them into a rich view of culture, Dr. Bell
says. 

In the 1930s, Nazism drove Benjamin out of Germany, to Paris. In 1940, at age 48, while trying to
reach safety in the United States, he was detained while crossing from occupied France into Spain.
He committed suicide rather than be captured by the Gestapo. 

"The complexity of Benjamin's thought is very extraordinary, and the problem is that most people
read only one side of him," says Charles Rosen, a noted concert pianist and music scholar. 

Dr. Rosen, who has written studies of Classicism, Romanticism, and other movements in music with
literary counterparts in which Benjamin took great interest, is the author of a highly regarded 1977
essay, "The Ruins of Walter Benjamin." It suggests that Benjamin's greatest contributions were at
once grand and subtly inflected, such as his argument that literary or artistic criticism is immanent in
works of art. Critics could develop their understanding by paying attention to the ideas about art
within the works themselves, he said. "Essentially, this was, with one stroke, to turn criticism from an
act of judgment into an act of understanding," Dr. Rosen writes. 

Another key concept in Benjamin's work is his theory of the "aura" of artistic works, which Dr.
Rosen describes as "the traces of history that guarantee the authenticity and uniqueness" of a work
of art. 

According to Dr. Bell, Benjamin adapted this idea from cabalism, Jewish mystical theosophy. 

Benjamin's most-cited work in the United States is "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," in which he proposed his theory of the aura and wondered whether mass
production, as in film and photography, would degrade art. 

The essay, says Wisconsin's Dr. Bullock, "is enormously influential, even though there's not much
agreement on where Benjamin comes down." It is "generally read as a strong endorsement of the
political importance of film. Yet his position is quite complex." 

The essay can also serve as a test case for the extent of Benjamin's influence, suggests Miriam
Hansen, a professor of English and director of the film-studies center at the University of Chicago. 

His major insight into aesthetic experience -- that it would be fundamentally altered by the advent of
film and photography, of art as mechanical reproduction -- remains relevant today, she says. "The
cinema that Benjamin depicts doesn't exist as it did," she adds, but Benjamin's perceptions can
throw light on the technologies that have emerged since he died, such as television and digital media.
"The culture has finally caught up with Benjamin," she says. 

Like Mr. Marcus, however, she warns that the reception of Benjamin's ideas in the United States
has often distorted his place in the history of German thought. "The influence of an intellectual figure
is always a rather haphazard and arbitrary affair," she says. While Benjamin and such other figures
as Theodor Adorno get much of the limelight in discussions of photography, film, and mass culture,
they do not hold a monopoly on the subjects, says Dr. Hansen. She is writing a book about the
Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist intellectuals, in which she will highlight the contributions of
another German theorist, Siegfried Kracauer. 

Even so, Benjamin authorities say his influence in the United States is likely to grow with Harvard's
release next year of the second volume in its series, The Arcades Project, a 1,100-page translation
of Passagen-Werk, the unfinished masterwork of his Paris years. 

The title refers to the Paris Arcades of the 1850s, a precursor of the shopping mall. Benjamin
viewed the activities in the Arcades -- new modes of mercantilism, transportation, monumental
architecture, and social relations, along with prostitution -- as metaphors. The work was, says Dr.
Jennings, "a really breathtaking array of theorizing on the rise of capitalism and modernity." 

The Arcades Project will be followed, in 1999 and 2000, by two more volumes of selected
writings. 

Although Harvard's Dr. Bell argues that several other thinkers should get the same treatment
Benjamin is receiving, he doubts that many will. "All the publishing houses, the academic ones, are
under pressure for books to pay their own way. Publishing today is with a beggar's bowl in hand. 

"And you can't send Benjamin on a book tour." 


Copyright (c) 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc. 
http://chronicle.com
Title: Translation of Walter Benjamin's Works May Add to His Impact 
Published: 97/04/18