Best beginners books on W. Benjamin

[L Spencer]

Bernd Witte's "WB: an intellectual biography" is undoubtedly a very 
good place to start in reading ABOUT Benjamin. It is a fairly 
straightforward run through of the life and work. But Witte is an 
astute writer with a special feel for the young Benjamin (subject of 
his own Habilitationsschrift) and a clear grasp of the complexities 
of politics in the Weimar period. 

Richard Wolin's "Toward an Aesthetic of Redemption" is a 
reasonably reliable but sometimes rather plodding summary of 
themes. Where he ventures into deeper water it is only to take the 
side of Adorno against Benjamin on the topics raised in their 
famous debates. I am surely not being entirely fair to Wolin. This 
would feature in my top 6 introductions to WB. But there is not 
much sign here of an appreciation of Benjamin the writer, the 
stylist, the very distinctive and consistently idiosyncratic 
modernist. This kind of treatment of Benjamin has been much to 
the fore in wonderful recent books on Benjamin by Beatrice 
Hanssen (Walter Benjamin's Other History), Margaret Cohen 
(Profane Illumination) and Gerhard Richter's wonderful study of 
Benjamin's autobiographical writings (Walter Benjamin and the 
Corpus of Autobiography). These are all wonderfully written, very 
readable books but may be over-specialised for the beginner. 

I think John McCole's book (Walter Benjamin and the Antimonies 
of Tradition) is still probably the most successful treatment of the 
whole of this complex writer within the scope of one book. Even 
beginners should investigate Susan Buck-Morss's magisterial 
treatment (reconstruction, almost) of Benjamin's 'arcades project' in 
her Dialectics of Seeing. 

It should be pointed out that the introductions to the various 
editions of Benjamin's essays are all very readable and instructive. 
So Hannah Arendt (Illuminations), Susan Sontag (One-Way 
Street), Stanley Mitchell (Understanding Brecht) and George 
Steiner (Origins of German Tragic Drama) are all very good essays. 
I am less enamoured by the introduction to the US edition of One-
Way Street under the title Reflections.

Graeme Gilloch has two good books on Benjamin and is excellent 
not only on the arcades project but on the whole urban nature of 
Benjamin's intellectual landscape.

Momme Broderson's was a workmanlike biography even if he could 
bring no special sympathy to his subject. 

Loads of material on Benjamin available via the Walter Benjamin 
Research Syndicate, a prize-winning website with loads of texts 
and masses of well-organised links. It is at URL:
http://www.wbenjamin.org/walterbenjamin.html

The LookSmart website has GUIDES to more material on Benjamin 
at URL: http://www.looksmart.com/

Some of my own Benjamin materials are collected at URL:
http://www.tasc.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/WBindex.ht
m

Hope this is of some use. (And not too controversial.)

Lloyd Spencer


On 15 Oct 2001, at 9:44, Michael Young wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm reasonably new to the list and was wondering if anyone has
> suggestions for a friend and I who are 'preparing' for a Benjamin
> reading project. Our plan is to spend some time reading widely in WB
> and were wanting to begin by reading a couple of books *on* him, to
> prepare the ground, as it were. We were thinking of Richard Wolin's
> "WB: an aesthetic of redemption" and 
, for no other reasons than 1) they're
> referenced "around" and 2) I had both of them on my shelves. Any other
> suggestions?  Also, any web-based resources would be great, too.
> 
> thanks
> 
> mdy/.