Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Belknap Press)

Walter Benjamin passed some of the happiest moments of his life wandering shirtless in the sun on the Spanish island of Ibiza. In a letter in 1932, he wrote that the little Mediterranean island lacked modern conveniences, such as “electric light and butter, liquor and running water, flirting and newspaper reading.” The nearest village boasted a mere seven hundred inhabitants, who got by without modern farm equipment: the economy ran mostly on goats. During his two stays there, in 1932 and 1933, Benjamin strolled the beaches and explored the island’s interior in the company of his friend Jean Selz, who would recall that “Benjamin’s physical stoutness and the rather Germanic heaviness he presented were in strong contrast to the agility of his mind, which so often made his eyes sparkle behind his glasses.” Together they took long walks through the countryside, but the walks were “made even longer by our conversations, which constantly forced him to stop. He admitted that walking kept him from thinking. Whenever something interested him he would say, ‘Tiens, tiens!’ This was the signal that he was about to think, and therefore stop.” Among the German guests on the island this idiosyncrasy was well-known and they gave the strange apparition a nickname: “Tiens-tiens.” The village locals called him el miserable. It is true that Benjamin was poor and prone to depression. But out of each day he crafted a scholar’s idyll: he rose early and bathed in the ocean, then ascended the hills to his favorite spot, where he retrieved a hidden lounge chair from the bushes. He sat there among the fig trees for the full length of the morning, writing, or reading Lucretius.

We do not imagine Benjamin on the beach. He was a poet of the city, one of the most probing critics of the bourgeois experience. In manifold essays and books, some of them fragmentary and left unpublished until much later, he sought to portray modern life in all its richness and variety—its literature, its dreams, its cultural detritus. Like a ragpicker in the marketplace (this was his own comparison), nothing seemed to him without significance. He wrote brilliantly about the exalted poets and novelists (Goethe, Baudelaire, Proust), but he did not neglect the “phantasmagoria” of modern capitalism, the secret corners of everyday life (from detective novels to children’s literature) in which the urban masses found both distraction and redemption. He read the major capitals of Europe—Berlin, Moscow, and Paris—the same way he read works of literature, as if they were texts, or grand tapestries woven from all the multi-colored threads of modern consciousness. He was especially susceptible to the charms of Paris. Like Baudelaire, he was a flâneur who wandered the French capital in a state of rhapsodic distraction. He devoted a massive study to the Parisian arcades, glass-roofed corridors flanked with shops, which he interpreted as allegories of capitalist illusion. He called the Arcades Project his “dialectical fairy tale.”

A heretic to all orthodoxies, Benjamin never cleaved easily to the schools of Marxism that have claimed his name. He was a companion to Bertolt Brecht, but he lacked his friend’s tough-minded militancy and the required disdain for bourgeois aesthetics. He was affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, the collective of Marxist philosophers and sociologists that published some of his best-known essays and supported him during the 1930s with a generous stipend, but his friendship with the Institute’s leaders was troubled by disagreement: Max Horkheimer worried about his qualifications for a university career, and even his friend Theodor Adorno insinuated that Benjamin’s theorizing lacked dialectical nuance. Others see in Benjamin a thinker attuned more to religion than to politics, and some have wished to make of him a kind of Jewish saint. But Benjamin could never muster the sort of ardent identification with Judaism that animated his friend Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish mysticism, who tried unsuccessfully to bring Benjamin to Palestine. In 1929, Benjamin secured a grant from Rabbi Judah Magnes for instruction in Hebrew, but the lessons lasted less than a month: he was distracted by disputes over his divorce, and his teacher left Berlin for spa treatments.

Benjamin’s temperament—original, unclassifiable—helps to account for the fact that he continues to inspire a bewildering welter of theories. “Benjamin studies” today is a thriving but ill-defined trade. This is unsurprising when we recall that Benjamin thought in “constellations” rather than doctrines. His preferred method was to compress an overabundance of signification into a single vision—a Denkbild, or “thought-image”—as if he could convey his ideas in lightning-flashes of insight rather than philosophical argument. This technique of “literary montage” drew inspiration from the avant-garde, including the Surrealists and Dada: look at the Merzbilder by Kurt Schwitters or the collage-constructs by Hannah Höch and you will see in painting the stylistic cousins of Benjamin’s essays, especially the kaleidoscopic displays of city life in his book One-Way Street.





In his brief life, Benjamin developed many of the themes that now serve as an indispensable foundation for literary and cultural criticism. Yet there is also the fascination of the man himself: Benjamin remains an object of enduring interest not least because he seems to embody the modern condition. His dislocation, his not-at-homeness and willful alienation, mark him as a kindred spirit to Kafka and Baudelaire. Like Kafka, Benjamin seems to have been waiting for a messiah in whose arrival he could not quite believe. He spent long days in destitute wandering, unable to finish essays that were long overdue or waiting in desperation for financial compensation from journals and newspapers who had published his latest exercise. He did not just write about Paris as a capitalist dreamscape: he also experienced it that way.