In Our Time - Walter Benjamin

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most celebrated thinkers of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, critic, historian, an investigator of culture, a maker of radio programmes and more. Notably, in his Arcades Project, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, examined how the new media of film and photography enabled art to be politicised, and politics to become a form of art. The rise of the Nazis in Germany forced him into exile, and he worked in Paris in dread of what was to come; when his escape from France in 1940 was blocked at the Spanish border, he took his own life. With Esther Leslie Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of LondonKevin McLaughlin Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English, Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown UniversityAndCarolin Duttlinger Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

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I told you it was easy. Now, let's get back to the podcast. Hello, for one of the most celebrated thinkers of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin is hard to categorise, and that, for many, is one of his strengths. Born in Berlin in 1892, he was a philosopher, a critic, a historian, an investigator of culture.

Notably, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and examine how the new media of film and photography and radio enabled art to be politicised and politics to become a form of art. And as a Jewish man exalted France from Knights of Germany,

he worked in dread of what was to come, ending his own life in 1940 when his escape was blocked at the Spanish border. With me to discuss Walter Benjamin are Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetist, at Birkbeck, University of London.

Kevin McLaughlin, Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University. And Carolyn Duttlinger, Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Kevin McLaughlin,

as a child in Berlin, towards the end of the 19th century, what were the prospects for Walter Benjamin? Well, Benjamin was a sickly child, and he was sent to a boarding school, quite well known at the time, called Halbinda, when he was 12 years old, so that was in 1904.

His parents sent him there, hoping that this would be good for his health. It turned out to have a rather different effect, radicalizing Benjamine at an early age. Benjamin became, in particular, involved with this growing educational reform movement, which was very influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of traditional university education and traditional humanism. And it was this emphasis on the concept of life, as the basis for education, that really became central for Ben You mean during these years.

And really, this philosophy became a very important influence in the university that Benyman would eventually attend, first in Berlin, then in Freiburg and Munich. He was brought up in a wealthy German-Jewish family, so nothing was spared. And he was also, as you're suggesting, a precocious child. He was, and his father, who had been born in Cologne, but who had established himself in Berlin as primarily as an art dealers where he made most of his money. He got involved in some other investments after that. But like other wealthy Berliners from the Ode Bourgeoisie, Benjamine's father moved the family further and further west in the city. And eventually they purchased a villa

in Grunewald, which was a very well-to-do new neighborhood in the West. Ben-Eemine had a French governess. They lived in an enormous four-story villa. He aimed for an academic life, for that you had to pass to get two doctorates. You've got the first doctorate, but failed the second. He wrote his first dissertation in Switzerland, in Bern, Switzerland. That was the dissertation that was on German Romanticism. In those years, he was trying to establish himself in the university, and he settled on his second dissertation, as you point out, which is the one that you need to teach in the university, the so-called habitation, which was focused on the 17th century German Baroque Theatre. This was an immense failure in the end. He submitted his thesis to the philosophy

faculty in Frankfurt and was promptly invited to withdraw his thesis because the examiners found it incomprehensible. From then on, he was struggling for the rest of his life. He was struggling quite simply to make ends meet, wasn't he? Yes, he was. From that point on, from the mid-20s on for the last 15 years of his life, he was living by his pen and also trying to keep some of his larger intellectual projects going, like the one you mentioned at the outset on the Paris arcades. And also interestingly, from our perspective here today, I think, from 1929 to 1932, he recorded a series of over 80 radio broadcasts in Frankfurt in Berlin, primarily for a children's hour.

Thank you. Esther Leslie, one of his friends was Gershom Shole. Who was here and why did he influence Benjamin? Gersham Shulam Shulam is somebody that Benyemin met in the university library. He was a few years older than Sholam, but they seemed to hit it off immediately in terms of having the same interests in philosophy, in politics, particularly anarchist politics, and what was happening in Soviet Union around the time of the Russian Revolution

and theological questions as well. I mean, Ben Amin had been quite a leader in the youth and student movement and had broken with that movement when his mentor plumped for the First World War. This was such an absolute betrayal and that sent shockwaves through Benimine and his friends. So having gone to university, he's looking for new interlocutors. And Sholom's a very important one for him and remains the person to whom he doggedly writes letters. and receives letters until his death. And through those letters, he's working out his ideas.

There's a lot of tension. Sholem becomes a leading figure in the analysis of Kabbalah and Judaic traditions. Benjam is interested to the point that he goes along with Sholom's idea that he should come with Sholom to Palestine. Sholom goes there in 1923, leaves Germany behind. any means should come there. If you can't get a position within the German university system, he should surely try to get one in Palestine. Why did Benjamin turn that down? I think he was just too embedded in European literary and cultural, philosophical and political traditions. I think he was

probably worried that to go to a university in another part of the world would, it would just not be the same environment or the same set of conditions. He'd be too distant from his beloved Paris, his beloved Capri, the people who he was speaking with in Europe. He just couldn't face it. How did Benjamin become interested in Marxism? Was he pro-Russia? No, he was not pro-Russia. He was curious. I think it's when he's on Capri in 1924 and he's reading this book by Georg Luchat, his Hungarian, German, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian. Marxist, who called History and Class Consciousness, and a lot of Benyemines' generation become fascinated by this book and the way it tries to explain how we come to seem like

things in the world, questions of alienation, the sort of dark, negative side of Marxism. He's fascinated by that. He's fascinated by this sort of apocalyptic utopian Marxism in Ernst Bloch, another figure. In Capri, though, he meets a woman. and he falls in love with, Asya Latsis, who is a Latvian Bolshevik theatre producer. And he says at one point, every time I meet a woman who I fall in love with, I just completely recompose myself, you know. So he becomes fascinated in Marxism or Bolshevism or what has happened in Russia,

and he goes there at the end of 1926 for a couple of months to see it in practice. He has lots of criticisms of it, lots of interesting, observations, but he never joins the party and the relationship with Lutzis fizzles out in certain ways. But by this time, you know, he's interested in Bertolt-Brecht and cultural Marxism and the possibilities of culture to open up a space of political critique. Thank you, Carolyn Nuttlinger. How did Walter Benjamin make a living? How precarious was his working life. Can you give listeners a sketch of it? Kevin already mentioned this huge disappointment, this huge blow to Benjamin when in 1925 he was

forced to withdraw his professorial dissertation and basically had to give up on his plans to become an academic. And so he really had to completely rethink his entire life plans. He was married by this point with a young son, although the marriage was already failing. but he basically really had to find alternative ways of income. And so the main source of income was writing, setting himself up as a freelance critic and journalist. So very important for Benjamin's career is this idea of the critic. So it's different from being an academic, but it's also more serious than being just a sort of day-to-day journalist or reporter. Benjamin says at some point that his ambition is to,

establish himself as the foremost critic of German literature. So he really sees writing for newspapers, writing for magazines and journals, as a serious intellectual career, even though it has to be said that he often complained, of course, about the need to find time for this day-to-day work to earn a living,

when he would much rather be pursuing his big academic projects. I don't think we can really say, that the texts, Spaniy, I mean, publishes after he leaves academia, are sort of of a second or lesser quality than his proper sort of academic stuff. Who was helping him along at this stage? He was very good at networking. That's one of the interesting things about him. I think that's what makes him such a sort of oscillating figure.

He had various supporters in various places and camps in the German cultural scene. So he had two major outlets for his publications. One is the Frankfurter Zeitung, the main left-wing German daily newspaper, and there the arts editor was Siegfried Krakauer, who was himself a cultural critic, a film theorist, a sociologist. He also wrote for a magazine called The Literary World, Literarish World, edited by someone called Willy Haas, and he also wrote for various other magazines.

And so he basically was very good at establishing connections with various editors, getting them to accept what he had written, but also getting them to give him book reviews and commissions. I mean, intellectually speaking, his main point of contacts were probably Sholem, as we've already heard. Brecht became increasingly important and then also Theodore Adorno, the philosopher. who became extremely important as time went on as I understand it. Is it too obvious, it is obvious to many people, but still is worth saying, why and when did he leave Germany for France?

From about the late 20s, Ben, I mean, led a very unsettled, very mobile life. He spent two summers on Ibiza. He spent time in Italy. He spent time in Moscow, as we've already heard. But it was really in March 1933. after, of course, Hitler had come to power after the fire of the Reichstag in Berlin, that Benjamin realised his position had just become untenable. But really, when you look at his letters, all the way going back to the late 20s,

he absolutely foresees the rise of Nazism. Already in 1931, 32, he begins to think of suicide. He is deeply depressed about the political situation. He obviously stays in Berlin almost. as long as it's safe to do and he almost has to be persuaded to leave for France but that's what he does in March

1933 until he'll never return to Berlin. He had to leave behind his library, his possessions, some manuscripts and that was obviously a huge break in his life. Thank. Kevin McLaughlin, can we look at some detail

of the next few minutes with all three of you at one of his major works given that he plunged into new modern media, radio, photography, cinema, one of this major work starts with Paris, 19th century Paris, and how he saw the city, he went to live there. Can you take it from there? Ben Amin was spending time in Paris in the late 20s,

and he became interested in the arcades, the Paris arcades. Of course, one can still today visit some of these arcades, which still exist in Paris, and that were formed out of the narrow commercial streets and alleyways of old Paris. These arcades were made possible during the first half of the 19th century, as Benjamins points out,

by a new artificial building material, namely iron, which also made the railways possible. And iron beams allowed for the enclosure of the narrow commercial alleys with roofs made of iron. and glass. Ben Amin saw the arcades as interiorizing the remains of an antiquated city that was fading away in this space with shops displaying the various commodities of a bygone era. So, for example, he talks about cobblers and umbrella and cane makers, confectioners, seamstresses, and so on,

that were in these spaces that became enclosed by the roofs of glass and iron. So Ben Amin appears to have become interested in these architectural structures in 1927 when he read Louis Aragon's novel, the Paris Peasant, which had just been published a year before. And the setting of Aragon's novel is an arcade, specifically the Passage de l'Opera, an arcade that was about to be demolished to make way for the Boulevard O'Sman. And the name O'Sman here is significant. since it recalls the baron who supervised the large-scale renovation of Paris in the 19th century under Napoleon III during the Second Empire, so from 1852 to 1870. This enormous and enormously destructive, violently destructive renovation project

involved the demolition of whole-scale demolition of old neighborhoods and tiny streets in old Paris and the installation of the great boulevards that we're familiar with today. And indeed, Osman's demolitions included the leveling of many of the arcades. Which theory was driving him at this stage? If we can move to that. The arcades for Benjamin represented

kind of architectural manifestation of the ephemerality of modernity that Benjamine had become interested in through his readings of Charles Baudelaire, and Baudelaire's theory of Moré, modernity as focused on the ephemeral and the transient. These architectural structures were themselves very ephemeral. They emerged in the 1820s and 30s, and most of them were demolished by the early 1850s.

So not only did they contain things that were fading away, the old Paris that was fading away, but as architectural structures, they themselves were sort of antiquated from the beginning, as Ben Yamin put it. One of the things he's trying to do through the arcades project is to, I don't know, identify the primal form of industrial capitalism as it is experienced. So it's the place where the consumer is born, where the shopper comes into being, where, as exemplified by the figure of the flaneur,

who just wants to take in the delights of the street and gaze in front of shop windows. The flanner is generally a wealthy man who spent a lot of his time wandering around Paris, admiring it and enjoying it and stopping for the old odd coffee and brandy, the flaneur. Or not necessarily so wealthy there. If we think about Bodle-Ares of Flannur, they're also trying to sell their poems here and there

or sell a bit of criticism to the art magazine or, you know, strike up a deal somewhere. So I think it's been in that condition of inhabiting the streets as a sort of site of stimulation, a sort of electrical energy, which Benymin sees being incubated in the arcades, but at the same time he says this is also the coming of a dream sleep over Europe. We're going to succumb in a way to the wonders and the beauties that are put before us. Because often in the arcades, imperial goods, intoxicating goods of tobacco and chocolate

and perfumes were sold. So it's a sort of emblem of a very seductive form of capitalism. but it is also precarious. It disappears and becomes rationalised and becomes the department store in time. Why do you think it's going to, you think it's becoming a dream? As Kevin said, it's stimulated by this surrealist idea

of, you know, staring into a shop window, and this is a scene in Aragon's Paris peasant, where the walking canes and things all start coming to life and moving around. or capitalism he sees as the generation of sort of fantastical relationships to these objects that become lively, that will service our dreams. But one of the things that's happening in the arcades by his time, or as they become less fashionable, is they become the place of junk and flea market style things and arbitrary montages. of objects that are brought together with no relationship to each other.

So there again, you've got a level of fantasising why is this musical score sitting next to a bird seed tray, sitting next to some old wig. So it's also all about things falling out of fashion and thereby revealing to us desires that we once had and that are now unaphradisiac as well. Carlin Dutlinger.

I just wanted to pick up on the idea of dreams. So dreams are really important. There's a sort of psychoanalytic, psychological argument running through the arcades project. But what's very important to Benjamin is actually the moment of awakening, as he calls it. So that sort of threshold between dreaming and being awake. And so I think the question really is, why does he look to the 19th century and then, of course, Paris from his present point of view? And I think for Benjamin, any form of historical, inquiry is only ever rooted in the present moment of the historical critic. So in other words, why do we look to 19th century Paris? Because it's the nucleus, it's the origin of our own

present day, which we can't really understand. We can't understand the present until we, unless we go back to the 19th century where he sees the roots of many of the sort of current developments, such as the city, technology, crowds, revolution and protest and how it's being crushed. So it's not just, Benjamin is very critical of any form of history that just tries to reconstruct the past as it really was, which was pretty much what historians at the time were trying to do. He always emphasises that history is about that moment of dialogue when we look back at the past and recognise something that people at the time didn't recognise.

Benjamin says, looking at it from the 20s and 30s, we are awake now and we see what people in that period couldn't see. Thank you. Kevin, you've translated the archaids project into English. How was he being thought of at that time when he was working his way through this arcades project? Was his circle of friends influential? Were they egging him on? Were they impressed by him? Where was he? He was certainly making them aware of his Paris project, and particularly Adorno, Theodore Adorno, who was mentioned, and his partner, Max Horkheimer, who were at the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt, which was about to move to New York during the war. And he read excerpts of his early sketches to Adorno in the late 20s.

He was making his German interlocutors aware of this, but also new connections that he had made in France with some of the intellectuals in Paris, in particular, who were associated with the college. of sociology, people like George Batai, with whom, in fact, he deposited his manuscript when he fled Paris in 1940. So there was also a series of French interlocutors that he engaged with while he was in Paris, and he was quite active in networking with the French intellectuals. Esther, can we come back to you then? Arguably, Benyman's most influential work was published in 1935, it's known in English as the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. What was he responding to? What was his main thesis there? It has been tremendously influential. Can you just tell us a bit about it? Yes, this is a tremendously influential piece of work,

and it's not really published in 1935. It goes through several versions, and then there's a reduced French version, and it's part of a whole backwards and forwards with Adorno and people, at the Institute for Social Research who find elements of it crude and Gersham Shulham's not a big fan of it. But it has had an immense influence on people wanting to think about how art changes once we are able, first of all, once we're able to reproduce it. So what does it mean that we can hold a postcard of the Mona Lisa

or painting by Monet in our hands? And then, beyond, that what does it mean that we can make artworks that are photographs, that we can make artworks that are films that are born reproduced. And of course, those debates extend today when we think about questions around digitality and NFTs, which are so fashionable now. So the core of the essay is trying to work out what happens once you can both reproduce artworks or make artworks which only exist in their reproduced form.

and he comes up with a term which he calls aura, which people have debated endlessly. What did he mean by aura? For him, aura is what adheres to an artwork when there is only one of that artwork in one single place and you in a sense can't approach it because it's authentic, it's original, it's distanced, it's surrounded by a kind of glow of authenticity.

That he says, away once nobody can say, which is the original photograph, or I'm holding this postcard in my hand. That doesn't have aura because I could hold anyone of 50 in my hand. When he says aura, when he says aura, he's actually saying, if I'm looking at a reproduction of the Mona Lisa as a postcard, then I am having a diminished experience. Yes, but you gain as well as lose in the sense that you can take it into your life, you can take it into your hand, it can become a fulcrum of discussion, whereas were you not able to access it in that way, were you not able to go to the Louvre? Then you would have no experience of it. And then it becomes

interesting if there is only the reproducible, because there's no original referent that you're missing out on. So in a sense, culture is democratised because everybody has the same access to the film at the cinema. So how does that change the value and the status and the reach of art and who feels emboldened to speak about it, to get involved in it? And what does he conclude about that? Partly he's saying this is what is happening, let's track it, how does that recompose us, how does that put different demands on the artist? But he writes this very significant epilogue to his work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction essay, whereby he says who are the experts in using photography and film now?

Well, actually, as much as Hollywood is developing, it's also the Nazis. They are able to occupy these forms. And rather than that being a way for the masses, the many people to sort of participate in representation and self-representation, and self-representation, they become material for the photograph. They're shaped into patterns in the Nazi rallies and so on. And this can then be broadcast back at them to say, look, you are on screen, you are being heard, but he sees it as completely disempowering.

And he sees that as an abuse of the technological forms. Carlin, can you develop that? Benjamin says very memorably, the problem in the current, age, and of course, again, this is 1935, it's national socialism, is that politics has become an aesthetic spectacle. So this idea, if we think of the films of Lenny Riefenstahl, for instance, of, you know, that the mass is becoming an aesthetic spectacle, Hitler being staged and so on. And he says what we have to do in this situation is we need to politicise art. So the Nazis are aestheticizing politics, getting people to just, go along with whatever they are trying to do, but we need to politicise art. And what does that mean? And I think here again, aura is quite useful to understand what Beniamin wants to happen.

I think it's important to understand that the work of art essay isn't just a sort of passive, descriptive history of art and technology. It's what Benjamin calls a programmatic statement. It's trying to make an impact. And so Benjamin, says the aura and the way we look at, say, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, is part of basically a religious form of relating to art. We stand, we venerate this painting, but we're not aware of the person next to us. It's just us and the painting. And this means that the spectator can't really become part of a group of people who can bring about change. So for Benjamin, the alternative is film.

Film for Benjamin is a revolutionary medium where the audience is no longer entranced with what's happening on screen, but they are becoming a sort of collective subject who can become aware of itself, become aware of its situation, and perhaps bring about some sort of revolution. And here, by the way, we can very clearly see Brecht's ideas, Brecht's idea of spectatorship, of the epic theatre, where again people are not meant to be sort of immersed in what's happening on stage, but they're meant to maintain a critical distance.

That's what Benjamine thinks film in particular can achieve. That's what Adorno in particular was very critical of, because Adorno saw film as part of Hollywood, part of this machinery that is just trying to pull the world. over our eyes, stop us from asking questions, just go to the cinema and forget about your troubles. That's what Adorno thought film was like. Kevin, do you think that what he's describing the impact of cinema, let's stick with that for the moment in photography and so on, do you think that he thought that this was replacing the aura of the unique object or just something else that turned up was going on alongside it? I think he thought that this was replacing the traditional

traditional concept of the work of art. And in particular, as I believe Carolyn mentioned earlier, that for Ben Amin, this was also rooted in a religious tradition of a ritualistic engagement with art that was connected to the concept of the aura. And I would add one further thing here. There's a suggestion in Ben Umin's essay on technical reproducibility that there is, in fact, an erratic quality to the disappearance of the aura,

so that the reception of the work of art as it's technically reproduced, also involves a kind of repeated experience of this loss of the aura, this disappearance of the aura. So it's not as though this is an event that happens at one point in time or in history at once and for all. This is a sort of long, repetitive process of what he calls the decline of the aura. I think that's a really important point. And just to add to that, I think there's a real sense of melancholy. in Benjamin's argument about the disappearance of the aura.

So at some point he talks about the destruction of the aura and how it has to be shattered for a new form of experience to emerge, a modern form of experience, which is characterized by shock and alertness. But there is a real sense of melancholy about this process as well. And I think that is very characteristic of Benjamin's work more generally. It's never cut and dried. It's never just in fact.

favour of one thing. It is ambivalent about the very thing it also tries to defend. Benjamin was living and working under threat from the Nazis in Germany. What happened to him when war broke out? He was in France in 1939 and when war broke out, the French immediately rounded up all German and Austrian citizens living in France, who were aged between 18 and 49 Benjamin at the time was 47. So men were rounded up, and women in some cases, rounded up in their thousands. And Benjamin ended up first in the Olympic Stadium in Paris, where he stayed together with all these other people for about 10 days,

having to sleep on the ground. There was hardly any roof even. The diet was incredibly poor. And another younger man who was there with Benjamin at the time described, in very moving terms, how Benyamin just sat there on a bench, almost not moving for days, and how he very quickly realized that this man would probably not withstand this ordeal. Benjamin was then moved on to an empty chateau,

which served as an internment camp. And again, I think there was a real danger to his life at this point. There was a great sense of community. There were a lot of intellectuals and writers, of course, among these exiles in France. So people rallied round, but Benyamin at the time had tachycardia. He had high blood pressure. He had an enlarged heart.

And I think he really was in existential danger at this point in his life. He was eventually released, but his health was probably irreparably damaged. Are Adorno and Breck trying to help him at this stage? Yeah, the Institute for Social Research through Hawkeimer managed to get him some sort of permit to go to the United States, but he's unable to get an exit visa. So he has a partial way out. Brecht is going to leave and go to the US as well. I think there's not much concrete they can do. And he's, you know, leaving Paris was so hard for him. Adorno's wife, Greta, Greta, Caplus, who was very close to Benimin, wrote him lots of letters, spoke about him, sort of building a kind of cave for himself out of books and quotations inside the French National Library, and he won't leave it. He really cannot stomach the idea of going to the US and trying to do what Krakawa

and all these other people are doing, trying to find a life there. Kevin, Kevin McLaughlin, I know it's a bleak story, but can you tell the listeners how the Walter Benjamin had an entry visa for the U.S., and he also had a transit visa for Spain and Portugal. And this was due to efforts of Horkheimer, mainly in New York at the time. But he did not have an exit visa from France. And so he was in Marseille in the summer of 1940. And finally in September, he set out on foot with two acquaintances who had also been hold up in Marseille, a woman named Henny Gurland and her son Joseph.

And they set off on foot for the Spanish border to make an illegal departure from France because, again, he didn't have the exit visa. So when they arrived in the border town of Porbeau in Spain, they were told that the Spanish government had just closed the border to illegal refugees from France and that Benjamin and his party would be returned to the French authorities the next day.

and they were put up in a pension in Porbo for the night. At that point, as we've said earlier, Benjamine's health was very poor, and he was barely able to make the walk to Porbo. And so at that point, the hopelessness of the situation, they would have certainly been sent to concentration camps if they had gone back, led Benjamine to kill himself by taking morphine,

and he died that night on September 27, 1940. It was very common for these refugees to carry poison with them. Henny Gerland was actually in the room with Ben Yamin when he was suffering from what turned out to be a rather protracted death. I see. Well, thank you for that. Can we look, Esther, at what happened to magnify his influence so much in the years after his death? We've had him in Little rooms in Paris. We've had him working away.

We've had him getting scarce to any money. But now it goes, there's Shazam boom really, isn't it? Can you give us a taste of that? Very quickly after his death, his friends in New York from the Institute of Social Research, start to put together materials, and then Sholem and Adorno come together and decide they want to issue some representative selected writings and also the letters, because Benin was such a phenomenon, letter writer and so many of his ideas were worked out there. So there's a big editing project possibly motivated by survivor guilt or just a sense that somehow this man of such extraordinary

thought had not really been given his due. He had published books. So which of his ideas began to circulate and become important and needing to be held in such enormous esteem? I think it's the 1960s really shoot him up into, begin to the superstar sort of elevation. Through his ideas, the work of art and the age of mechanical reproduction, an essay called the author as producer, the much more left-wing works that seem, or obviously left-wing works, which are taken up by the student movement. In Germany, there's a poster of him with a Kalashnikov in one hand

and a joint in the other because he did a lot of drug experimentation, like other intellectuals in the 20s. So he's seen as this figure of absolute liberation, rebellion, and the reinvention of culture. But as it starts to be translated, John Berger alights on the work of our essay and ways of seeing is unthinkable without Benyemines' contributions on technological culture.

And then from the 80s onwards, the Harvard translation project of Benjamine, increasingly his star rises in the English-speaking world, which in some ways, it seems to me, leads certain directions of research. So it's really, you know, more recently when his radio writings were translated into English, that they were recognised as truly significant and a new edition of the works was carried out in Germany, sort of subsequently. They were, they were brought together, hadn't been brought together in German really before. Corling, is there any way you can encapsulate for listeners to this program?

What key points he had that struck people in the second half, later 20th century and still today, so forcefully and had such an impact? What were the, if people had to go away with the funeral notions, oh, that's what he said that changed, and that's what he said that changed things. What would they say? So there's a really nice line from the Arcades Project, from the VIII. the section where he reflects on his method, where he says, I have nothing to say, only things to show. And that for me is one of the most important comments to sum up what Benjamin did, what he wanted to do, what he didn't want to do.

Benjamin was not keen on philosophical systems that kind of generalized, that abstracted, that talked about eternal truths or grand trajectory. or teleological developments. Ben Yawin was an applied thinker. He wanted to really encounter everyday life, everyday objects, material culture. He wasn't really interested in high art so much as people's everyday lives and experience. And I think in that sense, his project is quite similar to that of Sigmund Freud, who also tried to really engage with what it's like to be human. So Benjamin was interested in the body. He was interested, as we've already heard, in fashion, in architecture, in basically what constitutes human life. But he didn't write about them in a grand system or some sort of big overarching philosophical theory.

He really shaped his texts to sort of really match the object of his inquiry. And I think that's a very sort of likable trait. I think it means that you can read individual texts by Benyamin and very beautiful also his essays on literature. He is probably the most influential critic on France Kafka. I think his Kafka essay from 1934 is probably still the absolute sort of most beautiful and influential piece written on Kafka. but he really engages with what he writes about close up.

And that means that as a reader, you can read these individual texts and they will be self-contained, they will be beautifully phrased. He was a great stylist, but not in a kind of difficult, abstract, kind of pretentious way. But you can then also, the more you read of Benjamin, the more you see certain ideas coming back,

you see patterns, but it's not a system. And I think that really sets him apart from what you could call philosophers with a capital P, who I think especially nowadays are quite off-putting to read. I think Beniamin, he's not accessible, but you can engage with him in small texts and then build on that. But every Beniamin text will have something unique and particular about what it has to say about the thing that it's about. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks to Haster Leslie, Carolyn Duttlinger, and Kevin McLaughlin, and to our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram.

Next week, but soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It's Romeo and Juliet. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Is there anything in the programme that you would like to have said, this is the time to say it, because this could be included in the podcast. Just to add on to something Carolyn just said.

I think one of the interesting things about Ben Yamin is that about his reception is that, as Esther mentioned earlier, certainly the Benyamine explosion happened in the 1960s, and that was the sort of first wave of Benymin, very much based on Hannah Arendt's edition of Illuminations, a collection of essays that came out in the late 60s. And then there was a second volume that was edited by Peter Demets in the 1970s called Reflection. And these were the kind of paperbacks that students were carrying around with them in the 1970s. And then we had this massive translation of thousands of pages of Benjamine's work into English and also the editing of all of his work in German, in some, I believe, in 14 volumes in the collected writings.

And what's very interesting is that there was both an internal academic reception and a more external, popular reception of Benjamin's work. On the university side, I think Benjamine's interest in language and history made him very appealing to things that were happening in the university in the 1980s and 90s, in the wake of structuralism in France, focusing on language, and then sort of turned to history in the 1980s and with the impact of Michel Foucault's work. And I think Benjamin was very well positioned to be taken up from those perspectives, but very hard to assess. simulate to any of those thinkers exactly. Outside of the university, it's interesting that the fact that he was driven out of the university early in his career meant that he had to write about things that people outside of the university cared about. And so that's what's had his legacy around film, new media, in particular. It was very much him trying to bring his philosophical

training and thinking to bear on the very practical things that were happening in the culture. And he was forced to do that, as we said earlier, because he had to be a freelance writer. And maybe just to build on that, I mean, I do think it's really fascinating to look more closely at the journalism, because this is really work that exists in that spot between necessity, constraint, but also freedom and creativity and trying to reach new audiences. So Benjamin was suddenly forced to write for everyday people who would read his stuff in the newspaper,

maybe on the commute. So it's a completely different style of writing. I mean, coming back to his habilitation, which, as Kevin said, was of course rejected with utter incomprehension. And it's a very influential work, but it's so difficult, especially the preface is almost, I mean, it is hardcore philosophy.

But then Benjamins just pivots and changes his style. I mean, he's also, of course, a literary writer. We haven't mentioned that. One of his most beautiful books is his memoirs of his Berlin childhood around 1900. He writes riddles, he writes travelogs. So he is just such a versatile writer. And again, that I think ties in with this, this, this, this idea that he's appealing to so many different people and so many different audiences.

I think that's so right, Carolyn, that it's the, he's an experimentalist with so many different forms. He's writing short stories. He writes poems and sonnets. But I think, as Kevin mentioned earlier, the radio work is really quite extraordinary. I mean, this is being written mainly for teenagers. Sometimes there are small lectures about something like the Berlin Brass Factory or toy shops in Berlin or the earthquake in Lisbon from the past and so on. And sometimes though he's working with sound. He's working in this genre of the Heur-Spiel, you know, where you use work that can only really appear on radio, mobilises all of radio's capacities for sound effects and multiple voices and delay and all those issues.

And he's doing that because he is helped by a friend of his who we haven't mentioned, which was Ernst Schurne, who was his childhood friend, who was probably the person he felt closest to all the way through and kept up a sort of letter exchange with Schoen when Schoen came into exile here and Schen was running Frankfurt Radio and saw this as a way to really concretely help his friend who was not going to get an academic job. So he puts him on the radio in a spirit of experimentation

as was happening in Weimar and particularly in Frankfurt Radio at that time. And I think that's important really also as context for the work of art essay, the photography essay, Benjamin didn't just theorise about the new media. He was a practitioner as well in the radio, and he was experimenting. And maybe just another comment on Ernst Truen. I think it's striking how many different people we've discussed today as being

Benjamins friends, dialogue partners, collaborators. So Benjamin knew a huge range of people, but very, very different people, and in a sense almost incompatible people. Sholem didn't like Brecht. Adorno didn't like Brecht. So he was sort of in the middle of this incredible force field of different intellectual positions, different ideologies.

So if you look at Benjamin, within this landscape, it's almost like he is at the center of all these conflicting strands and movements. And that's what I think makes his life ultimately. so iconic for the period that he lived through this period of two world wars, exile, migration, displacement. And I think it's, I mean, I don't want to stress this too much, but I think Benjamin's life can't really be separated from his work, because the work is absolutely rooted in

these often very difficult conditions. There's actually, if I could just mention it, I often recommend those radio broadcasts to students as a way into Ben Amin. And then there's a wonderful moment. I think it's in the radio broadcast on the markets, the old markets of Berlin, in which at one point he slyly says to the audience, perhaps I'll see you in the market or perhaps you'll see me, but of course he won't recognize me because you don't know what I look like. So the media theorist peeps out of that particular radio broadcast.

Well, thank you all very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, I'm John Ronson, and I want to tell you about a new podcast I've made for BBC Radio 4. It's called Things Fell Apart. If you've ever yelled at someone on social media about, say, cancel culture or mask wearing, then you are a soldier in the culture wars. Those everyday battles for dominance between conflicting values. I was curious to learn how things fell apart,

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