Walter Benjamin and Theology

Colby Dickinson, Stéphane Symons, Colby Dickinson, Stéphane Symons

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823270187, 9780823270170
• eBook ISBN: 9780823270194
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is "related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it." For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin's relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin's relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.

Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Influences

Walter Benjamin’s Jewishness

HOWARD EILAND

Benjamin’s Jewishness was at first no more than an exotic “aroma” in his life. He grew up in a thoroughly assimilated household of the liberal Jewish bourgeoisie in Berlin. His mother’s side of the family felt some allegiance to the Jewish reform community in Berlin, while his father’s side inclined to the orthodox rite, but all during Benjamin’s protected childhood his family celebrated Christmas in high style and organized Easter egg hunts for the children—these occasions are commemorated in his Berlin Childhood around 1900—whereas the young Benjamin knew next to nothing about the Jewish holidays.1 In the vignette “Sexual Awakening” (1932) in Berlin Childhood, he tells of a misadventure during the Jewish High Holy Days that prevented his attendance at services in the synagogue, a slip-up and deviation he traces in part to his own “suspicion of religious ceremonies, which promised only embarrassment.” The boy’s anxiety at having lost his bearings in an unfamiliar neighborhood where he was supposed to meet a relative quickly gives way, however, to indifference (“So be it—I don’t care”) and to “a dawning sensation of pleasure,” wherein the profanation of the holy day is combined with the pandering of the street, “which here, for the first time, gave me an inkling of the services it was prepared to render to awakened instincts.”2 The profane services rendered on this holy day by “the street” are associated with an instinctive awakening of powers more intellectually and spiritually fruitful than organized religious services could ever be, catering as they do to what he would call, in his “Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present” in 1912, “the useless energy of piety” (EW, 75).

It was Benjamin’s experience with the antebellum German youth movement in his last years in high school and first years of university study, and especially with the contingent of students around the leading educational reformer Gustav Wyneken, many of whom were Jews, that first occasioned his reflection on his own Jewishness. In this regard, the four lengthy letters to a fellow student and poet, Ludwig Strauss, written by the twenty-year-old Benjamin between September 1912 and January 1913, provide insight into his thinking about the “Jewish problem” at this time. Indeed, these letters constitute the only extended direct reflection on his Jewishness that we have today from Benjamin.3

At the outset of the exchange with Strauss, he raises the vexed question of the German-Jewish relationship, and this question hangs over the entire exchange (prompted as it evidently was by a public debate on the subject in the pages of the Munich literary journal Kunstwart, a debate to which Strauss had recently contributed).4 “Although in ourselves we have two sides, Jewish and German, up until now we have been wholly and quite willingly absorbed in the German. The Jewish was often, it would seem, only an exotic, southern (or worse: sentimental) aroma in our production and in our life” (GB, 1:61–62). He mentions his liberal upbringing to Strauss, as something that would be self-evident to him, and adverts to the two years (1905–1906) he spent at the country boarding school Haubinda, where he first studied under Wyneken, a popularizing Nietzschean who introduced him to philosophy in his class on German literature. “I had my decisive intellectual and spiritual experience before Judaism ever became important or problematic to me. What I knew about it was really just anti-Semitism and a vague piety. As religion it was remote from me, and as national feeling altogether unknown” (69–70). Now, however, that has changed, and he feels Judaism and the Jewish to be at his core (“als mein Kernhaftes”). The “decisive influence,” in this development, was his encounter with the charismatic non-Jew Wyneken, who in 1906 cofounded the progressive coeducational Freie Schulgemeinde (Free School Community) in the Thuringian village of Wickersdorf in central Germany.5 Among those active in the “enlightened reform work” growing out of the Wickersdorf pedagogic program, says Benjamin, it was for the most part Jews who were in the forefront. “This all has become clear to me in the past few months. On the basis of Wickersdorf—not by speculative means, and not simply by means of feeling either, but on the basis of outer and inner experience—I have found my Judaism. What to me was the highest in ideas and in people—I have recognized this as Jewish.6 And to reduce all that I’ve discovered to a formula: I am a Jew, and if I live as a conscious man, I live as a conscious Jew” (71). The element of the “Jewish” pervades conscious being at the same time that it manifests what is highest. The Jewish is a principle of both universalism and exclusivism.

Strauss had evidently invited Benjamin to collaborate on a planned journal of Jewish affairs (GB, 1:76–77), and Benjamin expressed an interest in writing for the journal so long as this did not mean promoting Zionism, the problem of which he has given much thought to, he says, although he has not had time to look into the literature (62). He is careful to distinguish his newfound sense of Jewishness and “Jewish spirit” from “political Zionism” and “practical Zionism.” He is interested in furthering a broad educational-cultural program, but “not as dogma!” (70). “Assuming one can know the Jewish spirit, can one then build on it more than a provisional realm—a cultural realm? More generally: what do those who are capable of judgment expect from the artificial instauration of a culture-state [Kulturstaat]?” (62). The problem with Zionism in its present manifestation is, on the one hand, the philistinism of its membership—“they make propaganda for Palestine and then get drunk like Germans” (72)—and, on the other hand, the fundamental nationalism of its mission (82). For culture is valid, first and last, as human culture, and, however localized its origins, its appeal should not in principle be restricted to any one part of humanity (77). In his letter of October 10 to Strauss, Benjamin sums up the issue as follows: “I see three kinds of Zionist Judaism: the Palestine Zionism (a necessity of nature), the German Zionism in its half-heartedness, and the cultural Zionism [Kultur-Zionismus] that sees Jewish values everywhere and works for them. I stand with the latter, and, as I think, you too must take your stand there” (72).7 In his letter of January 7, however, there is a more unqualified repudiation of Zionism as a whole: “I cannot make Zionism my political element. (And for that reason I shall naturally have to combat it in radical politics.)” (82). He glances at the possibility of an emancipated “Zionism of the spirit [Zionismus des Geistes],” which would promote “a certain Jewish gesture” that he knows from Strauss and one or two others, but “such a Zionism remains an idea and is thoroughly esoteric” (82–83). Moreover, it is not only Zionist tenets, both practical and esoteric, from which he keeps his distance; a “rigorous engagement with the Jewish sphere is something denied me” (77).

Judaism, he argues, cannot become an end in itself but may serve as “a preeminent vehicle and representative of the spiritual [des Geistigen];” in fact, “Jews constitute an elite in the ranks of intellectuals [der Geistigen]” (GB, 1:75). It is jüdischer Geist—Jewish spirit and intellect—that he is concerned with, and in his first surviving letter to Strauss he suggests that the Jewish spirit shows itself in its nature more readily in the field of culture, of artistic endeavor, than in “Jewish religious life” (61).8 In the whole Komplex of his convictions, he tells Strauss in January, the Jewish plays but a partial role (83). And he remains incapable of defining more closely what for him is at issue in the notion of a fruitful Kulturjudentum. What he has in mind here is “more an image than a line of thought”: “It is the reverse of the Tower of Babel: the biblical peoples pile ashlar upon ashlar, and their spiritual desideratum [das geistig Gewollte]—the tower that reaches heaven—fails to materialize. / The Jews handle ideas like ashlars; the origin, the matter [Materie], is never attained. They build from above, without reaching the ground” (84).9 That Benjamin himself does not exactly “build from above” is indicated by a statement made toward the beginning of the letter of January 7–9, where it is not any teleological deduction that is decisive for his thinking but recurrent and ever-changing sudden confrontation (which will become the principle of montage): “Once again it seems to me that I am now for the first time confronted with [nun erst bei] the ultimate and essential” (81). In the letter of September 11 to Strauss, he writes that “the best Jews today” are bound up with a valuable process of struggle and formation taking place in Western European society, and in this connection he paraphrases a rhetorical question of Heinrich Mann’s: “What would spirit, art, and love mean for us without the Jews?” (64). This comes at the end of a brief excursus on “the literati” (compare his later reference to “today’s intellectual literary Jew [Literaten-Jude]” [83]) and their role in the formation of a new social consciousness and new modes of living—the excursus being an amplification of his thesis that the Jewish spirit is most fully expressed in the cultural sphere.

Benjamin prescinds from the customary negative connotation of “literati” (as a species of café-dweller or bohemian), insisting on the cultural and indeed religious importance of this type for the present day. The literati, he says, draw the ultimate consequences from “our famous enlightenment and freedom from prejudice.” It is not enough for them to be open-minded under cover of bourgeois security; they seek out new ways of living that are in accord with the spirit of today’s artistic expression. “They have their most serious mission in this: out of art, which they themselves cannot make, to win spirit for the life of the times” (GB, 1:63). The idea of the literary man—or “the man of letters (as idea)”—is for Benjamin associated, paradoxically enough, with a “modern asceticism,” which extends even to the café culture. The literati “take the present day as seriously as Tolstoy takes the culture of Christianity.… [They are] called upon to be, in the new social consciousness, that which ‘the poor in spirit, the downtrodden [Geknechteten] and the humble’ were for early Christianity.10 One can only wonder whether this social consciousness will seek and find metaphysical formulas, whether it will become a general or broader class consciousness” (63–64).

Several themes of these letters are rehearsed in the posthumously published “Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present,” which Benjamin completed in October 1912, and which he mentions to Ludwig Strauss at this time. There he further elaborates the idea of “the literati,” associating them with a Zarathustrian “mania for exposing and overleaping abysses” and with “the mighty will to see everything unmoored—that is, not so peacefully and self-evidently anchored in the ‘I’ as it customarily appears to be” (EW, 72). His speaker remarks that he both loves and fears “this cynicism.” To Strauss Benjamin characterizes the literati as zukunftsvoll, full of the future, and in the dialogue on religiosity he writes that “religion … will once a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Metaphysics of Transience, Natural and Supernatural Life, and Apokatastasis
• Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Influences
• Dislocated Messianism: Modernity, Marxism, and Violence
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series Page