A generation ago, many leftists were reading Walter Benjamin. His thoughts on “art in an age of mechanical reproduction” were both proto-Warhol and anti-bourgeois: instead of worshipping rare, singular works of art, why not celebrate photographs and posters and other cheaply reproduced and widely consumed media? His studies of Baudelaire started him wandering the Paris arcades and celebrating all the accumulated layers of ephemera. Benjamin the flâneur inspired his readers to celebrate the city as a smorgasbord of the senses.
We may have imagined Benjamin spending his whole life sitting in cafes, roaming obscure backstreets and writing anti-capitalist essays…but that was not the case, as Peter E. Gordon’s biography of Benjamin demonstrates. Born in 1892 to a middle-class German Jewish family, Benjamin grew up intending to be a professor of philosophy at a traditional German university. World War I interrupted, but Benjamin was hardly military material. At the same time, with Jewish quotas in the universities and the stubborn opaqueness of Benjamin’s own writings, he was coming to realize he would have a hard time finding any high-ranked professors to sponsor his academic career. Occasional fees from academic journals for obscure tracts on baroque tragedy weren’t paying the rent, and his financial difficulties were only compounded when he married and had a child to support. Soon, even his parents refused to cover his bills.
His solution was vaguely practical and entirely romantic: to take passage on ships to southern European ports where at least the cost of living was lower. He even tried a visit to the Soviet Union, only to realize he was unsuited to the Marxist-Leninist state. He flirted with joining his dear friend, Gershom Scholem, in Jerusalem, but ultimately, felt unable to commit. Indeed, the more friends like Adorno identified with Marxism, the more Benjamin realized his anarchic/romantic tendencies were incompatible with Marxist dialectics. He befriended leftist artists like Brecht, who weren’t as rigid ideologically, but by the 1930s, they were all looking around for an exit from Germany. Benjamin gravitated to his “second home,” Paris, where he thought he could live cheaply and still write. Before long, Benjamin, in poor health and deep despair, was joining the thousands of other stateless Jews looking for visas to anywhere that would take them.
Gordon actually covers Benjamin’s eventual suicide in an introductory chapter — his way of saying that Benjamin’s death did not define his life. As the reader comes to the closing pages of Benjamin’s story, his choice to leave this life seems inevitable. Decades earlier, Benjamin had debated the meaning and direction of history with other philosophy students. Now he knew: history was just a “train wreck” and progress was meaningless.
By setting aside the myths and trying to understand the actual man, Gordon has made an important contribution to Benjamin studies. His analyses of Benjamin’s philosophical treatises may be a bit abstruse for the general reader, but they’re necessary for understanding why, ultimately, Benjamin could never make himself into a Marxist dialectician. For Benjamin, things were always too complicated.
Bettina Berch, author of the recent biography, From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Life and Work of Anzia Yezierska, teaches part-time at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
