Interpreting an author’s work from their life is like judging fruits by their tree: in other words, the wrong way around. But their lives can be interesting and compelling on their own terms, and Walter Benjamin’s was one such. Besides being one of the most original philosophers of the 20th century, he was a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany for France in 1933 and died by suicide in 1940 to avoid deportation to the camps.
Gordon’s new biography opens with an account of this death but seeks to reduce its shadow over the story of Benjamin’s life. (“No individual’s life is defined by its end.”)
The resulting portrait is not always even: the sordid details of Benjamin’s infidelities and compulsive gambling are left out. We follow Benjamin from his youth in Germany, eventually to Paris, and finally his aborted escape from France.
Gordon puts a welcome emphasis on the Jewish theological strand of Benjamin’s thought, which he owed to his friendship with the pre-eminent modern scholar of the Kabbalah, Gerhard Scholem. Benjamin also flirted with Zionism in his youth but was put off by its nationalistic tenor.
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But Gordon is less comfortable with Benjamin’s Marxism, from his friendship with Bertolt Brecht to the incorporation of Marxian ideas in key texts such as On the Concept of History. Gordon writes: “Although [Benjamin] fell under the influence of friends with a strongly Marxist orientation (…) he never overcame a certain scepticism regarding the deeper principles of official Marxist doctrine.” Yet this scepticism did not extend to Marx’s writings. Marxism for Benjamin was like Irish nationalism for Yeats: an ambivalent but essential part of his best work.
Benjamin’s philosophy combines a hard-nosed sense of economic and social inequalities with a visionary understanding of the human condition. In a new imperialist age, it reminds us how the horrors of the past never finished.
