by Jon Lackman | 30 October 2007 | Books, Theory
In the Spring 2007 issue of Biography, Udi E. Greenberg writes on biographies of Walter Benjamin:
Since it is Benjamin’s eccentric personality and the figure of Benjamin himself, not just his thoughts and ideas, which stand at the center of [academia's] attention, it is hardly surprising that his private life has given birth to a long line of biographical texts, many of them best-sellers … it was not [the] texts of the seventies, interesting as they are, that generated what was to become “the Benjamin cult.” Benjamin gained his enormous popularity only in the mid eighties and nineties, and not by coincidence. Indeed, the new Benjamin biographies of the eighties, such as Bernd Witte’s, framed an alternative perspective that glorified Benjamin, in contrast to his revolutionary friends, mainly for his lack of political commitment … Benajmin’s life is no longer presented as a failure, as the defeat of the thinker who failed to choose the correct political path. Rather, the failure lies in the behavior of society, which rejected his desperate calls for criticism. Benjamin’s thought suddenly acquires a heretofore unobserved homogeneity, and his intellectual life is not a series of twists and turns, but rather a long, smooth growth, with one purpose — true spiritual freedom … In the last two decades, an era in which it seems that there is no relevant or essential criticism of the capitalist-democratic system, despite its faults and the unease felt among major parts of the intelligentsia, it is easy to identify with a critic who does not present a clear alternative system … Indeed, after the collapse of the radical left in the West and the Soviet Union in the East, it seems that every radical Marxist thinker of the period has gone through a form of reconsideration and even “rehabilitation” in order to survive and remain relevant, as shown in the debates around the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtin and Bertolt Brecht. In the case of Benjamin, however, the biographical writing not only “saved” his writing from oblivion, it also successfully “liberated” the thinker from his historical context. By going back to traditional models of narration, it made him into an a-historical model for later generations, and by so doing, gave birth to a myth.
See also “Benjamin as Historian,” a review of Walter Benjamin and History and Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” in the Summer 2007 issue of Clio.
