By Walter Benjamin
A significant other quantity to Illuminations, the 1st number of Walter Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents an extra sampling of his wide-ranging paintings. the following Benjamin evolves a conception of language because the medium of all construction, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces approximately Berlin within the Nineteen Twenties, remembers conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and offers travelogues of varied towns, together with Moscow less than Stalin. He strikes seamlessly from literary feedback to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his popularity as one of many maximum and such a lot flexible writers of the 20th century. additionally integrated is a brand new preface through Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's persevered relevance for our instances.
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Extra resources for Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
Sample text
As I continue reading Benjamin thirty and more years after his death, I cannot close my eyes to the obsolescence of many of his beliefs (including his demand that the artist join the revolutionary proletariat), and yet I find myself constantly impressed by the erudite range of his conflicting interests and by his stubborn loyalties, which do not easily tinto the schematic image of a Central European left-wing intellectual emlre deux guetres. He is well known to us as a sophisticated and cosmopolitan translator and critic of Baudelaire and Proust, but he also loved “na'ive” art (as we would say today) and the didactic narratives of Johann Peter Hebel, an Alemannic writer concerned with the moral education of simple village people.
Undoubtedly, these rooms lend themselves to dreamlike representation; there is something nightmarish even in the sober recollection of the damp odor of sweat secreted by the stone steps that I had to hasten up ve times or more each day. The school, outwardly in good repair, was in its architecture and situation among the most desolate. It matched its emblem, a plaster statue of the Emperor Frederick, which had been deposited in a remote corner of the playground (admittedly one favored by hordes engaged in martial games), puny and pitiful against a rewall.
Moreover, little about the actual classrooms has remained in my memory except these exact emblems of imprisonment: the frosted windows and the infamous carved wooden battlements over the doors. It would not surprise me to hear that the cupboards, too, were crowned with such adornrnents, not to mention the pictures of the Kaiser on the walls. Heraldic and chivalrous obtuseness shone forth wherever possible. In the great hall, however, it was most ceremoniously united with art notweau. A crude, extravagant ornament stretched with stiff gray-green limbs across the paneling of the walls.