No one would have been as astonished by this volume as the author himself. When Walter Benjamin took his own life in 1940 while fleeing and on the threshold of a new world war, he considered himself lost and gave hope that he would ever emerge from oblivion again it not.
But now even his newspaper articles are already being critically edited in the second edition of his work like the main works of a classic thanks to the work of editors who, in the words of the historical-philosophical theses, "wake the dead and piece together what has been shattered".
One wonders, would Benjamin have revised his idea of a historical “disaster that ceaselessly piles rubble upon rubble”?
But even before the "fall of the German nation", as Rudolf Borchardt called it, and the way into exile, Benjamin spoke of the "ruined site" of his books, and his curriculum vitae actually made it impossible for him to create a coherent, consistent life's work.
The failure of academic plans forced the philosopher to earn his living through journalism.
The new volume of the Critical Complete Edition could appear like a collection of side works, but it documents Benjamin's fluctuating reality of life in the 1920s and 1930s in a particularly impressive way.
This can already be seen from the efforts of the editors to create some meaningful order for this polyphony, and one will not do them an injustice with the judgment that their division into "texts about cities",
"Reports" and "Feuilletons" is not much more convincing than that of the first complete edition.
Even the differentiation between drafts, versions and finished essays is tricky in view of the estate - and if a one-line dedication to Gerhard Scholem appears as a separate text, sometimes curious.
Contortion to communist and soviet cultural ideology
But all of that depends on the thing itself.
The day-to-day work forced the initially rather hermetic author to constantly perform a balancing act between his own demands and those of his journalistic clients: “It would be wonderful,” says a letter to Scholem in 1928, “if the ignominious scribbling of earnings wasn’t kept to a certain level on your part wanted to be, so as not to become disgusting to me myself.” Even if Benjamin's intellectual and stylistic exertion can often be felt in such texts, one does the author a disservice if one overvalues the everyday all sorts of things in all their breadth.
Then you lose sight of the fact that professional routine, idiosyncrasies, important texts and allotria coexist in his journalism, sometimes even in the same text.
Benjamin's rank is often revealed in remote places: extremely strange, the suggestive dream narratives that anticipate surrealism;
unforgettable the report on a visit to Karl Wolfskehl and his recitation of Lenau's "The sun-weary leaves hang sleepily...";
great the passionate defense of Rilke's memory against Franz Blei's mockery, of Max Brod's publications from Kafka's estate.
The equally passionate commitment to Eisenstein's "Panzerkreuzer Potemkin" then already points to the political range of the texts, and one reads one or the other contortion to the communist and Soviet cultural ideology rather tormented.