{"id":17851,"date":"2026-03-02T08:37:27","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T16:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=17851"},"modified":"2026-03-10T21:50:38","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T04:50:38","slug":"the-original-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=17851","title":{"rendered":"“The Original”, The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back to News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A new biography of the Berlin-born philosopher emphasizes his combination of stubborn unworldliness and startling prescience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Anahid Nersessian<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

March 2, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cWalter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver,\u201d Peter E. Gordon avoids treating his subject in allegorical terms, in part because Benjamin always resisted conscription into a story larger than his own.Photograph by Gis\u00e8le Freund \/ \u00a9 IMEC, Fonds MCC \/ CNAC \/ MNAM \/ Dist. RMN-Grand Palais \/ Art Resource<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Anahid Nersessian<\/a> March 2, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ten days passed before the men were transferred to a prison camp in central France, where Benjamin gave lectures in exchange for Gauloises cigarettes. In a lean-to on the floor next to a staircase, he held editorial meetings for the purpose of establishing a literary journal. For Sahl, Benjamin\u2019s stubborn commitment to the life of the mind\u2014his belief that humanism could counter crimes against humanity\u2014was its own kind of tragedy. \u201cNever,\u201d Sahl wrote, \u201chave I been so conscious of the painful failure of a method, which in sympathetic unworldly innocence thought it possible to \u2018change\u2019 reality, but which remained only an interpretation, limping behind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Benjamin was released, two and a half months later, he went back to Paris, renewed his reader\u2019s card for the Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale, and brushed off friends who urged him to escape to the United States; he insisted that he had to finish his second book, on the French poet Charles Baudelaire<\/a>. (It would \u201cnot suffer being neglected,\u201d he explained, \u201ceven to ensure the survival of its author.\u201d) After France fell to Hitler, in June, 1940, he made a desperate attempt to flee to Portugal, crossing the Pyrenees on foot despite severe asthma and a weak heart. He arrived in Spain only to find that he could not enter without an exit visa from the French government. That night, under arrest in a local hotel, he took an overdose of morphine tablets and died the next morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the circumstances of his death, Benjamin, who was raised in a mostly secular Jewish household, might easily be made a symbol of \u201cthe long and troubled history of German Jewry,\u201d Peter E. Gordon writes\u2014a cautionary tale of failed assimilation and bookish na\u00efvet\u00e9. But, in \u201cWalter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver<\/a>,\u201d a short, serene volume published in Yale University Press\u2019s Jewish Lives series, Gordon avoids treating his subject in such allegorical terms, in part because Benjamin always resisted conscription into a story larger than his own. Despite being a Marxist, he never joined the Communist Party, and, though he described himself as a person who \u201csees Jewish values everywhere and works for them,\u201d he consistently rejected political Zionism and its nation-building ambitions. He was, as Hannah Arendt put it in this magazine, in 1968, stubbornly \u201csui generis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Benjamin who emerges from Gordon\u2019s book is a sympathetic but often aggravating figure, the quintessential absent-minded professor who fumbles his romances, never works a real job, and, though he clearly recognizes the existential threat of Nazism, buries his head in his books as everything falls down around him. For all his apparent unworldliness, he was a stunningly prescient theorist of popular media, not to mention a prose stylist of exceptional beauty and vigor, whose name has attained a cult status on university campuses. (When I was in graduate school, a professor once asked a group of us doctoral students if we knew we were allowed to read things not written by Walter Benjamin.) Though he remained obscure in his own lifetime, those who knew his work recognized its power. On hearing of Benjamin\u2019s death, Bertolt Brecht reportedly declared it the first real loss Hitler had dealt to German literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walter Bendix Sch\u00f6nflies Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, the eldest of three children in an upper- middle-class family. His father, an art-and-antiques dealer, came from a long line of Rhineland merchants; his relatives on his mother\u2019s side had made their money in agriculture. Their house was in Berlin\u2019s Westend, not far from the Tiergarten, the large park that houses the Berlin Zoo. A frail child, Benjamin was predisposed toward a certain passivity. In his memoir, \u201cBerlin Childhood Around 1900<\/a>,\u201d he suggests that his chronic ill health was \u201cthe source of something in me that others call patience but in truth does not resemble a virtue at all: the inclination to see everything I care about approach me from a distance, the way the hours approached my sickbed.\u201d (Later, this tendency would make women seem, to the adult Benjamin, \u201call the more beautiful the longer and more confidently\u201d he had to wait for them.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many German teen-agers in the years before the First World War, Benjamin was influenced by a youth movement referred to as the Wandervogel, or \u201cwandering bird.\u201d As Gordon says, the Wandervogel was not a single organization but, rather, \u201ca broad spectrum of clubs and societies that flourished during the first decades of the twentieth century, uniting both young men and women with the promise of cultural and spiritual renewal.\u201d It was through the movement that Benjamin made some of his closest friends, including Gershom (n\u00e9 Gerhard) Scholem, who first spotted Benjamin debating members of the Jung Juda, a Zionist youth group, at a gathering at a caf\u00e9 in 1913. Scholem noted Benjamin\u2019s awkwardness\u2014\u201cHe delivered his absolutely letter-perfect speech with great intensity to an upper corner of the ceiling, at which he stared the whole time\u201d\u2014but also his brilliance. The speech was so impressive, Scholem admitted, that \u201cI do not recall the rejoinder made by the Zionists<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scholem, at the time a student of philosophy and mathematics, would become the first professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His friendship with Benjamin forms the through line of Gordon\u2019s biography, with good reason: their published correspondence comes to more than three hundred pages. Scholem was one of Benjamin\u2019s most significant interlocutors, a thinker who, in his own words, \u201cwalked the fine line between religion and nihilism.\u201d It was from Scholem that Benjamin absorbed the messianic strain that characterizes his political writing, fraught as it is with themes of apocalypse, divine violence, and unexpected but inevitable redemption. In the final paragraph of \u201cTheses on the Philosophy of History<\/a>\u201d\u2014an essay from 1940 that quotes Scholem\u2019s gloss on Paul Klee\u2019s painting \u201cAngelus Novus\u201d\u2014Benjamin observes that since Jews are prohibited by the Torah from fortune-telling and divination, they have a uniquely urgent relationship to the present. \u201cEvery second of time,\u201d he writes, is \u201cthe strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As close as they were, Scholem and Benjamin remained at odds over Scholem\u2019s enthusiasm for the Zionist project. After Scholem immigrated to Palestine, in the nineteen-twenties, he spent the next decade and a half urging Benjamin to follow suit, insisting that his friend attempt what he called \u201ca true confrontation with Judaism.\u201d Benjamin would entertain these plans at best vaguely, declaring his readiness to travel and then finding reasons to stay in Europe. Gordon chalks up this foot-dragging to Benjamin\u2019s dislike for programmatic thought, and to a corresponding desire for European Jews to adopt an internationalist orientation that might diffuse their contributions to thought and culture around the globe. But Benjamin also had serious objections to Zionism\u2019s \u201cracial ideology,\u201d which, he told Scholem, resembled \u201cvulgar anti-Semitism\u201d in its insistence that \u201cthe gentile\u2019s hatred of the Jew is physiologically substantiated on the basis of instinct and race\u201d\u2014that Jewishness, in other words, is a biological category superseding all kinds of national or political belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin\u2019s own intellectual disposition was expansively humanist while being rooted in the literary traditions of Germany and France. Between 1912 and 1919, he studied literature and philosophy at the Universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich before earning his Ph.D. from the University of Bern, in Switzerland. His doctoral dissertation was titled \u201cThe Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,\u201d and his postdoctoral thesis, a passport to an academic career, was on German Baroque theatre. \u201cThe Origin of German Tragic Drama<\/a>\u201d was presented to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 and rejected by its faculty that same year, on the ground that it was incomprehensible (more precisely, Benjamin was told to withdraw his submission). Shut out of a teaching job and cut off financially by his father, he found work translating Proust and began writing short pieces for journals and magazines. During the next decade, he would come to exemplify a new kind of criticism, aimed at an audience of literate laypeople and marked by the application of left-wing political thought to the analysis of both high and popular culture, from Marx to Mickey Mouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the late eighteenth century, few would think to write an essay unpacking the hidden meaning of a novel or painting, let alone suggest that works of art might have ideological agendas or biases. Art was good if it was well executed and managed to entertain without being coarse, immoral, or sacrilegious. As Benjamin argued in his dissertation, it was writers such as Friedrich Schlegel who, around 1800, first began to consider aesthetic objects as capacious and mercurial entities, whose true contents could be revealed only through sustained scrutiny. For them, an art work became a \u201cmedium of reflection,\u201d no longer simply a mirror of the world but a tool for understanding things about history, society, and politics, as well as about more familiar matters of the human heart. As for criticism, it was both a means to discover what the art object had to say and an extension of the object itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although he aspired to be \u201cthe foremost critic of German literature,\u201d Benjamin\u2019s real talent was for grasping the richness and complexity of vernacular culture, not just the new media of photography and film but also the ephemera of consumer society. In 1928, he published \u201cOne-Way Street<\/a>,\u201d a collection of aphoristic meditations on objects such as gloves (\u201cAll disgust is originally disgust at touching\u201d) and numbered lists of epigrams (\u201cI. Books and harlots can be taken to bed. II. Books and harlots interweave time\u201d). Elliptical and fragmentary, \u201cOne-Way Street\u201d is, Benjamin said, an homage to the \u201cinconspicuous forms\u201d of urban life taken in by the fl\u00e2neur, the man who strolls aimlessly about a city covered with \u201cleaflets, brochures, articles, and placards,\u201d whose pithy, highly evocative, and sometimes surreal style Benjamin borrowed as his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From 1927 to 1933, he worked as a radio broadcaster, writing and recording programs for stations in Berlin and Frankfurt; in a little less than six years, he produced roughly ninety episodes on topics including robber bandits in old Germany, E. T. A. Hoffmann, children\u2019s toys, the Bastille, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, postage-stamp fraud, and dogs. No audio recordings survive, but transcripts reveal a playful sensibility and a fondness for sensuous detail, as when, in an episode on the market halls of Berlin, Benjamin describes their damp stone floors feeling \u201clike the cold and slippery bottom of the ocean.\u201d Although many of these broadcasts were aimed at children, it didn\u2019t stop Benjamin from lacing them with political content. In an episode on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, he compared the flood waters to those \u201craging elements of human cruelty\u201d represented by the Ku Klux Klan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That episode aired on March 23, 1932. Almost exactly one year later, forty-six days after Hitler seized power, Benjamin fled Germany for Paris, and travelled on to Ibiza, then an obscure and impoverished island, where he spent the next several months. Paris, he wrote to Scholem, had become inhospitable. \u201cThe Parisians are saying \u2018les \u00e9migr\u00e9s sont pires que les boches\u2019 \u201d\u2014the immigrants are worse than the Krauts\u2014\u201cand that should give you an accurate idea of the kind of society that awaits one there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin nonetheless did return to Paris, in October, 1933. There, he became newly close to Brecht, whom he had met years earlier in Berlin. It was under Brecht\u2019s influence, Gordon suggests, that Benjamin found himself drawn decisively toward Marxist thought, and to the belief that \u201cin a society riven by class conflict, art must be enlisted in the struggle for liberation.\u201d The proof is Benjamin\u2019s best-known piece of writing, an essay called \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction<\/a>\u201d (or, more pontifically, \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,\u201d a closer translation of its German title). Drafted around 1935 and revised several times before Benjamin\u2019s death, it is a monumental and dizzyingly prophetic analysis of the fate of art once it has become an infinitely replicable mass-media product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the advent of photography, if you wanted to see the \u201cMona Lisa,\u201d you had to go to a museum. Now the painting is everywhere\u2014or, rather, its image is. We find the \u201cMona Lisa\u201d in books, and on posters, T-shirts, and iPhone cases, and we can see it at any time by searching on Google. These copies bear no trace of what Benjamin terms the \u201caura\u201d of the original, a quasi-mystical quality that comes from being the only \u201cMona Lisa\u201d in the world. Meanwhile, as anyone who\u2019s pushed through crowds of tourists to catch a glimpse of the real \u201cMona Lisa\u201d will know, the painting itself seems to have lost much of what must once have been its overwhelming aesthetic power. We have simply seen it too many times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about film, an art form that is nothing but<\/em> reproduction, a \u201cseries of mountable episodes\u201d pieced together from a supply of interchangeable images? Unlike the \u201cMona Lisa,\u201d a movie exists wherever it\u2019s projected; it is not an object but a travelling circus of shadows and light. Film, Benjamin argues, has no aura at all, and therefore represents a total \u201cliquidation\u201d of traditional notions of cultural value. As it dismantles old ideas about what art is, it creates a new kind of spectator: someone who encounters the work of art collectively, in a theatre with others, and who pays a more slack, casual attention to it than he would to a Renaissance painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We watch movies in a state of distraction: spacing out, getting up to use the bathroom, and, now, checking our phones. For Benjamin, this dreamy, inattentive attitude is full of political promise, for if we can be emancipated from a servile, awestruck relation to works of art, perhaps we can also be emancipated from a servile, awestruck relation to the state. It was a daring, perhaps even difficult, conclusion for Benjamin, an inveterate collector of old and precious objects, to draw\u2014that believing in progress meant submitting to the destruction of the past, of its cherished relics and ways of seeing. And yet, as he saw it, being a leftist all but required this paradoxical relationship to historical preservation and change. The alternative to the left making use of the medium was unthinkable: the inherent populism of film, with its accessibility, affordability, and mainstream appeal, would lead to its co- option by fascists. There were signs, as Benjamin was writing, that this had already occurred. The same year that he began his essay, Leni Riefenstahl\u2019s \u201cTriumph of the Will\u201d premi\u00e8red at Berlin\u2019s Ufa-Palast am Zoo, a movie theatre not far from Benjamin\u2019s childhood home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fascism excels at turning popular culture to its own ends, and at getting humanity to view \u201cits own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.\u201d The response, Benjamin says, is to politicize art\u2014to make work that trains its audience to think critically about social life. This requires developing aesthetic techniques capable of translating complex ideas into images, sounds, gestures, and narrative and poetic forms; it also requires making art that draws attention to its own artifice, so that we are always conscious of the real world outside. \u201cOne-Way Street,\u201d with its clipped, cryptic, strangely juxtaposed chapters, is one of Benjamin\u2019s early attempts to adopt montage\u2014the practice of editing disparate film images into a single sequence\u2014as a literary style. His unfinished masterpiece, \u201cDas Passagen-Werk,\u201d or, in English, \u201cThe Arcades Project<\/a>,\u201d was meant to perfect the method.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Arcades Project,\u201d a lavish, not terribly well-organized collection of notes, quotations, personal reflections, and theoretical musings compiled over thirteen years, is Benjamin\u2019s dossier of research into the shopping arcades of Paris, built primarily in the first part of the nineteenth century and largely demolished during Georges-Eug\u00e8ne Haussmann\u2019s radical restructuring of the city, between 1853 and 1870. Benjamin was fascinated by these covered passages, remnants of the early days of modern commodity culture, when the arcade felt like \u201ca world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.\u201d In the obsolete advertisements that used to line the walls of the arcades, in their promises of beautiful clothes, perfect hair, magical toys, state-of-the-art buildings, technological innovations, holidays in exotic locales, and medicines to cure everything, he saw traces of the \u201ccollective dream energy\u201d of society, of our human longing for a utopian future lying just beyond this difficult present. The montage of prose fragments that makes up \u201cThe Arcades Project\u201d is designed to conjure an image of that future, to be the form \u201cwherein what has been\u201d\u2014in German das Gewesene<\/em>, or \u201cthat which once was\u201d\u2014\u201ccomes together in a flash with the now [das Jetzt<\/em>] to form a constellation\u201d showing what might yet be. It\u2019s not entirely clear how this was meant to happen, but the sheer amplitude of the manuscript, which comes to more than a thousand pages, implies that Benjamin\u2019s insistent rush of words and thoughts might propel us into a kind of visionary state, much like the one he entered when he wandered the streets of Paris or pored over his collections of keepsakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Benjamin walked over the Pyrenees, stumbling and wheezing, he carried with him a large briefcase said to contain a manuscript. There has long been speculation that the pages were a new, perhaps more complete version of \u201cThe Arcades Project,\u201d but no one knows for sure: the briefcase disappeared after Benjamin\u2019s death, and no significant work has ever been found. His companions, though, remembered it well. Lisa Fittko, who guided Benjamin to the Spanish border, later recalled that he would under no circumstances \u201clet himself be parted from his ballast,\u201d and so, \u201cfor better or worse, we had to drag that monstrosity over the mountains.\u201d \u201cIt is more important than I am,\u201d Benjamin told Fittko, \u201cmore important than myself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arendt ruefully described Benjamin, her old friend from Berlin, as having \u201ca sleepwalker\u2019s precision,\u201d ever bumbling into trouble and misfortune. It was, she suggests, just like him to achieve fame only posthumously, when it would be both \u201cuncommercial and unprofitable.\u201d It was also like him to embody the sort of tragic idealism that would lead a person, physically weak and on the run from a genocidal regime, to risk his safety and comfort for a manuscript. And yet, it is this very combination of stubbornness and fragility, melancholy and valor that has turned Benjamin into a secular saint, enhancing his reputation no less than his vast and beautifully heterogeneous body of work, which is itself its own Parisian arcade, bearing up with elegance under ruin and despair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is no document of civilization,\u201d Benjamin wrote in \u201cTheses on the Philosophy of History,\u201d \u201cwhich is not at the same time a document of barbarism.\u201d Every masterpiece is part of human history, and there has never been a moment in human history when people were not suffering terribly, needlessly. Benjamin knew this when he refused to leave Paris without finishing his book, and he knew it when he carried his briefcase over the Pyrenees\u2014when he was too weak to walk and had to be dragged by his companions, who took turns holding the bag. He seemed to believe, all the same, that to abandon his work meant giving in to what fascism wanted for him: an existence so devoid of value and meaning that it would be indistinguishable from death. He held on to his briefcase not until it was too late but because it was too late. When the barbarians are past the gate, there is nothing to do but stand your ground. \u2666<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published in the print edition of the March 2, 2026<\/a>, issue, with the headline \u201cThe Original.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anahid Nersessian<\/a>, a former poetry editor of Granta, is the author of \u201c<\/em>Keats\u2019s Odes: A Lover\u2019s Discourse<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back to News A new biography of the Berlin-born philosopher emphasizes his combination of stubborn unworldliness and startling prescience. By Anahid Nersessian March 2, 2026 In \u201cWalter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver,\u201d Peter E. Gordon avoids treating his subject in allegorical terms, in part because Benjamin always resisted conscription into a story larger than his own.Photograph by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17851"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17851"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17857,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17851\/revisions\/17857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}