Arturo Galansino is the director of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence© Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio

Walter Benjamin, Voltaire and Mozart: art historian Arturo Galansino on his cultural influences

The director of Florence's Palazzo Strozzi tells us about his favourite books, artists and why he likes RAI TV

24 DECEMBER 2020

Brief History of a Project by Walter Benjamin

Marina Montanelli, University of Florence

January 12, 2021

If I might use one image to express what I am planning, it is to show Baudelaire as he is embedded in the nineteenth century. The impression he left behind there must emerge as clearly untouched as that of a stone that one day is rolled away from the spot on which it has rested for decades.

President of the Moon Committee / Walter Benjamin’s radio years.

Walter Benjamin

President of the Moon Committee

Walter Benjamin’s radio years.

Peter E. Gordon
August 8, 2023

No audio recordings of Walter Benjamin have survived. His voice was once described as beautiful, even melodious—just the sort of voice that would have been suitable for the new medium of radio broadcasting that spread across Germany in the 1920s. If one could pay the fee for a wireless receiver, Benjamin could be heard in the late afternoons or early evenings, often during what was called “Youth Hour.” His topics ranged widely, from a brass works outside Berlin to a fish market in Naples. In one broadcast, he lavished his attention on an antiquarian bookstore with aisles like labyrinths, whose walls were adorned with drawings of enchanted forests and castles. For others, he related “True Dog Stories” or perplexed his young listeners with brain teasers and riddles. He also wrote, and even acted in, a variety of radio plays that satirized the history of German literature or plunged into surrealist fantasy. One such play introduced a lunar creature named Labu who bore the august title “President of the Moon Committee for Earth Research.”

Walter Benjamin by Michael Löwy

Walter Benjamin

Michael Löwy
Platypus Review 5
May-July 2008

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Walter Benjamin occupies a unique place in the history of modern revolutionary thought: he is the first Marxist to break radically with the ideology of progress. His thinking has therefore a distinct critical quality, which sets him apart from the dominant and “official” forms of historical materialism, and gives him a formidable methodological superiority.

My hero / Walter Benjamin by Elif Shafak

 

Walter Benjamin by Mathieu Laca

My hero: Walter Benjamin by Elif Shafak

'One doesn't read him to feel better – one reads him to feel'

Elif Shafak

Friday 27 April 2012

Iwas a student in college when I first starting reading Walter Benjamin. Literary critic, philosopher, essayist, he was a man of words. As a German Jew he had been born in turbulent times, at the end of the 19th century, and in the most dangerous of places, Berlin.

Walter Benjamin in Ibiza

ARTS & CULTURE

Walter Benjamin in Ibiza

By Frédéric Pajak

March 20, 2019

When Hitler came to power, Walter Benjamin did not immediately realize what the dictatorship had in store. Like many intellectuals, he counted on an early collapse of the regime. To begin with, he seemed almost serene in the face of events. But events picked up speed, and, even though it was hard to obtain reliable news, by March 1933 it was apparent to him that “there can be no doubt that in very many instances people have been dragged from their beds in the night and beaten or murdered.”

Walter Benjamin

Recalling The Past: The Intimate Objects Of Childhood

Jeffrey Lewis

May 28, 20126:00 AM ET

Some authors have snob appeal.

Like many people, I long wanted to read, or at least be able to say that I had read, Walter Benjamin, widely acclaimed as one of the geniuses of 20th century literature. But I was daunted by the fact that his most celebrated work, The Arcades Project, is difficult, long and surrounded by dense clouds of academia, mystifying would-be readers in Europe and America.

I became un-daunted, and un-snobbed, when I discovered his Berlin Childhood around 1900.

It's short — no more than 130 pages. Its prose is as direct as it is beautiful and precise; and it is about a subject so intimate and universal that I immediately felt welcomed into it.

In fact, I felt embraced by it, almost as if it were my own childhood. The book consists of 46 very short chapters, each organized around something — a sewing box, a new telephone in the house, a carousel, the otter in the zoo — to which in Benjamin's childhood whole universes of emotions, associations, bits of lore, and a child's understandings and misunderstand-ings, adhered.

In the mid-1930s, when he wrote the book, Benjamin was a man on the run from the Nazis, a man in exile, knowing he would probably never see Berlin again. He wrote, as he said, to inoculate himself against a debilitating homesickness.

Benjamin's was a middle class, city childhood, and so finely is it observed that I found myself not only recalling events from my own upbringing, but inhabiting those memories, becoming for a few minutes a child again. Take the thimble from his mother's sewing box. "Held up to the light," he writes, "it glowed at the end of its shadowy hollow, where our index finger was at home. For we loved to seize the little diadem, which in secret could crown us."

Just as his mother's thimble turned Benjamin into a prince, I could immediately recall the power window buttons in my father's car, with their chrome efficiency turning me into a mighty engineer, grandly commanding the windows to leap up and down. I learned from Benjamin how to remember my own childhood, and how to see that it as still a part of me. Benjamin, on the run for his life, took his past along with him. It was how he could triumph over nostalgia.

Berlin Childhood around 1900 is perhaps an even more important book today than when it was written. It's possible now to live in a kind of exile from our childhoods. The ever-multiplying ubiquity of photographs and film tempts us more than ever to believe that the images on our screens and in our albums are full and accurate evocations of what we were.

I see a photo of myself when I was 9 and conclude that I always frowned and always wore a plaid shirt and there was nothing invisible about me. I forget to truly remember. I neglect it. I have this photograph instead.

And so both my past and my present are diminished. What a loss. But what a gain, to read Benjamin's short book. You must read this.

NPR

Walter Benjamin / Berlin Chilidhood around 1900

Walter Benjamin

BERLIN CHILHOOD AROUND 1900

Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin’s lifetime, one of his “large-scale defeats.” Now translated into English for the first time in book form, on the basis of the recently discovered “final version” that contains the author’s own arrangement of a suite of luminous vignettes, it can be more widely appreciated as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century prose writing.

Walter Benjamin who was more than a bit curious about the effects of “mechanical reproduction” on the quality of art as the mid-twentieth century approached. One can only imagine what he would have made of digital reproduction.

The Curious Case of Walter Benjamin (or where is art headed in the 21st century?)

Nicholas Petroni
May 19, 2018

What will art look like at the end of the 21st century?

Suppositions about the future of art seem to have generally stemmed from presuppositions about the interaction between the present and the shifting nature of art. Walter Benjamin, writing as the world struggled to emerge from the Great Depression could not possibly have known that capitalism would emerge from the worldwide economic wreckage, different, somewhat restrained (at least for a time), but more firmly entrenched in the West than ever before. Similarly, Benjamin could not have imagined the ubiquity of for-profit creative endeavors in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Walter Benjamin / The Philosopher Stoned

Walter Benjamin

The Philosopher Stoned

What drugs taught Walter Benjamin

By Adam Kirsch

August 14, 2006

On December 18, 1927, at three-thirty in the morning, Walter Benjamin began writing a memorandum titled “Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish.” It is characteristic of Benjamin that the first fact he thought it necessary to record was not the time he had taken the drug but the time he started writing about it. Like the books he read and the streets he wandered—like life itself—hashish was important to him less for its own sake than as a subject for interpretation.

For Benjamin, the whole world was material for criticism.Illustration by Ralph Steadman

For a writer with Benjamin’s interests and allegiances, a rendezvous with hashish was inevitable. The surprising thing is that it took him until the age of thirty-five to try it. As early as 1919, he had been fascinated by Baudelaire’s “Artificial Paradises,” in which the poet issues warnings against the drug so seductive that they sound like invitations: “You know that hashish always evokes magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions, cascades of liquid gold.” Benjamin, who regarded Baudelaire as one of the central writers of the nineteenth century, admired the book’s “childlike innocence and purity,” but was disappointed in its lack of philosophical rigor, noting, “It will be necessary to repeat this attempt independently.” The notes from his first hashish trance show him holding deliberately aloof from any kind of rapture. “The gates to a world of grotesquerie seem to be opening,” he wrote. “Only, I don’t wish to enter.” According to Jean Selz, a friend with whom Benjamin smoked opium on several occasions, “Benjamin was a smoker who refused the initial blandishments of the smoke. He didn’t want to yield to it too readily, for fear of weakening his powers of observation.”