Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver

by Peter E. Gordon

Genres: Biography

224 pages, Hardcover

Published February 24, 2026

About the author

aka Peter Eli Gordon

Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History, Faculty Affilitate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He works chiefly on themes in Continental philosophy and social thought in Germany and France in the late-modern era, with an emphasis on critical theory, Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, and existentialism. Primarily a scholar of modern European social theory, he has published major works on Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, and Theodor W. Adorno.

Reviews

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hannah Arendt once described Walter Benjamin – among the twentieth-century’s greatest literary and cultural theorists – as a pearl diver. He carried around “little notebooks with black covers” into which he “tirelessly” recorded “in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of ‘pearls’ and ‘coral’” (14). It is this characterization that Peter Gordon chose as the subtitle for his novella-esque biography of Benjamin (1892-1940). On more than one occasion, though, Gordon also compares Benjamin to an otter diving into a cistern – a reference to his childhood fascination with an otter that lived in an artificial grotto inside the Berlin zoo, the “Tiergarten.” Benjamin recalled waiting and waiting to catch sight of the reclusive otter: “If I finally succeeded it was certainly just for an instant, for in the blink of an eye the glistening inmate of the cistern would disappear once more into the wet night” (13).

Gordon has convinced me that both of these metaphors capture something essential about Benjamin. “He loved to hide” (9, 149 ). He was “by habit a collector” (14). But Benjamin was more than a pearl diver and an otter-lover. Humans generally agree that pearls are precious - so much so that not to appreciate one renders a person, idiomatically, a swine. And have you ever met anyone who doesn't enjoy watching otters play? But Benjamin could do more than collect the beautiful. Towards the end of the book, Gordon quotes a passage from Benjamin’s Paris essay in which Benjamin appears to be describing himself as much as his ostensible subject, the ragpicker featured in Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal: “Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously, he collects, like a miner guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.” (133) Collecting refuse may or may not be similar to diving for pearls, I suppose, depending on what you think about the choices made by those who enjoy so much of the “bric-a-brac of abundance” (I forgot to note the page number for this lovely phrase) that they are continuously discarding excess.

Peter Gordon is a professor of history at Harvard, but his true love is philosophy. Readers who share that predilection will get even more from his discussions of Benjamin’s work than I did. I’m not philosophically inclined. I was most especially drawn to Benjamin’s reflections on language, literature, art. Language “means nothing less than the expressive web by which the world gains its intelligibility” (46) - and from there it’s only a hop skip and a jump to the necessity of translation. If literature is “a promise for meaning that overflows all languages and limits,” then a translator “is like a secular prophet: he has the duty to free that meaning from its provincial boundaries and dispatch its gospel to all corners of the earth.” (81) I was delighted to learn that when Benjamin wanted to learn English to prepare for a possible emigration to the US, he practiced by reading William Faulkner’s Light in August.

More humbling for me was Benjamin’s distinction between criticism and commentary (and his utter disdain for the latter). “Critique seeks the truth content of a work of art” (68). “One does not criticize an artwork from a perspective that is exotic to the work itself; on the contrary, criticism is nothing but the artwork’s self-realization.” (54) As Gordon explains, with this approach Benjamin elevates “the critic to a position that is nearly equal in authority to the artwork itself” (54) Literary (or, by extension, art) “criticism is no longer a subjective practice added after the fact to the aesthetic material: it is the objective unfolding of what is already at hand.” (55) In Benjamin’s own words: “The critic does not pass judgement on the work; rather, art itself passes judgement.” (55) I had to read sheepishly, after a year of writing little reviews on GR that peddle in historical descriptions and offer spurious comparisons, Benjamin’s declaration that “‘The function of great criticism is not, as is often thought, to instruct by means of historical descriptions or to educate through comparisons.’ The purpose of criticism is ‘to cognize by immersing itself in the object.’” The critic’s task is “‘to account for the truth of works, a task just as essential for literature as for philosophy.’” (64) Maybe next year.

This book appears in the Jewish Lives series, published by Yale University Press, but it is not only for that reason that Gordon has to contend with Benjamin’s complex relationship with his Jewishness. He grew up in a largely secular household in Berlin, but there was no part of his life where his Jewish heritage did not matter to someone, even if it’s not clear how eager he was to admit it mattered to him. Gordon suggests that he possibly viewed Judaism “not as a faith or devotional practice but as a conceptual inheritance” (47) but warns his readers that “No individual is a mere exemplar of the social whole” (20). Benjamin cannot be reduced to his ancestry. Nor can it be, even for a moment, entirely irrelevant. Benjamin once wrote that “My work is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain.” Gordon comments: “The analogy is curious” (18) and then goes on to conclude that “Even if [Benjamin] was seldom preoccupied with explicitly Jewish themes, his thinking was like an ink blotter that had absorbed the ink of his tribe.” (20)

Benjamin was given many chances to act on (act out?) his Jewishness. One of his closest and most abiding friends, Gershom Scholem, did everything in his power to convince Benjamin to learn Hebrew and move to Palestine. And although Benjamin seems to have strung him along a bit, holding out the possibility that he would indeed go, he couldn’t quite stop being German, he couldn’t quite give up on Paris. Gordon quotes an article by a young journalist named Moritz Goldstein, he wrote in 1912 that “We Jews manage the intellectual property of a people that denies us the right and the ability to do so.’” (32) But for Benjamin, the separation of the Jewish and the German was not so definitive. When I read the quotation “If we are two-sided, Jewish and German, we have indeed until now oriented ourselves with all of our affirmation toward the German side; in our productivity and in our life the Jewish aspect was, perhaps, often only a foreign land, a southern (or worse, sentimental) aroma” (33), I couldn’t help but think of the opening line of Goethe’s poem, “Mignon”: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn…”. Do you know the land, where the lemons blossom? That, to me, is the consummate German longing for “southern aroma,” the lands of the Mediterranean that Hans Castorp "remembered" although he had never, ever been there.

But Benjamin did not have the option of deciding not to be Jewish (not that he wished to). He might have insisted on the importance of transcending national boundaries, but he could not make them disappear. “Benjamin was first and foremost an intellectual, a literary and cultural theorist whose mind ranged freely across a broad terrain, seldom stopping to ask himself whether he had the requisite papers of transit for other lands.” (161) And yet having, or not having the “requisite papers” shaped his life and his death. “Everywhere one looked, it seemed, Jews were unwelcome.” (138) His German citizenship was denied; he had no papers in France; he couldn’t get permission to go to the United States; by the time he was ready to consider Palestine that option, too, was closed off to him. He was turned away from university, his articles were rejected by the very colleagues who claimed to admire him most. He struggled to make ends meet. He once wrote to Sylvia Beach, the founder of Shakespeare and Company, to ask only for “a bar of chocolate or some cigarettes.” (147) As war loomed, he found himself in an internment camp in France, where he was considered a German even though he had already become stateless, stripped of German citizenship. He and a friend “stood at the barbed wire fence and observed the sheep that were grazing in peace on the other side, wholly oblivious to the world at war.” (147)

Catastrophe hangs over Benjamin’s life and over his times. Even before the rise of Hitler and the war that ravaged Europe, Benjamin and his interlocutors could sense it.“Capitalism is entirely without precedent. It is a religion which offers not the reform of existence, but its complete destruction.” (59) In a copy of German Men and Women (Deutsche Menschen) that he sent to a dear friend, Benjamin wrote this inscription: “Gerhard, you may find a chamber for the memories of your youth in this ark I built, when the fascist deluge began to rise. January 1937 Walter.” (95)

Benjamin seems to have been loved by many people. His sister offered him a place to stay. The very same men who rejected his articles promised to support him. His ex-wife begged him to join her in the UK. His best friend invited him over and over again to Palestine. And yet he often faced this catastrophe alone. Sometimes, reading this little book, it seemed like his closest companion was a monotype he bought from his friend Paul Klee, “Angelus Novus,” created in 1920. The angel, Benjamin wrote, turned his face towards the past and sees “one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. … A storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.” (150-151) Benjamin connects his beloved painting to his beloved poet, Baudelaire, whom he quotes, “I am like a weary man whose eye, looking backward into the depth of the years, sees only disillusion and bitterness, and looking ahead sees only a storm which contains nothing new, neither instruction nor pain” (142).

Benjamin had purchased Paul Klee’s monoprint “Angelus Novus” from Klee in or around 1920 and carried it around with him for his entire adult life. It was simultaneously a kind of “alter ego,” in Gordon’s words, and also a nest egg: “This picture being the sole object of importance and feasible for sale that remains to me. … It’s precisely the Klee on which I’ve always relied for the moment when I would be able to reach America.” (154) He left it behind in Paris, entrusted to a friend, who later sent it to Scholem in Jerusalem, where it has remained ever since.


Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Image courtesy of imgur.com

In A Woman's Story, Annie Ernaux comments on the primary importance of finding the right order of things. That theme is powerfully resonant here. Gordon, like Ernaux in this, chooses not to follow the standard chronology of biographies. He starts his story with Benjamin’s death: “A certain fashion in existential philosophy would tell us that death stands as the singular truth of the human being. But this is little more than a hollow cliché. No life is defined by its death. Nor can the achievements of an entire people be summarized by the story of its suffering or defeat. The life of Benjamin should be told in such a way that what we know of his end does not subtract from our esteem for what he accomplished. So let us now leave the ending aside and begin anew” (8). From there, we begin to follow his life.

Gordon quotes Nietzsche’s observation that: “ the individual can experience himself only at the end of his wandering” (26) – but that is not how Gordon “experiences” Benjamin, nor how he invites us to. “No individual’s life is defined by its end.” To honor this, Gordon turned the end of Benjamin’s life into the prologue of his story. He then ends the book not with Benjamin’s death, but with a moment when, trudging across the Pyrenees by foot, suffering from myocarditis – literally an inflammation of the heart – and thus struggling to breathe, he saw before and below him the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean, “flashing in the sun like the promise of freedom.” (156)
This is a powerful gesture. It simultaneously honors the contingency to which academic historians are so wedded: “at any moment even the smallest change might have turned one’s life in a direction one may never have anticipated” (157) and transports Benjamin to Mann’s Magic Mountain, where Hans Castorp, in the snow, sees in a dream how “the glistening curtain of rain fell away – and there lay the sea, a sea, the Mediterranean, deep deep blue, sparkling with silver, a marvelously beautiful bay … Oh, oh, enough, all so undeserved – what a bliss of light, of deep pure sky, of sun-drenched water” (The Magic Mountain, 481). Without wanting to spoil the great irony of Benjamin’s fate to those who aren’t familiar with it, I’ll just say that the sense of how easily everything might have been different is particularly powerful when considering the last days of his life.

And finally, one more quotation, not from Benjamin, but from Gordon himself, who writes with a beauty that builds and builds: “Works of the past offer more riches than the past can control. This is no less true of an individual life.”