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Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs
An absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin’s personal manuscripts, images, and documents The work of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is an audacious plotting of history, art, and thought; a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps, and fragments of everyday life, art, and dreams. Throughout his life, Benjamin gathered together all kinds of artifacts, assortments of images, texts, and signs, themselves representing experiences, ideas, and hopes, each of which was enthusiastically logged, systematized, and analyzed by their author. In this way, Benjamin laid the groundwork for the salvaging of his own legacy. Intricate and intimate, Walter Benjamin’s Archive leads readers to the heart of his intellectual world, yielding a rich and detailed portrait of its author.
322 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 17, 2007
35 people are currently reading
564 people want to read
About the author
Walter Benjamin
835 books2,026 followersWalter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Charles Baudelaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Nikolai Leskov, Marcel Proust, Robert Walser, Trauerspiel and translation theory. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological, though he eschewed all recourse to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority.
In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.
Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Charles Baudelaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Nikolai Leskov, Marcel Proust, Robert Walser, Trauerspiel and translation theory. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological, though he eschewed all recourse to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority.
In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
July 3, 2018
A glimpse into the mind of Walter Benjamin, one of those who lost everything to the cultural holocaust of WWII. What is contained in this book is most of what survived. The book contains coloured photos of all sorts of things, notebook pages, postcards, receipts etc. Anything that Benjamin made notes on or planned an essay or a article. This is an extremely well presented book. The translations are good, and the photos include the original German text in Benjamin's minuscule handwriting. Fabulous!
September 15, 2010
I had to read this for an assignment in my first Archives class. I found the artifacts completely absorbing. However, it did not help that I had no idea who Walter Benjamin was when I first began the book; however, I learned about this man in a different context. The pieces he chose to save in his life were fantastic -- I particularly loved the words his son invented.
Recommended to anyone who is invested in Archives.
Recommended to anyone who is invested in Archives.
July 31, 2017
I found this work to be absolutely fascinating. It gives us brief look into the architecture, structure, and method of Benjamin's writing, thinking, and mind. I thoroughly enjoyed this text. Plus, it had pictures; and I love books with pictures!
September 17, 2008
amazing and beautiful.
I really enjoy the documented turns of phrases, first words, and sentences of Steffen, Walter's son. So endearing and entertaining.
I really enjoy the documented turns of phrases, first words, and sentences of Steffen, Walter's son. So endearing and entertaining.
February 3, 2020
I read this as part of a university reading list for a class on life writing and archives. It is not a book I would otherwise have sought out so my review should be considered in that light.
Furthermore, the version I had was the translation into English by Esther Leslie. Given that much of Benjamin's thoughts and observations depended on linguistic wordplay, translation presents an additional complication in keeping the writing and the meaning accessible. This is particularly so with the section on Benjamin's riddles and Brainteasers where one admires the solution but knows one could never have guessed at it. However, I am tempted to try some of them on German speaking friends!
It appears that Benjamin was something of a self-archivist, collecting, organising and disseminating his writings to ensure all was preserved for posterity. However, the intervention of the Nazi rise to power in his native Germany and then the second world war and Benjamin's abortive flight to Spain all compromised the collection somewhat. Nonetheless there is a wealth of materiele for the archivists to draw on, collate and organise into 13 chapters and they provide some thematic order to presentation of Benjamin's wide ranging recorded thoughts.
I knew nothing of Walter Benjamin before picking up this book. However, catching glimpses of the life he led between the recorded notes, scraps and pictures, made me curious enough to look up his bio on Wikipedia.
Which is itself a paradox, for Benjamin's entire archive is physical, hard copy - which makes a strange contrast with the vast electronic records that all of us create with each passing moment in a modern technological age. One of Benjamin's most celebrated essays was on the degree to which ease of replication/mass production of works and images might affect the "aura" of the original artwork from which it was derived. What would he have made of the endlessly replicated and unattributed memes and images that are so much a part of our modern life? Not much I guess is the answer.
The archive is not an easy read, though that is perhaps just the nature of archives. Certainly I found myself growing more comfortable with the structure and the distinctions between the archivists reflections and annotations alongside Benjamin's original writing. I found some of the latter challenging, but Benjamin was a gifted writer with a turn of phrase that would have stood him in good stead in fictional writing. This shows up in the letters and asides to colleagues where he is perhaps not quite so driven by academic rigour. Eg describing a winter road on the point of thawing "...with its gleam of snow and mud." Or when exhausted by his friend's tales noting "I am often too tired to listen with both ears." Or when, in tracking down the original town wall he had seen in a postcard image (itself a short but funny story well told), he finally finds it "There in the moonlight, near and unmistakable, stood the wall. whose image had accompanied me for days, and in its custody was the town, to which we were returning home." - I just like that idea of a town in the custody of its walls - again, fair play to the translator.
There is also a very long section devoted to Benjamin's collation of his young son's utterances. Here the archive displays the eternal pride of the new parent in their first born, every magic moment to be recorded as the child's day brings fresh epiphanies for child and parent in viewing familiar concepts from unfamiliar perspectives. It is perhaps ironic that the child's first word was "quiet" - a small boy understanding that his father needed to work undisturbed.
There is also the word confusion that children often have and which the translate does well to convey when the boy describes condensed milk as "White Jam." or tells the adults "Don't expectorate so much from me."
I found quite a few little nuggets that appealed to me, such as Benjamin's observations on the creation of good prose. "Work on good prose has three steps: a musical phase where it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven." Which, in its complex and almost contradictory notions of what prose was, put me in mind of the deconstructions of the human body that you see in encyclopedia anatomy books: skin overlaid on musculature, supported by a skeleton.
With something of a mathematical background I also liked the reference to ellipses as a fundamental model for considering a work because ellipses have two foci and locus of any prose is constrained and shaped by both foci. And that is perhaps a suitable point to close a review on the multi-faceted archive of a multi-focused man. Not an easy read, but an interesting one.
Furthermore, the version I had was the translation into English by Esther Leslie. Given that much of Benjamin's thoughts and observations depended on linguistic wordplay, translation presents an additional complication in keeping the writing and the meaning accessible. This is particularly so with the section on Benjamin's riddles and Brainteasers where one admires the solution but knows one could never have guessed at it. However, I am tempted to try some of them on German speaking friends!
It appears that Benjamin was something of a self-archivist, collecting, organising and disseminating his writings to ensure all was preserved for posterity. However, the intervention of the Nazi rise to power in his native Germany and then the second world war and Benjamin's abortive flight to Spain all compromised the collection somewhat. Nonetheless there is a wealth of materiele for the archivists to draw on, collate and organise into 13 chapters and they provide some thematic order to presentation of Benjamin's wide ranging recorded thoughts.
I knew nothing of Walter Benjamin before picking up this book. However, catching glimpses of the life he led between the recorded notes, scraps and pictures, made me curious enough to look up his bio on Wikipedia.
Which is itself a paradox, for Benjamin's entire archive is physical, hard copy - which makes a strange contrast with the vast electronic records that all of us create with each passing moment in a modern technological age. One of Benjamin's most celebrated essays was on the degree to which ease of replication/mass production of works and images might affect the "aura" of the original artwork from which it was derived. What would he have made of the endlessly replicated and unattributed memes and images that are so much a part of our modern life? Not much I guess is the answer.
The archive is not an easy read, though that is perhaps just the nature of archives. Certainly I found myself growing more comfortable with the structure and the distinctions between the archivists reflections and annotations alongside Benjamin's original writing. I found some of the latter challenging, but Benjamin was a gifted writer with a turn of phrase that would have stood him in good stead in fictional writing. This shows up in the letters and asides to colleagues where he is perhaps not quite so driven by academic rigour. Eg describing a winter road on the point of thawing "...with its gleam of snow and mud." Or when exhausted by his friend's tales noting "I am often too tired to listen with both ears." Or when, in tracking down the original town wall he had seen in a postcard image (itself a short but funny story well told), he finally finds it "There in the moonlight, near and unmistakable, stood the wall. whose image had accompanied me for days, and in its custody was the town, to which we were returning home." - I just like that idea of a town in the custody of its walls - again, fair play to the translator.
There is also a very long section devoted to Benjamin's collation of his young son's utterances. Here the archive displays the eternal pride of the new parent in their first born, every magic moment to be recorded as the child's day brings fresh epiphanies for child and parent in viewing familiar concepts from unfamiliar perspectives. It is perhaps ironic that the child's first word was "quiet" - a small boy understanding that his father needed to work undisturbed.
There is also the word confusion that children often have and which the translate does well to convey when the boy describes condensed milk as "White Jam." or tells the adults "Don't expectorate so much from me."
I found quite a few little nuggets that appealed to me, such as Benjamin's observations on the creation of good prose. "Work on good prose has three steps: a musical phase where it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven." Which, in its complex and almost contradictory notions of what prose was, put me in mind of the deconstructions of the human body that you see in encyclopedia anatomy books: skin overlaid on musculature, supported by a skeleton.
With something of a mathematical background I also liked the reference to ellipses as a fundamental model for considering a work because ellipses have two foci and locus of any prose is constrained and shaped by both foci. And that is perhaps a suitable point to close a review on the multi-faceted archive of a multi-focused man. Not an easy read, but an interesting one.
January 2, 2021
This book is pretty fascinating and gives a great insight into Benjamin's way of working and being. I don't think anything in it is that surprising if you've read his writings though so better to start there obviously.
Next part is not a review, just some random notes (but to be fair, so is the book/archive):
A) Benjamin kept a list of everything he read. I'd already decided to try and do that for this year via here but maybe it would have inspired me if I hadn't. By 1939 it numbered up to 1712. Between 1917 and 1939, 1250 items so about 57 a year and just over one a week. So reading a book a week is officially a Benjamin level of respectable reading.
I didn't realise he wrote on education so will search those out. The free school community from May 1911, two part Teaching and evaluation may-july 1913, school reform, a cultural movement 1912, moral education 1913, aims and methods of the student pedagogic groups at the universities if the German Reich, 1914, erotic education 1914.
"Types of knowledge...
III Teachable knowledge
Its most significant form of appearance is banality"
Peasant basis of toy manufacture. Primitive forms and for the child, the appeal of being able to see the total construction and imagine how it was made. The toys M has are not like that so should I make some/find some.The knitted monkey I am making is half like that.
'The gift of perceiving similarities is, in fact, nothing but a weak remnant of the old compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically.'
Copying/similar seems earliest. When I moved my fingers in a wave motion, M tried to copy from around 3 months. But seeing difference sometimes seems easier than seeing similarity, eg in disproportionately scaled images or mathematics more generally. But maybe the generalisation that arises from difference is just more noticeable. Difference is more conscious because similar is more primitive/natural?
Benjamin collated the linguistic expressions etc of his son Stefan from 1918-32. Also early terms of endearment. So far for M: Bubbles/Bubbs, Mupito, Mouse, Maister. I'd always intended to record M's language use to study the development of consciousness, I think originally inspired by some of John Holt's work. She's not just a science experiment though. Piaget obviously did this most systematically, or at least his wife did, people think. Yet he came up with an essential wrong analysis based on that so there's no guarantees in the empirical.
On going to sleep Benjamin's kid says 'what should I dream?'
B) Connected thoughts re proportion while reading:
Lesson from Benjamin: Be a collector?
Models of proportion:: Visual sense; Elastic; Bar; Ratio table; Double number line; a/b = c/d; Straight line graph
Examples that develop model
Practice through variation and comparison
Comparing models
Practical consciousness
Embedded in practice
Recognition that a person further away is the same person, something in the distance is the same thing. Part of this relies on proportion?
RME- young children can recognise when images are changed to not be in proportion, computer scaling different in x y axes via stretching (not numerical), circus mirrors.
Numerical, semi-conceptual, tool based
Scaling up/down recipes (doesn't work with baking/oven times). Scaling images using numbers. Looking up tables for conversions.
Model based
Conceptual
The history of the development of practical consciousness and mathematical thought related to proportion
Similarity and difference in:
Same units/different units
Grouping and sharing
Common sense/metaphor uses of proportion
Proportionate
Art/lit/film
A relationship. A similarity in one aspect of that relationship, in their relative measurements. What is more general - aspects of similarity between relationships eg mother, body temperature with external sg feel cold/cooling (quantifiable but experiential here). Categorise possible similarities in relationships (infinite?) Then categorise types that lead to proportion?
Direct sense of proportion, speed, density etc -explore. (Vygotsky on scientific concepts- indirect relation to object mediated by concepts but this seems wrong eg speed, mother?)
Next part is not a review, just some random notes (but to be fair, so is the book/archive):
A) Benjamin kept a list of everything he read. I'd already decided to try and do that for this year via here but maybe it would have inspired me if I hadn't. By 1939 it numbered up to 1712. Between 1917 and 1939, 1250 items so about 57 a year and just over one a week. So reading a book a week is officially a Benjamin level of respectable reading.
I didn't realise he wrote on education so will search those out. The free school community from May 1911, two part Teaching and evaluation may-july 1913, school reform, a cultural movement 1912, moral education 1913, aims and methods of the student pedagogic groups at the universities if the German Reich, 1914, erotic education 1914.
"Types of knowledge...
III Teachable knowledge
Its most significant form of appearance is banality"
Peasant basis of toy manufacture. Primitive forms and for the child, the appeal of being able to see the total construction and imagine how it was made. The toys M has are not like that so should I make some/find some.The knitted monkey I am making is half like that.
'The gift of perceiving similarities is, in fact, nothing but a weak remnant of the old compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically.'
Copying/similar seems earliest. When I moved my fingers in a wave motion, M tried to copy from around 3 months. But seeing difference sometimes seems easier than seeing similarity, eg in disproportionately scaled images or mathematics more generally. But maybe the generalisation that arises from difference is just more noticeable. Difference is more conscious because similar is more primitive/natural?
Benjamin collated the linguistic expressions etc of his son Stefan from 1918-32. Also early terms of endearment. So far for M: Bubbles/Bubbs, Mupito, Mouse, Maister. I'd always intended to record M's language use to study the development of consciousness, I think originally inspired by some of John Holt's work. She's not just a science experiment though. Piaget obviously did this most systematically, or at least his wife did, people think. Yet he came up with an essential wrong analysis based on that so there's no guarantees in the empirical.
On going to sleep Benjamin's kid says 'what should I dream?'
B) Connected thoughts re proportion while reading:
Lesson from Benjamin: Be a collector?
Models of proportion:: Visual sense; Elastic; Bar; Ratio table; Double number line; a/b = c/d; Straight line graph
Examples that develop model
Practice through variation and comparison
Comparing models
Practical consciousness
Embedded in practice
Recognition that a person further away is the same person, something in the distance is the same thing. Part of this relies on proportion?
RME- young children can recognise when images are changed to not be in proportion, computer scaling different in x y axes via stretching (not numerical), circus mirrors.
Numerical, semi-conceptual, tool based
Scaling up/down recipes (doesn't work with baking/oven times). Scaling images using numbers. Looking up tables for conversions.
Model based
Conceptual
The history of the development of practical consciousness and mathematical thought related to proportion
Similarity and difference in:
Same units/different units
Grouping and sharing
Common sense/metaphor uses of proportion
Proportionate
Art/lit/film
A relationship. A similarity in one aspect of that relationship, in their relative measurements. What is more general - aspects of similarity between relationships eg mother, body temperature with external sg feel cold/cooling (quantifiable but experiential here). Categorise possible similarities in relationships (infinite?) Then categorise types that lead to proportion?
Direct sense of proportion, speed, density etc -explore. (Vygotsky on scientific concepts- indirect relation to object mediated by concepts but this seems wrong eg speed, mother?)
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January 27, 2024A broad view of Benjamin's archival obsession - his "struggle against dispersion." The book follows everything from his toy collections to his unfinished work on the Paris arcades.
Benjamin also collected his children's early utterances which are rather amusing to read. The guy is a genuine nerd.
Benjamin also collected his children's early utterances which are rather amusing to read. The guy is a genuine nerd.
September 5, 2020
True definition of aura was written on a cocktail napkin
January 20, 2021
Very fun book to read if you like archives
June 18, 2021
Didn't get it exactely.
September 8, 2024
well– this is the book that made me finally buy a copy of arcades project after a decade of people nagging me to read it
March 13, 2016
A very worthwhile volume to anyone interested in Benjamin's life and the impressive range of media and modes of writing spanned over his career. I have the paperback edition and it's very aesthetically pleasing, with heavy pages and colour photographs of pages of Benjamin's notebooks, diagrams, postcards, etc. Esther Leslie has provided a capable and characterful translation.
July 16, 2008
I'm embarassed to say that I'm rating this book more for the way it affects my ephemera-loving heart than for the contents of its text, but if you're a Benjamin fan, it's exquisite.
June 12, 2024
An interesting collection of notes & photographs from an interesting thinker.
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January 11, 2016838.91209 B468w 2015
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