"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested
from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January
1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those
powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the
Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over
Benjamin's writings in the final years of his life, the "victories
wrested" in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most
remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern
society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a
lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the
crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the
abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin's own faith in the written
word.
This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the
historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and
poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and
thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an
ethic for the critic and artist--a subdued but resilient heroism.
At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of
how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.
Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin
refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final
version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility." Also included in this volume is his
influential piece "On the Concept of History," completed just
before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the
nature of "the modern" (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for
its ideas about thetransmogrification of art and the radical
discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and
thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is
eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under
siege.
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