Walter benjamin theses on history pdf

Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Jonathan Druker. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Are they memoir or historical fiction? Do the author and his deeply cynical narrator share the same point of view, let alone the same experiences?

Rather than force the stories into one category or another, the most fruitful interpretive strategy is to embrace their hybridity. As a writer of historical fiction, Borowski deploys an array of literary devices that make his stories among the most compelling in Holocaust literature. Satire, irony, and the disparity between content and tone are among his most important techniques. But a storm is blowing from Paradise.

This chance for redemption, however slight, provides solace to victims and witnesses of catastrophe who are forced to confront the possibility that history is indeed a sequence of Auschwitzes.

These two writers, whose very lives were overturned by the Holocaust, seem to have concluded that history is inherently traumatic and that the tormented past lives on in the present.

Consequently, they see historical events as a premonition of the present catastrophe, and they view Nazism as the latest iteration in an extended sequence of traumatic violence that is difficult, although not impossible, to interrupt. This kind of thinking links historical development with Freudian trauma theory, especially with the notion that collective traumas return belatedly in symptomatic form to haunt communities and nations.

Moreover, they seem to suspect that history is more mythic and archetypal than dialectical. Despite the many parallels, Benjamin and Borowski have never been brought together in an extended critical dialogue like the one staged here. While they both suffered in the en- counter with the brute force of Nazism, there is no provable common intellectual culture shared by Benjamin and the younger Borowski, apart from a kind of apocalyptic nihilism pervading Europe in the years following World War I.

However, even before his stay in Auschwitz, Borowski had reason to view the concentration camp as a paradig- matic institution of modernity. He was born in Ukraine in to Polish parents, both of whom were later incarcerated in labor camps by the Soviets. Its dominant image was that of a gigantic labor camp. It is not the case that Borowski specifically dismissed the histori- cally unique aspects of the Holocaust, or the unprecedented extremes of Nazi racial ideology, or the particular suffering of the Jewish people.

However, as a Holocaust writer, he was most interested in understand- ing malevolent historical and cultural continuities over the long term. He wrote in This Way for the Gas that Auschwitz, the very paradigm of state barbarism, revealed to him the dark underside of civilization, which built its glorious monuments on the backs of the oppressed and on his own back and then systematically obscured their suffer- ing. Yet his strongest writing explores the moral crisis the narrator experiences on account of what he witnesses and can do little to prevent: the brutalization and death of the ordi- nary inmates, mostly Jews.

Shame and guilt, while often masked by an offhand tone, are palpable sensations in nearly all of the stories. We are going to the gas chambers! According to the traditional practice, the spoils are carried in the procession.

For in every case these treasures have a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great geniuses who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of others who lived in the same period. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

For each departing truck he enters a mark; sixteen gone means one thousand people more or less. The gentleman is calm, precise. The past, therefor, is the key to all possible redemption for Benjamin, and we thus owe the past a great debt. Here Benjamin asserts that history is not, for him, an accurate account of the past. There seems to be a sense here that time presents moments when certain memories become vital and urge themselves on us. That first sentence is, of course, a direct reply to Schmitt.

The more complex thought here is the attack on a particular conception of history, one that sees history as a process of progress or advancement through time. It is an extremely enigmatic and difficult analogy, and we will just have to talk about it. Paul Klee was a modernist artist influenced by the surrealists who also influenced Benjamin himself. Google the painting. The list he constructs here describes one basic idea derived from humanism: that time is the field upon which human progress takes place.

Many people have attempted to excavate exactly what he means, and Benjamin himself attempts to explain in the next aphorism. But clearly for Benjamin there is a link between the mistaken belief that history is the accurate recounting of past events and the equally mistaken belief in human progress.

Benjamin sees an analogy between the way particular clothing items from the past can refresh themselves in new mixtures in the present and his own view of the past as a collection of moments that may at any given time play a vital new role in a struggle. We can see how religious notions of messianism are being knitted together with historical materialism in this aphorism. Benjamin, on the contrary, stresses again the notion of a time that stops.

Hegel, The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle.

They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.

A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations. The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.

And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. Consider the darkness and the great cold In this vale which resounds with mystery. Brecht, The Threepenny Opera. To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There is no better way of characterising the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia , which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly.

Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers.

Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.

According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.

A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.

One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back. If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.

The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.