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ABSTRACT
In this article, I wish to elaborate on Benjamin’s reading of so-called “dark thinkers,” i.e. those radical thinkers of the fin de siècle whose cultural criticism willingly or not reinforced and reiterated what they actually criticized. I will refer to Benjamin’s early writings on the German youth movement as well as to his later writings on Baudelaire, Jugendstil, and Lebensphilosophie and thereby focus on motives that connect these diverging periods of Benjamin’s oeuvre, notably contemporaneous gender relations, gender identity, and images of the feminine, which Benjamin used in order to delineate an immanent messianism. In this way I want to demonstrate that while Benjamin followed Nietzsche in understanding history as loss and decline, he nonetheless insisted on moments of becoming intrinsic to this very understanding of history. In this dialectical turn the Nietzschean cultural criticism, just as the criticized itself, emerge as two connected sides of one coin.
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Notes
1 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 388.
2 Ibid., 546.
3 Cf. Wolin, Walter Benjamin; Stauth and Turner, “Ludwig Klages;” Lebovic, “The Beauty and Terror.”
4 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 842–843.
5 Ibid., 15.
6 Benjamin, “Central Park,” 175.
7 See Le Rider, “Nietzsche et Baudelaire.”
8 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 346.
9 Cited in Le Rider, “Nietzsche et Baudelaire,” 88.
10 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390–391.
11 Ibid., 391.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 390.
14 Cf. Kittsteiner, Listen der Vernunft, 180.
15 Cf. Wolin, Walter Benjamin, xxiv.
16 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 168.
17 Le Rider, “Nietzsche et Baudelaire,” 99. In The Case of Wagner, 34, Nietzsche notes: “I am just as much a child of my age as Wagner—i.e., I am a decadent. The only difference is that I recognised the fact, that I struggled against it. The philosopher in me struggled against it”.
18 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 59.
19 Ibid., 59–60.
20 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 36.
21 Cf. Cooke, “Habermas, Feminism;” Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public;” Benhabib, Situating the Self.
22 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 107.
23 Cf. Wolin, Walter Benjamin, xxv.
24 Cf. Stögner, “Nature and Anti-Nature.”
25 See Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe I, 125–129; Benjamin, “Erotische Erziehung;” Benjamin, “Metaphysics of Youth.”
26 Cf. Cooke, “Habermas, Feminism;” Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public;” Benhabib, Situating the Self.
27 Giacchetti Ludovisi, “The Over-Bourgeois,” 23.
28 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 40.
29 Cf. Stauth and Turner, “Ludwig Klages,” 57.
30 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 456–457.
31 Cf. Adorno, “À l′écart,” 102; Pulliero, Le désir d′authenticité, 50.
32 Cf. Scholem, Walter Benjamin; Stögner, “Der Traum vom Erwachen.”
33 Cf. Laqueur, Young Germany.
34 Cf. Gumpert, Hölle im Paradies, cited in Schweppenhäuser and Tiedemann, “Anmerkungen der Herausgeber,” 867.
35 Cf. Hillach, “Ein neu entdecktes Lebensgesetz,” 879.
36 Jungmann, “Autorität und Sexualmoral,” 678.
37 Cf. Witte, Walter Benjamin, 14.
38 Jessica Benjamin, “Authority and the Family,” 36.
39 Cf. Horkheimer, “Gedanken zur politischen Erziehung.”
40 See Riesman, The Lonely Crowd.
41 Cf. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality.
42 Cf. Laqueur, Young Germany; Stachura, The German Youth Movement; Williams, Turning to Nature; Savage, Teenage.
43 Williams, Turning to Nature.
44 Cited in Lebovic, The Beauty and Terror, 27.
45 Reventlov, Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen.
46 Cf. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality.
47 Janz, “Die Faszination der Jugend,” 310.
48 Delanty and Mahony, Nationalism and Social Theory, 44.
49 Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 92.
50 Cited in Korotin, “Die mythische Weiblichkeit,” 100.
51 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 550.
52 Benjamin, “Erfahrung und Armut,” 214.
53 Cf. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 118.
54 Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” 605.
55 Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe I, 128.
56 Benjamin, “Die Jugend schwieg,” 66.
57 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 558.
58 Ibid.
59 Cited in Linse, “Geschlechtsnot der Jugend,” 264.
60 Citied in ibid., 266; cf. Jungmann, “Autorität und Sexualmoral,” 670.
61 Theweleit, Male Fantasies.
62 Cf. Linse, “Geschlechtsnot der Jugend,” 271.
63 Benjamin, “The Life of Students.”
64 See Benjamin, “Paris of the Second Empire,” 55–57.
65 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460.
66 Ibid.
67 Benjamin, “Metaphysics of Youth,” 9–10.
68 Stoessel, Aura, 76.
69 Cf. Weigel, Body- and Image-Space.
70 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 149.
71 Benjamin, “On Language as Such,” 73.
72 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 67.
73 Cf. Stauth and Turner, “Ludwig Klages.”
74 Cf. Wolin, Walter Benjamin, xxxi–xxxii.
75 Schmid-Noerr, Gesten aus Begriffen.
76 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11.
77 Benjamin, „Erotische Erziehung,” 71.
78 Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe I, 128.
79 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 10.
80 Cf. Cooke, “Habermas, Feminism;” Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public.”
81 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 345.
82 Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” 446–447.
83 Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe I, 145.
84 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 884.
85 Ibid., 550.
86 Sternberger cited in ibid.
87 Ibid., 552.
88 Ibid., 558.
89 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 75–88.
90 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 556. The Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl) by Margarete Böhme from 1905 purportedly is the anonymous memoir of a prostitute.
91 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 392.
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Karin Stögner
Karin Stoegner holds the chair of Sociology at the University of Passau, Germany. She has been a visiting professor and visiting researcher at numerous universities, among them Vienna, Frankfurt, Haifa, and Jerusalem. Stoegner is the author of Traum-Zeit Moderne – das ewige Bild der Weiblichkeit. Eine Annäherung an Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk (Braumüller 2004) and Antisemitismus und Sexismus. Historisch-gesellschaftliche Konstellationen (Nomos 2014).