About the concept of history

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There is a posthumous essay on the philosophy of history by Walter Benjamin on the concept of history from 1940, in which, under the impression of the rise of fascism and the Hitler-Stalin pact, he criticizes the historicizing conception of social democracy in particular and at the same time takes a messianic standpoint .

The essay, one of Walter Benjamin's last works, has been widely received and cited. Some of the metaphors included have become winged words.

Emergence

The 18 theses on the concept of history emerged in the winter months of 1939/1940 after Benjamin was released from the French internment camp Vernuche in Varennes-Vauzelles , where he was imprisoned as a German at the beginning of the war. They are mentally related to the passage work and two essays on Charles Baudelaire . The text was created under the impression of the rise of fascism and the Hitler-Stalin pact, but on the other hand it expressed thoughts that Walter Benjamin had kept with him for "about twenty years".

Benjamin gave the German-language manuscript to Hannah Arendt , who had since fled to Marseille . He had also created an unfinished version in French. Walter Benjamin died in September 1940 while on the run in the Spanish border town of Portbou . It is believed that he believed his situation to be hopeless and therefore committed suicide.

publication

Hannah Arendt handed the manuscript over in New York to the emigrated Frankfurt Institute for Social Research , whose journal for social research Benjamin had made the most reliable collaboration possible during his years of exile. The institute published the essay in 1942 as part of the volume Walter Benjamin on memory , as a hectography and in a small edition.

In 1946 a different French version appeared in the Temps Modernes . In 1950 the theses were printed in the literary magazine Die neue Rundschau and thus made accessible to a wider public.

content

The essay, written in a strongly aphoristic style, is divided into 18 sections and a two-part appendix.

I.

Benjamin is reminiscent of the chess Turk , who was presented as a supposed automaton in the 18th century and inside of which a dwarf was hidden. In the same way, historical materialism could take on anyone if it took theology into its service.

II

Based on the envy of people of the present towards the future , noted by Hermann Lotze , Benjamin recognizes a weak messianic power that is given to every present gender in relation to the past generations. There is “a secret meeting between the genders and ours”. We are "expected on earth".

III

"Nothing that has ever happened [is] to be lost for history". But only redeemed humanity could succeed: to quote each of its past moments.

IV

Following on from the Hegel -word "Seek ye first food and clothing, so shall the kingdom of God by itself fall" consists of Benjamin, that the "fine and spiritual" things (confidence, courage, humor, cunning, steadfastness) not are simply the prey of the winners of the class struggle , but are already working from the “distance of time”; they were already questioning the current victories of the rulers. The past is already turning "like flowers" to the sun rising in the sky.

V

The word " Truth will not run away from us", ascribed to Gottfried Keller , is wrong, because every true picture of the past always means the present, and it only lasts (fleeting) insofar as the present is recognized as being meant in it.

VI

Historiography must preserve the memory of the moment of danger which threatens both tradition and its recipients, the danger of " making itself available as an instrument for the ruling class ". Tradition has to be won over and over again from conformism ; just as the Messiah comes (also) as overcomer of the Antichrist .

VII

Benjamin sees the historicizing process characterized by the advice of Fustel de Coulanges to forget later history in order to relive an epoch. However, this leads to empathy with the victors and the rulers who follow them, who regard their booty and their achievements as cultural assets . However, cultural goods are always documents of nameless compulsory labor, and thus of barbarism. Materialism, on the other hand, has to "brush history against the grain".

VIII

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is the rule. We have to come to a concept of history that corresponds to this. ”This perspective should also include the alleged state of emergency of fascism , which improves the position in the fight against it. “Our task” is to “bring about a real state of emergency”.

IX
Paul Klee: Angelus Novus , 1920

In a poem by his friend Gershom Scholem and in Paul Klee's sketch Angelus Novus , Benjamin recognizes the angel of history, who looks back on the past and wants to heal the devastation, but is blown into the future by the storm that blows from paradise as progress.

X

Similar to how the meditation regulations of a monastery are supposed to wean the monks of the world, Benjamin intends to detach the “political child of the world” from the networks of those politicians who would have betrayed the fight against fascism. For Benjamin are

"The stubborn belief in progress of these politicians, their trust in their ´mass base´ and finally their servile classification in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three sides of the same thing".
XI

Benjamin rejects the social democratic concept of work, which was represented by Joseph Dietzgen or the Gotha party program criticized by Marx . In this working concept, Protestant morality is rising again in a secularized manner, with nature now being exploited instead of the proletariat, contrary to the ideas of the Vormärz and early socialists like Charles Fourier .

XII

In contrast to the reference made by social democracy to the redemption of future generations by the working class, Benjamin recalls the class struggle as it was represented by Karl Marx , the Spartakusbund or Auguste Blanqui on behalf of previous generations.

XIII

Benjamin criticizes the social democracy's concept of progress not only because of its exaggeration as unstoppable, irreversible progress of humanity in itself, but more fundamentally because he starts from the wrong idea of ​​a homogeneous and empty time.

XIV

Based on Karl Kraus ' dictum "origin is the goal" and Robespierre's view of the French Revolution as the return of Rome , Benjamin calls the French Revolution a "leap into the past", but in an arena dictated by the ruling class, while the dialectical revolution is the same leap " under the open sky of history ”.

XV

According to Benjamin, the revolutionaries' awareness of the discontinuity of time is also expressed in the introduction of new calendars. Holidays then serve as remembrance , whereby basically the same day recurs. This historical awareness was even shown in the shooting at the Paris tower clocks during the July Revolution of 1830 .

XVI

The materialistic concept of the present is not a transition, but a standstill and a standstill of time. Benjamin calls the story of 'once upon a time' a whore in the brothel of historicism. Instead of surrendering to it, the continuum of history should be broken.

XVII

While the historicizing universal history accumulates knowledge additively, materialism is based on a constructive principle. The materialist recognizes his object as a monad , which bears the sign of the messianic standstill of events and thus a revolutionary opportunity. The work contains the life's work, this the epoch, this the entire history. Benjamin offers the metaphor:

"The nutritious fruit of what is historically understood has time in its interior as the precious, but tasteless seed."

XVIII

As a model of the messianic time, the present time forms a tremendous summary of the whole of human history , which is why humanity in the universe is judged according to the present time.

Appendix A.

It is not enough to establish historical causalities , which Benjamin compares with praying a rosary , but the present is to be grasped in its relationship to a certain past and can only be understood as the present time, which contains fragments (“splinters”) of the messianic time .

Appendix B.

Like the old fortune-telling religions the future, just as would the Jews , where comparable divination and the remembrance is advised not perceive the past as a homogeneous or empty time, but also the future not because of the second by second expectation of the Messiah.

expenditure

  • Institute for Social Research: Walter Benjamin in memory. Edited by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, Los Angeles 1942. (First published under the title Geschichtsphilosophische Reflexionen .)
  • Die Neue Rundschau , Volume 61. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 1950, p. 560.
  • Walter Benjamin: Collected Works . Edited by Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann . Volume I / 2, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 690-708.
  • Walter Benjamin: About the concept of history . Works and Estate - Critical Complete Edition, Vol. 19. Ed. By Gérard Raulet. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-58549-8 . (Contains all surviving versions as well as drafts, variants, explanations, comments, documents.)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Momme Brodersen: Walter Benjamin. Life, work, effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2005, ISBN 3-518-18204-8 , pp. 128-131
  2. ↑ About some motifs in Baudelaire , and the forerunner Das Paris des Second Empire in Baudelaire
  3. ^ Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Briefe VI, p. 435, quoted from. after Momme Brodersen: Walter Benjamin. Life, work, effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2005, ISBN 3-518-18204-8 , pp. 129f
  4. ^ Momme Brodersen: Walter Benjamin. Life, work, effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2005, ISBN 3-518-18204-8 , p. 48
  5. ↑ a b Momme Brodersen: Walter Benjamin. Life, work, effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2005, ISBN 3-518-18204-8 , p. 131
  6. ↑ The sentence is in fact and truth from Guilt and Atonement by F. Dostojewski: Guilt and Atonement