International Walter Benjamin Society
The International Walter Benjamin Society was a typical production of the counterculture targeted by the 1968 movement, directed against the so-called establishment .
founding
The 1968 by Natias Neutert in Hamburg , founded Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft e. V. was a philosophical-cultural-political society, which not only wanted to contribute to a deeper knowledge of Walter Benjamin and to give suggestions to the research devoted to him, but above all wanted to show his importance for the cultural revolution. Not only intellectual solidarity with Walter Benjamin should be expressed, the history philosopher should even be promoted to a global reference figure and Marx should be placed alongside in this regard, as it was called in the founding manifesto. The foundation, in the spirit of its anarcho-syndicalism , was far from being a regular company in the sense of civil law according to § 705 BGB - on the contrary: the company, which was originally to be called Provo headquarters, was an invention based on solidarity , without obtaining permission from the Benjamin heirs.
aims
It was therefore also one of their actionist goals to ensure that the manuscripts in Adorno's possession by Walter Benjamin are freely available to international young scholars. Rather than being on Walter Benjamin's historical-philosophical approach merely talked and discussed, should follow the slogan of Walter Benjamin! above all are “traded”. Not with regard to a “closed building of ideas […], but one in which all doors, windows and skylights are wide open,” as it is formulated more poetically than politically in the founding manifesto. It was important to note that the revolt should run through the medium of pop (music). The point of reference for this was provided by the formula filtered by Natias Neutert from Karl Marx's “Grundrissen” , transferred to the pop scene and clearly directed against Adorno : “Rock is a use value that satisfies a specific need.” Pop critic Helmut Salzinger created Swinging Benjamin finally, internally a kind of literary legacy of this first International Walter Benjamin Society and externally a cult book. Soon, however, it became more modest and was only called the Walter Benjamin Society, because apart from a few 'hot wires', for example to Rob Stolk , through whom there was a loose connection to the Amsterdam Provo movement and similar actors from the general optimistic mood of these years , the envisaged international response did not make progress, but the influence on the Federal Republican cultural life was definitely there and noticeable, because the III. The first floor at Jungfernstieg 48 was repeatedly approached by outsiders as a kind of think tank:
| International Walter Benjamin Society | |
|---|---|
| 2000 Hamburg | Jungfernstieg 48 / III |
| Founded in 1968 | |
| Natias Neutert | Founding Manifesto, 1968 |
| Patronage Members | |
| Christian Blechschmidt alias "Citadel" | Literary organizer (until 1972) |
| Hubert Fichte | Writer (until 1973) |
| Helmut Salzinger alias Jonas Überohr | Writer (until 1973) |
| Joachim Schickel | Writer / radio editor (until 1970) |
| Werner Stingl | Writer / copywriter (until 1973) |
| Rob Stolk | Provo activist / printer (until 1970) |
| Dissolution 1973 | |
Effects
Sympathetic beneficiaries of the heated debates, mostly based on Benjamin's work, were among others the sociologist and sex researcher Günter Amendt , who received decisive suggestions for the linguistic style of " SEX FRONT " from there; the writer Daniel Dubbe , who collected live material for his debut book "Szene"; the writer and editor of Rowohlt Verlag Jürgen Manthey , who got ideas for the content of the book series "dnb"; the writer Helmut Salzinger , who himself contributed significantly to the basic orientation on Benjamin's work; and the sociologist Irmgard Schleier, potential director of the exhibition project “Playing”. The famous publisher of the March publishing house Jörg Schröder was about a script for a literary political western.
The great aim of the upheaval in society as a whole has not been achieved. The smaller, unrealized goal of stealing the unpublished manuscripts from Walter Benjamin , which Theodor W. Adorno had at his disposal, in a night-and-fog operation and making them freely available to anti-authoritarian science in a public handover event, is on the other hand has now been overtaken by the historical process: The estate that was formerly in Adorno's hands, consisting primarily of the documents that Walter Benjamin had with him when he fled Paris (1940), is now as readily available for “young science globally” as you once imagined it: Since April 2004, the Walter Benjamin Archive - an institution of the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture as part of the archive of the Academy of the Arts (Berlin) - “if not completely, at least with the greatest possible Completeness “a good 12,000 sheets of working documents, letters, photos, manuscripts and notebooks; including the materials that were only discovered in 1981 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and hidden there by Georges Bataille at the time .
This 1968 project was taken up again in May 2000. Now no longer with an anarcho-syndicalist style, but integrated into a global university discourse: an International Walter Benjamin Society is once again coming into being in the vicinity of the Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin been called. According to her own admission, she wants to bring together “scientists and interested readers from all over the world” and organize “every two years large conferences on Walter Benjamin and related topics”.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cf. Natias Neutert : “With” Walter Benjamin! Poeto-philosophical manifesto for the establishment of the International Walter Benjamin Society, Hamburg 1968, p. 6.
- ↑ See Carl Creifelds / Klaus Weber: Legal dictionary . Verlag CH Beck Munich 2002. ISBN 3-406-38190-1
- ↑ See Helmut Salzinger
- ↑ Cf. Natias Neutert : With Walter Benjamin! Poeto-philosophical manifesto for the establishment of the International Walter Benjamin Society>, Hamburg 1968, p. 6.
- ↑ Natias Neutert : "Let It Rock!" In: Frankfurter Rundschau No. 228, October 2, 1970.
- ↑ Helmut Salzinger : Swingin Benjamin. Fischer paperback, Frankfurt / M. 1973, ISBN 3-43601717-5 .
- ↑ Daniel Dubbe accompanied Neutert for weeks with a tape recorder under his arm. He then distributed the original quotes obtained in this way to several of his characters in the novel. See Daniel Dubbe : Scene . Prose. quer-verlag Uwe Wandrey, Hamburg 1973.
- ↑ The paperback series “das neue buch” published by Manthey at Rowohlt.
- ^ Helmut Salzinger : Swinging Benjamin. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt / Main 1973, ISBN 3-43601717-5 , pp. 9–24.
- ↑ See Natias Neutert : Wherever he stepped, grass grew again. In: Klaus Modick , MO Salzinger, Michael Kellner (eds.): Humus: Hommage à Helmut Salziger . Kellner Verlag, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-89630-101-2 , p. 99.
- ↑ Schleier handed over completely to the International Walter Benjamin Society for reasons of time. See Natias Neutert (Ed.): Playing. Preface by Bazon Brock , catalog. Kunsthaus Hamburg 1971.
- ↑ Regardless of the pornographic coloring requested by Jörg Schröder, the plot was based on youthful cowboy characters who, instead of shooting at Colts, 'shot' around with sharp-tongued sentences taught by Edgar Allan Poe and Emerson, or according to Ralph Waldo Emerson's slogan “The great man is the one who lives along with perfect sweetness in the middle of the crowd, the independence of loneliness. / According to records in the Natias-Neutert-Nachlass-zu-Leben-Archiv from January 6, 2012.
- ↑ See Natias Neutert : Wherever he stepped, grass grew again. In: Klaus Modick , MO Salzinger, Michael Kellner (eds.): Humus: Hommage à Helmut Salzinger. Kellner Verlag , Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-89630-101-2 , pp. 98-100.
- ^ Akademie der Künste: The Walter Benjamin Archive , accessed on March 22, 2012.
- ↑ See International Walter Benjamin Society , accessed on August 10, 2015.