In light of the legendary difficulty of Walter Benjamin's
works, it is a strange and intriguing fact that from 1929 to
1933 the great critic and cultural theorist wrote—and
broadcast—numerous scripts, on the order of fireside
chats, for children. Invited to speak on whatever subject he
considered appropriate, Benjamin talked to the children of
Frankfurt and Berlin about the destruction of Pompeii, an
earthquake in Lisbon, and a railroad disaster at the Firth of
Tay. He spoke about bootlegging and swindling, cataclysm and
suicide, Faust and Cagliostro. In this first sustained
analysis of the thirty surviving scripts, Jeffrey Mehlman
demonstrates how Benjamin used the unlikely forum of
children's radio to pursue some of his central philosophical
and theological concerns.
In Walter Benjamin for Children, readers will
encounter a host of intertextual surprises: an evocation of
the flooding of the Mississippi informed by the argument of
"The Task of the Translator;" a discussion of scams
in stamp-collecting that turns into "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction;" a tale of
bootlegging in the American South that converges with the
best of Benjamin's essays on fiction. Mehlman superimposes a
dual series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one
hand, and fraud, on the other, that resonate with the false-
messianic theology of Sabbatianism as it came to focus the
attention and enthusiasm of Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem
during the same years. The radio scripts for children, that
is, offer an unexpected byway, on the eve of the apocalypse,
into Benjamin's messianic preoccupations.
A child's garden of deconstruction, these twenty-minute
talks—from the perspective of childhood, before an
invisible audience, on whatever happened to cross the
critic's mind—are also by their very nature the closest
we may ever come to a transcript of a psychoanalysis of
Walter Benjamin. Particularly alive to that circumstance,
Mehlman explores the themes of the radio broadcasts and
brilliantly illuminates their hidden connections to
Benjamin's life and work.
This lucid analysis brings to light some of the least
researched and understood aspects of Walter Benjamin's
thought. It will interest and provoke literary theorists and
philosophers of culture, as well as anyone who hopes to
understand one of this century's most suggestive and
perplexing critics.
works, it is a strange and intriguing fact that from 1929 to
1933 the great critic and cultural theorist wrote—and
broadcast—numerous scripts, on the order of fireside
chats, for children. Invited to speak on whatever subject he
considered appropriate, Benjamin talked to the children of
Frankfurt and Berlin about the destruction of Pompeii, an
earthquake in Lisbon, and a railroad disaster at the Firth of
Tay. He spoke about bootlegging and swindling, cataclysm and
suicide, Faust and Cagliostro. In this first sustained
analysis of the thirty surviving scripts, Jeffrey Mehlman
demonstrates how Benjamin used the unlikely forum of
children's radio to pursue some of his central philosophical
and theological concerns.
In Walter Benjamin for Children, readers will
encounter a host of intertextual surprises: an evocation of
the flooding of the Mississippi informed by the argument of
"The Task of the Translator;" a discussion of scams
in stamp-collecting that turns into "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction;" a tale of
bootlegging in the American South that converges with the
best of Benjamin's essays on fiction. Mehlman superimposes a
dual series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one
hand, and fraud, on the other, that resonate with the false-
messianic theology of Sabbatianism as it came to focus the
attention and enthusiasm of Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem
during the same years. The radio scripts for children, that
is, offer an unexpected byway, on the eve of the apocalypse,
into Benjamin's messianic preoccupations.
A child's garden of deconstruction, these twenty-minute
talks—from the perspective of childhood, before an
invisible audience, on whatever happened to cross the
critic's mind—are also by their very nature the closest
we may ever come to a transcript of a psychoanalysis of
Walter Benjamin. Particularly alive to that circumstance,
Mehlman explores the themes of the radio broadcasts and
brilliantly illuminates their hidden connections to
Benjamin's life and work.
This lucid analysis brings to light some of the least
researched and understood aspects of Walter Benjamin's
thought. It will interest and provoke literary theorists and
philosophers of culture, as well as anyone who hopes to
understand one of this century's most suggestive and
perplexing critics.
