In a unique blend of political, intellectual, and cultural history, Brian Vick explores the world of German nationalism during the first half of the nineteenth century. Vick first presents an original investigation of German conceptions of nationhood in these decades before moving on to analyze the efforts of deputies at the Frankfurt Constituent National Assembly to construct a German national state based on the ethnically diverse German Confederation. He examines debates over fundamental issues that included citizenship qualifications, minority linguistic rights, Jewish emancipation, and territorial disputes, and offers valuable insights into nineteenth-century liberal opinion on the Jewish Question, language policy, and ideas of race.
Contrary to the often invoked dichotomy between cultural and political types of nationalism, in which the German case is usually seen as prototypical of the xenophobic, exclusionary cultural form, this study reveals how German nationalists at Frankfurt interwove cultural and political strands of the national ideal so finely as to sanction equal citizenship status in the proposed state for both the German-Jewish minority and the non-German-speaking nationalities within its boundaries. Yet deputies also contentiously defined Germany's borders so as to incorporate the latter, often unwilling groups, thereby hoping to dominate them both culturally and politically. Conflict was thus as much a part of this "culture of nationhood" as inclusion.
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.
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