Although Walter Benjamin possessed a profound knowledge of classical German literature, his preoccupation with modernism usually led him to explore more obscure or neglected traditions. Thus he ignored mainstream German drama in favour of Baroque tragedy, because of the relevance of allegory to Expressionism; and his writings on Romanticism pursued a similar strategy. For this reason alone the essay printed here holds special interest, as one of the few exceptions to Benjamin’s evasion of the classical tradition.
It was not, however, Benjamin’s first study of Goethe. In 1922 he had written an essay on Elective Affinities, publishing it two years later in a review conducted by the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Neue Deutsche Beitrage. But the contrast between the two compositions could not be more vivid. Where the earlier was arcane and metaphysical, the later was direct and materialist in manner—a tour de force of critical compression. The ‘succession’ from the first to the second dramatized the profound change that occurred in Benjamin’s cultural outlook in the mid twenties—the moment of One-Way Street. Their different publishing histories were equally eloquent. Benjamin’s study of Elective Affinities appeared in a little-frequented periodical of pronounced conservative and religious bent; his ‘Reluctant Bourgeois’ was commissioned for the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia.