Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life is not only the first full-length English-language biography, but far the most comprehensive survey of its subject in any language, superseding all predecessors. Its authors have devoted much of their careers to Benjamin. Jennings, the general editor of the four-volume Harvard selection of Benjamin’s writings, specializes in Weimar culture, particularly the avant-garde, at Princeton; Eiland, who teaches literature at mit, is co-editor of three of the volumes, and currently working on a book about Benjamin’s Jewishness. The strategy of the authoritative biography at which they aim takes the form of a combination of detailed narrative of Benjamin’s personal life with intellectual exposition of his major writings. Interpretation of Benjamin’s work has been famously controversial since Theodor and Gretel Adorno co-edited the first two-volume German collection of his writings in 1955, followed by Adorno and Scholem’s selection of a single volume of his letters in 1966—each anthology coming under attack from the student movement for misrepresenting, in different ways, Benjamin’s thought—and Hannah Arendt’s first English-language selection, Illuminations, in 1968, presenting a view of Benjamin at variance with that of both Adorno and Scholem. Sharp disagreements over his legacy have persisted to the present.
In their introduction, Eiland and Jennings set out the governing principle of their enterprise: ‘Previous studies of this writer, whether biographical or critical, have tended to proceed in a relatively selective manner, imposing a thematic order that usually eliminates whole regions of his work. The result has all too often been a partial, or worse, mythologized and distorted portrait. This biography aims for a more comprehensive treatment by proceeding in a rigorously chronological manner, focusing on the everyday reality out of which Benjamin’s writings emerged, and providing an intellectual-historical context for his major works.’ The result will therefore not be partisan: here the many conflicting aspects of Benjamin’s personality—the ‘fire-breathing Communist’, ‘Frankfurt School neo-Hegelian’, ‘messianic Jewish mystic’, ‘cosmopolitan assimilated Jew’ and ‘literary deconstructionist avant la lettre’—can hopefully coexist. The motto of their study is taken from one of Benjamin’s own descriptions of his thought. It formed, he said, a ‘contradictory and mobile whole’—a phrasing that becomes the leitmotif of their interpretation of his corpus: ‘Coming generations of readers will undoubtedly find their own Benjamins in the encounter with the “mobile and contradictory whole” that is his lifework.’
With this credo in place, the biography is open to assessment, corresponding to its structure, in two registers. Firstly, what does it tell us about Benjamin’s life that is not by now already well known: his early involvement in the romantic Schwärmerei of the Youth Movement of pre-First World War Germany; his early marriage, friendship with Scholem, and refuge from the draft in Switzerland; the rejection of his doctorate on the Trauerspiel; encounter with Asja Lacis in Capri, turn to Marxism, trip to Moscow; belles-lettres, journalism, divorce; relations with Adorno and Brecht; poverty and exile in Paris; Arcades Project; flight across Pyrenees, suicide—a via crucis rehearsed many times? Secondly, what fresh light does it cast on the trajectory of Benjamin’s thinking, and its complexities? These are not exhaustive of the questions posed by this biography. But they are obviously the most immediate ones.