Abstract
Between 1910 and 1917, Walter Benjamin composed a range of philosophical works and fragmented texts all of which touch upon the concept of youth (Jugend) and its intersection with issues of modernity and theology, faith and political action, religion and secularization, God, and the world. Yet, while scholars have rather extensively discussed Benjamin’s early works on language, literature, and esthetics, less attention has been given to his work on youth. This paper focuses on Benjamin’s writings on youth from these early years. Its aim is to demonstrate how these writings were intended as contributions to the composition of a comprehensive theory of youth, which itself was to combine philosophical discussion with theological imagination. More concretely, by using the example of Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), who is rarely discussed in connection to Benjamin’s thought, the paper shows how Benjamin draws on Christian mystical notions of time, transcendence, and divinity, albeit in a secularized and therefore transformed guise, and how Benjamin’s intellectual endeavor can hence be labeled a modern-mystical theory of youth.
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Notes
Fidus was the pseudonym of the illustrator Hugo Reinhold Karl Johann Höppener (1886–1948).
The type of Männerbund that the youth movement represented, with its esthetic ideal that related mainly to the male body, and the fundamental experience that assumed at its center the psychology of the maturing boy, induced Hans Blüher (1912), the first scholar to present a study of the German youth movement, to underline the youth movement as a homo-erotic phenomenon (Mosse 1985; Nur 2014).
This particular text was based on a speech that Benjamin gave at the Berlin Free Student Group. See Witte 1991: 29.
Eckhart 2009, Sermons 8, 21, 37, 79, 80.
Interestingly, in their correspondence, Scholem and Adorno agree on this point. See Angermann 2015: 462, 467.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paul North for his piercing and highly challenging comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would like also to convey my special thanks to Hanan Hever, Yishai Kiel, David Sorkin, Kirk Wetters, and Eugene Sheppard for profound, insightful and passionate dialogues on issues of modernity, theology, Judaism, secularization, history, literature and philosophy and to my students, Clara Collier and Courney Hordrick, for intellectually captivating and thought provoking discussions during my stay as a visiting professor at the Judaic Studies Program at Yale.
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Hotam, Y. Eternal, Transcendent, and Divine: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Youth. SOPHIA 58, 175–195 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0620-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0620-y