Benjamin as a Reader of Holderlin: The Origins of Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism

Abstract

The demythologization of Walter Benjamin has already begun. Benjamin's expressed desire to be considered premier critic of German literature' has certainly come close to fulfillment in the 25 years since the publication of his selected works;2 he is by any reckoning one of the preeminent critics of the twentieth century. Negative critical reaction to this rise could not be long in coming, and attacks upon both the larger structures of Benjamin's thought and upon specific insights have indeed proliferated in recent years.3 This rapid canonization and equally swift denunciation should, I think, be viewed with a certain detachment, if not irony, since the work of understanding Benjamin's notoriously and often willfully difficult writings remains in its earliest stages. We have not yet, for example, been able to sort out in a satisfactory manner the multitude of influences working upon a thinker as eclectic as Walter Benjamin. Critics attempting to situate Benjamin's work within its context in intellectual history have thus far been content to refer to Benjamin's mysticism, derived from his friendship with Gershom Scholem, his Marxism, stemming from his encounter with Lukacs' Geschichte und Klassenbewufltsein and the influence of Brecht, and, above all, his Hegelianism, associated with his work in the 1930's for the Institut for Sozialforschung.4 If we are to evaluate Benjamin's contribution to the theory of literary criticism, we need to balance this acknowledgment of his very real debt to Hegel, Marx and the Kaballah with an appreciation for Benjamin's reliance upon the thought of a diverse group of poets and philosophers of the age of Goethe. The development, in the period 1912 to 1916, of Benjamin's theory of literary criticism, the broad outlines of which remain in force for the post-Marxist criticism, is documented in a series of essays which look to Kant (Ober das Programm der kommenden Philosophie), to Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Fichte, and to Goethe himself (Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik), to Herder and Hamann (Ober Sprache tiberhaupt und uiber die Sprache des Menschen), and, in his first major literary essay, to HOlderlin. Looking back on his career in 1930, Benjamin referred to Zwei Gedichte von