Hannah Arendt’s Transatlantic Walter Benjamin

Abstract

In 1968, twenty-eight years after Walter Benjamin’s death, Hannah Arendt published a literary portrait of Benjamin that questioned the Frankfurt School’s editorial infringements on and interpretive appropriations of Benjamin’s work. In recent discussions of her intervention in the debate that had escalated upon Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem’s publication of Benjamin’s letters in 1966, it has been neglected that Arendt published two versions of her portrait, American and German. This article shows that the American version differs significantly from the German as it amplifies a characteristic citation method through which Arendt performatively preserves and promotes Benjamin’s work. Thus, the American version indicates how Arendt transformed her strong editorial commitment to rescuing European Jewish cultural heritage after the Holocaust into a critical method. The initial occasion for Arendt’s portrait was her American Benjamin edition Illuminations (1968), toward which she had begun working since her arrival in New York in 1941. The edition’s continuing global distribution demonstrates the lasting impact of Arendt’s intervention.