752 Reviews Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. Ed. by Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Ben? jamin. New York and London: Continuum. 2002. viii+ 246 pp. $33.95. ISBN 0-8264-6021-6. The Hieroglyph of Tradition: Freud, Benjamin, Gadamer, Novalis, Kant. By Angelika Rauch. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associ? ated University Presses. 2000. 249 pp. $45.50. ISBN 0-8386-3846-5. Walter Benjamin began work on his doctoral thesis in Bern during the First World War and was awarded his doctorate in 1919. When it came to publishing the text, he was concerned that the difficultsituation of publishing houses after the war might make publishing unaffordable, and wrote to his friend Gershom Scholem that he did not mind about the size of type as long as the paper was of good quality. The topic of the dissertation was the concept of criticism in German Romanticism. Linking a text to its context is never easy, but when the context is the momentous changes in Germany in the winter of 1918-19, and when the text in question is written by a figure known in particular for creative forms of historical analysis, then it seems a missed opportunity not to make even an attempt. Walter Benjamin and Romanticism is the firstin a new series of 'Walter Benjamin Studies' which hopes to set 'new standards for scholarship on Benjamin for students and researchers in Philosophy, Cultural Studies and Literary Studies' (p. ii). The book collects twelve essays, at least half of which have been published before, discussing Benjamin's doctoral thesis and other well-known pieces that he wrote on Holderlin, Goethe, and the questions of language in the period 1914-23. A few of the essays in the collection make gestures towards context. Beatrice Hanssen's essay suggests that casualties of the war motivated Benjamin's interest in finitude in the Holderlin essay of 1914-15. Sigrid Weigel mentions the figure of the artist propagated by the George circle as a model with which Benjamin took issue in his essay on Die Wahlver? wandtschaften. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe discusses the common epoch informing Benjamin's reading of Holderlin in the 1910s and Heidegger's in the 1930s. The col? lection also wishes to convey the developing context of readings of Benjamin, since it reprints work, in particular by Winfried Menninghaus, that has become something of a standard reference. Nevertheless, the volume has not been conceived to illuminate context, except in the rather narrow sense of which books might have influenced Benjamin. The highlight of the collection is the translation of Menninghaus's chapter on Benjamin's doctoral thesis, which was originally published as part of his Unendliche Verdopplung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987). Menninghaus meticulously shows how Benjamin reads selected quotations from Novalis and Schlegel tendentiously and constructs a version of Romanticism that plays down the role of feeling and the imagination and privileges reflection as a form of immediate knowledge in a way that does not fairly represent his sources. At the same time, for Menninghaus, Benjamin's partial reading does capture a key element of the Romantic concept of reflection, raising the question of how Benjamin could articulate important aspects of German Romanticism even as he did violence to the texts. Menninghaus does not answer this question, but his essay very successfully positions itself both in? side and outside Benjamin's texts, combining sympathy with critical analysis in a way which could set the stage for a wider investigation of Benjamin's productive misreading. The essays by Anthony Phelan and Josh Cohen offerfurther clear ex? position of Benjamin's arguments about reflection, explaining how he replaces the infiniteregress of the individual subject thinking about thinking about thinking, ete., with a view of thinking which does not have the individual as its centre or starting point. Instead, a web of interconnections, in which the subject can participate but MLR, 100.3, 2005 753 which he or she does not initiate or control, replaces the subject-oriented linear regression . Menninghaus's essay sets out a problem: how can Benjamin be at once so wrong and so rightabout the Romantics? Phelan and Cohen clarifyaspects ofthe arguments. But the other essays in the...