An Investigation Into the Reappearance of Walter Benjamin

By Adam Leith Gollner 

PenguinRandomHouse – September 11, 2014

History tells us that the influential German literary critic died more than seventy years ago. So how is it then that Benjamin is now out doing lectures and has published a new book?

On the night of Jan 2, 1940, while fleeing Nazi Germany, the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin overdosed on morphine pills at the Franco-Spanish border. He had with him a heavy black briefcase he said contained a manuscript. What those papers may have been remains unresolved.

Now, seventy-four years after his death, Walter Benjamin is releasing Recent Writings, a new collection of nine essays written between 1986 and 2013. “I have been dead since 1940,” Benjamin explains, in his new book, “but it seems I am also alive today in a certain way.” The About The Author page adds: “In 1986—many years after his tragic death—Walter Benjamin reappeared in public with the lecture “Mondrian ’63–’96” organized by the Marxist Center in Ljubljana.”

Grainy video footage of that talk exists online. In it, a bespectacled middle-aged man with a British accent speaks to a classroom full of expressionless students, chins resting in hands. The lecturer, ostensibly Walter Benjamin, starts discussing six Piet Mondrian paintings hanging on a wall behind him. The earliest painting is dated 1963; the latest 1996. A perplexity here is that Mondrian died in 1944. Another is that the talk was held in 1986 (or 1987), while one painting on view was made a decade later. “I don’t know if it makes sense to say this picture originated in 1996,” Benjamin says at one point in the talk, “or that it would perhaps be more correct to say that it will originate in 1996?”

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