L'amicizia tra Walter Benjamin e Bertolt Brecht è stata una delle più importanti relazioni del secolo scorso dal punto di vista estetico e politico. Quest'amicizia conserva ancora un'attrazione magica: Benjamin la considerava una costellazione, mentre Hannah Arendt la definì 'unica', 'perché in essa il più grande poeta tedesco vivente incontrò il più grande critico dell'epoca'. Altri amici di Benjamin non condividevano questo giudizio. I loro sospetti hanno portato a interpretazioni errate che ancora oggi persistono nella ricerca. Il libro conserva le tracce del rapporto tra i due e rimuove ogni pregiudizio.

The work of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is an audacious plotting of history, art and thought; a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, art and dreams. It comprises myriad smaller archives, in which Benjamin gathered together all kinds of artefacts, assortments of images, texts and signs, themselves representing experiences, ideas and hopes, each of which was enthusiastically logged, systematized and analyzed by their author. In them, Benjamin laid the groundwork for the salvaging of his own legacy.

This unique book, produced in association with the Benjamin Archive, delves into these archives. They include carefully laid-out manuscripts; photograps of a home with luxurious furniture, arcades, Russian toys; picture postcards from Tuscany and the Balearics; meticulous and unconventional registers, card indexes and catalogs; notebooks, in which every single square centimeter is covered; a collation of his son’s first words and sentences; riddles and enigmatic Sibyls. Everything here is subtly interlinked with everything else.

Intricate and intimate, Walter Benjamin’s Archive leads right into the core of his work, yielding a rich and detailed portrait of its author.


From the Hardcover edition.