Finale

On the Concept of History

Some of the background to Benjamin's 'Theses'

The following is an extract from my book Benjamin for Beginners which will be published some time in 2000 by Writers and Readers. It takes up the story near the end of Benjamin?s life after he had already spent many years in precarious exile in Paris. It explains some of the background to the writing of his these ?On the Concept of History? and takes us up to the reception of the piece by Benjamin?s friends after Benjamin?s suicide in 1940 while trying to flee France into Spain.

(Quotations are from Benjamin unless otherwise noted.)

Lloyd Spencer

War and internment

The anti-fascist positions adopted in Benjamin?s writings were bound to bring him to the attention of the authorities. In February 1939 the Gestapo applied for Benjamin?s expatriation. In August 1939 the Stalin and Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact, thus bringing to an end all hopes that Russia would somehow come to the aid of the German working class against Fascism. On 1 September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war.

?The war arrived without much fuss. It had already been announced too often. It was as if it wanted to say: I?m coming to show you that you can rely on me.?
[Quoted in Brodersen, p. 242]

In September, all Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians aged between 17 and 50 were interned. Any of these who were living in Paris had to present themselves at the Stade Colombe, a football stadium. After ten days they were bundled into buses and transported to hastily improvised internment camps.

The group Benjamin belonged to was sent to Nevers, a small town between Paris and Lyon. As part of the camp life which inmates organised for themselves Benjamin gave lectures (on ?Guilt?). Benjamin soon hit on the idea of organising a camp newspaper, to be called the Bulletin de Vernuche. Journal des Travailleurs du 54. Régiment. Although it was never printed it did advance beyond mere planning. A number of handwritten articles were collected.

As the result of concerted efforts of his friend, Adrienne Monnier and the French PEN club Benjamin was released from the internment camp at the end of November 1939. He wrote immediately (November 30, 1939) to Max Horkheimer to give ?some sign that I am still alive?:

?If you have no other task in mind for me, I would like to return to the ?Baudelaire? as soon as possible to write the two other parts. They, along with the part with which you are already familiar, will constitute the book as such. (The chapter you are publishing would be the central section of the book. I would cast both the first and third parts as essays that could exist independently of each other.)

And Benjamin reported new literary encounters and proposed new intellectual projects:

One thing I might propose is to do a comparative study of Rousseau?s Confessions and Gide?s Journal. I was unfamiliar with the Confessions before I read them recently. The book seemed to me to constitute an outline of the social characteristic, of which Gide?s Journal would represent the decline. (Gide?s Journal has just been published in an unabridged edition.) This comparison should provide a kind of historical critique of ?sincerity?.

Benjamin began to think seriously about emigrating to the United States. Twice Benjamin met up with his ex-wife Dora who pleaded that he flee Europe. Instead he renewed his reader?s card for the Bibliotheque Nationale so that he could continue work on the ?Arcades? project, or rather his book on Baudelaire. To Gretel Adorno (Letter 327, January 17, 1940) he wrote:

?The fear of having to abandon the Baudelaire once I have begun writing the sequel is what makes me hesitate. This sequel will be work of monumental breadth and it would be a delicate matter to have to start and stop again and again. This is, however, the risk I would have to take. I am constantly reminded of it by the gas mask in my small room? the mask looks to me like a disconcerting replica of the skulls with which studious monks decorated their cells. This is why I have not yet really dared to begin the sequel to the Baudelaire. I definitely hold this work more dear to my heart than any other. It would consequently not suffer being neglected even to ensure the survival of its author. ??

Benjamin?s theses ? ?On the Concept of History?

In the early months of 1940 while he waited in Paris for arrangements to be made for his long-delayed flight from Europe Benjamin comitted to paper a series of meditations in the form of 18 ?theses? ? ?On the Concept of History?. It was to be the last piece of writing that he completed. In May 1940 Hitler?s armies opened their offensive on the western front and converged on Paris causing a mass exodus from the city. In the early summer of 1940, also in a letter to Gretel Adorno, Benjamin commented on his preoccupations in these theses:

' The war and the constellation it brought with it has lead me to set down certain thoughts about which I can say that I have kept them in safe-keeping for almost twenty years; ? indeed, I kept them even from myself?'

Benjamin?s last piece of writing

This, Benjamin?s last piece of writing, echoes many of his early writings set down under the impact of the 1914-18 war. In Benjamin?s work theological insights and the urgent imperatives suggested by historical materialism are never at odds; in this last piece of writing they are crystallised in a series of extraordinarily suggestive meditations.

Many of the arguments of the theses were used by Benjamin in an important article, ?Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian? written in 1937 for the journal of the Institute of Social Research. In that essay Benjamin?s preoccupations were stated in more mundane, more historically concrete language. In the ?theses? they are set down with all the concentration of an incantation or prayer.

Benjamin?s 18 ?theses? are couched in the language of Messianism and invoke specifically Jewish themes such as that of remembrance. At the same time these ?theses? represent a condensed and encoded statement on the nature of the revolutionary experience of time and of history. The first thesis addresses the puzzle of the continued relevance of a theological perspective in his most materialist impulses.

?The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could pay a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponenet with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet?s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ?historical materialism? is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know is wizened and has to keep out of sight.? [Thesis I]

?Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice the spoils are carried along on the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with a cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of those who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as a document if not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it is transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.?

Theology / historical materialism

?This is theology; but in recollection [Eingedenken] we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally a-theological, just as we are not allowed to write it in immediately theological concepts.? [GS V, p. 589 (N8,1)]

?My thinking relates to theology like the blotting page to the ink. It has entirely soaked itself full with it [Es ist ganz von ihr vollgesogen]. If the blotting paper had its way, nothing that is written would remain.? GS, I (3) 1235

Susan Buck-Morss has offered the following insightful gloss:
?Were Benjamin to use theological concepts openly, he would be giving Judaic expression to the goals of universal history; by eschewing them, he gives universal-historical expression to the goals of Judaism. The difference is crucial. Judaism proves its chosen status by disappearing into secular, non-nationalistic politics. Disappearance is, paradoxically, the price paid for the survival of any particularistic religion in the Messianic Age. Such a dialectical "rescue" is antithetical to the eternal return of the same.?

To identify a Messianic element in Benjamin?s work is not to de-politicise it. In Benjamin?s thinking theology and historical materialism do not neutralise or cancel one another out, but, on the contrary, energise and radicalise one another. Benjamin says this explicitly from the ?Theologico-Political Fragment? (1919) to the opening of his ?these? ?On the Concept of History? (1940).

Genuinely revolutionary experience?

At a time of the most severe reversals for the working class Benjamin attempted to ?save? the notion of a genuinely revolutionary experience - to ensure its survival, even through the ?thousand-year rule? that the Nazis were preparing. Cut off from any means of addressing the German working class directly Benjamin must have could only conceive of the ?theses? as a message ?to those who come after?. Like the true story, the theses are capable of preserving their strength, concentrating it and ?releasing it even after a long time?.

? and the critique of progress

Throughout his life Benjamin was temperamentally opposed to all forms of reformism or gradualism. Now ? at a moment of historical crisis ? Benjamin is less concerned to attack Fascism than once again to criticise reformism and gradualism and the conception of history on which they were based. According to Benjamin, this conception (or experience of history) was emboddied by misguided political programme of the Social Democrats.

?Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current.?

?The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.?

?Once the classless society was defined as an eternal task, so the empty and homogenous future transformed itself into a ? so to speak ? antechamber, in which one could wait, with more or less composure for the entry of the revolution. In reality, there is not a single moment which does not carry with it its own revolutionary potential.? [from notes to ?Theses?]

?The experience of our generation: That capitalism will die no natural death.? [Notes to the Theses on History, Gesammelte Schriften vol I, p. 1244]

Messianism

?To the concept of the classless society its authentic Messianic face must be given again, precisely in the interest of the revolutionary politics of the proletariat itself.? [Notes to the Theses on History, Gesammelte Schriften vol. I, p. 1232]

?The authentic concept of universal history is a Messianic one.? [GS V, p.608 (N18a, 3)]

?In the concept of the classless society, Marx secularized the concept of the Messianic Age. And that was as it should be.? [GS I, p. 1231]

Rolf Tiedemann, of the editors of Benjamin?s Gesammelte Schriften, has pointed out that ?an interpretation of the theses would stop halfway if it did not ask why Benjamin proceeds in this manner: at certain points he translates back into the language of theology that which Marx "had secularized" ? which Benjamin thought was "as it should be".

The tradition of Jewish messianism

Against the opposition of Jewish orthodoxy, Gershom Scholem had devoted his life to resurrecting the buried tradition of Jewish messianism. In these final reflections Benjamin resorts to the language of messianic Judaism in order to undermine any complacency about the present. He used prayer as an image of the kind of alertness and preparedness which is demanded ? but also created ? by the experience of revolutionary action.

?For (within the Jewish messianic tradition) every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might come.?

Judaism also emphasised that the past was the only source of an image of the possible future: ?.the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance however.?

Remembrance, the conscious re-collection of the fragmented and threatened past, is the capacity in which the historian expresses his solidarity with the revolutionary classes. The eye, and the memory of the Judaic God serve as Benjamin?s model of a universal human, social justice in which the living would take the past upon themselves, making the past an ?integral part of the process of making their own history?. ?Such a memory would encompass any image of the past, however tragic, however guiltily, within its own continuity?.

To identify a Messianic element in Benjamin?s work is not to de-politicise it. In Benjamin?s thinking theology and historical materialism do not neutralise or cancel one another out, but, on the contrary, energise and radicalise one another. Benjamin says this explicitly from the ?Theologico-Political Fragment? (1919) to the opening of his ?theses? ?On the Concept of History? (1940).

Benjamin's lifelong friend Gershom Scholem (whose poem 'Greetings from Angelus Novus' is quoted in the 'Theses') reminds us that: ?Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature ? this cannot be sufficiently emphasized ? a theory of catastrophe.? [Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in The Messianic Idea, p. 7]

Fanning the spark of hope

?To be sure only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past ? which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has the past become citable in all its moments.?

?Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.?

'Like every generation which has preceded us we possess only a weak Messianic power: we are unable to fully redeem the past, or to undo the distortions and destructiveness of the cultural hegemony of successive ruling classes. But at unexpected moments we are given the opportunity of grasping the ?true image of the past? as ?it flares up at a moment of danger?, (the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes).'

In the moment of revolutionary upheaval, and in certain revolutionary ideas and events, time is brought to a standstill so that we might grasp the ?constellation? which our own age has formed with a definite earlier one. ?Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ?time of the now? (Jetztzeit) which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.?

The ?time of the now? (Jetztzeit)

The ?time of the now? is a notion opposed to the Reformist conception of time as homogeneous, empty, a conception which underlies the Social Democratic notion of ?Progress?. ?The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.?

?A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.?

?Not man or men but the struggling oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the down trodden. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.?

?Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or put differently a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.?

Confronting ?the powers of darkness?

In his last letter to Scholem (Jan 11, 1940) Benjamin noted:

?Every line we succeed in publishing today ? no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it ? is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.?

But Benjamin did not intend his theses for publication. In the same letter to Gretel Adorno quoted earlier, Benjamin gives some idea of his own hesitations in even setting these ideas down.

?These reflections ?are not merely the methodological preparation of a section of the "Baudelaire" [book]. They lead me to suppose that the problem of memory (and that of forgetting), that appears in them at another level, will preoccupy me for a long time. ?
? Nothing is further from my mind than the publication of these notes (not to mention in the form in which you have them).?
? I need not tell you that would leave the door wide open to enthusiastic misunderstanding.? [GS I (3) 1223, Benjamin, letter to Gretel Adorno.

In 1942 Benjamin?s ?theses? were published posthumously by the Institute for Social Research in a book In Memory of Walter Benjamin. By then a copy of the ?theses? had already reached Bertolt Brecht who, in August 1941, noted in his Arbeitsjournal (work-diary):

günther stern gave it [Benjamin?s treatise ?On the Concept of History?] to me, commenting that it is complex and obscure, i think he also used the word ?beautiful?. the little treatise deals with historical research, [?] b[enjamin] rejects the notion of history as continuum, the notion of progress as a mighty enterprise undertaken by cool, clear heads, the notion of work as the source of morality, of the workforce as protégés of technology, etc. he makes fun of the oft-heard remark that it is astonishing that fascism should ?still be possible in this century? (as if it were not the fruit of every century). in short the little treatise is clear and presents complex issues simply (despite its metaphors and its judaisms) and [?]?it is frightening to think how few people there are who are prepared even to misunderstand such a piece.

Forr material on

some of the difficulties with the translation,

click here.

	The following is an extract from my book *Benjamin for Beginners* which will be published some time in 2000 by Writers and Readers. It takes up the story near the end of Benjamin?s life after he had already spent many years in precarious exile in Paris. It explains some of the background to the writing of his these ?On the Concept of History? and takes us up to the reception of the piece by Benjamin?s friends after Benjamin?s suicide in 1940 while trying to flee France into Spain. (Quotations are from Benjamin unless otherwise noted.)
	Lloyd Spencer


	War and internment

	The anti-fascist positions adopted in Benjamin?s writings were bound to bring him to the attention of the authorities. In February 1939 the Gestapo applied for Benjamin?s expatriation. In August 1939 the Stalin and Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact, thus bringing to an end all hopes that Russia would somehow come to the aid of the German working class against Fascism. On 1 September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war.

	?The war arrived without much fuss. It had already been announced too often. It was as if it wanted to say: I?m coming to show you that you can rely on me.? [Quoted in Brodersen, p. 242]

	In September, all Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians aged between 17 and 50 were interned. Any of these who were living in Paris had to present themselves at the Stade Colombe, a football stadium. After ten days they were bundled into buses and transported to hastily improvised internment camps.

	The group Benjamin belonged to was sent to Nevers, a small town between Paris and Lyon. As part of the camp life which inmates organised for themselves Benjamin gave lectures (on ?Guilt?). Benjamin soon hit on the idea of organising a camp newspaper, to be called the *Bulletin de Vernuche. Journal des Travailleurs du 54. Régiment*. Although it was never printed it did advance beyond mere planning. A number of handwritten articles were collected.

	As the result of concerted efforts of his friend, Adrienne Monnier and the French PEN club Benjamin was released from the internment camp at the end of November 1939. He wrote immediately (November 30, 1939) to Max Horkheimer to give ?some sign that I am still alive?:

	?If you have no other task in mind for me, I would like to return to the ?Baudelaire? as soon as possible to write the two other parts. They, along with the part with which you are already familiar, will constitute the book as such. (The chapter you are publishing would be the central section of the book. I would cast both the first and third parts as essays that could exist independently of each other.)

	And Benjamin reported new literary encounters and proposed new intellectual projects:

	One thing I might propose is to do a comparative study of Rousseau?s *Confessions* and Gide?s *Journal. I was unfamiliar with the Confessions* before I read them recently. The book seemed to me to constitute an outline of the social characteristic, of which Gide?s *Journal* would represent the decline. (Gide?s Journal has just been published in an unabridged edition.) This comparison should provide a kind of historical critique of ?sincerity?.

	Benjamin began to think seriously about emigrating to the United States. Twice Benjamin met up with his ex-wife Dora who pleaded that he flee Europe. Instead he renewed his reader?s card for the *Bibliotheque Nationale* so that he could continue work on the ?Arcades? project, or rather his book on Baudelaire. To Gretel Adorno (Letter 327, January 17, 1940) he wrote:

	?The fear of having to abandon the Baudelaire once I have begun writing the sequel is what makes me hesitate. This sequel will be work of monumental breadth and it would be a delicate matter to have to start and stop again and again. This is, however, the risk I would have to take. I am constantly reminded of it by the gas mask in my small room? the mask looks to me like a disconcerting replica of the skulls with which studious monks decorated their cells. This is why I have not yet really dared to begin the sequel to the Baudelaire. I definitely hold this work more dear to my heart than any other. It would consequently not suffer being neglected even to ensure the survival of its author. ??

	Benjamin?s theses ? ?On the Concept of History?

	In the early months of 1940 while he waited in Paris for arrangements to be made for his long-delayed flight from Europe Benjamin comitted to paper a series of meditations in the form of 18 ?theses? ? ?On the Concept of History?. It was to be the last piece of writing that he completed. In May 1940 Hitler?s armies opened their offensive on the western front and converged on Paris causing a mass exodus from the city. In the early summer of 1940, also in a letter to Gretel Adorno, Benjamin commented on his preoccupations in these theses:

	' The war and the constellation it brought with it has lead me to set down certain thoughts about which I can say that I have kept them in safe-keeping for almost twenty years; ? indeed, I kept them even from myself?'

	Benjamin?s last piece of writing

	This, Benjamin?s last piece of writing, echoes many of his early writings set down under the impact of the 1914-18 war. In Benjamin?s work theological insights and the urgent imperatives suggested by historical materialism are never at odds; in this last piece of writing they are crystallised in a series of extraordinarily suggestive meditations.

	Many of the arguments of the theses were used by Benjamin in an important article, ?Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian? written in 1937 for the journal of the Institute of Social Research. In that essay Benjamin?s preoccupations were stated in more mundane, more historically concrete language. In the ?theses? they are set down with all the concentration of an incantation or prayer.

	Benjamin?s 18 ?theses? are couched in the language of Messianism and invoke specifically Jewish themes such as that of remembrance. At the same time these ?theses? represent a condensed and encoded statement on the nature of the revolutionary experience of time and of history. The first thesis addresses the puzzle of the continued relevance of a theological perspective in his most materialist impulses.

	?The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could pay a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponenet with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet?s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ?historical materialism? is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know is wizened and has to keep out of sight.? [Thesis I]

	?Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice the spoils are carried along on the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with a cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of those who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as a document if not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it is transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.?

	Theology / historical materialism

	?This is theology; but in recollection [Eingedenken] we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally a-theological, just as we are not allowed to write it in immediately theological concepts.? [GS V, p. 589 (N8,1)]

	?My thinking relates to theology like the blotting page to the ink. It has entirely soaked itself full with it [Es ist ganz von ihr vollgesogen]. If the blotting paper had its way, nothing that is written would remain.? GS, I (3) 1235

	Susan Buck-Morss has offered the following insightful gloss: ?Were Benjamin to use theological concepts openly, he would be giving Judaic expression to the goals of universal history; by eschewing them, he gives universal-historical expression to the goals of Judaism. The difference is crucial. Judaism proves its chosen status by disappearing into secular, non-nationalistic politics. Disappearance is, paradoxically, the price paid for the survival of any particularistic religion in the Messianic Age. Such a dialectical "rescue" is antithetical to the eternal return of the same.?

	To identify a Messianic element in Benjamin?s work is not to de-politicise it. In Benjamin?s thinking theology and historical materialism do not neutralise or cancel one another out, but, on the contrary, energise and radicalise one another. Benjamin says this explicitly from the ?Theologico-Political Fragment? (1919) to the opening of his ?these? ?On the Concept of History? (1940).

	Genuinely revolutionary experience?

	At a time of the most severe reversals for the working class Benjamin attempted to ?save? the notion of a genuinely revolutionary experience - to ensure its survival, even through the ?thousand-year rule? that the Nazis were preparing. Cut off from any means of addressing the German working class directly Benjamin must have could only conceive of the ?theses? as a message ?to those who come after?. Like the true story, the theses are capable of preserving their strength, concentrating it and ?releasing it even after a long time?.

	? and the critique of progress

	Throughout his life Benjamin was temperamentally opposed to all forms of reformism or gradualism. Now ? at a moment of historical crisis ? Benjamin is less concerned to attack Fascism than once again to criticise reformism and gradualism and the conception of history on which they were based. According to Benjamin, this conception (or experience of history) was emboddied by misguided political programme of the Social Democrats.

	?Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current.?
	?The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.?
	?Once the classless society was defined as an eternal task, so the empty and homogenous future transformed itself into a ? so to speak ? antechamber, in which one could wait, with more or less composure for the entry of the revolution. In reality, there is not a single moment which does not carry with it its own revolutionary potential.? [from notes to ?Theses?]
	?The experience of our generation: That capitalism will die no natural death.? [Notes to the Theses on History, Gesammelte Schriften vol I, p. 1244]

	Messianism

	?To the concept of the classless society its authentic Messianic face must be given again, *precisely in the interest of the revolutionary politics of the proletariat itself.? [Notes to the Theses on History, Gesammelte Schriften* vol. I, p. 1232]

	?The authentic concept of universal history is a Messianic one.? [GS V, p.608 (N18a, 3)]

	?In the concept of the classless society, Marx secularized the concept of the Messianic Age. And that was as it should be.? [GS I, p. 1231]

	Rolf Tiedemann, of the editors of Benjamin?s Gesammelte Schriften, has pointed out that ?an interpretation of the theses would stop halfway if it did not ask *why* Benjamin proceeds in this manner: at certain points he translates back into the language of theology that which Marx "had secularized" ? which Benjamin thought was "as it should be".

	The tradition of Jewish messianism

	Against the opposition of Jewish orthodoxy, Gershom Scholem had devoted his life to resurrecting the buried tradition of Jewish messianism. In these final reflections Benjamin resorts to the language of messianic Judaism in order to undermine any complacency about the present. He used prayer as an image of the kind of alertness and preparedness which is demanded ? but also created ? by the *experience* of revolutionary action.

	?For (within the Jewish messianic tradition) every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might come.?

	Judaism also emphasised that the past was the only source of an image of the possible future: ?.the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance however.?

	Remembrance, the conscious re-*collection* of the fragmented and threatened past, is the capacity in which the historian expresses his solidarity with the revolutionary classes. The eye, and the memory of the Judaic God serve as Benjamin?s model of a universal human, social justice in which the living would take the past upon themselves, making the past an ?integral part of the process of making their own history?. ?Such a memory would encompass any image of the past, however tragic, however guiltily, within its own continuity?.

	To identify a Messianic element in Benjamin?s work is not to de-politicise it. In Benjamin?s thinking theology and historical materialism do not neutralise or cancel one another out, but, on the contrary, energise and radicalise one another. Benjamin says this explicitly from the ?Theologico-Political Fragment? (1919) to the opening of his ?theses? ?On the Concept of History? (1940).



	Benjamin's lifelong friend Gershom Scholem (whose poem 'Greetings from Angelus Novus' is quoted in the 'Theses') reminds us that: ?Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature ? this cannot be sufficiently emphasized ? a theory of catastrophe.? [Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in *The Messianic Idea*, p. 7]


	Fanning the spark of hope

	?To be sure only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past ? which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has the past become citable in all its moments.?

	?Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.?

	'Like every generation which has preceded us we possess only a *weak* Messianic power: we are unable to fully redeem the past, or to undo the distortions and destructiveness of the cultural hegemony of successive ruling classes. But at unexpected moments we are given the opportunity of grasping the ?true image of the past? as ?it flares up at a moment of danger?, (the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes).'

	In the moment of revolutionary upheaval, and in certain revolutionary ideas and events, time is brought to a standstill so that we might grasp the ?constellation? which our own age has formed with a definite earlier one. ?Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ?time of the now? (*Jetztzeit*) which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.?

	The ?time of the now? (Jetztzeit)

	The ?time of the now? is a notion opposed to the Reformist conception of time as homogeneous, empty, a conception which underlies the Social Democratic notion of ?Progress?. ?The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.?

	?A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.?

	?Not man or men but the struggling oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the down trodden. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.?

	?Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or put differently a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.?

	Confronting ?the powers of darkness?

	In his last letter to Scholem (Jan 11, 1940) Benjamin noted:

	?Every line we succeed in publishing today ? no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it ? is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.?

	But Benjamin did not intend his theses for publication. In the same letter to Gretel Adorno quoted earlier, Benjamin gives some idea of his own hesitations in even setting these ideas down.

	?These reflections ?are not merely the methodological preparation of a section of the "Baudelaire" [book]. They lead me to suppose that the problem of memory (and that of forgetting), that appears in them at another level, will preoccupy me for a long time. ? ? Nothing is further from my mind than the publication of these notes (not to mention in the form in which you have them).? ? I need not tell you that would leave the door wide open to enthusiastic misunderstanding.? [GS I (3) 1223, Benjamin, letter to Gretel Adorno.

	In 1942 Benjamin?s ?theses? were published posthumously by the Institute for Social Research in a book *In Memory of Walter Benjamin. By then a copy of the ?theses? had already reached Bertolt Brecht who, in August 1941, noted in his Arbeitsjournal* (work-diary):

	günther stern gave it [Benjamin?s treatise ?On the Concept of History?] to me, commenting that it is complex and obscure, i think he also used the word ?beautiful?. the little treatise deals with historical research, [?] b[enjamin] rejects the notion of history as continuum, the notion of progress as a mighty enterprise undertaken by cool, clear heads, the notion of work as the source of morality, of the workforce as protégés of technology, etc. he makes fun of the oft-heard remark that it is astonishing that fascism should ?still be possible in this century? (as if it were not the fruit of every century). in short the little treatise is clear and presents complex issues simply (despite its metaphors and its judaisms) and [?]?it is frightening to think how few people there are who are prepared even to misunderstand such a piece.

	Forr material on some of the difficulties with the translation, click here.