Religion Around Walter Benjamin

Brian Britt presents a meticulous analysis of the religious, theological, and spiritual currents that swirled around Walter Benjamin in Religion Around Walter Benjamin. The book, a reader-friendly combination of cultural genealogy and intellectual biography, charts a roughly chronological course through Benjamin’s life, from his upbringing in Berlin by prosperous, assimilated Jewish parents to the First World War (“No event comes close . . . for its impact on religion around Benjamin” [95]) to the Weimar Republic, his peripatetic exile, and eventual suicide on the Spanish border following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. Britt’s focus extends beyond Benjamin’s literary output to include the perspectives of his colleagues, contemporaries, friends, and foes—which included, among others, Christian theologians, devoted Marxists, and dedicated Zionists (labels that were not, Britt reminds us, mutually exclusive). Britt does an excellent job of incorporating textual evidence (including archival sources, correspondence, memoirs, and more) alongside analyses of popular culture, mass media, architecture, and statistics in order to “contextualize and integrate the diverse religious and cultural influences on Benjamin’s thought” (4).

This is no small feat; it is a truism that Benjamin’s work is “wide ranging and unsystematic” (8). Such eclecticism leads Britt to adopt a dual lens to analyze Benjamin and religion around him.

First, Britt identifies Benjamin as a “postsecular” thinker who “challenges the sharp dichotomy of religion and secularity” (194). Britt points out how complaints against Benjamin “for being either too theological or not theological enough” (196) make little sense in a period where there were “measurable declines in some religious practices . . . while other practices, such as visiting museums and public parks, holiday shopping in department stores, attending political demonstrations, and going to the cinema, took on religious qualities” (5). Given this blurring of sacred and secular, the second lens Britt selects is ‘lived religion,’ which for him means a focus on how everyday, ostensibly nonreligious actions can entail a “spiritual sense” or “sacred presence” (7). Benjamin himself, though he “never embraced political Zionism, Jewish practice, or the Hebrew language” (141) and “chose not to affiliate or align with a particular religious and political organizations for most of his life” (151), was nevertheless extremely sensitive to “the imbrication of religious tradition with modernity” (3), which the concept of lived religion presupposes.

This awareness is repeatedly reflected in his writings, from his travel essays on religious festivals in Italy (140) and spiritual soundscapes in Moscow (190) to his musings on the moral component of history. And even in instances where Benjamin is silent, Britt fruitfully explores how this “neglect of lived religion opens a space to consider more fully the workings of religious and secular discourses in his world and in the study of religion generally” (7).

Yet if Britt conclusively establishes the frame of religion as viable and even necessary for understanding Benjamin’s texts and contexts, the book scarcely addresses what is actually going on within the frame—in other words, what religion, religious language, and theology does for Benjamin.

It is emblematic of this disconnect that the book raises many questions which it doesn’t directly answer (“What sparked his interest in religious traditions when his own upbringing was largely secular?” [1]; “Why did he overlook the obvious option of religious communities in this search [to find a way to link religion with communal life]?” [32]; “How does theology fit into the profile of late Benjamin as a Marxian cultural scholar and critic of modern life?” [193]). Though the author does an excellent job of cataloguing Benjamin’s religious influences, he is less successful in characterizing the exact nature of that relationship, although there are tantalizing glimpses, such as when Britt observes that “what [Karl] Barth and Benjamin share most of all is an interest in connecting divine sovereignty to radical political and cultural thought” (143) or notes how religious language “enable[d] Benjamin to criticize secular discourse and gesture, however ambiguously, toward a politics in dialogue with religious traditions” (175). Likewise, since Britt’s primary objective is to “show the vitality and multiplicity of religion around Benjamin” (27), the political, personal, and socioeconomic dimensions of Benjamin’s life and thought (and the utility of religious or theological language therein) receive relatively little attention.

Another downside is that some of the religious connections Britt draws seem tenuous, as when he makes the assertion that “it is suggestive of Barth’s possible influence that Benjamin planned a journal called Krisis and Kritik” (143), writes that Benjamin’s combination of the aesthetic, religious, and political “reveal[s] the influence of Aby Warburg” (195), claims that “[Fritz] Lieb may have contributed to the theological drift of Benjamin’s later writings” (169) and “may also have influenced Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’” (169), or notes how the Christian theologian Karl Thieme’s work “resonates with Benjamin’s own apocalyptic and messianic reflections” (167).

These are all perfectly plausible observations—Britt makes it abundantly clear that because “his work is so wide-ranging, allusive, and fragmentary, research on Benjamin often depends on associations, analogies, and ‘what if’ speculations” (192)—but they deserve further elaboration. The same could be said for much of the book. Though Britt rightly points out that the answer to practically any question about Benjamin “is overdetermined, since there are so many possible right answers” (169), this shouldn’t preclude deeper analysis. Nor should the sheer volume of religious elements in Benjamin’s life and work and valid skepticism about  “a definitive account of ‘religion around Benjamin’” (81) justify scant textual analysis. Benjamin himself acknowledges these difficulties, writing at one point in his Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999) that “my thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain” (as quoted by Britt on page 170).

Minor quibbles aside, it is a mark of his efforts that Britt has succeeded in extracting so much thought-provoking scholarship from the blotting pad of Benjamin’s religious milieu. The overall result is a detailed survey that indubitably does justice to the religious and theological atmosphere of Benjamin’s life and work. While there are few larger takeaways once the argument is granted, Britt provides readers with the scaffolding to challenge his conclusions and apply his methods in areas that deserve further exploration.

Ryan Dradzynski is an independent scholar.

Ryan Dradzynski

Date Of Review:

December 12, 2023