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Radio Benjamin by Walter Benjamin

February 9, 2015, 12:31 am
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讀了 Radio Benjamin by Walter Benjamin數篇，必須注解許多德國文化、史地：
譬如說
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Hosemann

Review

“Everything which fell under the scrutiny of his words was transformed, as though it had become radioactive.” —Theodor Adorno

“A complex and brilliant writer.” —J.M. Coetzee

“Walter Benjamin was one of the unclassifiable ones ... whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre.” —Hannah Arendt

“Benjamin buckled himself to the task of revolutionary transformation … his life and work speak challengingly to us all.” —Terry Eagleton

“There has been no more original, no more serious critic and reader in our time.” —George Steiner

About the Author

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations; The Arcades Project; and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Lecia Rosenthal is the author of Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation. She has taught at Columbia and Tufts.

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Radio Benjamin

by Walter BenjaminEdited by Lecia RosenthalTranslated by Jonathan LutesWith Lisa Harries Schumann and Diana Reese
“The German critic was not only a theorist of the media – he was a gifted broadcaster as well.” – Financial Times
Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin’s thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated “Enlightenment for Children” youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity.
Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century’s most respected thinkers.


Radio Benjamin Edited by Lecia Rosentha, book review: A new voice graces the airwaves
Walter Benjamin's work for radio finds the German thinker in beguiling form
JONATHAN GIBBS Author Biography


Thursday 23 October 2014


Walter Benjamin is a writer whose star has only brightened since his death on the French-Spanish border in 1940, in despairing flight from the Nazis. While most of that brightening has taken place inside academia, it is delightful to learn that, as well as his intense theoretical writings on literature and society, Benjamin also wrote for the radio – and often for children.
The surviving texts of his German radio broadcasts have been side-lined over the years, rather than forgotten, and as editor Lecia Rosenthal admits in her introduction to these translations (by Jonathan Lutes, Lisa Harries Schumann and Diana Reese), that's how Benjamin would have wanted it. His radio work was largely done for money, although he was also interested in the medium itself, which was still in its infancy when these broadcasts were aired, between 1927 and 1933.
The pieces included here range from talks and readings to dialogues and radio plays, and two oddities: a "novella", the rather impenetrable "Sketched in Mobile Dust", and what Benjamin called a "listening model"– a sort of didactic public information broadcast.
This "listening model" goes by the distinctly un-Benjamin-ish title "A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea!" and is essentially an acted-out "how-to guide" for employees wanting to know how to deal with their boss – which, in a bizarre coincidence, is also the subject of Georges Perec's The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise. It seems they really were on our side, those maverick European 20th-century thinkers!
In truth, however, students of Benjamin are likely to find less of interest in the pieces directed at adults than in some of those written for children, which make up the bulk of the book.
These transcripts, running to six or seven pages each, cover subjects such as real and fictional figures like Kaspar Hauser and Faustus, historical events such as the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the destruction of Pompeii, and, most pertinently, the life and history of Berlin, in pieces such as "Berlin Dialect", "Berlin Toy Tour" and "The Rental Barracks".
Although the tone is obviously different, these pieces can certainly be read alongside Benjamin's autobiographical writings on the city of his childhood, and might even be considered as sorts of primers for Benjamin's work on his mammoth Arcades Project: digging at the political and economic roots of what we think of as the purely cultural artefacts of the urban environment.
Through all of this runs a liberal humanist voice that is quite beguiling. The desire to incorporate even the harshest workings of the world into an optimistic and progressive narrative is at one with that of Ernst Gombrich's wonderful children's book A Little History of the World, which was written, in fact, within two years of Benjamin's last broadcast before the worsening political climate meant that as a left-wing Jew he could find no more air time.
We are still powerless before earthquakes, yet "technology will find a way out, albeit an indirect one: through prediction". A fire in a Chinese theatre in 1845 killed 2,000, but gives Benjamin opportunity for digressions into Chinese drama and national character.
The Firth of Tay railway disaster is carefully placed by Benjamin "within the history of technology". This collection shows a lighter – though entirely characteristic – side to this most influential of 20th-century thinkers.




Reviews

  • “Radio Benjamin could hardly be bettered... There really is no parallel for what Benjamin did in these talks. Imagine a particularly engaging episode of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time narrated by Alan Bennett – if Bennett were more profoundly steeped in Marx and politically engaged by the revolutionary potential of the medium of radio – and you have something of their allure.”
    – Stuart Jeffries, Financial Times
  • “This collection shows a lighter – though entirely characteristic – side to this most influential of 20th-century thinkers.”
    – Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent
  • “Like the best of children’s writers, he never condescends to his audience, and he communicates his encyclopaedic passion for the teeming immensity of the modern metropolis in vivid, engaging prose...He takes the standard villains of the children’s tale – the witch, the Gypsy, the robber – and shows that they were men and women who were often the victims of cruel prejudice.”
    – Michael Cronin, Irish Times
  • “Walter Benjamin, one of the first theorists to ponder the social impact of mass media [...] was equally entranced by the way thin air mysteriously transmits radio waves. In 1927, five years before he exiled himself from Germany in advance of the Nazi putsch, Benjamin began a series of experimental broadcasts on this new medium.”
    – Peter Conrad, Observer
  • “[An] ebullient compendium...In both their tone and mesmerizing array of subject matter, the broadcasts avoid the treacly condescension of contemporary children’s programming.”
    – Publishers Weekly

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b044b3lj

The Benjamin Broadcasts

Archive on 4


The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin is best known as the author of seminal texts such as "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and for his influence on Theodor Adorno and the "Frankfurt School" of philosophy. But behind the much-mythologised figure of Benjamin the philosopher, there lies the little-known historical reality of Benjamin the broadcaster...
When the Gestapo stormed Walter Benjamin's last apartment in 1940, they stumbled upon a cache of papers which the fleeing philosopher had abandoned in his hurry to escape Paris. Amongst these papers were the scripts for an extraordinary series of radio broadcasts for children covering everything from toy collecting to the politics of tenement housing, from the psychology of witch hunts to human responses to natural catastrophes. Designed to encourage young listeners to think critically, to question sources and to challenge clichés, Benjamin's broadcasts stand in stark contrast to the fascist propaganda which would come to take their place.
Benjamin committed suicide in 1940, when his flight out of Europe was blocked at the Spanish border. He died believing that most - if not all - of his writings were lost.
Here Radio4 listeners have an exclusive chance to discover them in this Archive on Four documentary presented by Michael Rosen, and with Henry Goodman as the voice of Walter Benjamin. It's the first ever English recreation of his pre-war broadcasts to children.
Producer: Kate Schneider
A Made in Manchester Production for BBC Radio 4.


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