Saturday, October 15, 2022

My hero / Walter Benjamin by Elif Shafak

 

Walter Benjamin by Mathieu Laca


My hero: Walter Benjamin by Elif Shafak

'One doesn't read him to feel better – one reads him to feel'

Elif Shafak
Friday 27 April 2012

Iwas a student in college when I first starting reading Walter Benjamin. Literary critic, philosopher, essayist, he was a man of words. As a German Jew he had been born in turbulent times, at the end of the 19th century, and in the most dangerous of places, Berlin.

While he was known only to a limited audience during his lifetime, his fame rocketed after his death. I remember waiting impatiently for the Turkish edition of the Arcades Project. The book travelled everywhere with me in my backpack; its pages torn on the edges, dotted with cigarette burns and coffee stains, and once, during a rock concert, soaked in the rain. Among all the books I read that year, fiction and non-fiction, no other was so tattered, so deeply loved.

Benjamin was an alchemist of sorts, the most unusual of Marxist intellectuals, a black sheep in every flock. He merged literature with philosophy, the questions raised by religion with the answers provided by secularism, left-wing opposition with mysticism, German idealism with historical materialism, despair with creativity … He was an expert on Goethe, Proust, Kafka and Baudelaire, but he also wrote extensively on about the small, ordinary things in life. He was no philosopher of ivory towers. As you keep reading him you can almost watch him strolling the streets, listening to people, taking notes, making sketches, constantly collecting.

One doesn't read him to feel better. One reads him to feel. In his universe nothing is as it appears to be and there is a vital need to go beyond surfaces and connect with humanity. To live is to walk upon a pile of rubble, listening to any signs of life coming from under the ruins. Melancholy constitutes an intrinsic part of his existence. One evening a nihilist boyfriend got drunk and yelled at Benjamin's photograph on the wall: "Smile Mr Walter! Don't need to carry the world on your shoulders. You are dead now, relax!" He then flung his wine glass at him, which he probably wanted to throw at me. I cleaned the mess with dishwashing soap, but a stain remained on Benjamin's glasses, making him see everything through a lens of red.

God, progress, civilisation, there was nothing he could not doubt, least of all himself. He was so modestly uncertain, this man of towering intellect. Gershom Scholem, the fountainhead of Jewish mysticism, thought Benjamin was a most special soul but why on earth did he converse with those leftists? Brecht had a profound respect for him but never understood what he was doing around those mystics. And in between two worlds, translating the words of those who never spoke the same language, Benjamin stood on his own, beautiful in his loneliness.

As the Nazis consolidated their power and humanity exchanged reason for madness, harmony for bigotry, he had to flee his homeland, this man who could not live away from his library. The journey across Europe was full of perils. On 26 September 1940, he committed suicide on the Franco-Spanish border while waiting for his visa to be granted. Suddenly he had decided to wait no more, doubt no more.

THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
054 My hero / Michael de Montaigne by Liyun Li
055 My hero / Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
056 My hero / Richmal Crompton by Louise Crompton
057 My hero / Edward Thomas by David Constantine
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
059 My hero / Sefton by Jilly Cooper

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 My hero / Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson

102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill
111 My hero / Arnold Lobell by Julia Donaldson (23 December)

2012 (PAGE 9)
115 My hero / Nadime Gordimer by Tessa Hadley (27 January)

(PAGE 8)

2013

(PAGE 5)
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman (13 September)
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer (1 November)

(PAGE 4)



(PAGE 3)

2015
250 My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre (22 January)
2016

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