By Walter Benjamin
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Extra info for Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Example text
There is, for one thing, the gesture, so significant of an era of public darkness, with which the collector not only withdraws from the public into the privacy of his four walls but takes along with him all kinds of treasures that once were public property to decorate them. ) Also, in his passion for the past for its own sake, born of his contempt for the present as such and therefore rather heedless of objective quality, there already appears a disturbing factor to announce that tradition may be the last thing to guide him and traditional values by no means be as safe in his hands as one might have assumed at first glance.
Besides, it never was anything • A fashionable residential area of Berlin. Illuminations but the concern of the Jewish intelligentsia and had no significance for the majority of Central European Jewry. For the intellectuals, however, it was of great importance, for their own Jewis~ness, which played hardly any role in their spiritual household, determined their social life to an extraordinary degree and therefore presented itself to them as a moral question of the first order. " 15 No matter how insignificant this problem may appear to us in the face of what actually happened later, we cannot disregard it here, for neither Benjamin nor Kafka nor Karl Kraus can be understood without it.
This is what they felt was wrong with the Ureturn" to the Jewish fold as proposed by the Zionists; they could all have said what Kafka once said about being a member of the Jewish people: " ... " 23 Introduction No doubt, the Jewish question was of great importance for this generation of Jewish writers and explains much of the per sonal despair so prominent in nearly everything they wrote. But the most clear-sighted among them were led by their personal conflicts to a much more general and more radical problem, namely, to questioning the relevance of the Western tradition as a whole.