Hannah Arendt: On Walter Benjamin

Overview

An intimate and intellectual lecture given by Hannah Arendt about the work and fate of her friend and colleague in the philosophical field, Walter Benjamin. Delivered in January 1968 at the Goethe House in New York, Arendt's speech paid tribute to Benjamin's ideologies surrounding linguistic philosophy, history and literature. Arendt notes the importance of German-Jewish literature in Benjamin's work, insisting that "without being a poet, he thought poetically. For him the metaphor was the greatest gift of language, because it transforms the invisible into the sensual." (Hannah Ardent) Through his passion for writers such as Kafka, Goethe and Proust, Benjamin honed his own sort of theology revolving around classic texts, preservation, and the collecting of wisdom.