But this is only how it appears in retrospect. At the time when Benjamin tried, first, a half-hearted Zionism and then a basically no less half-hearted Communism, the two ideologies faced each other with the greatest hostility: the Communists were defaming Zionists as Jewish Fascists22 and the Zionists were calling the young Jewish Communists ‘red assimilationists.’ In a remarkable and probably unique manner Benjamin kept both routes open for himself for years; he persisted in considering the road to Palestine long after he had become a Marxist, without allowing himself to be swayed in the least by the opinions of his Marxist-oriented friends, particularly the Jews among them. This shows clearly how little the ‘positive’ aspect of either ideology interested him, and that what mattered to him in both instances was the ‘negative’ factor of criticism of existing conditions, a way out of bourgeois illusions and untruthfulness, a position outside the literary as well as the academic establishment. He was quite young when he adopted this radically critical attitude, probably without suspecting to what isolation and loneliness it would eventually lead him. Thus we read, for example, in a letter written in 1918, that Walther Rathenau, claiming to represent Germany in foreign affairs, and Rudolf Borchardt, making a similar claim with respect to German spiritual affairs, had in common the ‘will to lie,’ ‘the objective mendacity’ (Briefe I, 189 ff). Neither wanted to ‘serve’ a cause through his works – in Borchardt’s case, the ‘spiritual and linguistic resources’ of the people; in Rathenau’s, the nation – but both used their works and talents as ‘sovereign means in the service of an absolute will to power.’ In addition, there were the littérateurs who placed their gifts in the service of a career and social status: ‘To be a littérateur is to live under the sign of mere intellect, just as prostitution is to live under the sign of mere sex’ (Schriften II, 179). Just as a prostitute betrays sexual love, a littérateur betrays the mind, and it was this betrayal of the mind which the best among the Jews could not forgive their colleagues in literary life. In the same vein Benjamin wrote five years later – one year after the assassination of Rathenau – to a close German friend: ‘… Jews today ruin even the best German cause which they publicly champion, because their public statement is necessarily venal (in a deeper sense) and cannot adduce proof of its authenticity’ (Briefe I, 310). He went on to say that only the private, almost ‘secret relationships between Germans and Jews’ were legitimate, while ‘everything about German-Jewish relations that works in public today causes harm.’ There was much truth in these words. Written from the perspective of the Jewish question at that time, they supply evidence of the darkness of a period in which one could rightly say, ‘The light of the public darkens everything’ (Heidegger).

As early as 1913 Benjamin weighed the position of Zionism ‘as a possibility and thus perhaps a necessary commitment’ (Briefe I, 44) in the sense of this dual rebellion against the parental home and German-Jewish literary life. Two years later he met Gerhard Scholem, encountering in him for the first and only time ‘Judaism in living form’; soon afterwards came the beginning of that curious, endless consideration, extending over a period of almost twenty years, of emigration to Palestine. ‘Under certain, by no means impossible conditions I am ready if not determined [to go to Palestine]. Here in Austria the Jews (the decent ones, those who are not making money) talk of nothing else.’ So he wrote in 1919 (Briefe I, 222), but at the same time he regarded such a plan as an ‘act of violence’ (Briefe I, 208), unfeasible unless it turned out to be necessary. Whenever such financial or political necessity arose, he reconsidered the project and did not go. It is hard to say whether he was still serious about it after the separation from his wife, who had come from a Zionist milieu. But it is certain that even during his Paris exile he announced that he might go ‘to Jerusalem in October or November, after a more or less definitive conclusion of my studies’ (Briefe II, 655). What strikes one as indecision in the letters, as though he were vacillating between Zionism and Marxism, in truth was probably due to the bitter insight that all solutions were not only objectively false and inappropriate to reality, but would lead him personally to a false salvation, no matter whether that salvation was labelled Moscow or Jerusalem. He felt that he would deprive himself of the positive cognitive chances of his own position – ‘on the top of a mast that is already crumbling’ or ‘dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor’ among the ruins. He had settled down in the desperate conditions which corresponded to reality; there he wanted to remain in order to ‘denature’ his own writings ‘like methylated spirits … at the risk of making them unfit for consumption’ by anyone then alive but with the chance of being preserved all the more reliably for an unknown future.

For the insolubility of the Jewish question for that generatiion by no means consisted only in their speaking and writing German or in the fact that their ‘production plant’ was located in Europe – in Benjamin’s case, in Berlin West or in Paris, something about which he did ‘not have the slightest illusions’ (Briefe II, 531). What was decisive was that these men did not wish to ‘return’ either to the ranks of the Jewish people or to Judaism, and could not desire to do so – not because they believed in ‘progress’ and an automatic disappearance of anti-Semitism or because they were too ‘assimilated’ and too alienated from their Jewish heritage, but because all traditions and cultures as well as all ‘belonging’ had become equally questionable to them. This is what they felt was wrong with the ‘return’ 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: ‘… My people, provided that I have one.’23

No doubt, the Jewish question was of great importance for this generation of Jewish writers and explains much of the personal 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. Not just Marxism as a doctrine but the Communist revolutionary movement exerted a powerful attraction on them because it implied more than a criticism of existing social and political conditions and took into account the totality of political and spiritual traditions. For Benjamin, at any rate, this question of the past and of tradition as such was decisive, and precisely in the sense in which Scholem, warning his friend against the dangers to his thinking inherent in Marxism, posed it, albeit without being aware of the problem. Benjamin, he wrote, was running the risk of forfeiting the chance of becoming ‘the legitimate continuer of the most fruitful and most genuine traditions of a Hamann and a Humboldt’ (Briefe II, 526). What he did not understand was that such a return to and continuation of the past was the very thing which ‘the morality of [his] insights,’ to which Scholem appealed, was bound to rule out for Benjamin.24

It seems tempting to believe, and would indeed be a comforting thought, that those few who ventured out onto the most exposed positions of the time and paid the full price of isolation at least thought of themselves as the precursors of a new age. That certainly was not the case. In his essay on Karl Kraus, Benjamin brought up this question: Does Kraus stand ‘at the threshold of a new age?’ ‘Alas, by no means. He stands at the threshold of the Last Judgment’ (Schriften II, 174). And at this threshold there really stood all those who later became the masters of the ‘new age’; they looked upon the dawn of a new age basically as a decline and viewed history along with the traditions which led up to this decline as a field of ruins.25 No one has expressed this more clearly than Benjamin in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ and nowhere has he said it more unequivocally than in a letter from Paris dated 1935: ‘Actually, I hardly feel constrained to try to make head or tail of this condition of the world.