:DOWHU%HQMDPLQ૷V.DUO.

UDXV1HJDWLRQ4XRWDWLRQ
DQG-HZLVK,GHQWLW\
Benjamin E. Sax

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume 32,

Number 3, Spring 2014, pp. 1-29 (Article)

Published by Purdue University Press

DOI: 10.1353/sho.2014.0022

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sho/summary/v032/32.3.sax.html

Access provided by Ebsco Publishing (18 Jul 2014 11:11 GMT)

Walter Benjamin’s Karl Kraus:
Negation, Quotation, and Jewish Identity

Benjamin E. Sax

Abstract
This article considers Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay on Karl Kraus and
explores how Benjamin uses Kraus (who was Theodor Lessing’s classi-
cal example of a self-hating Jew) to explain how Jewish theology can be
transformed into secular Jewish cultural identity through quotation.
Benjamin does this by focusing on what he believes to be the “Jewish”
style of quotation in Kraus’s writing, or what George Steiner has termed
a “hermeneutic of citation.”

A person who quotes something in the name of

the one who said it brings about redemption of
the world.
—Mishnah Avot 6.6

“Memory” . . . it is the name of what for us (an

“us” which I define only in this way) preserves the
essential and necessary relation with the possibility
of the name, and of what in the name assures
preservation.
—Jacques Derrida1

Where the name of God is desecrated, one does

not accord honor to a sage.
—Talmud Berakhot 19b

No, the word is very close to you, in your mouth

and in your heart, to observe it.
—Deuteronomy 31:14

Quotations in my work are like wayward robbers

who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller
of his conviction.
—Walter Benjamin2

SHOFAR 32.3 (2014): 1-29 | 1

2 | Benjamin E. Sax

From within the linguistic compass of the name,

and only from within it, can we discern Kraus’s
basic polemical procedure: citation. To quote a
word is to call it by its name.
—Walter Benjamin3

Introduction
Jewish intellectuals have intrigued journalists, writers, and politicians, in-
ter alia, for years, and the study of them has, in many ways, emerged as an
academic discipline. Scholarship on Jewish intellectuals tends to examine
those thinkers whose attitude toward Judaism is at best ambivalent, at times
tempestuous, and on some occasions outright hostile.4 Within their writ-
ings, scholars of Jewish intellectuals claim to have unearthed a distinctive
Jewish identity. Some, like David Biale, have argued that within the writ-
ings of Jewish intellectuals a tradition of Jewish secularism can be found.5
Others, like George Steiner, have argued that these thinkers are more like
meta-rabbis. One well-known Jewish intellectual fits neither of these molds,
though both sides try to claim him: Walter Benjamin. Despite the fact that
during his own lifetime Benjamin never found an academic home, nor did
he espouse one discernible political or theological point of view, his work
today is still regarded as authoritative in a variety of academic disciplines,
such as literary criticism, culture, theology, historical materialism, and, of
course, the study of Jewish intellectuals. The reason for his wide-ranging
influence is based on the reception of his work. To read Walter Benjamin
is, in many ways, to read those who have read, appropriated, and to a cer-
tain extent sanctified him.6 This process, what George Steiner acerbically
termed the “Benjamin industry,”7 is precisely the result of the elusive char-
acter of Benjamin’s oeuvre. Benjamin was not merely “an intellectual.”8 As
the executor of Benjamin’s literary estate, Theodor Adorno worked tire-
lessly to place Benjamin within the canon of critical theory. Even though
Adorno was accused—perhaps rightly so—of editing Benjamin’s works in
a procrustean manner, where Benjamin’s perceived avant-garde brio was
used to vindicate, indeed approbate Adorno’s “new left,”9 others, such as
Hannah Arendt, discerned in Benjamin and his work a “Privategelehrter,”10 a
“hommes de letters” who “always strove to keep aloof from both state and soci-
ety,”11 or even as simply “old Benjamin.”12 Benjamin has even been crowned
“the paradigmatic Jewish literary intellectual of our century.”13

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus |3
Also while stubbornly trying to locate an Archimedean point in Ben-
jamin’s writings, the scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem main-
tained that Benjamin’s early penchant for theology (1910s and 1920s) was
the handmaiden to his status in the Marxist canon. He wrote, not without
irony: “Among the peculiarities of Benjamin’s philosophical prose—the
critical and metaphysical prose, in which the Marxist element constitutes
something like an inversion of the metaphysical-theological—is its enor-
mous suitability for canonization; I might almost say for quotation as a
kind of Holy Writ.”14 Continuing, Scholem linked Benjamin’s sentences to
the “authoritarian stance of words of revelation, as which they were in fact
considered by him to no slight extent during his youthful metaphysical pe-
riod.”15 The transition from this youthful period to his more mature Marxist
period is the focus of this essay, which takes place, I argue, in Benjamin’s
1931 essay on Karl Kraus.
Within the vast sea of commentaries, biographies, and interpretations
of Walter Benjamin, his essay on Karl Kraus has drawn the least interest.16
The few commentators that address this essay in relation to Benjamin’s
thought oscillate between a theory of quotation and a theory of Eros.17 Yet
until recently,18 no attention has been paid to Benjamin’s enigmatic proc-
lamation in the essay that Kraus’s theory of language proves to be a “gen-
uinely Jewish salto mortale.”19 In what follows, I examine Benjamin’s essay
“Karl Kraus” so that I may develop what George Steiner termed his “herme-
neutic of citation”20 in relation to this “genuinely Jewish salto mortale.” More
important, Benjamin, in this essay, cultivates a dual method of quotation
that coalesces his notion of myth developed in his youthful period (most
prominently in his 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language
of Man”) with his later materialist view of historical process. This earlier
position for Benjamin, as we shall learn from his essay on Kraus, was as
much a self-criticism as it was a critique of Jewish contemporary thinkers,
particularly Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, and their appropriation
of a post-Goethean category of the Allmensch21 (the cosmic man)—which
comprises the first part of his essay on Kraus. Because Benjamin later un-
derstood myth as oppressive in relation to history, he created his “imaginary
Jew,” his modern Jewish Faust—Karl Kraus—to counter what he perceived
to be a destructive practice in historical consciousness, who, in many ways,
became the harbinger for the act of quotation itself, which is also part of
the process of moving beyond the mythical into the historically redeemed. I
argue that this characterization of Kraus is Benjamin’s way of employing his

spring 2014
4 | Benjamin E. Sax

own Jewish method of quotation, which he uses to overcome his own histori-
cal predicament. It is in Benjamin’s dual method of quotation that we learn
how the opposing characters of Benjamin’s beloved angel and chronicler
in his “Theses on the Concept of History” can be reconciled and ultimately
synthesized. The tempestuous relationship between Zerstörung (destruc-
tion) and redemption that features prominently in Benjamin’s thought,
as we also learn from the Kraus essay, is part of a messianic development
that functions as a propaedeutic toward a redeemed history. We discover
how, for Benjamin, quotation violently moves the sacred into the secular in
order to preserve theologized existence. This essay then explores how he
understands the history of Judaism in precisely this move—which is helpful
in constructing the broader argument that a Jewish religious ethic, when
thought through rigorously, cannot only preserve the past, but must destroy
it—not only in order to make it applicable to a latter moment historically,
but even in order to apply it at all. We shall learn how language only exhibits
its essence when it becomes vulnerable, when it communicates. Finally, this
essay shows how a hermeneutics of quotation can sustain a secular Jewish
identity grounded theologically.

Benjamin’s Essay “Karl Kraus”

Born into a wealthy manufacturer family in the town of Jiçík, a small Bohe-
mian town northeast of Prague, Karl Kraus spent most of his life in Vienna.
He became a widely read satirist, aphorist, and occasional poet. Between
1899 and his death in 1936, Kraus published Die Fackel (The Torch), a satiri-
cal journal largely written by Kraus himself. Kraus was a relentless critic.
In a two-volume study of Kraus’s life and work, Edward Timms called him
an “Apocalyptic Satirist.”22 Kraus developed the uncanny ability to place
the stake of the world, in no uncertain terms, in language and grammar.
Misplaced commas could be cataclysmic. Paul Reitter’s recent study on
Kraus and his tempestuous relationship to Judaism and, more important,
to journalism has helped scholars better understand the context of the
nuances in Kraus’s writings.23 He was a complex writer fashioned dialecti-
cally in the spirit of European modernism and spent most of his literary
energy engaged in polemics against not only journalism, but also the po-
litical corruption that characterized Viennese political life. “Journalism”
for Kraus, as Benjamin wrote in his 1931 essay on him, is “the expression of
the changed function of language in the world of high capitalism.”24 It is a
language where a vapid phrase, sentence, or aphorism can be marketed in

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus |5
the same manner in which newspapers market events or situations. Kraus
sought to rescue language and thus culture. This more mature Benjamin
hoped to disclose how capitalism influenced language and equally hoped
to establish a more Marxist-oriented concept of language.25 Benjamin’s es-
say on Kraus reflects this idea as well.
The essay is composed of three sections, each beginning with one of
Kraus’s aphorisms. The first section is titled Allmensch (Cosmic Man), the
second Dämon (Demon), and the third Unmensch (Monster). These titles
function not only as section headings, but also are related to one another
in the classical thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, though not entirely in the
conventional dialectical Hegelian manner but rather as a way to portray
the modernist, indeed Faustian, relationship of creation as destruction.
The final section, the Unmensch, stands diametrically opposed to Friedrich
Nietzsche’s Übermensch (super-human). It reflects not only Kraus’s tor-
mented intellectual relationship to Nietzsche, but also how in the process
of destroying the Unmensch Kraus emerges as the prototype of a genuine
humanism—one that is starkly dissimilar to classical Enlightenment human-
ism. What made the protagonist of classical humanism, Goethe’s Faust, for
example, modern, indeed heroic, was his ability to emancipate all of his
repressed potential and zeal, as well as to emancipate the repressed poten-
tial and zeal in all those he came in contact with. This activity in itself has
the power to change the whole of society. Yet, all these efforts come at a
tremendously high human cost. The Faustian bargain implies that human
creativity, ingenuity, and power are known and developed through lurid
forces that enter the world and spiral endlessly out of control. The famous
denouement of this bargain is that once Faust declares “Verweile doch, du
bist so schön,” he is annihilated. Creation implies destruction. A genuine
humanism, for Benjamin, resides precisely in this moment of destruction—
which, we learn in the third section of his essay on Kraus, is discovered in
Kraus’s mode of critique: quotation.
Quotation is clearly the salient theme in the essay, but it also consumed
Benjamin in his ruminations on language in general. In diagramming this
essay, Benjamin notes, “Kraus wrote an article, in which not a single word
is by him.”26 Quotation in Kraus’s writings is more than a web of intertex-
tual references. Benjamin argues that language, Jewishness, and Gerechtig-
keit (justice) are inexorably connected for Kraus, yet this interrelationship
caused critics to argue that Kraus labored to “suppress the Jewishness in
himself,” and that he “travels the road from Jewishness to freedom,” though

spring 2014
6 | Benjamin E. Sax

for Benjamin, “nothing better refutes this than the fact that, for [Kraus],
too, justice and language remain founded on each other.”27 Quoting is si-
multaneously violent and messianic—it returns a word to an ambrosial Ur-
sprung (origin) by violently pulling it out of its current context. Once quoted,
words destroy their current context in order to create a new one. Yet within
this new context, another meaning is not necessarily produced. The cre-
ative moment is where “to quote a word” is in fact “to call it by its name.”28
Quoting returns words back to their origin in language—their name. To
better understand this move, we will shortly turn to Benjamin’s early essay
“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916) where he first
makes this point. The realm of the Allmensch in the first part of the Kraus
essay—where language and myth exist unencumbered—reflects precisely
this view of language. It also shows the nascent stage of Benjamin’s quest
to place language within Jewish identity since quoting challenges not only
the partition between the mystical and the mundane, but also the partition
between origin and destruction that fulfills language—“freed from the con-
text of meaning”—and affords it a glimpse into something metaphysical.
Quotation in Kraus, for Benjamin, we shall learn, both challenges and af-
firms aspects of Judaism and Jewish culture. It is the place where quotidian
speech appears transcendent. It is a place that is, according to Benjamin,
quintessentially Jewish. Finally, it is the place where the older, less ebullient
Benjamin seems to end up himself.

The Ur-Kraus: Benjamin’s Early Move to Language and Origin

Benjamin’s ruminations on language are central to his thought. From his
first publication, “On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man”
(1916), to his doctoral work, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925), to
his essay on Kraus, language remained central to Benjamin’s theoretical
concerns. Connecting these works is Benjamin’s overarching position that
there is a true relationship between language and existence. So connecting
Kraus to language was obvious—as was identifying Judaism as a language.
Kraus’s work helps Benjamin achieve this end. First, by the time Benjamin
finished his essay on Karl Kraus he already had published shorter works on
him in 1928 and 1929.29 Second, according to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin
had been interested in Kraus’s work by the time he published his essay “On
the Language as Such and on the Language of Man.”30 By 1919, Scholem
and Benjamin regularly corresponded about the work of Kraus. In all these
cases, Benjamin tirelessly links the work of Karl Kraus to mystical forms of

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus |7
Judaism. In 1923, in a letter to Scholem describing a visit to the German
Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, Benjamin described how he was
bedeviled by the invisible, though discernible, partition between Judentum
and Deutschtum.31 Also, in 1929, Benjamin beseeches Scholem to share his
notes on “the origin of Kraus’s language in mosaic style [Musivstil].” 32 So
the relationship between language, Jewish identity, and their relationship
to Karl Kraus clearly played a role in Benjamin’s intellectual development.
That Kraus has been called a polemicist cannot be understated. He
understood the corruption of language, especially in the press, as an equal
corruption of thought and action. Language was the source of truth.33 Not
surprisingly, then, he employed a subversive theology to his philosophy of
language. Language was not only “the divining rod that finds sources of
thought”34 but also the “mother of thought not its handmaiden,” the well-
spring from which he elicited “many a thought which [he did] not have
and which [he] could not put into words.”35 For example, in his poem “Der
sterbende Mensch,” God affectionately utters the words “Ursprung ist das
Ziel” (origin is the goal). Language was thus the means of returning to
this origin. 36
Prompted by this reassessment of Ursprung, Kraus nostalgically longed
for a lost Golden Age.37 Ursprung, he felt, was much less concerned with
recovering some passive ethical ideal; rather, it represented a linguistic co-
nundrum that understood the ethical as something dynamic. The literary
critic Erich Heller remarked, “for Kraus, language was the touchstone of
morality; and this was so because like nothing else it is apt to serve the tool
of malevolent concealment, mendacity and falsehood.”38 Kraus understood
the term Ursprung to characterize the belles lettres of many generations of
German-speaking poets, philosophers, and writers as quasi-theological.
While the word Ursprung was singular, Kraus understood the meaning to
be plural. He used the term to impart a more kaleidoscopic and transient
understanding of the modus operandi involved in discovering both tradi-
tion and its so-called origin. Since Ursprung, for Kraus, was transient and
dynamic, it could not be reduced to one locale.39
This position stood diametrically opposed to Friedrich Nietzsche’s
diatribes against Ursprungsphilosophie (a philosophy of origins). Nietzsche
famously took issue with historical philosophizing. His arguments resonated
with contemporary German intellectual life. However, others like Kraus felt
his positions unnecessarily restructured the ontology of basic reality. De-
spite Nietzsche’s claims to the contrary, Kraus felt that Ursprungsphilosophie

spring 2014
8 | Benjamin E. Sax

was precisely the goal of philosophy. However, in popularizing the oppo-

site view, Nietzsche not only jeopardized the future of historicism, but he
also collapsed the scholarly tradition within historical thought. His ideas
characterized the awareness of an epochal transition in European think-
ing, bringing an end to the metaphysical tradition initiated by the early
Greeks. Nietzsche replaced this tradition with his own. According to Mar-
tin Heidegger: “Even when Nietzsche is no longer known by name, what
his thinking had to think will rule.”40 By the 1890s, Nietzsche had already
become required reading for the Bildungsbürgertum (German bourgeoisie).41
Agitated by this fact, Kraus termed these young Germans, under the
spell of Nietzsche, “Überaffen des Kaffehauses” (super-apes of the coffee
house).42 While the impetus to read and discuss Nietzsche varied tremen-
dously for them there was no denying his cultural impact. He was every-
where.43 Germans found his language and style to be not only prepotent
but also German.44 As one historian remarked, Nietzsche “was a German
thinker with German roots addressing what were thought to be largely
German problems.”45 However, Kraus and others sought to “minimize his
Germanness” by emphasizing the more foreign elements of his thought and
use of language.46 Their concern was that as the position of the so-called
German text in classical German thought attained a relatively privileged
status in the formation of both ethics and hermeneutics, Nietzsche’s mod-
ernism threatened to render these forms of tradition obsolete. Ironically,
the very notion of a Nietzschean was contrary to Nietzsche’s own requisi-
tion: “I want no ‘believers,’” he claimed. “I think that I am too malicious to
believe in myself; I never speak to masses—I have a terrible fear that one
day I will be pronounced holy.”47 Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s opponents focused
their criticisms on his use of language. These discussions form the milieu
from which Benjamin’s “On the Language as Such and on the Language
of Man” emerged. The relationship of Ursprung (origin) to language as the
preeminent state of being characterizes much of this essay.
Benjamin was the quintessential peripatetic philosophy student. In
addition to his many interests, Benjamin studied myriad German philoso-
phies of language throughout Europe. He discovered therein a common
position. Most of these philosophies of language took language merely as
the medium of thought. Language assisted in epistemology as well as in
explaining intention. As a result, it certainly needed to be absolved of its
quotidian idiosyncrasies. Language as communication, however, remained
the only medium of thought. Benjamin’s work challenges precisely this view.
Language, he contended, is more than communication.

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus |9
For Benjamin, everything in existence communicates itself. In fact, it
communicates a metaphysical essence. In his “On Language as Such and
on the Language of Man” he argued that this communication of a meta-
physical essence should not be confused with basic communication in lan-
guage. Philosophies of language that do so risk “the great abyss into which
all linguistic theory threatens to fall.”48 There endures a contradiction be-
tween language and essence in Benjamin’s philosophy of language. If es-
sence is actually communicable, then it may temporarily cross paths with
language. However, Benjamin also asserts in this essay that essence cannot
fully communicate itself through language. “Mental being communicates
itself in, not through, a language, which means that it is not outwardly iden-
tical with linguistic being.”49 Benjamin recognized that this conclusion may
appear tautological—language communicates itself. However, he challenged
this position by focusing on the difference between the “language of the
lamp” and the lamp itself. “The language of the lamp,” Benjamin argues,
“communicates not the lamp (for the mental being of the lamp, insofar as
it is communicable, is by no means the lamp itself) but the language lamp,
the lamp in communication, the lamp in expression.”50 Therefore, in it-
self, language may communicate itself as a “mental being”—as something
metaphysical. Yet the communication of this “mental being” remains cir-
cumscribed by language.
This essay is also theological. Benjamin uses the language of exege-
sis to describe this view of language—that is, as a commentary to Genesis
2:19 –20, that the biblical Adam “names each living creature.” Words are
the means by which the language of people communicates itself. People
are different from things (i.e., lamps). So the language of people cannot
be understood as “language as such.” By drawing on the creation story
from the Hebrew Bible, Benjamin, sounding much like a medieval theolo-
gian, argues that people communicate their essence through the practice
of naming: “in the name, the mental being of man [ein geistiges Wesen]
communicates itself to God.”51 Naming is a theological activity, not merely
one with a utilitarian purpose. Words are an insufficient means by which
to communicate the “mental being of man” in a conversation between at
least two people regarding a thing. This activity—naming—portrays the
moment in which a thing ceases to communicate and where it culminates
“both the intensive totality of language, as the absolutely communicable
mental activity, and the extensive totality of language, as the universally
communicating (naming) activity.”52 For Benjamin, then, only the “mental

spring 2014
10 | Benjamin E. Sax

being of man” communicates through naming—it is “language as such.”

Here again Benjamin sounds suspiciously similar to a medieval theologian
because he links Ursprungsphilosophie to biblical exegesis to argue that this
language as such is not only “pure” but precisely the realm in which God’s
creation reaches completeness or perfection: that is, the moment where
Adam calls things by their proper names. For “in the name,” Benjamin as-
serts, “the mental being of man communicates itself to God.”53 The Hebrew
Bible—as a language of names—thus provides, as Brian Britt has argued,
“a model for Benjamin’s writing as the paradigmatic archive of pure lan-
guage.”54 The Ursprache is the language of naming. Therein the “essential
law of language [Wesensgesetz der Sprache]” bestows the true knowledge
or nature of people and things.55 Like with Adam, the communicability of
this language is understood only as “language as such.”56
So Benjamin’s early turn to language in his “On Language” essay was
not only rooted in the German Romantic tradition, but as in Nietzsche
characterized a move beyond it. Indeed he made the traditional Roman-
tic move—like Kraus—by linking language to thought and spoke about a
unity of languages. Benjamin even argued that translation was a recovery
of a proto-language.57 Commentators already have pointed to the affinities
between Benjamin’s early work and those who worked within the scheme of
Ursprungsphilosophie.58 Like many others, Benjamin experimented with the
concept of language as myth. The youthful Benjamin was strongly influ-
enced by the work of Johann Georg Hamann and Wilhelm von Humboldt.
Yet, Benjamin, like so many other German Jewish thinkers of his time—also
inspired by the late work of Friedrich Schelling59 —not only rejected the
anti-myth position espoused by neo-Kantianism, but as we shall see below,
through Kraus, also developed idiosyncratic views of the relationship be-
tween identity, language, and knowledge.

Jewish Negation as Jewish Quotation:

Prolegomena to Jewish Secular Identity
In a letter to Benjamin dated March 30, 1931, Scholem commented on
Benjamin’s “admirable essay on Karl Kraus” by stressing to him that “there
is a disconcerting alienation and disjuncture between your true and alleged
way of thinking.”60 Benjamin’s “self-deception” was perforce his conflated
identification with materialism. Even though Scholem was in no way casti-
gating Benjamin for his embrace of dialectical materialism, he was wary of
the influence of an atypical Marxism that rejected theological engagement

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus | 11
a priori. As a materialist, Benjamin lacked verve and his true talent lay as
a theological “metaphysician into the language of the bourgeois.”61 Scho-
lem was not arguing here that Benjamin was a theologian in a conventional
sense, but that he was a theologian nonetheless.
For the theologian Benjamin, Karl Kraus was indeed the new bibli-
cal Adam. He fully understood the power of the original context of nam-
ing. Unlike writers such as Nietzsche and Heinrich Heine, who for Kraus
muddled the efficacy of naming in language with “essayism” and the “feuil-
leton,” Kraus developed a method—quoting—that returns language to its
antediluvian state. This incessant need to quote, according to Benjamin,
afforded Kraus the opportunity to purify words by taking them out of their
current corrupted context and restoring them to their origins. Quotations
rescue words. They have the uncanny ability to paradoxically purify words
in the present while returning them to the “original language of angels in
which all words, startled from the idyllic context of meaning, have become
mottoes in the book of creation.” The words in their present context rep-
resent the vapid “bourgeois conception of language,” explained Benjamin
in his “On Language as Such” essay.62 Kraus’s style of writing, on the other
hand, was “never of bourgeois respectability”; rather, “it is a theological
criterion.”63 In other words, Kraus starts from a bourgeois conception of
language—the apolitical—and moves to the ambit of confrontation, which
belongs to the theological realm. Both Benjamin and Kraus bemoaned the
public’s general ignorance of how these styles of language developed and
how they related to both the culture and the society. I would argue that
Benjamin’s stance here is an ambivalent, though nevertheless important,
critique of his previous metaphysical notion of language, described above.
More important, though, Benjamin saw Kraus in himself. In fact,
through Kraus, Benjamin was able to grasp the implications of his early af-
fair with such Romantic notions of language. This relationship was clearly
problematic. For example, in his “On Language as Such and On the Lan-
guage of Man,” Benjamin writes: “After the Fall, which, in making language
mediate [in der Mittelbarmachung der Sprache], laid the foundation for
its multiplicity, linguistic confusion could only be a step away.”64 In the be-
ginning, as it were, language remained in an ambrosial state, sacred, and
pure. It existed beyond history, and thus beyond the need to communicate,
indeed, to mediate. The communicability (die Mitteilbarkeit) of language is
reduced to mere communication (die Mitteilung). Benjamin recognized that
the thesis driving this essay—that there is a relationship between origin,

spring 2014
12 | Benjamin E. Sax

language, sacrality, and purity—characterized the efforts of many national-

ist, pre-fascist ideologues. By the time Benjamin started to write on Kraus,
the link between language and origin (clearly a salient feature of his early
writings) had morphed into a dangerous ideology.
From the very beginning of his essay on Kraus, Benjamin draws at-
tention to the precarious relationship between language and origin. Benja-
min quotes Kraus—“How noisy everything grows”—to begin his essay. The
subsequent sentence is a commentary on this quote. “In the old engravings,
there is a messenger who rushes toward us crying aloud, his hair in end,
brandishing a sheet of paper in his hands—a sheet full of war and pesti-
lence, of cries of murder and pain, of danger from fire and flood—spread-
ing everywhere the Latest News.”65 The “messenger” functions as the leit-
motif of the essay. Within the messenger is the dialectical tension between
religion and politics and between language and origin. The protagonist,
Kraus, is “the messenger of a more real humanism.” However, his message
has paradoxically reversed “the development of bourgeois-capitalist affairs
to a condition that was never theirs.” Kraus reverses the “divine justice as
language,” which for Benjamin allows Kraus’s zeal for justice and his theory
of language to be understood as a form of Jewish theology. He then com-
ments on Kraus by quoting Kraus again:
Expect from me no word of my own. Nor should I be capable of
saying anything new; for in the room where someone writes, the
noise is great, and whether it comes from animals, from children,
or merely from mortars shall not be decided now. He who addresses
deeds violates both word and deed and is twice despicable.66

This double admonition against the “word and deed” is reminiscent of the
conversation between Mephistopheles and Faust in part one of Goethe’s
Faust in regard to Faust’s renewed intimacy with the divine and the chal-
lenges of human existence (line 1224).67 Faust endeavors to translate “Lo-
gos” in the first sentence in the Gospel of John as “deed” (Tat) (line 1237).68
Surreptitiously Faust draws on the medieval tradition to discover a God
defined through creation and action and as a result, he is spiritually re-
newed. As an image of this creator God, Faust affirms his commitment to
terrestrial activities. Faust’s god is the God of the Hebrew Bible, who, like
his medieval predecessors, defines himself through creation. Many commen-
tators in Weimar, though, had already discerned in this passage a furtive
position on the political controversy of Jewish emancipation in Germany.69
Already within the context of Goethe’s narrative is the troublingly “com-

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus | 13
mon paradigm underlying standard accounts of the history of ideas” that
involve the “presence of irrationality,” and, of course, antisemitism, “in
the self-declared ‘rational’ philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach,”
which Michael Mach has recently explored.70 In portraying the Jewish God
within the context of the worldly, as the constitutive feature of the Hebrew
Bible and subsequently of the Jewish community, Goethe, and no less Karl
Marx, certainly espoused common nineteenth-century German inner and
outer problematic positions on Jews. So it was not at all surprising that, for
example, the devil appears precisely at the point of Faust’s renewed quest
for imitatio dei.71
Benjamin’s Kraus, like Goethe’s Faust, exhibited this penchant for
romanticized self-aggrandizement. The demon’s efforts attempt to over-
come a Kantian critique of heteronomy by divorcing one’s self from the
Gemeinschaft (society), yet simultaneously operating within the Gemeinschaft.
How can the demon successfully liberate itself from the shackles of myth?
For Benjamin, he is stuck between the community that contains him and
his desire to move beyond it. This demonic context is the purgatory where
“ambiguity, the demon, is manifest: self-expression and unmasking merge
in it as a self-masking.”72 The demonic figure of Kraus is situated between
his deluded belief that he can traverse his Gemeinschaft-oriented mythi-
cal world and his imagined place in an autonomous one. A Jewish Faust,
Kraus as the demon, portrays the tempestuous relationship between two
selves. This Jewish figure oscillates between the romanticized image of a
communal self and a persistent impulse to move beyond it. As a result, the
demonic Kraus is doomed to inhabit this mythical world, while focusing
all his efforts, though in vain, to move beyond it. The figure of the demon
dramatically describes the enigmatic reality of myth, which, for Benjamin,
is a history not yet redeemed that struggles incessantly to move beyond it-
self. Interestingly, like Franz Rosenzweig’s tragic hero in book one of his
magnum opus, Star of Redemption (1921), Benjamin’s demon recoils into it-
self as a movement beyond itself. Because all inward attempts to respond
to myth continually fall short, Benjamin employs the demon to challenge
this reality of myth that is inexorably bound to the fate of the Allmensch.
The demon characterizes the destructive force within the reality of myth.
In Faustian terms, it portrays the negation. Within this demonic environ-
ment, then, Benjamin’s Faustian Jew, Kraus, is bedeviled by an unredeemed
history, in the mythical.
The dark background from which Kraus’s image detaches itself is not
formed by his contemporaries, but it is the primeval world [Vorwelt], or the

spring 2014
14 | Benjamin E. Sax

world of the demon. The light of the day of Creation falls on him—thus
he emerges from this darkness . . . The demon’s solitude, too, is felt by him
who gesticulates wildly on the hidden hill: “Thank God nobody knows my
name is Rumpelstiltskin.”73
Here Benjamin clearly espouses a transcendent historical dialecticism.
In fact, in a diagram Benjamin designed for this essay, Kraus “appears as
Rumpelstiltskin: ‘God be thanked that no one rumbles/that my name is
Marx and Engels.’”74 Benjamin challenged this historical process from the
Ursprung through the demon (now portrayed as myth) culminating in re-
demption. It becomes difficult here to discern the difference between the
demon and the origin. In fact, both are distinct in his earlier work. The
origin of the world, creation, and the subsequent fragmented universe of
myth sublimate into a singular entity. In fact, the demon not only ceases to
personify unredeemed history, it also returns to the lower echelon of the
Allmensch, a place where Ursprung-related considerations reign. Within this
realm, “the dark background from which Kraus’s image detaches itself is
not formed by his contemporaries”; rather, the demonic Kraus embodies
the Vorwelt. In fact, “the light of the day of creation [Schöpfungstage] falls
on him—thus he emerges from the darkness.”75 Thus, the relationship be-
tween the mythical world of Ursprung and of creation simply disappears.
Both endeavors belong to the demonic realm.
Unlike in his “On Language” essay, Benjamin interprets Ursprung as
something clearly precarious. He is now wary of Ursprungsphilosophie. The
young Benjamin echoed his elder, neo-Kantian contemporary Hermann
Cohen by espousing a decidedly antinomian position, especially in his 1921
essay “Critique of Violence,” which places law and myth on equal ground.
As Jacques Derrida remarked in his paper for a colloquium organized at
UCLA by the renowned Holocaust scholar Saul Friedlander (who developed
the concept of violence and “redemptive anti-Semitism”76 in Nazi ideology):
“Zur Kritik der Gewalt is also inscribed in a Judaic perspective that op-
poses just, divine (Jewish) violence, which would destroy the law, to mythi-
cal violence (of the Greek tradition), which would install and preserve the
law.”77 Judgment, Benjamin averred, affirms “the fall” into human speech,
so justice, then, as the result of the partisan views that are part and parcel
of judgment, eclipses divinity, though it often translates into a form of re-
demptive violence. The question remained for Derrida that if Benjamin is
intent on reducing law to the mere spectral alienation of myth, how do we
live in the present, modern age without regressing to a previous unrecog-

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus | 15
nized aporia? The young Benjamin here was unclear; however, he revisits
the same position in the demon section of his Kraus essay.
What is clear, though, for Benjamin, is that the Gerechtigkeit, in “Cri-
tique on Violence,” signifies a trace of the theological because the term de-
notes a primordial state of being—a mythical unity with the divine. Yet, in
his section on the demon, Benjamin abandons his early attachment to the
sanguine Ursprungsphilosophie in favor of Zerstörung (destruction, negation),
so any procurement of Gerechtigkeit remains elusive. Attempts to grasp this
primordial state of being, then, are negative, destructive efforts. Benjamin
here follows a different epistemological trajectory. A trace of a fragment of
this mythic Ursprung can only be discerned in Zerstörung and only through
social interaction. So, Benjamin is unwilling to fully disestablish the role
of Ursprung here since he prefers to radically transform the dialectical cir-
cumstance of it through a method of quotation. Within the demonic realm,
Ursprung must paradoxically move beyond itself while preserving its sense
of self and it does so by assembling what is sacred in its primordial state of
being in a violently secularized situation through the destructive efforts of
quotation. The move beyond itself preserves its state of being. Quotation
violently moves the sacred into the secular in order to preserve theologized
existence. This move toward quotation, then, signifies a change in Benja-
min’s earlier position on language and myth.
There are affinities between Benjamin’s early work and those who
worked within the scheme of Ursprungsphilosophie. When we compare this
part of the Kraus essay with his essay “On Violence,” however, there is al-
ready an impulse toward Zerstörung, toward understanding myth through
negation. While it is clear that Benjamin constructs a less Daedelean no-
tion of myth here (as compared to the one in his Kraus essay), where myth
defines a world tragically removed from divinity, Benjamin still resisted
the Romantic and irrationalist surge, like in the works of Hamann, toward
amalgamating myth and Ursprung. Rather, the Benjamin of “On Violence”
espouses an unusual pantheistic position where Ursprung is perceived mi-
raculously, where God and being are unified, whereas myth describes the
fall from this state of being into the mundane, quotidian cycle of a secular-
ized existence. So even in the early Benjamin, we find the departure from
standard contemporary views on Ursprungsphilosophie. In fact, within this
essay, there is dialectic of history from the Ursprung toward the fallen, mythi-
cal existence, on its way to redemption. What is remarkable, then, about
his essay on Kraus is that Benjamin purposely confounds the terms “myth”

spring 2014
16 | Benjamin E. Sax

and “demon.” Indeed, these terms are used often synonymously, which im-
plies existence outside myth. Because the demon “will pay any price to get
himself talked about” and “is vain,” he characterizes the stasis of mythical
life.78 Yet, the demon also points to a life beyond.
Nonetheless, it is troubling that the demon characterizes Kraus’s so-
called Jewish efforts. As was already well known, the association of the word
“demon” with “Jew” was inexorably tied to the history of German antisemi-
tism. Semantic differences between what Hitler called the “evil Jew of the
German people” and what Alfred Rosenberg identified as the “evil demon
of the Jew” dominated theoretical and political discourse in Germany.79
In fact, by the 1920s, professional German academicians did very little to
combat this insidious correlation.80 It should therefore be surprising, if not
altogether unsettling, that Benjamin employs this term to identify Kraus’s
Jewishness. Moreover, Benjamin delineates how the destructive impetus of
the demon, a clear form of opposition, is a fractional redress of what he
sees as the dismaying qualities of the Allmensch.
The demon’s (Kraus’s) bifurcated personality is again explained as a
relationship to Ursprung, but it is also linked to Jewishness. “In Karl Kraus
we find the most magnificent irruption of halachic writing into the massif
of the German language. You understand nothing about this man if you do
not recognize that everything without exception, words as well as things, is
necessarily acted within the realm of law . . . his life is one that embodies the
most fervent prayer for salvation that passes Jewish lips in our age.”81 This
“irruption of halachic writing” is a style of writing that shifts between the
quotatio and citatio, which contains a legal framework as well: Gerechtigkeit.
“To worship the image of divine justice [Gerechtigkeit] in language—even
the German language—this is the genuinely Jewish salto mortale by which
he tries to break the spell of the demon.”82 Indeed, here, Benjamin exhibits
his early disposition to Ursprungsphilosophie by placing the essence of lan-
guage in the theological realm of “divine justice” (gottlichten Gerechtigkeit).
Yet, this origin of language is violently detached from a fixed historical situ-
ation in order to challenge demonic life. Lacking the authentic originality
that once defined it, Ursprung, here, for Benjamin, is reduced to the mun-
dane, secular sphere of history. So the radically theologized notion of lan-
guage engenders the context for which Gerechtigkeit can move beyond the
demon. This notion of a mythical history is inexorably bound, then, to a
dialectic that intrinsically seeks to move beyond itself. The obsession with
the Ursprung simply belongs to the mythical, as well as to the demonic. So,

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus | 17
only through Gerechtigkeit—a radically revalorized notion of Ursprung—can
demonic life move beyond mythical life, “but in this zone, too, ambiguity,
the demon, is manifest: self-expression and unmasking merge in it as self-
unmasking.”83 This ambiguity describes Benjamin’s own previous investment
in Ursprungsphilosophie through his Faustian Jew, Kraus, and how he himself
moved beyond this particular fetish through a method of quotation, where
“in citation the two realms—of origin (Ursprung) and destruction (Zer-
störung)—justify themselves before language.”84 Quotation is the moment
where the demon who “will pay any price to get himself talked about,” the
demon who characterizes pure Innerlichkeit, makes his Jewish salto mortale.
By moving beyond itself as an act of destruction (Zerstörung), demonic life
revalorizes the concept of Ursprung into a dynamic, multivalent process,
whereby the demon ultimately is subsumed under the weight of its own in-
action. The demon as this Faustian Jew is itself the route beyond demonic
life, subsequently of history. So, in sum, Kraus’s method of quotation is the
route beyond the demonic world. “Kraus’s achievement,” for example “ex-
hausts itself at its highest level by making even the newspaper quotable.”85
The newspaper is a wellspring of culture. To quote from the newspaper is to
attain a specific cultural brand while transforming the demonic potential
therein into a destructive activity. The demonic impulse comes to fruition
by a counter effort. It neglects creation by ignoring the universal space of
Ursprung by quoting the specific cultural text in the newspaper. The de-
mon’s “solitude” and his preoccupation with his self are traversed by the
demonic potential in a specific cultural artifact—the quoted newspaper.
By employing a method of quotation to even something as mundane as a
newspaper, the demon moves himself beyond himself.
There is a hermeneutical impulse at work here as well. The demon’s
need to move beyond even history implies an epistemological shift. The
problem of the demonic impulse, in general, is that it posits and subse-
quently affirms a philosophical totality, which is not dependent on, or even
accessible to, a phenomenology of philosophical contemplation since quota-
tions (cited texts), not thoughts, move beyond the realm of history through
this hermeneutical method of quotation. Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and
Method argued: “language has its true being only in dialogue, in coming to
an understanding.”86 Gadamer wanted to establish a method that would allow
for a focus on ontology in hermeneutics—language as the way we experience
the world.87 To rephrase Gadamer’s position in regard to Kraus’s demonic
impulse, it could be said that this focus on ontology in hermeneutics is a

spring 2014
18 | Benjamin E. Sax

way to remember collectively, or that Dasein (Being) that is remembered

is encased in a quotation. Because Walter Benjamin was insistent on plac-
ing philosophy beyond the linguistic form of a text, he had structurally
prevented the potential goals of any philosophy to reach a totality (Allheit).
This need to move beyond—as a philosophical axiom—must incorporate
all other particularistic philosophical axioms in order to establish its modus
operandi: one that is destined by virtue of this method to sublimate, yet also
to resist, sublimation in its actualization in the “now-time” (Jetztzeit) of the
writing of philosophy. Quotations in the writing of philosophy enter into
history and into experience (Erlebnis) by continually being in the process of
being read, being interpreted, being reinterpreted, and being revised. This process,
for Benjamin, should not be confused with an aesthetic one—in the realm
of empirical experience (Erfahrung). That is to say, the act of writing is never
actually seen, but rather, as stated above, is in the process of being read, be-
ing interpreted, being reinterpreted, and being revised and the Jetztzeit remains
pointed to a future rather than committed to a present. This process is cru-
cial to Benjamin’s critique of both Hegel’s philosophy and current streams
in Marxist German Jewish thought. The acts of reading, rereading, and
revising are not perforce experiences of a type of consciousness (Bewusst-
wein), but are, in avant la lettre poststructuralist terms, merely aspects of an
intertextual reality. Marx argued that Sein (Being) determined Bewusstsein
(Consciousness), whereas Hegel argued the opposite. The idea behind the
difference is that Hegel ventured to bring a Weltanschauung into the Welt.
What is troubling about Hegel’s position is that writers, politicians, artists,
and the like have the capacity to broaden what is politically, morally, or spiri-
tually possible in the present world—the Nazis being an extreme example.
Benjamin places the role of quotation somewhere in between. This place
in between—the language, a perceived neutral space—does not bespeak
any cultural homogeneity, yet he insists it is a Jewish method of thought despite
its move to the secular. Benjamin was not a Hegelian, so by placing Karl
Kraus’s linguistic style between his collective and Jewish identities, he was
in no way amalgamating them into a dialectical Aufhebung (sublimation).
It simply provides this new hermeneutical context. By doing so, Benjamin
is able to conclude his essay on Kraus by writing:
Neither purity nor sacrifice mastered the demon; but where origin
and destruction come together, his reign is over. Like a creature
sprung from the child and the cannibal, his conqueror stands be-
fore him: not a new man—a monster, a new angel. Perhaps one of

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus | 19
those who, according to the Talmud, are at each moment created
anew in countless throngs, and who, once they have raised their
voices before God, cease and pass into nothingness. Lamenting,
chastising, or rejoicing? No matter—on this evanescent voice the
ephemeral work of Kraus is modeled. Angelus—that is the mes-
senger in the old engravings.88

Benjamin draws on a Midrashic legend (though he mistakenly places it

within the Talmud) by identifying Kraus as a “new angel” or the “Ange-
lus—that is the messenger in the old engravings.”89 Thus Benjamin as-
serted that Kraus’s technique of quotation, on the level of form, was Jew-
ish. He underscored Kraus’s ability to cloud style, language, and form with
cultural identity, and claimed that Kraus deliberately demarcated German
Jewish identity. Kraus achieved this through his stylistic journalism. As a
German-speaking Jew, he demarcated German Jewish identity by becom-
ing a German Jewish journalist. Even though Benjamin argued that Kraus’s
technique of quotation was intrinsically linked to the shaping of cultural
identity—specifically, of Jewish identity—he did so inclusively, that is to say,
he never specifically disaffirmed this association to other self-defined cul-
tural commitments. Thus Benjamin was unwavering in his assertion that a
“hermeneutics of citation” is indispensable to defining a cultural identity
as it is situated in language. This shaping and defining of cultural identity
through a hermeneutics of citation was, for Benjamin, what was “authen-
tic” about Kraus’s writings, indeed, what was “authentically Jewish” about
them, since they were contingent on a rich literary tradition (Jewish ex-
egesis). Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem assumed something similar:
Kraus’s writings, they claimed, were “Jewish” in that Kraus’s style simulated
a pseudo-Kabbalistic aesthetic.90
More specifically, though, Benjamin’s Unmensch is fully transformed
into an angel. The whole essay, at first glance then, would seem like his es-
say “On Language As Such”—tautological. The theological impulse of the
Allmensch and the demon’s penchant toward authenticity are fully aban-
doned in favor of the Unmensch, who characterizes the destruction of the
efforts of both. Within the realm of the Unmensch, though, we witness once
again efforts similar to that of the Allmensch—where theology and history
meet—and where the imaginary Jew, Kraus, is again susceptible to theo-
logical inquiry. The now theologized, authentic figure of the Jewish Kraus
is acquired through the course of moving beyond himself (Zerstörung). In-
nerlichkeit and Ursprung as windows into authenticity are once again disre-

spring 2014
20 | Benjamin E. Sax

garded in favor of a theologically nuanced destruction of the self. Similar to

how Scholem described the antinomian tendencies in Kabbalah, the Jewish
figure of Kraus is only realized as a negation of his self.91 By moving beyond,
even denying, an authentic Jewishness, or an authentic Judaism grounded
in a Jewish Ursprung, the Allmensch is able to recover its authenticity through
destruction. Indeed, the authenticity of Kraus’s Jewishness is found in the
wake of its destruction. Kraus’s “Jewish salto mortale” is the self-destructive
move toward Jewish authenticity, which emerges as a secular Jewish iden-
tity. Benjamin concludes this essay, then, by returning precisely to the tem-
pestuous relationship that characterized his historical thought in general
between destruction and redemption, linking it to a secular Jewish identity.

Conclusion
In 1910, the celebrated German novelist Thomas Mann asked: What is liter-
ary culture? Mann determined literary culture to be a process of both learn-
ing and imitating, refracted by what he understood to be tradition.92 Some
twenty-six years later—in 1936—Mann was in Vienna commemorating the
eightieth birthday of the pioneer psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. That same
year Karl Kraus passed away. In honor of Freud’s birthday, Mann penned
the essay “Freud and the Future,” in which he coined the phrase “zitathaftes
Leben” (a life in quotation), which established continuity with the past
while renewing itself in the present.93 For Benjamin, Kraus’s simultaneous
rejection and preservation of tradition in his technique of quotation was a
clear representation of this “zitathaftes Leben,” and the location in which
a secular Jewish identity is discovered. In poststructuralist terms, Benjamin
argued that if Jewish identity were located in the speech-act, then every
subsequent speech-act would be an agonizing reminder of that identity or,
as Kraus called it, ein Wundmal (a stigma). For Benjamin, Kraus’s demonic
method of quotation emerged out of an obligation to quote. Benjamin ac-
knowledged Kraus’s antisemitic disposition, but argued that Kraus’s com-
plex technique of quotation and self-disclosure represented his complex
relationship to Judaism.
This perhaps explains Benjamin’s earlier enigmatic statement that
“above all, in a study of Goethe, one finds Jewish substance.”94 Similarly
in his “On the Concept of History,” he places his notion of history within
Jewish tradition by establishing “a conception of the present as now-time
(Jetztzeit) shot through with the splinters of messianic time.”95 So by drawing
on a Talmudic dictum,96 Benjamin claims Jewish history requires a style of

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus | 21
storytelling: “We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into
the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance.”97
In fact, coupled with his interest in quotation, this style is most likely what
led the critic Siegfried Kracauer to remark that Benjamin’s thinking was
“foreign to current thought,” and that it was “more akin to Talmudic writ-
ings and medieval tractates.”98 As mentioned above, Benjamin’s approach
to language in general, and specifically in the Kraus essay, was method-
ologically rigorous, but like in the Jewish commentary tradition, systemati-
cally opaque. Benjamin was wary of the idealist confidence in systems. This
hope for a unity of thought embedded in numerous nineteenth-century
pursuits fell flat. Indeed, Benjamin’s work can be read as a challenge to a
philosophical-systematic form since his writing took the form of reviews,
essays, critiques, and commentaries. This form, for him, however idiosyn-
cratic, was Jewish and as such relied on canonical literature.
Any definition of canon is ideological, so much so that Gershom Scho-
lem even argued that Gerechtigkeit is a “canonical idea.”99 Benjamin agreed,
though his definition of the canon is modern. In his Canon and Creativity:
Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture, Robert Alter defines canon as
“a transhistorical community,” where “knowledge of the received texts and
recourse to them constitute the community, but the texts themselves do not
have a single, authoritative meaning.”100 For Benjamin, canonical literature
imparts most, if not all, serious knowledge. The erratic and widespread wis-
dom and experiences found in the writings of canonical literature drive
Benjamin’s theoretical inquiries. His goal was to consolidate these texts
metaphysically by montaging them through quotation and through his id-
iosyncratic style of writing. Within Benjamin’s oeuvre, there are attempts
to write within the formal tradition of an essay, though “ein beflügelter
Gedanke” (a winged thought) appears in “der Verpuppung der Kritik”
(pupation of the critic).101 The phrase “ein beflügelter Gedanke” calls atten-
tion to the phrase “geflügelte Worte” (winged words), which was the title of
the German philologist Georg Buchmann’s famous 1864 book, reprinted
in 1912, of German quotations and proverbs.102 By alluding to the Greek
poet Homer’s celebrated cryptic “epea pteroenta” (winged words)103 in his
book’s title Geflügelte Worte, Buchmann’s book on quotation was interest-
ingly already a quotation—although without the actual quotation marks.
Quotations as paralipomena was a theme for other German Jews as well.104
Similarly, Benjamin’s critic couches originality within canonical texts. The
critic’s task is to make these texts present, which according to Benjamin was

spring 2014
22 | Benjamin E. Sax

the engine driving his modus operandi, and one that embodies Jewishly the
disposition of the commentator.
Gershom Scholem stated that in Judaism there is not a system, but a
commentary.105 Commentary in Judaism is tradition, but is also considered
philosophical. Benjamin places this effort within the realm of the critic’s
literary interpretation. Biblical exegesis, of course, is the prototype of Jewish
commentary. Interestingly, similar to Scholem’s position, Benjamin argues
that the hermeneutics involved in commentary not only constitute philoso-
phy but is also in fact true philosophy. There is a process of revision that
occurs in the hermeneutical process of new or unfamiliar texts. An inter-
nal dialectic takes place in the mind of the interpreter between the texts
that make up her current worldview, which continually adjudicate specific
meaning, and those from a new canon, which require a new epistemological
lens. Commentary as philosophy balances the dialectical tensions between
theological and non-theological texts. With the help of Scholem, Benjamin
argued that the notion of a sacred text should be extended to all texts,
which would, ironically enough, lead to a non-theological theology—or,
simply to a secularized hermeneutics. Because commentary is theological
and is inexorably related to criticism, Benjamin argues in a commentary to
Berthold Brecht’s poetry that “the commentary comes from the classicism
of its text, and with it, so to speak, from a prejudice.”106 Quotation, then, is
invariably theological because it relies precisely on this classicism. It is what
makes this practice Jewish.
“Philosophy always reappropriates for itself the discourse that delimits
it,” wrote Jacques Derrida, and “belongs to the closure of language” that
“must nevertheless proceed within that language and with the oppositions
it provides.”107 Derrida published this essay in a volume entitled Textual
Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism in 1979 as part of “a gen-
eral introduction to poststructuralist theories and practices for students
and critics of literature.”108 His goal was to “define and situate the language
of philosophy.” In this essay, he most certainly did not intend to deal with
Benjamin’s reading of Kraus, but his insight may help explain how this
messenger in old engravings, who emerges as our imaginary Jewish Faust,
is also avant la lettre poststructuralism on its way to such a secular view of
Jewish language and quotation.
John Caputo called Derrida “Jewish without being Jewish.”109 Could
the same be said of Benjamin? By predicating the role quotation plays in
this opposition on a Saussurian linguistics, the method of Benjamin’s quo-

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus | 23
tation in his essay on Kraus has been opened up to new philosophical hori-
zons. For example, in Derrida, all words, and subsequently quotations, are
“traces.” Even before him E. E. Kellet wrote: “in one sense all, or practically
all, our writing is quotation.”110 In many ways, quotation traverses the binary
opposition described above. The French poststructuralist and pioneer lit-
erary critic Roland Barthes in many ways cautioned the theoretical move
to associate intertextuality with a method of quotation when he argued
that the quotations ensconced in a text are “already read” and, as such,
remain untraceable and anonymous.111 For him, the intertextual “code” is
merely a “mirage” of quotations. Thus they elude any sort of classification
or identification. These “codes” are embedded in readers and speakers, who
already are denizens of this particular discourse. Yet the “origin is lost.”112
If Barthes is correct, then the meaning of quotations in a text is relatively
inconsequential. The influence of quotations proves to be more relevant
than the actual meanings of them. This is precisely the linguistic conun-
drum raised in Benjamin’s essay on Kraus. For Benjamin, of course, there
is no context for the original meaning of the quote. The penultimate stage
in writing, Benjamin argued, is where the text is replete with quotations.
By interpreting Karl Kraus’s aphorism—“Ursprung is the goal”—Benjamin
unpacks Kraus’s linguistic re-creations of earlier belletrists, so that he too
could participate within the synoptic space of Bildung. Yet, as he argued,
the Ursprung no longer could be assessed. The Ursprung is usurped by quo-
tations that precede and follow one another. As quotations multiply, so do
their contexts. The result is a “collage of quotations.” In his oft-cited work,
Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present, Harold
Bloom made the somber observation that “we no longer know just what
makes a book Jewish, or a person Jewish, because we have no authority to
instruct us as to what is or is not Jewish thought.”113 This was precisely the
issue Benjamin hoped to address in this essay. Whether or not his inter-
pretation of quotation as Jewish is truly authentic requires another context
that for him would already be in the realm of a Jewish modus operandi. It
would require, as such, a Jewish salto mortale.

Notes
1. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 49.
2. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed.
Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith, and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), vol. 1, 481. Hereafter SW.

spring 2014
24 | Benjamin E. Sax

3. Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in SW, vol. 2, 453.
4. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Study of the Jewish Intellectual: A Methodologi-
cal Prolegomenon,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Mo-
dernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 23–53.
5. David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princ-
eton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).
6. Udi E. Greenberg, “Remembering Walter Benjamin: Benjamin and his
Biographers,” Biography 30, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 209.
7. George Steiner, Benjamin Bulletin 3 (October 1998): 1.
8. Zygmunt Bauman, “Walter Benjamin, The Intellectual,” in The Actuality
of Walter Benjamin, ed. Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1998), 72.
9. Ansgar Hillach, “Walter Benjamin: Korrektiv Kritischer Theorie oder revo-
lutionäre Handhabe? Zur Rezeption Benjamins durch die Studentenbewegung,”
in Literature und Studentenbewegungen, ed. W. Martin Lüdke (Opladen, 1977).
10. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 24.
11. Ibid., 27.
12. Abridged interview with Lisa Fittko (June 27, 1991). Brian Britt, Walter
Benjamin and the Bible (New York: Continuum, 1996), 144.
13. Norman Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Con-
temporary Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 11.
14. See Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and his Angel,” in On Jews and
Judaism in Crises: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken
Books, 1976), 198.
15. Ibid.
16. Sigrid Weigel, “Eros and Language: Benjamin’s Kraus Essay,” in Benjamin’s
Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gerhard Richter
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 278.
17. Josef Fürnkäs, “Zitat und Zerstörung: Karl Kraus und Walter Benjamin,”
in Verabschiedung der (Post) Moderne? Eine interdisziplinäre Debatte, ed. Jacques Le
Rider and Gerard Raulet (Tübingen: Narr, 1987), 209–25; C. J. Thornhill, Walter
Benjamin and Karl Kraus: Problems of a “Wahlverwandtschaft” (Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-
Dieter Heinz, 1996).
18. The exception is Paul Reitter, The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-
Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 163–74.
19. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in SW, vol. 2, 444.
20. George Steiner, “Introduction,” in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German
Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1999), 21.
21. See Letter #45 to Martin Buber in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin:
1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacob-
son and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 79–81.
Hereafter Correspondence.
22. Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptical Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in
Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Karl Kraus: Apoca-

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus | 25
lyptical Satirist: The Post-War Crisis and the Crisis of the Swastika (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2005).
23. Reitter, The Anti-Journalist, 1–30.
24. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in SW, vol. 2, 435.
25. As late as 1938, Benjamin and Scholem quarreled over this point. See
Gershom Scholem, ed., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem:
1932–1940, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1992), 227–38.
26. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften II.3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1977), 1093. Hereafter GS. These two essays are “The Court” and “Morality
and Criminality” (1902)
27. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in SW, vol. 2, 443–44.
28. Ibid., 453.
29. In 1926, Benjamin also published an essay entitled “One-Way Street” where
he devotes a section to Karl Kraus. See “One-Way Street,” SW, vol. 1, 469.
30. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry
Zohn (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1981), 64.
31. Correspondence, 203–5.
32. Ibid., 349.
33. Erich Heller, “Karl Kraus,” in The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern Ger-
man Literature and Thought (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 240.
34. Karl Kraus, Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths, trans. Harry Zohn (Mon-
treal: Engendra Press, 1976), 63.
35. Ibid., 68.
36. Harry Zohn, Karl Kraus and the Critics (Columbia, SC: Camden House,
1997), 78.
37. The prefix Ur denotes something primary or original, and Sprung means
“leap”; the combination of the two amounts to a primal leap.
38. Erich Heller, In the Age of Prose: Literary and Philosophical Essays (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 92.
39. John Pizer, “Ursprung ist das Ziel: Karl Kraus’s Concept of Origin,” Modern
Austrian Literature 27, no. 1 (1994): 1.
40. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 3, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York:
HarperCollins, 1987), 8.
41. Dominic Boyer, “The Bildungsbürgertum and the Dialectics of Germanness
in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals and the Dia-
lectic in Modern German Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 46–98.
42. Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 2, no. 51 (August 1900): 21–22.
43. For an insightful introduction to the impact of Nietzsche’s thought, see
Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1994).
44. While Nietzsche was overtly critical of German culture, his criticism was es-
sentially German since he employed Bildung to critique it. Karl Löwith commented:
“Nietzsche continues to be the epitome of German unreason, or what is called the
German spirit. A gulf separates him from those who unscrupulously preach his

spring 2014
26 | Benjamin E. Sax

message, yet he prepared the way for them that he himself did not follow . . . His
influence within the boundaries of Germany was—and still is—boundless. [Non-
Germans] will never be able to fully comprehend it, so essentially foreign to them
is what draws Germans to Nietzsche. Like Luther, he is a specifically German phe-
nomenon—radical and fatal” (My Life in Germany Before and After 1933, trans. by
Elizabeth King [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986], 5–6). Nietzsche was no
German but what he lived and created was possible as a German experience (see
Rudolf Pannwitz, Einführung in Nietzsche [München-Feldafing: Hans Carl, 1920],
1). In fact, according to Thomas Mann, “Nietzsche’s immortal European drama
of self-conquest, self-discipline, and self-crucifixion with the intellectual sacrifi-
cial death as a heart-and-brain-rendering conclusion,” was unthinkable outside of
“the Protestantism of the Naumberg’s preacher’s son” and the “Nordic German,
burgerly-moral sphere” (Reflections of a Non-Political Man [Unger, 1987], 104).
45. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 19.
46. Ibid. Paradoxically, as late as 1912 Kraus wrote that he did not know Ni-
etzsche’s work (“ich, der Nietzsche nicht kennt” [Die Fackel, 345–46]), yet he also
wrote that he had read excerpts from Nietzsche work. See Edward Timms, Karl
Kraus Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 192. Most likely, Kraus read Nietzsche uncritically
and thus “did not know him.”
47. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Why I Am a Destiny,” in Ecce Homo, trans. Walter
Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 326.
48. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” in
SW, vol. 1, 63.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 65.
52. Ibid., 65–66.
53. Ibid., 65.
54. Brian Britt, Walter Benjamin and the Bible (New York: Continuum Press,
1996), 66.
55. Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” in SW, vol.
1, 65.
56. Ibid.
57. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in SW , vol. 1, 253–63.
58. See Christian Schulte, Ursprung ist das Ziel: Walter Benjamin Über Karl Kraus
(Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neuman, 2003); Thornhill, Walter Benjamin
and Karl Kraus.
59. See Steven M. Wasserstrom, “ A Rustling in the Woods: The Turn to Myth
in Weimar Jewish Thought,” in The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth: Challenge or Response?
ed. S. Daniel Breslauer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 97–122.
60. Correspondence, 374.
61. Ibid.
62. Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” in SW,
vol. 1, 65.

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus | 27
63. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in SW, vol. 2, 436.
64. Benjamin, “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man,” in SW,
vol. 1, 72.
65. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in SW, vol. 2, 433.
66. Ibid., 436.
67. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Erster und Zweiter Teil (München: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003), 40.
68. Ibid.
69. See W. Daniel Wilson, “‘Humananitätssalbader’: Goethe’s Distaste for
Jewish Emancipation, and Jewish Reponses,” in Goethe in German-Jewish Culture, ed.
Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost Hermand (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2001),
146–64.
70. Michael Mach, German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Phi-
losophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1.
71. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in SW, vol. 1, 315.
72. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in SW, vol. 2, 441.
73. Ibid.
74. Benjamin, “Diagrams for Karl Kraus,” trans. Ester Leslie, in Walter Benja-
min’s Archive, ed. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, and Erdmut
Wizisla (New York: Verso, 2007), 247.
75. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in SW, vol. 2, 441.
76. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and The Jews, vol. 1 (New York: HarperCol-
lins, 1997), 87: “Redemptive anti-Semitism was born from the fear of racial degen-
eration and the religious belief in redemption. The main cause of degeneration
was the penetration of Jews into the German body politic, into German society,
and into the German bloodstream. Germanhood and the Aryan world were on
a path to perdition if the struggle against the Jews was not joined; this was to be
a struggle to the death. Redemption would come as liberation from the Jews—as
their expulsion, possibly their annihilation.”
77. Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law: ‘The Mythical Foundation of Author-
ity,’” trans. Gil Anidjar, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge,
2002), 259.
78. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in SW. vol. 2, 441.
79. Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 81–84.
80. Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crime
against the Jewish People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 202–7.
81. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus (Fragment),” in SW, vol. 2, 194–95.
82. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in SW, vol. 2, 444.
83. Ibid., 441.
84. Ibid., 454.
85. Ibid., 452.
86. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Meaning, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1997), 446.
87. Ibid., 438.

spring 2014
28 | Benjamin E. Sax

88. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in SW, vol. 2, 457.

89. Ibid. What Benjamin has in mind is the passage from Bereshit Rabba 78.1:
“The holy one blessed be he, creates a new company of angels every day, and they
utter a song before him and then depart [evermore].”
90. The idea of the text as a montage of quotations is similar to the Kabbalistic
idea of the Torah as a montage of the names of God as a “mosaic style.” Scholem
writes about a conversation: “From this outline there developed a long conversation
about Jews’ relationship to language. There were lively discussions about Heinrich
Heine, Karl Kraus, and Walter Calé . . . as well as philosophers of language like
Lazarus Geiger, Haim Steinhal, and Fritz Mauthner. From very different points of
view we discussed the thesis whether the Jews’ special attachment to the world of
language might be traced to their thousands of years of occupation with sacred
texts, with revelation as the linguistic basic fact and its reflection in all spheres of
language. Karl Kraus, with whose attitude toward, and indeed addition to, language
Benjamin was already beginning to concern himself, was the subject of a heated
debate. I had for a long time reflected on the derivation of Kraus’s style from the
Hebrew prose and poetry of medieval Jewry—the language of the great halakhists
and of the ‘Musivstil,’ the poetic prose in which linguistic scraps of sacred texts
are whirled around kaleidoscope like and are journalistically, polemically, descrip-
tively, and even erotically profaned. Benjamin often requested that I elaborate on
these reflections in writing, but my study of this subject . . . ever assumed definitive
form” (Scholem, “The First Postwar Years [1920–1923],” 106–7).
91. Gershom Scholem, “The Meaning of Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” trans.
Ralph Manheim, in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books,
1965), 80–83.
92. See Hans Wysling, Quellenkritische Studien zum Werk Thomas Mann (Berne, 1967),
and T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).
93. Thomas Mann, “Freud und die Zukunft,” in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer, 1960), ix, 497.
94. Walter Benjamin to Ludwig Strauss, January 7, 1913, Jewish National Univer-
sity Library, Jerusalem, Archives Ms. Var. 424, 196/9, p. 9, cited in George L. Mosse,
German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 14.
95. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in SW, vol. 4, 397.
96. Though Benjamin does not cite these texts, he is drawing on several texts
in the Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin:
97b: “R. Samuel bar Nahmani said in the name of R. Jonathan: ‘Blasted be the
bones of those who presume to calculate the time of redemption.’” 97a: “Whenever
R. Zera found sages engaged [in calculating the time of the Messiah’s coming], he
would say to them: I beg of you, do not put it further off, for we have been taught
that three come without warning: Messiah, something found, and a scorpion.”
97. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in SW, vol. 4, 397.
98. Siegfried Kracauer, “On the Writings of Walter Benjamin,” in The Mass
Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 259.

Shofar 32.3
 Walter Benjamin's Karl Kraus | 29
99. Karlfried Gründer, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, and Friedrich Niewöh-
ner, eds., Gershom Scholem Tagebücher: nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bi 1923, vol. 2
(Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 2000), 330.
100. Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scrip-
ture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 5.
101. Benjamin, “Kierkegaard: Das Ende des philosophischen Idealimus,” in
GS III, 383.
102. George Büchmann, Geflügelte Worte: Der Zitatenschatz des deutschen Volkes
(Berlin: Verlag der Haude und Spenerschen Buchhandlung Max Paschke, 1912).
103. See Françoise Létoublon, “Epea Pteroenta (“Winged Words”),” Oral Tra-
dition 14, no. 2 (1999): 321–35.
104. Even though he broached it from an entirely theological perspective,
Franz Rosenzweig made the same point. See Benjamin E. Sax, “Das geflügelte
Wort: Franz Rosenzweig als Post-Goethekenner,” Naharaim: Zeitschrift für deutsche-
jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte 5 (December 2011): 115–49.
105. Gershom Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in
Judaism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 289.
106. Benjamin, “Kommentare zu Gedicten von Brecht,” GS II, 539.
107. Jacques Derrida, “The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguis-
tics,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 83.
108. Ibid., Josué V. Harari, “Preface,” 9.
109. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without
Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xvii.
110. E. E. Kellet, Literary Quotation and Allusion (London: Kennikat Press, 1933), 14.
111. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang,
1974), 20.
112. Ibid., 21.
113. Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the
Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 156.

spring 2014
Copyright of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies is the property of Purdue
University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a
listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.