Schad, J;
(2025)
Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A departure in biography.
[Book].
Comparative Literature and Culture.
UCL Press: London, UK.
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Abstract
In July 1940, amidst fear of Nazi invasion, HMT Dunera left England. On board were a few British soldiers guarding over 2000 interned male Enemy Aliens, mostly Germans. Some of the internees were passionate Nazis, but most were Jewish refugees. Among them was Stefan Raphael Benjamin, the estranged child of the German-Jewish intellectual, Walter Raphael Benjamin. Cue Walter Benjamin’s Ark which re-reads the life and work of Walter Benjamin via the curious life of his only child. The focal point is Stefan's dramatic voyage from England to Australia in 1940, a voyage rich in intellectual suggestion, shared as it was with obscure men with famous names such as Wittgenstein, Kafka, Marx and Wilde. Central to the book is the one substantive text that can be ascribed to Stefan: Benjamin’s meticulous transcription of Stefan’s utterances as an infant. This fascinating text has been largely overlooked, despite the insistence of Benjamin’s biographers that ‘it continued to play a role in Walter Benjamin's writing until the end of his life’. This book thus seeks not only to bring into view the intriguing figure that is Stefan but also to identify him as that most crucial of Benjaminian spectres, namely, the secret ‘you’ or addressee of Benjamin’s writings.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A departure in biography |
| ISBN-13: | 9781800089709 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.9781800089709 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089709 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © Author, 2025 Any third-party material in this book is not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. This licence allows you to share and adapt the work for non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) and any changes are indicated. Attribution should include the following information: Schad, J. 2025. Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A departure in biography. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089709 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ |
| Keywords: | Benjamin, biography, Dunera, Australia, Woolf, Luxemburg, Wittgenstein, Kafka, Wilde, Kolmar |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215855 |
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