Radio Benjamin

By Walter Benjamin and Lecia Rosenthal

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin’s thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated “Enlightenment for Children” youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity.

Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century’s most respected thinkers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781685761

Walter Benjamin

WALTER BENJAMIN (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.

Reviews for Radio Benjamin

[jbarringer-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I chose to read this book out of a deep-seated guilt that has remained with me ever since I left grad school and stopped reading scholarly books as a regular activity. Walter Benjamin was a theorist I heard of in several courses in grad school, and I was intrigued with what I heard of his work, though I had never read anything he wrote. So, I figured reading an advanced copy of this book (provided to me free in exchange for a fair review) would be worth doing.

I was very pleasantly surprised by the first half of this book. The second half is a bit dry and while no doubt of great interest to scholars in German studies, history, media studies and other fields, was not highly entertaining. For the last 150-200 pages I did feel like I was reading an assigned book for a class, which is what I would expect given the nature of the book. The first half, however, was delightful, a selection of radio shows Walter Benjamin wrote out, essentially essays that would have guided the actual radio broadcasts like a script. These essays/shows cover a very broad range of topics and describe a version of Europe, and especially of Germany, that we don't quite get post-WW2. Walter Benjamin, a Jewish intellectual working in radio in the early 1930's, did not know about concentration camps, and did not have the weight of the knowledge of what the Nazi's were up to, let alone knowledge of the terrible chaos that would tear Europe apart shortly after these radio shows were created.

For the modern reader, there are traces of interesting tension in some of Benjamin's choices of subject matter, but all quite subtle. He is talking about the vanishing art of puppeteers, the architecture of Berlin, and travels in Naples, among many other topics. There is a lot in these shows to interest the scholar, but in part because they were written for a youth audience these shows are also pleasant, easy reading that anyone outside academia could also enjoy. I read a few of these essays each night before bed, and they worked quite well for such a purpose. I would love to see them repackaged for the general public, actually. In the meantime, this is one book that academics might hang onto and read parts of to their kids once their research needs are satisfied.


(I received my copy of this book free in exchange for a fair review.)