Walter Benjamin in the European East

Networks, Conflicts, and Reception
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-78340-6
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 448 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Reihe: Marx and Marxisms

Walter Benjamin in the European East offers the first comprehensive account of how Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) work circulated, was translated, contested, and creatively reworked across socialist and post-socialist Europe, shifting the focus from canonical Western reception to Benjamin’s Eastern afterlives.

Bringing together scholars, translators, artists, editors, and activists, the volume reconstructs a wide range of overlooked material: newspaper notices, unpublished correspondence, censored or delayed translations, samizdat editions, editorial disputes, artistic appropriations, and political reuses. Its case studies historicize Benjamin’s reception in specific local, linguistic, and institutional contexts, while showing how his concepts moved across theory, literature, visual culture, and activism. In doing so, the book challenges center–periphery models of intellectual history and rethinks the East/West divide as a historical and epistemological problem rather than a fixed geography.

This volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in literary and cultural studies, intellectual history, translation studies, art history, and East European studies, as well as to readers working on Walter Benjamin, materialism, socialism and post-socialism, and the transnational circulation of critical theory.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Adler, Caroline

Buck, Sophia

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Theorie, Politische Philosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Marxismus, Kommunismus
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Prologue: Side Alleys of Benjamin’s Modernity  Part I: Benjamin’s European East  1. ‘Nothing ever happens as planned or expected’: Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Adventure  2. A Neglected Interview: Walter Benjamin in the Soviet Newspaper Vecherniaia Moskva  3. Walter Benjamin’s reception of the East, or: Mediating Sergei Tret'iakov’s operative practice  4. Franco-Romanian Entanglements: An Archeology of Walter Benjamin’s Early Reception in Romania  Part II: Theorizing (with) Benjamin – Editions, Scholarship, Philosophy  5. Gerhard Seidel and Walter Benjamin in the GDR: Lost Possibilities of an East German Counter Legacy?  6. ‘The Shattering of the Aura as a Moment of Communist Revolution’: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin’s Work in the Scientific Aesthetics of the GDR  7. ‘The Most Significant Art Theorist of Avant-Gardism’: Lukács reads Benjamin  8. Angelus Novus in Budapest: The Possibilities and Vicissitudes of Walter Benjamin’s Reception in Hungary before 1989  9. With radical tolerance for communal culture: Benjamin-inspired aesthetic alternatives in Hungarian dissident thought  10. ‘A rather secretive affair’: Walter Benjamin in post-1968 Czechoslovakia  11. Walter Benjamin travels to Romania: Quotations as ‘Wayside Robbers’  Part III: Translating (with) Benjamin – Artistic Adaptation, Activist Transformation, Linguistic Transfer  12. Before-after: Benjaminian Thought and the Photomontage Practice of Sanja Ivekovic  13. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Metamodern Reproduction: Walter Benjamin in Late Socialist Yugoslavia  14. When the ‘Angel of History’ Encounters the Russophone Migrant: Haïm Sokol’s Artistic Reading of Walter Benjamin  15. Walter Benjamin and Radu Jude: Bucharest as the Capital of the 21st Century in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn  16. Oaths, Crypto-mining, and Divine Violence in the Caucasus: Benjamin at Work in the Worlds of Post-Soviet Georgia  17. Polish Translation History: Benjamin and the Polish Editor as Tormentor  18. Romanian Translation History: Benjamin and the Romanian Transition  19. Ukrainian Translation History: Benjamin and the Ukrainian Task of Revisiting (Translation) Canon

Über Autor(innen)

Caroline Adler is a scholar of Cultural History and Theory and research associate at the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force at Hamburg University. From 2020 to 2023 she was part of the DFG-Research Training Group The Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms at Humboldt-University Berlin, where she completed her dissertation on Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Moscow’ and its literary construction (forthcoming with Kadmos, 2026). Her research focuses on genealogies of modernity, method and literarization in the works of Walter Benjamin, epistemologies of the aesthetic, and theory and critique of scientific exhibition practice. Alongside her academic work, she curates both discourse and exhibition programs, serves as an editor of the Berlin Review, and is a board member of the Berlin collective diffrakt.

Sophia Buck is a literary scholar and comparatist specialising in modern German and European intellectual history, and she is currently Montgomery Fellow in Modern German Literature at the University of Oxford. She studied German literature and philosophy in Heidelberg, Prague, and Oxford, and completed her DPhil at Merton College, Oxford (2019–2024) on Walter Benjamin’s “New Optic” and his Soviet-French connections, with visiting positions in Paris and Berlin and prizes from Merton in 2022 and 2023. Her work focuses on European intellectual networks, twentieth-century literary criticism across German, French, and Russian contexts, material philology, and the history of the humanities in times of war, and she has published in English and German and is a member of the International Walter Benjamin Society.