Stephan Wackwitz
>The no-man’s land between scholarship and poetry
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Stephan Wackwitz recovers Walter Benjamin from the academy @ Die Welt. Translated from the German at Sign and Sight.
In 1972 I was twenty, a supposedly not entirely untalented, deeply impressionable and utterly confused individual. One week it was maoism, the next it was poetry or fine art. The interminable vacillations of a young man. Ersatz military service in Bad Urach, holidays in Paris, a patchwork university degree in Munich. The obligatory hitch-hiking in Italy. The effects of Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra” and three cans of beer in a youth hostel in Milan. An old man holds his head in despair over the diaries of his younger self.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )One day, on a marble table top in an Ulm cafe, next to a cup of coffee, lay a red and white Bibliothek Suhrkamp book. It was Walter Benjamin’s “One Way Street”. The effect it was to have on me in the months and years to come echoed that experienced by it author in the 1920’s, who could only read Aragon’s “Paysan de Paris” one page at a time because it made his heart race and kept him awake for nights on end.
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