Walter Benjamin

In a letter to Max Brod about German-Jewish writers he said that the Jewish question or “the despair over it was their inspiration—an inspiration as respectable as any other but fraught, upon closer examination, with distressing peculiarities. For one thing, what their despair discharged itself in could not be German literature which on the surface it appeared to be,” because the problem was not really a German one. Thus they lived “among three impossibilities . . .: the impossibility of not writing” as they could get rid of their inspiration only by writing; “the impossibility of writing in German”—Kafka considered their use of the German language as the “overt or covert, or possibly self-tormenting usurpation of an alien property, which has not been acquired but stolen, (relatively) quickly picked up, and which remains someone else’s possession even if not a single linguistic mistake can be pointed out”; and finally, “the impossibility of writing differently,” since no other language was available. “One could almost add a fourth impossibility,” says Kafka in conclusion, “the impossibility of writing, for this despair was not something that could be mitigated through writing”—as is normal for poets, to whom a god has given to say what men suffer and endure. Rather, despair has become here “an enemy of life and of writing; writing was here only a moratorium, as it is for someone who writes his last will and testament just before he hangs himself.” 16

For the insolubility of the Jewish question for that generation by no means consisted only in their speaking and writing German or in the fact that their “production plant” was located in Europe—in Benjamin’s case, in Berlin West or in Paris, something about which he did “not have the slightest illusions” (Briefe II, 531). What was decisive was that these men did not wish to “return” either to the ranks of the Jewish people or to Judaism, and could not desire to do so—not because they believed in “progress” and an automatic disappearance of anti-Semitism or because they were too “assimilated” and too alienated from their Jewish heritage, but because all traditions and cultures as well as all “belonging” had become equally questionable to them. This is what they felt was wrong with the “return” to the Jewish fold as proposed by the Zionists; they could all have said what Kafka once said about being a member of the Jewish people: “. . .My people, provided that I have one.”23

“Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions” (Schriften I, 571).