Delimiting Literary Criticism: Walter Benjamin's Dissertation

The complex philological project that Walter Benjamin began to develop in his early literary criticism can be seen subtly and even surreptitiously at work in what might appear to be his most conventional, and certainly his most professionally successful (indeed his only professionally successful), piece of academic literary criticism—his doctoral dissertation on German Romantic literary criticism (written in 1918–19). In keeping, it would seem, with the conventions of such a formal academic exercise, the dissertation—a literary critical study of the Romantic concept of literary criticism—begins by reflecting on the limitations of its method and scope. This is not merely a matter of academic decorum: Benjamin's project, as we will see, is indeed all about self-limitation (Selbstbeschränkung). The emphatic care given to the limits placed on the project in the introductory paragraphs titled "Delimitations of the Question" (Einschränkungen der Fragestellung) contributes to the sense of disciplinary rigor that would have been expected of a Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Bern in 1919 (and indeed Benjamin's dissertation exceeded expectations and was awarded the citation of summa cum laude). Yet the stress on the limitations that lend coherence to the work also points to the obstacles standing in the way of a true understanding of what is most important about German Romantic criticism from Benjamin's critical point of view. In this sense the constraints placed on the dissertation, as Benjamin underlines in its opening pages, restrict the thesis to the limited critical contribution only of "materials" (Materialien) to be used toward the definition of the essence of German Romanticism and preclude inquiry into the determination of its aesthetic "point of view" (Gesichtspunkt) (Benjamin 1991a, 12; 1996a, 185).¹ "This point of view," Benjamin states, "may be sought in romantic messianism" (Benjamin 1991a, 12, n. 3; 1996a, 185, n. 3). This statement, contained in a footnote and thus relegated to the margins of the dissertation, is related to the "point of view" developing in Benjamin's own broader critical project during these student years. It raises the possibility that the restrictions imposed on the dissertation, which seem to be a matter of scholarly prudence and convention, might also have the effect of obscuring its author's own critical point of view. This is the thesis explored in what follows, namely, that Benjamin's philological study of the Romantic concept of literary criticism is designed simultaneously to outline and to underline the limitations of academic literary criticism from an aesthetic perspective that remains largely hidden in the dissertation. Or as Samuel Weber has elegantly put it in response to a comment by the eminent Germanist Peter Demetz: "Benjamin's 'professionally done' dissertation [as Demetz describes it] was thus intended to lead its readers to the limits of its explicitly treated subject-matter and point them beyond, in the direction of an 'esoteric' dimension that transcends the purview of traditional scholarly discourse" (Weber 2008, 21). In this sense Benjamin's dissertation may be said to delimit Romantic literary criticism in a way that is characteristic of all of his critical work on German literature throughout his early years. In what follows, I will specify the critical engagement of Benjamin's dissertation with the authoritative sources of German studies in this period and then suggest how the "'esoteric' dimension" of this work contributes to the philology of life that can be discerned in his earlier work.

Not a history of the concept of criticism, not a study of the place of Romanticism in the history of philosophy, also not an investigation into Romanticism from the perspective of the philosophy of history or an attempt to represent the "historical essence of romanticism," this dissertation is to be understood, as Benjamin insists in its first sentence, as "a problem-historical investigation": "The present work is conceived as a contribution to a problem-historical investigation … (problemgeschichtlichen Untersuchung)" (Benjamin 1991a, 11; 1996a, 116). The term somewhat awkwardly translated as "problem-historical"—problemgeschichtliche—inscribes Benjamin's critical project in the broader debate, spurred by the work of Max Weber and...