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not e s
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no t e s preface 1. Theodor W. Adorno. “Charakteristik Walter Benjamins,” 1950, in Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann. vol. 10.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 241. Translated into English by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber as “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 231. 2. For an excellent overview of Nietzsche reception in the United States after the Second World War and the outsized roles played first by Walter Kaufmann and then by Jacques Derrida in creating a Nietzsche who would be at home in the specialized research university, see Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen , American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), particularly chapters 5 and 6. 3. Helmut Pfotenhauer, “Benjamin und Nietzsche,” in “Links hatte noch alles sich zu enträtseln”: Walter Benjamin im Kontext, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1978), 111. 4. Irving Wohlfahrt, “Resentment Begins at Home: Nietzsche, Benjamin, and the University,” in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections , ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 224–59. 5. Renate Reschke, “Barbaren, Kult und Katastrophen: Nietzsche bei Benjamin: Unzusammenhängendes im Zusammenhang gelesen,” in Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her: Texte zu Walter Benjamin, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), 303–39. 6. Stéphane Moses, “Benjamin, Nietzsche et l’idée de l’éternel retour,” Europe, revue littéraire mensuelle 74, no. 804 (1996): 152. introduction: walter benjamin, friedrich nietzsche 1. Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche, 3 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag , 1978), 3:224. 2. The meaning of the German word Förster being “forester,” a FörsterHaus would be a gamekeeper’s lodge. Notes 264 3. The reference is in fact to the fairy-tale “Riffraff” [“Lumpengesindel”] in the collection by the Brothers Grimm, in which a rooster and a hen climb a hill to gather nuts before the squirrel can haul them away. 4. “Nietzsches Leben ist typisch für die bloße Fernenbestimmtheit, die das Verhängnis der höchsten unter den fertigen Menschen ist.” 5. Urgeschichte, Benjamin’s term, first appears in the tragic theory of The Origin of German Trauerspiel. There Benjamin is contrasting tragic drama with the epic saga (Sage) that is the older form in which mythic content appears. “Tragic poetry is opposed to epic poetry as a tendentious re-shaping of the tradition,” Benjamin writes there, “. . .The reshaping of the saga is not motivated by the search for tragic constellations, but it is undertaken with a tendentious purpose which would lose all its significance if the tendency were not expressed in terms of the saga, the primordial history [Urgeschichte] of the nation” (OT, 106; GS, 1:285). What distinguishes epic ur-history from tragedy is not its mythic content but the disinterested and impersonal presentation of that mythic material. The tendentiousness of tragedy is its defiant denunciation of mythic judgment; in the saga, “the streams of tradition , which surge down violently, often from opposite directions, have finally come to rest beneath the epic surface which conceals a divided, many-armed river-bed” (OT, 106; GS, 1:285). At this point Benjamin is using the term Urgeschichte in its ordinary sense, to indicate the archaic narratives that precede any documented historical individuals. It is only later, in his overlooked essay on the French American writer Julien Green that Benjamin’s own idiosyncratic use of the word begins to develop. It is the virtue of Green’s novels, Benjamin claims, to depict the distinctly modern form of mythic suffering. Green’s characters are destroyed by external chance, not by their internal drives, and “Chance is the figure of Necessity abandoned by God” (SW, 2:332, GS, 2:330). Thus the figures in Green’s stories unite a sharply observed historical objectivity with the unsettling timelessness of mythic sanction. Inflexible as the mask-like personae of tragedians, [Green’s characters] live out their lives in small French towns. Their clothes and their daily lives are stunted and old-fashioned, but in their gestures survive age-old rulers, evildoers, fanatics. . . . The merging of the old-fashioned with ur-history, the trauma of seeing one’s parents in a dual perspective—one that is both historical and part of ur-history—is the abiding motif of this author. (SW, 335; GS, 2:333) Ur-history converges with history in the parental generation; more important , it disturbs history. By the time of The Arcades Project, ur...