Adorno’s posthumous editorial work made Walter Benjamin a major intellectual figure

Evidence

What can be said with certainty is that the Institut was sorely disappointed and upset by his premature death. In subsequent years it sought to secure for him the recognition and acclaim he had been denied in life. The first manifestation of this was a memorial volume circulated in a limited, mimeographed edition (because of the Institut’s financial problems) in 1942. It contained essays by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin himself. After the Institut returned to Germany, Adorno, with the help of Benjamin’s old friend Gershom Scholem, published editions of his writings and letters, which have sparked widespread interest in Benjamin’s work in the last decade. Whatever his critics may have said about Adorno’s interpretation of his friend’s ideas, and its repercussions on the picture of Benjamin he fostered, they could not deny that only through his efforts, in collaboration with Scholem, did Benjamin become a figure of controversy at all. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 596

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader picture of how intellectual reputations are manufactured posthumously; echoes earlier chapters on the Institut’s financial woes limiting its publishing.