Walter Benjamin’s early activism moved from the radical Youth Movement to Zionism

Evidence

Benjamin was born in 1892 in Berlin, and grew up, like most of the other Institut members, in a family of well-to-do assimilated Jews. His father was an antiquarian and art dealer from whom he inherited a collector’s fascination with books and the artifacts of the past. Relations with his family, however, were never easy. Although he would return to his childhood again and again in his work, it was apparently a period of great sadness for him. Like many other disaffected bourgeois German adolescents, he joined Gustav Wyneken’s Youth Movement before the war, becoming a member of its most radical wing, which was composed largely of Jewish students.”’ During the period of his affiliation, he rose to the presidency of the Berlin Free Student Association and was a frequent contributor to Wyneken’s Der Anfang, under the pseudonym “Ardor.” During the war, however, his interest in another escape from the oppressiveness of bourgeois life crowded out the Youth Movement. Zionism became the dominant passion of his life for the next few years. His interest in it was strengthened by the close friendship he began with Gershom Scholem in 1915, who also awoke his curiosity in Jewish theology and mysticism. Benjamin’s wife Dora, whom he married in 1917, was herself the daughter of a prominent Zionist, Leon Kellner. Benjamin’s commitment to Zionism, however, was never undiluted. In 1922 he resisted Scholem’s entreaties to accompany him to Palestine, although later letters indicate his continued interest in such a move. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 598

Categorization

• XREF: Benjamin’s trajectory from Wyneken’s Youth Movement to Zionism foreshadows his later messianic-historical bent in conjunction with the Frankfurt School’s secular Marxism