Archive of a Defeated Generation: Walter Benjamin and the Origins of Critical Theory

Friday 20 November 2026, 10.30–18.00

Diffrakt | Zentrum für theoretische Peripherie, Crellestraße 22, 10827 Berlin

Registration opens 1 October 2026

Walter Benjamin understood, well in advance, that “the only image our generation will leave is that of a defeated generation [as] its legacy to those who come.” Philosophy and the humanities have still not fully reckoned with the methodological consequences of this sentence.

The postwar image of the prewar period was formed, necessarily, from what survived: lives not extinguished, archives not destroyed, collections not dispersed beyond recovery, authorities still able to speak, edit, classify, and remember. Benjamin’s works and correspondence were first assembled by friends, certainly, but also by figures external to many of the most intimate constellations of his life — assembled, moreover, from those survivors, collections, and memories available to them. In Benjamin’s own autobiographical diagram, Theodor W. Adorno is absent, while Gershom Scholem appears as a node without connection. Yet it was substantially on the basis of such surviving authorities that the religious or “messianic” hypothesis concerning Benjamin’s thought was constructed; a hypothesis that, despite several later waves of archival expansion, remains one of the dominant frameworks of Benjamin scholarship.

This seminar asks, ‘what changes when Benjamin’s thought is approached not from the retrospective authority of survival, but from the defeated and dispersed generative world out of which it emerged?’. Much contemporary work in the humanities remains governed by an archival positivism: what is not cited, named, or textually preserved cannot be avowed in interpretation. Yet the archive is never simply given: it is the historical remainder of destruction, exile, accident, friendship, hostility, institutional mediation, and editorial power. Even the most stringent philology presupposes a hypothesis that renders its findings intelligible. The question, then, is not whether interpretation may move beyond the archive, but how the archive itself demands a more rigorous account of its own absences. What is needed is not speculation against philology, but a speculative philology: a disciplined reconstruction of the vanished relations without which the surviving documents cannot be understood. Through the archaeology of a lost generation, this event looks to construct a space in which hypotheses transcendent to the archive can be formulated anew.

Certain enigmas were visible from the beginning. What, for example, are we to make of Gustav Glück — the Austrian banker, art expert, and Benjamin-Brecht intimate to whom texts such as “Karl Kraus” and “The Destructive Character” are dedicated — who appears at the centre of Benjamin’s own diagram of life? How could such a figure, apart from the archival dead-end to which he seemed to lead, remain marginal to the dominant construction of Benjamin’s intellectual origins? Recent work by Georg Wiesing-Brandes on Benjamin’s address book, and by Sam Dolbear on the figures named in Benjamin’s life diagram, begins to reopen this question. Such projects do not simply supply new ‘influences’, but reconstruct the generational environment in which Benjamin lived, read, argued, loved, and wrote.

The critical history of philosophy is not an inventory of citations, but a science of origins.

The seminar will therefore construct a constellation of figures and relations drawn, among other contexts, from the German Youth Movement, including the psychologist Siegfried Bernfeld; from Berlin Expressionist culture, including Lotte Wolff; and from the wider philosophical, sociological, and political milieu of figures such as Alfred Seidel and Gottfried Salomon-Delatour. Following the event, CRMEP BOOKS will publish an anthology of the seminar papers, accompanied by some English translations of relevant texts by the figures discussed and also by Walter Benjamin himself.

Confirmed speakers include: Franziska Aigner, Howard Caygill, Sam Dolbear, Louis Hartnoll, Mimi Howard, Christian Voller