“Sr. Desengonçado manda lembranças”: Walter Benjamin – um fracasso?

Abstract

Erdmut Wizisla takes as his point of departure the German expression “Ungeschickt lässt grüßen” (“Mr. Clumsy sends his regards”)—associated with the “little hunchback” in Berlin Childhood around 1900—and discusses how Hannah Arendt transformed this literary figure into a biographical key for interpreting Benjamin’s life, including his death in Portbou. While acknowledging the importance of Arendt’s essay and the professional and historical defeats Benjamin faced, Wizisla challenges the reduction of his life to an inevitable succession of catastrophes. To this end, he distinguishes Benjamin’s literary self-representation from his actual conduct and draws on autobiographical writings, letters, testimonies, and essays on Franz Kafka. His reading of Kafka shows that, for Benjamin, failure did not simply mean defeat: it could constitute a condition of fidelity to writing, resistance to the transformation of literature into doctrine, and an opening toward hope. Wizisla concludes by presenting three central arguments against the image of Benjamin as the “clumsy one.”