Medeea Pașca reviews John Schad’s Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A Departure in Biography (UCL Press 2025)
Whilst some might argue the opposite, studying both a scholar’s work and biography have unequivocally proved to be fruitful. In Walter Benjamin’s case, the two are inseparable. There is an intimate connection between his fragmentary method, his intellectual range and his tragic end. Yet, one relationship remained strangely underexposed. In his book, Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A Departure in Biography, John Schad, sets out to correct this omission by bringing into light Benjamin’s relationship with his son, Stefan.
The German-Jewish writer, Walter Benjamin, became a notable literary figure only posthumously. Both Hannah Arendt and Leon Wieseltiere wrote that Benjamin thought of himself as a literary critic. His interests were, though, dispersed and his writings touch on theology, aestheticism, history and even German tragic drama, to name a few. Benjamin’s theoretical framework consistently seeks to subvert the rigidity of systematic philosophy, favoring instead a fragmentary approach to history and thought. Since becoming a canonical figure, his writings have been thoroughly examined and his biography has often been an important source of information. Still, in the process of analyzing his correspondence and relationships with friends like Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, the figures of his wife and son tend to be forgotten. This is where John Schad’s work comes as a much-needed addition and the angle from which the author decided to start Walter Benjamin’s Ark.
John Schad is an English writer and Professor of Modern Literature at Lancaster University. A syntagm most usually associated with his writing is creative criticism, describing both an approach to scholarship and a writing practice. While deeply rooted in literary analysis and theory, creative criticism moves towards fiction and the imaginary and thus artistically brings forward new insights and hypotheses. The main aim of this creative approach to criticism is to construct such forms of understanding that have the capacity to simultaneously contain dispersed information and illuminate new insights.
John Schad’s writing reflects his interest in fusing the work of the critic and that of the artist and his fine sense of dramatic writing. Among his works can be found an experimental biography of Marie Schad – in Paris Bride: A Modernist Life (2020) – fictional narratives that develop on traditional archival scholarship, such as his two novels The Late Walter Benjamin (2012) and Someone called Derrida (2007), as well as works written or adapted for the stage, one of them being Derrida|Benjamin, written in collaboration with Fred Dalmasso.
Walter Benjamin’s Ark follows Stefan Benjamin’s journey on the HMT Dunera, a British passenger ship which, in the 1940, transported refugees considered to be Nazi sympathizers from England to Australia. The voyage of the Dunera is almost perfectly simultaneous with Walter Benjamin’s journey from Paris to the Franco-Spanish border, which he intended to cross in order to escape repatriation to Nazi Germany. Stefan safely reaches Australia on the 6th of September 1940, while his father commits suicide on the 26th. Stefan will only be told about his father’s death two year later, in 1942, upon his return to England.
One starting point for Walter Benjamin’s Ark is Opinions et Pensées, a manuscript published in 2006 which contains Benjamin’s transcriptions of Stefan’s infant words and expressions. Schad remarks one striking point. Scholars acknowledged this manuscript’s influence, but omitted to consider how deeply it shaped Benjamin’s thinking.
Walter Benjamin’s Ark seeks, then, not only to recover the intriguing figure that is Stefan but also to identify him as that most important Benjaminian spectre – namely, the secret ‘you’ or addressee of Benjamin’s writing.
To pursue this line of inquiry, the book brings the father and the son together and in fictional conversations with a cast of historical and literary figures, such as Virginia Woolf, Rosa Luxemburg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Oscar Wilde, Hamlet and Kafka. The choice of characters is not arbitrary. Each shares some conceptual approaches with Walter Benjamin, which Schad uses to craft their interactions. The setting which makes these encounters possible is Stefan’s journey on the Dunera. The ship becomes the pretext for Stefan to meet these characters an attempt to connect with his father. Benjamin accompanies his son only on his voyage towards Australia. Upon arrival, Stefan urges him to disembark, but in vain. Salvation eludes both the real Benjamin and Stefan’s vision of him. Upon Stefan’s return to England, in 1941, no specter of his father appears.
Form matters as much as content in this book. The modernist Benjamin did not want criticism to describe a work of art, but to function like one. Schad manifests the same intention, only from a post-critical position. Namely, he infuses his book with intertextuality, while opting for fragmentary architecture and hybridization of genres. The mechanics of his discourse are always in plain sight. The introduction frames the entire project and serves as explanation and interpretation for the text as a whole. Moreover, each chapter has an introductory note. Document-like passages provide historical context throughout the chapters, thus periodically halting the flow of the text itself. In turn, this proves to be extremely fruitful, since the narrative’s unbroken continuity could be overwhelming.
Dialogues also support this fragmentation. Schad’s propensity for theatre seems to be the underlining force of the discourse, as the dialogues are crafted in the manner of the theatre of the absurd. Some dialogues are organized as lines in a script and chapter two and five contain An English Stage Experiment and An Interlude. The flow of consciousness and involuntary memory are two forces which intertwine through clever wordplay, advancing the story. It is important to note that these choices in form and style give strength to the text and freedom to its author. When engaging his “historical characters” in dialogue, Schad mainly uses actual quotes from their works or correspondence. His use of quotation is meticulous and gradual, choosing to bring his character to life slowly, with each new line, and not emphatically, with one all-too-recognizable phrase. In turn, this system of meticulous quotations aim to re-construct the process of thinking.
Much like Benjamin, Schad makes use of the collage in his work. The only way for such a text to embrace its fragmentation is to find a red thread to hold itself together. Schad makes use of contingence to support the coherence of his book. He brings together disparate events and people through the smallest details, always quietly questioning whether they only fit together because of pure coincidence. This strategy is used at length throughout the book. One instance of it is the association of two briefcases, the one Benjamin was travelling with in 1940, when he was trying to escape France over the Pyrenees, and the capricious handbag in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Benjamin’s briefcase was supposed to contain a “manuscript more valuable than myself”, just as the handbag in Wilde’s comedy. As the stories go, both manuscripts were lost so, for a few moments, the briefcase and the handbag become one, turning Benjamin from someone carrying something into someone carrying someone, namely the infant Stefan. Thus, is revealed on facet of his identity, namely, the child-manuscript. A second revelation follows. The child can never be certain of his identity:
Either way, that child will never quite know if he’s one or the other, man or manuscript, bonesEither way, that child will never quite know if he’s one or the other, man or manuscript, bones or words. Not unlike, say, poor –St John the Baptist? said the Wilde. (233)
The reference to St John the Baptist is not accidental here. In Florence, 1924, when wandering through the Uffizi Gallery, Benjamin stops to examine a painting depicting St. John the Baptist as a Young Boy still in the desert. This moment receives a retrospective weight. Throughout his writing, Walter Benjamin’s used paintings such as this one or Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus for broader stake. Through Angelus Novus he illustrated his critique of historicism. Schad proposes an adjacent perspective, suggesting that these two paintings also show a father’s deep and lasting connection with his son.
What truly brings Walter Benjamin’s Ark in relation to the thinker’s key concepts and directions is the way in which the book takes shape in precise accordance with the brushing of the history against the grain. Benjamin introduced this concept in his work, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History), written in 1940 and published in 1942 as Theses on the Philosophy of History. Here he criticized classical historicism for its linear presentation of events which emphasize victory and progress. In contrast, he advocated for a revolutionary attitude which does not try to smooth things over, but rather to reveal forgotten struggles. Such an attitude can only be undertaken if one regards history anti-chronologically, in reverse. This is exactly the method used by Schad. Looking back, he has a simultaneous perception of events and the understanding of someone in possession of all the facts. This is the understanding he shares with the reader. Stefan’s biography is one forgotten struggle, and its resurfacing is an illuminating one.
Medeea Pașca is an Assistant Editor in the Democracy and Culture Section.
