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THE TIES BETWEEN WALTER BENJAMIN AND

HERMANN COHEN: A GENERALLY NEGLECTED
CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF THE IMPACT
OF COHEN’S PHILOSOPHY

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Translated by Joel Golb

Considering the ties between Walter Benjamin and Hermann Cohen

means more than offering one more assessment of the work of each
of these German and Jewish philosophers. This is the case because
the question of what links the thought of such different figures illu-
minates a generally neglected chapter in the history of the impact
of Cohen’s ideas. In thus opening an important vista on Cohen, the
question also casts Benjamin’s early work in a fresh light.
In his early engagement with Hermann Cohen’s philosophical sys-
tem, Benjamin was struggling to clarify a specific set of conceptual
problems—problems that loomed in the context of his generation’s
historical experience on the threshold of the Great War. Put more
pointedly: the philosophical questions Benjamin formulated early in
his career, through an engagement with Cohen’s system, stemmed
directly from an effort to furnish that experience with its philosophical
reflection.
Adorno once observed that the young Benjamin was “a genius”
who “came to himself ” by “swimming despairingly against the tide”
of his generation.1 But Benjamin’s repeated grappling with Cohen
furnishes a more solid explanation than this unsettling contribution
to a cult of genius (or of what Adorno also called Superiorität). It
points to Benjamin as a willful young philosopher whose program-
matically formulated texts take up Cohen’s linkage of critical phi-
losophy and Judaism; this he did in search of a method for
philosophically articulating his generation’s experience. To a great
extent, the consistent actuality of Benjamin’s texts emerges from his

1
Theodor W. Adorno, Über Walter Benjamin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a.M.
1970), p. 97f.

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128 astrid deuber-mankowsky

steady confrontation with questions of cognitive theory and system-

atic philosophy. The confrontation is present in all his efforts at
describing the modern epoch. It forms the foundation for relating
historical phenomena—indeed history itself—to the present, and for
arriving at a fruitful philosophical criticism (and self-criticism) of
modernity. To cite only the better-known writings: In the unfinished
late text known as the Passagenwerk, this emerges in convolute N,
concerned as it is with “Cognitive-theoretical material. Theory of
progress.” In the Origin of the German Play of Mourning (dating from
1925) this confrontation is presented as the treatise’s “cognitive-theoretical
preface.” Benjamin also integrated this confrontation into the rigor-
ously composed essay on “Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’” (1922).2
Benjamin here takes up ideas from both his dissertation “The Concept
of Art Criticism in Romanticism” (1919) and the essay “Two Poems
of Friedrich Hölderlin” (which he wrote at the end of 1914). In the
latter, very early text, Benjamin makes use of Cohen’s ideas to implic-
itly distance himself from Stefan George’s religion of art. In this con-
text, he stresses that openness to criticism is part and parcel of the
concept of the artwork—which corresponds to a philosophically legit-
imated concept of art criticism.3 The text on Hölderlin is the first
in which Benjamin confronts an aestheticization of life with the con-
cept of a philosophically grounded art criticism.
His encounter with Cohen centers on three of Cohen’s motifs:
first, an insistence on the philosophical system’s structure, and hence
on a discontinuity between ethics, logic, and aesthetics;4 second, the
orientation toward a Jewish philosophy legitimating its claim to uni-
versality through ethics and through a sympathy with life; and third,
a fusion of cognitive critique, transcendence, and Judaism.5

2
Cf. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen.
Jüdische Werte. Kritische Philosophie, vergängliche Erfahrung (Berlin 2000), pp. 234–82.
3
Cf. Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin, pp. 203–34.
4
This point is emphasized in the “cognitive-theoretical prologue” of the Origin
of the German Play of Mourning. (Gesammelte Schriften, unter Mitwirkung von Theodor
W. Adorno und Gershom Scholem, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt a.M. 1986f. I.1,
p. 213).
5
This fusion culminates in Cohen’s interpretation of Jewish law. He sees its main
purpose as maintaining the “barrier between God and human beings,” the source
of its role as “basic law of the moral world.” Cf. Hermann Cohen, Religion der
Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Nach dem Manuskript des Verfassers neu
durchgearbeitet und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Bruno Strauß, Frankfurt
a.M. 1929. Reprint, Wiesbaden 1995, p. 393.
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the ties between walter benjamin and hermann cohen 129

Cohen’s project was to defend philosophy’s independent status

vis-à-vis the positive sciences—especially psychology.6 At the same
time, Benjamin’s linkage of philosophy with Judaism takes place
against the backdrop of a crisis facing philosophy at the start of the
20th century. The most prominent symptom of this crisis was the
growing strength of Lebensphilosophie, which soon penetrated all realms
of thought. What Gershom Scholem referred to as Benjamin’s “phi-
losophy of Judaism”7 emerged from direct contact with this influential
movement, on the one hand, and a desire for distance from it, on
the other.
The epistemological critique of an abstract and speculative use of
the concept of life is an inversion of the above-mentioned sympathy
for life.8 Connected with it is a critique of the transfer of concepts
from the natural sciences and aesthetics to the realm Benjamin terms
the “human being’s moral essence,”9 and which Cohen calls the
“possibility for self-transformation” rendering the “individual an I.”10
The distinction between the concepts of nature and history is tied
very closely to this theoretically legitimated safeguarding of the moral
life. In his Ethics, Cohen argues that the concept of history emerges
from the question of the reality of the moral sphere, and hence that
of freedom. Fixed limitations on the realm of logic’s validity, which
are grounded in critical cognitive theory, also explain Benjamin’s use
of the concept of mythos, which was to take on a central role in his
thinking. The negation of freedom, and hence of morals, is mythi-
cal—morals being conceivable by both Cohen and Benjamin only
in the framework of transcendence, meaning the difference between
human beings and God.11

6
Cf. Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin, p. 5; ibid. p. 380ff.
7
Cf. Scholem, Walter Benjamin—die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, Frankfurt a.M.
1975, p. 45.
8
Cf. GS VI., p. 56.
9
GS I.1, p. 284.
10
Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft, p. 225.
11
Cf. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”; Cf. Deuber-Mankowsky, “Walter Benjamin’s
Theological-Political Fragment Read as a Response to Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia,”
in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 2002, ed. Gross Grenville, Raphael Gross, J. A. S.
Grenville (Berghahn Books, 2002). Cf. Deuber-Mankowsky, “Das Gesetz und die
Suspension des Ethischen. Jacob Taubes und Hermann Cohen,” in Torah, Nomos,
Jus. Abendländischer Antinomismus und der Traum vom herrschaftsfreien Raum. ed. Gesine
Palmer et al., (Berlin 1999), pp. 243–63.
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130 astrid deuber-mankowsky

For Benjamin as for Cohen, history itself is at stake in the shel-

tering of ethics from interference by scientific or aesthetic concepts.12
Both figures explain history in terms of the taking on of a task, view-
ing it in connection with an ethically understood concept of humanity.
My thesis, then, is that both the actuality and the breadth of
Benjamin’s critical analysis of his age is owed, not least of all, to an
intense encounter early on with Cohen’s critical Jewish thinking.
Schooled by Cohen, Benjamin’s philosophical stance found its con-
crete expression in the following critical complex: a critique of George’s
religion of art; a critique of historicism’s aesthetization of history; a
critique of Bergson’s Lebensphilosophie; and to this we need to add—
no less importantly—a critique of Baudelaire’s L’art pour L’art and
Catholic-rooted decadence. We thus find the following eloquent
remark in a letter to Adorno written in 1940:
I’m having my Christian Baudelaire lifted to heaven by a bunch of
Jewish angels. But arrangements have already been made so that, in
the last third of the ascent to heaven, shortly before the entrance into
glory, they let him fall, as by accident.13
Oriented toward the discontinuous structure of Cohen’s system,
Benjamin’s approach found its most explosive political application
in his confrontation with fascism. Formulated in the reviews col-
lected under the title “Theories of German Fascism” (1930) and in
the now famous treatise “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” (1935), this confrontation is, of course, closely tied to
the critique of Lebenphilosophie’s aestheticization of life. It is the basis
for the above-mentioned review of Jünger in which Benjamin
reproaches Jünger for aestheticizing war; and it culminates in his
thesis that fascism aestheticizes political life14—a process he wished
to replace with a “politicization of politics.”

Historical Experience: The Great War and Lebensphilosophie

Running alongside the similarities between Benjamin and Cohen,

the conceptual differences between them are equally striking.

12
Cf. Deuber-Mankowsky, “Sprachformen der Apokalypse bei Hermann Cohen,”
in Jürgen Brokoff, Joachim Jacob, Apokalypse und Erinnerung, Göttingen 2002, S. 16–30.
13
Theodor W. Adorno – Walter Benjamin. Briefwechsel 1928–1940. Ed. Lonitz, Henri.
(Frankfurt a.M. 1994), p. 413.
14
GS I.2, p. 467.
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the ties between walter benjamin and hermann cohen 131

These differences are based in part on their dissimilar historical expe-

riences, which are all the more important since Benjamin took their
articulation and rescue to be a philosophical task.
Two experiences above all stamped Benjamin’s generation, the
first of these being, of course, the Great War. In a short article of
1933 called “Experience and Poverty” (“Erfahrung und Armut”) that
appeared in Willy Haas’s journal Die Welt im Wort,15 the forty-one
year old Benjamin reflected on the war’s meaning for his genera-
tion. The quintessence of this famous text lies in the insight that the
same generation that had shared “one of the most horrible experi-
ences in world history” had been reduced to silence by that same
horror. Never, Benjamin stressed, had the strategic, economic, cor-
poreal, and moral life been more completely called into question
than now, through power brokers, inflation, hunger, and trench war-
fare. Those in the field had not returned home richer, but “poorer
in communicable experiences.” Benjamin summarizes:
A generation, that still went to school by horse-drawn tram stood
beneath the open sky in a landscape where nothing had remained
unchanged but the clouds; and in the middle, within a force-field of
destructive streams and explosions, the tiny vulnerable human body!16
A “monstrous unfolding of technology” had stripped human beings
bare in a yet-represented way. In a penetrating image, Benjamin
describes this new poverty as having endowed the epoch with the
face of a beggar. Tradition had been lost—there was no longer a
bridge from the present to the past; no treasure of lived phenom-
ena to which one might have recourse for grasping things that have
happened. This is the precise meaning of Benjamin’s expression
“poverty of experiences of humanity”—Armut an Menschheitserfahrungen.17
At stake here was not only the concept of experience, but human-
ity itself.
Another text from 1933, also written on Ibiza, addresses the same
theme of generational experience. But this text—“A retrospective
look at Stefan George”—focuses on the prewar years 1913–1914:
the period around Benjamin’s 22nd birthday, when—as he wrote to

15
GS II.1, pp. 213–19.
16
GS II.1, p. 214.
17
GS II.1, p. 215. Benjamin describes in his famous essay “The Storyteller” (GS,
II.2, S. 439), in almost the same words, the loss of value of experience as the rea-
son for the loss of the art of narrating.
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132 astrid deuber-mankowsky

Scholem in 1933—“magnificent foundations” were laid upon which

he could not, however, build his entire life.18
Unfolding in this earlier period, the second formative experience
is a more general one. It is the confrontation with a violence inher-
ent in the aestheticism that blossomed in various forms around the
fin-de-siècle. For Benjamin and his contemporaries, the extent of the
violence culminates in a sense of belonging to a generation “pre-
destined to death.”19 As “Theories of German Fascism” makes clear,
the violence is directly linked to the deathly fascination drawing so
many young people of the time enthusiastically into the war.20
Aestheticism’s variants included the cult around Stefan George and
the range of rapturous nationalisms tied to the ideals of the youth
movement. It thus seems consistent that Benjamin used his review
of two new books on George as an occasion for critically discussing
the poet’s impact on German youth as the Great War loomed. Other
than in “Experience and Poverty,” the experience being described
here is in the realm of personal memory: Benjamin did not himself
participate in the war, but he was among the youth for whom—as
he describes it—George was not the “‘foreteller’ of ‘prophecies,’”
but rather “a minstrel, who stirred it [i.e. the youth] like the wind
stirs ‘the flowers of the early homeland’ that smilingly beckoned out-
side to a long slumber.”21 He was among those who, in his words,
found no “echo of the voice conveying the ‘Dwarf ’s Song’ or the
‘Abduction’”—the reference is to two poems of George from the
start of the 1890s that Benjamin highly prized—“in the priest’s sci-
ence of poetry watched over in the Blättern für die Kunst.”
He may in fact have been alone in not recognizing the George
of such poems in the volume appearing in the winter of 1914, Stern
des Bundes.22 This is at least suggested by a particular objection
Benjamin’s beloved Jula Cohn raised to one of his assertions: that
the verses mouthed by such youths never came from the Stern des
Bundes, and seldom from the Siebente Ring of 1907. For her part,

18
Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe Vol III, ed. Christoph Gödde & Henri Lonitz
(Frankfurt a.M. 1997), p. 251.
19
GS III, p. 399.
20
GS III, p. 240.
21
GS III, p. 399. The new books were, Willi Koch, Stefan George. Weltbild,
Naturbild, Menschenbild (Halle/Saale 1933); and Eduard Lachmann, Die ersten Bücher
Stefan Georges. Eine Annäherung an das Werk (Berlin 1933).
22
Cf. GS II.1, p. 623.
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the ties between walter benjamin and hermann cohen 133

Jula could recall an “unforgettable occasion” when Heinle, Benjamin’s

young poet-friend, recited a poem from the Stern des Bundes before
the student union.23
The difference between Jula Cohn’s memories and Benjamin’s is
symptomatic for Benjamin’s position in relation to his generation:
that of someone simultaneously tied to it in the deepest way and
located on its periphery. From his “inside-outside” locus, Benjamin
would attempt to decipher the historical experiences of his day. In
this respect, his skeptical stance regarding George’s Lebensphilosophie-
inspired aesthetic religion, stimulated by an intimate knowledge of
his poetry’s seductive power, is exemplary: essential to his stance is
a refusal to denounce the longing for a better life that drew young
people to George’s poems.
Jula Cohn was actually herself still a devotee of George as late as
1933. In the time of the publication of the Stern des Bundes, such
enthusiasm was deeply seated among the youthful circles with which
Benjamin identifies himself, looking backward, in his reviews. One
circle is here particularly salient: that around the educator and founder
of the Wickersdorf Free School, Gustav Wyneken. In Freiburg, Vienna,
and Berlin, around 3000 young people belonged to this circle. In
contrast to the Wandervogel movement, they were not nationalisti-
cally oriented and did not seek salvation in nature. They referred
to themselves programmatically as the “youth-culture movement”
and were to a large extent of Jewish origin. In his reminiscences of
this period, Martin Gumpert offers the following picture:
Presumably, the figures in this circle represented the best and most
upright people this generation could offer. Abandoned by our parents,
whose inoffensiveness we knew would send us toward disaster, we tried
to struggle against our fate, believing in a world ready to listen to the
voice of youth. Leadership and followers here played an important
role. We read Stefan George and the stern epochs of the Swiss writer
Carl Spitteler. We strived for escape-routs, but took the wrong path.24
Beyond Wyneken’s programmatic intentions, the “youth-culture move-
ment” offered an alternative to engagement in the ever-stronger
Zionist youth movement for young people from liberal bourgeois

23
Unpublished letter from the estate of Jula Cohn in Theodor W. Adorno Archives
Frankfurt.
24
Martin Gumpert, Hölle im Paradies. Selbstdarstellung eines Arztes (Stockholm 1939).
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134 astrid deuber-mankowsky

families. They met in so-called “conversation rooms”—Sprechsälen25—

and with a journal called Der Anfang had a forum entirely in their
hands, no contributions from “grown ups” allowed. Benjamin pub-
lished his first texts in Der Anfang, which was located in the vicinity
of Franz Pfemferts Die Aktion—the journal most closely associated
with the emergence of Expressionism as a literary movement. Contrary
to what Adorno has asserted, Benjamin could thus indeed be found
among the age’s “young literati”—though, to be sure (and here
Adorno is right), without being one of them. Rather, he faced the
literati in the reflective position of critic, tying an inner affinity to
distance.

The Letters to Ludwig Strauß

What is the basis for the critical vantage Benjamin maintained vis-
à-vis contemporary acolytes of George? Five letters that he wrote
during the fall and winter of 1912–1913 to his companion Ludwig
Strauß—an enthusiastic follower of Buber—in order to offer an
account of his Judaism, furnish the beginning of an answer. Such a
process did not come freely, but, as Benjamin perceived it, was forced
on him through his first encounter with Zionism, as well as through
the Kunstwart debate sparked by Moritz Goldstein in the first half of
1912. This was the first time Benjamin found himself exposed to the
violence inherent in all nationalisms. The choice being forced on
him—between a German nationalism accompanied by an increas-
ingly menacing anti-Semitism and a Jewish nationalism meant as a
response to anti-Semitism—was itself violent. Instead of succumbing
to violence, Benjamin arrived at a third position in his letters to
Strauß. As an alternative to answering German nationalism with
Jewish nationalism, it allowed him to subject the violence underly-
ing both to a philosophical critique.26 As an alternative to complete
cultural assimilation, he advocated a state of being “two-sided”—

25
Cf. Gershom, Walter Benjamin—Geschichte einer Freundschaft, p. 10. “Before I
became personally acquainted with Benjamin, I saw him in the fall of 1913 in a
room above the Café Tiergarten. . . . What, as far as I know, was studiously passed
over in literature published later, was that such ‘conversation rooms’ were frequented
mainly by Jews—to be sure the sort that made little or nothing of the fact.”
26
Cf. Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin, pp. 282–341.
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the ties between walter benjamin and hermann cohen 135

i.e. German and Jewish and claimed to embody this duality himself.
Benjamin’s call for a double perspective formed the basis of the
philosophical position he linked to his concept of being Jewish. He
saw the position as being both Jewish and universal, international
and—precisely on that account—Jewish. “The moral,” he wrote to
Strauß, “is always self-evident, says Vischer. I must say: the Jewish
is self-evident.”27 He continues: “everything Jewish going beyond the
self-evidently Jewish in me is dangerous to me.”28 For Benjamin as
for Hermann Cohen, the Jewish is the “radically ethical.” Only “the
Jewish” understood in this way is the self-evidently Jewish.
Benjamin invokes the Cohenian form of neo-Kantianism at a cen-
tral point in his fourth letter, dated 7 January 1913. “The spiritual”
(Das Geistige), we read, “is a sphere of agreement; serious battle and
absolute fidelity are only decided on in the political deed. Just as
the logic of cognition knows no concept of struggle or of fidelity—
just the logic of the will (i.e. ethics) knows no concept of agreement
or of cognition.” Following this, he added a parenthetical remark:
“(Please excuse this hopefully neo-Kantian formulation).”29
Even if Hermann Cohen would have had difficulty recognizing
himself in the formulation, it nonetheless forms a prelude to Benjamin’s
effort at inscribing himself in a Cohenian tradition linking philoso-
phy, cognitive criticism, and Judaism. This did not only distinguish
him from Gustav Wyneken’s followers, but also from his five-year
younger friend, Gershom Scholem: the source of most of the testi-
mony on Benjamin, Scholem’s vantage thus having a basic impact
on Benjamin’s reception.

History as an Endlessly Incurred Task

In the winter semester of 1912–13, Cohen had taken up the chair

in philosophy of religion at the famous academy for Jewish schol-
arship, the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. He
began his courses in January 1913, offering a lecture-course on the

27
Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe. Vol. I ed. Christoph Gödde &. Henri Lonitz
(Frankfurt a.M. 1995) p. 75.
28
On this concept, cf. Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton,
New Jersey 1992), p. 255.
29
Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe I, p. 82.
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136 astrid deuber-mankowsky

concept of religion and a seminar on Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-

Politicus. The courses were heavily discussed and very well attended.30
We do not know for sure whether Benjamin attended them, but we
may assume that the above quoted formulation is connected with
them.
It is apparent that the strict discontinuity Benjamin asserts between
the “logic of the cognition” and the “ethic of the will” (functioning
for him as a “logic of the will”) does not do justice to the complex
relation between the individual parts of Cohen’s system. Cohen him-
self describes the relation between the system’s parts as one of cor-
relation. In a beautiful image, he delineates the task of philosophy
as a “hovering over the abyss”31: the abyss that opens with a look
at the necessary discontinuities between the parts. Cohen addresses
the concrete implications of such a relation through an inquiry into
the reality of morals within his Ethics, in connection with the rela-
tion between nature and history. In a prophetic mode, he announces
the necessary simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity between
the parts of the system, consequently between nature and history:
In knowledge’s basic methodological thought, the basic law of truth
requires agreement between both problems, but at the same time main-
tenance of the difference in the direction of this basic thought.32
The question of the relation between ethics and logic concerns a
decisive point at which Cohen distances himself from Kants’ ideal-
ism. He does so in order to mark, along the ground of critical phi-
losophy, the limits set upon the power of cognition by the fact of
freedom. I wish to claim that Cohen’s response is a response to the
challenge of modernity.33 At the same time, as Benjamin’s long-term
engagement and increasing critique of Cohen’s standpoint shows, it
is also a challenge to philosophy. In fact, Benjamin’s critique of
Cohen remained in the same realm unfolded in his letter to Strauß

30
Cf. Hartwig Wiedebach, Einleitung, in Hermann Cohen, Kleinere Schriften V,
Hildesheim (Zürich, New York 1999), p. XVII.
31
Cohen, Kants Begründung der Ethik (Berlin 1877), p. 34. On the metaphor’s
significance, cf. Deuber-Mankowsky, “Sprachformen der Apokalypse bei Hermann
Cohen.”
32
Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, Werke 7, Hildesheim (Zürich: New York 1981)
p. 396.
33
Cf. Deuber-Mankowsky, “Sprachformen der Apokalypse bei Hermann Cohen,”
p. 23.
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the ties between walter benjamin and hermann cohen 137

until he formulated a solution in his great essay on Goethe’s “Elective

Affinities”: the “non-existent question” as the philosophical problem’s
ideal, in counter-position to Cohen’s own concept of the ideal.34
But let us first talk about the path that Cohen himself took: unlike
Kant, Cohen does not distinguish will from desire according to the
criterion of rationality, but in relation to the basic concept of time.35
Where for Kant the will that is rational is also good, Cohen firmly
asserts that “the pure will is not pure cognition.”36 In this manner,
Cohen’s concept of will is distinguished by an orientation toward the
eternity of the future, where desire seeks fulfillment within time.
Desire is aimed at the temporal; it lacks, in Cohen’s words, “the
end-goal of eternity” (der Zielpunkt der Ewigkeit). By contrast, pure will
withdraws from “the finitude of the temporal.”37
With this distinction, Cohen avoids tying will narrowly to reason,
in the process limiting the risk of arbitrariness. He gains a concept
of history fundamentally removed from that of nature, and, as a
result, removed from cognitive categories at work in the natural sci-
ences. In a gesture radical in its consequence, Cohen expounds on
history as an infinite task and assigns this task to humanity. Analogously
to the pure will, Cohen anchors history, and with it the idea of
humanity, in the anticipated eternity of the future, which he inter-
prets, in recourse to Kant, as the idea of eternal peace.38 The his-
tory of humanity is thus revealed as the future-oriented history of
eternal progress.
The concept of anticipation establishes the connection with the
Logic of Pure Cognition, in which Cohen interprets the idea as hypothesis.
As he explains it there, the idea is not a ground (Grund ) but a
generative grounding, or laying of foundations (Grundlegung).39 In this
way the claim is satisfied that the “basic law of truth” demands an
“agreement between both problems” of knowledge.
Cohen meets the simultaneous claim that a difference must
necessarily be preserved between the problems by founding morals,

34
Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin, pp. 251–282.
35
Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, p. 398.
36
Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, p. 396.
37
Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, p. 412.
38
Cf. Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, p. 407f.
39
On the relation in Cohen between ethics and logic and the significance of the
concept of anticipation, cf. Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin, p. 156f.
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138 astrid deuber-mankowsky

hence also history, upon what he terms—in consciously paradoxical

fashion—an “unground” (Ungrund ).40 The model for the conviction
allowing Cohen to anchor the reality of morality—hence history—
in the eternal future is the conviction of the prophets.41 Accordingly,
in the Ethics of Pure Will he comments that “God demands morality;
at the same time this means: he renders it manifest and answers
for it.”42
As his “ungrounding” (Ungrundlegung) makes clear, Cohen’s prover-
bial optimism and conviction in an enduring future is grounded in
a deep trust in religious tradition. As the son of a cantor, Cohen
grew up with and within the Jewish religion. Tradition was a bridge
helping him overcome the abyss of thinking. He was so sure of its
enduring nature that in his orientation of history toward the future,
he could in all equanimity surrender the past to the transitory.
The extent of the difference between such a historical situation
and that of Benjamin’s generation is made clear in his “Experience
and Poverty.” In contrast to the older philosopher, tradition was only
present for Benjamin—born in 1892 and stamped by the Great
War—by way of its loss.
To be sure, Benjamin was familiar neither with Jewish tradition
nor its sources. As he indicated to Strauss in the fall of 1912, what
he knew of Judaism was “really antisemitism and an indistinct piety.”43
The loss of tradition thus became a central motif through which
Benjamin posed the question of the relation between modernity and
the experience of transience. His own path did not lead, like Cohen’s,
back to the sources—but rather ever-more deeply into the present.
At the same time, the question of how a transient experience can
be taken up by cognitive theory became increasingly central in his
grappling with critical philosophy. Benjamin lacked the conviction
and optimism carrying Cohen’s philosophy forward.44 He shared nei-
ther an orientation of will toward the eternity of the future nor an
alignment of history with the idea of progress.

40
Cohen ironizes the wish for a concept of the absolute, “Unground” would be
the ground independent of all laying of foundations. In order to make the para-
dox of this wish for the absolute palpable, he transfers the concept of foundation-
laying into that of “non-foundation laying” or “ungrounding”—Ungrundlegung, Cohen,
Ethik des reinen Willens, p. 429.
41
Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, p. 406.
42
Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, p. 403.
43
Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe I, p. 76.
44
Cf. Deuber-Mankowsky, “Sprachformen der Apokalypse bei Hermann Cohen.”
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the ties between walter benjamin and hermann cohen 139

If we consider the “small methodological proposal regarding the

cultural-historical dialectic” that Benjamin noted in the “Passagenwerk,”
he appears to take a precisely sideways position to that expressed in
Cohen’s historical-philosophical reflections. Where Cohen sees his-
tory as fulfilling itself in the historical eternity of humanity’s mission
of peace, Benjamin assigns the historian the infinite task of uniting
scientific history with remembrance. To this end, the historian must
undertake “divisions according to certain viewpoints,” “in infinitum”
for “every epoch in its different ‘areas’”; and he is meant to do so
“in such a way that the ‘fruitful,’ ‘future-laden,’ ‘living,’ ‘positive’
portion of this epoch lies on the one side, the fruitless, backward,
defunct portion on the other.” This forms a basis for “newly apply-
ing a division” to each “tentatively defunct, negative portion” so that
“with an adjustment of the perspective (not, however, of the mea-
sure!) both a positive element and another one newly emerge in it,
as what has been previously designated. And so on in infinitum, until
the entire past has been brought into the present in an historical
Apokastasis.”45 Cohen’s concept of history is aligned with the future,
Benjamin’s with the past. Cohen is concerned with an orientation
around eternal values, Benjamin with a salvaging of what is transi-
tory. What Cohen and Benjamin have in common is a grounding
of history in an “unground,” and the locating of a basis for history
in a cognitive-theoretical framework. Like Cohen, Benjamin upholds
a difference between the problem of history and that of nature. He,
as well, conceives of history as an infinitely incurred task—one upon
which the idea of humanity needs to be constructed.

The Actuality of Benjamin’s Cohen-Reception

By way of a conclusion, I would like to consider one question in

particular: Granted an embedding of Benjamin’s early work in Cohen’s
synthesis of critical philosophy and Judaism, what conclusions can
we drawn regarding the relation between Judaism and modernism—
or Judaism and secularization? Benjamin’s critique of modernism
does not, in fact, fit tightly into the Marxist dialectical framework
furnished by Adorno, Horkheiner, and the Institute for Social Research;

45
GS V.1. p. 573.
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140 astrid deuber-mankowsky

nor into that of various efforts at Jewish renewal within the mod-
ern condition. The critique of Lebensphilosophie and aestheticism is by
no means “self-evidently” Jewish. Benjamin’s “philosophy of Judaism”
did not only involve an effort to gain distance from the vitalism of
Christian authors, but also from a similar current within Judaism itself.
Cohen’s writing—according to my argument—played an invaluable
role in this process. But this role points to an inverse possibility: that
Benjamin’s adaptation opens a new perspective on Cohen—one per-
haps leading to a differentiation of the ties and tensions between
Judaism and modernism.
Exploring this possibility requires a small thematic detour, toward
the friendship between Benjamin and Scholem. We are familiar with
it above all from Scholem’s perspective, based on his book “Walter
Benjamin: The History of a Friendship” and a number of essays
touching on the significance of Judaism for Benjamin. The “History”
is also the source of our information about Benjamin’s disappoint-
ment with Cohen’s “Kant’s Theory of Experience,” the book through
which Cohen founded Marburg neo-Kantianism. The two friends
read and discussed the third edition over many hours during a stay
in Bern in the summer 1918.46
Scholem’s account contributed significantly (if not solely) to the
traces leading from Cohen to Benjamin that remained unnoticed for
a long time. Another factor was Cohen’s particular reception-his-
tory—up into the 1980s, its general nature was both meager and
divided. It thus had to wait until March 2000 for Helmut Holzhey
to confirm, following the 2nd international Cohen conference (itself
devoted to Cohen’s Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism) that
the walls between a “concern with a Kantian-academic and Jewish-
religious Cohen had fallen.”47 Such walls mirror the philosophical sit-
uation of Germany’s postwar history: As Holzhey has indicated
elsewhere,48 this situation was characterized by a virtually seamless
recourse to philosophical positions of the 1920s, meaning above all
Heidegger—and with Heidegger, a non-questioning acceptance of

46
Scholem, Walter Benjamin—Geschichte einer Freundschaft, p. 76.
47
Helmut Holzhey, Vorwort. In, Idem, Gabriel Motzkin, Hartwig Wiedebach
(eds.), “Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums”. Tradition und Ursprungsdenken
in Hermann Cohens Spätwerk. Hildeheim, Zürich, New York, 2000, p. XI.
48
Helmut Holzhey, Einleitung, in Hermann Cohen. Auslegungen. Ed. Holzhey, 1994,
p. 20.
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the ties between walter benjamin and hermann cohen 141

that philosopher’s rejection of Marburg neo-Kantianism, especially

Hermann Cohen and his book “Kant’s Theory of Experience.”
The way to Benjamin’s reception of the great Jewish and German
philosopher was thus first opened up by a new interest in Cohen in
the 1980s, accompanying publication of the Werkausgabe. Consequently,
the first close consideration of Benjamin’s ties to Marburg neo-
Kantianism did not stem from the universe of Benjamin experts, but
from the small community of Cohen specialists. In his essay “Unend-
liche Aufgabe und System der Wahrheit” (“infinite task and system
of truth”) Pierfrancesco Fiorato interpreted Benjamin’s call for a
recourse to Kant in the “Program for a Coming Philosophy” against
the backdrop of a comparison with Cohen’s reading of Kant.49 Fiorato
put forward the thesis that the appeal for a philosophy knowing an
absolute experience does not signify a regression from Kant to a
dogmatic metaphysics; but rather that Benjamin’s “recoinage of expe-
rience into metaphysics” led to a radicalization of the problem of
chance.”50 Fiorato here advanced a movement away from interpret-
ing Benjamin’s texts as the hermetic essays of a metaphysical enthu-
siast; instead, he recognized their serious philosophical—and above
all their cognitive-theoretical—content, as well as Benjamin’s effort
to advance thinking along the lines of the Kantian dialectic of cog-
nition and experience. Now Benjamin was explicitly interested in this
dialectic in relation to the question of a philosophy of Judaism.
Precisely this linked him with Cohen and distinguished him from his
contemporaries. With his “philosophy of Judaism,” Benjamin thus
offers the idea of a philosophy whose validity is not limited to Judaism,
and that does not result in a dissolution—or Aufhebung—of Jewish
tradition into philosophical cognition. This philosophy stakes a claim
to universal applicability without thereby abandoning the specific
nature of the “Jewish.” It is a philosophy understanding itself as
“critical”: the precise framework for maintaining what can be addressed
as the “specifically Jewish” in Benjamin’s sense.
The interventions directed at various literary and political concepts
inspired by Lebensphilosophie are specifically Jewish: such interventions

49
Pierfrancesco Fiorato, “Unendliche Aufgabe und System der Warhheit. Die
Auseinandersetzung des jungen Benjamin mit der Philosophie Hermann Cohens,”
in Philosophisches Denken—Politisches Wirken. Hermann Cohen-Kolloqium 1992, ed.
Reinhard Brandt and Franz Orlik. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York, pp. 163–78.
50
Fiorato, “Unendliche Aufgabe,” p. 170.
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142 astrid deuber-mankowsky

resist the identification of life with representation. Life does not dis-
solve into its representation!—this is Benjamin’s translation of the
Jewish ban on idolatry (the Second Commandment). It is the basis
for the “small methodological proposal regarding the cultural-historical
dialectic,” according to which the historian’s task is an infinite task.
It is infinite because Benjamin’s historian is meant to bring the “entire
past” into the present: lived life and the transience belonging to it,
vanished hope and the experience of happiness. Now—and this is
the decisive moment—such a task is not only infinite, but by the
same token impossible. Life cannot be written down. In demon-
strating the impossibility of this effort—writing down life—Benjamin
defines, against Lebensphilosophie, the actual task of the philosophical
critic. And the antithetical stance vis-à-vis Lebensphilosophie is grounded
in just such recourse to the ban on images. We thus read in his
habilitation:
‘Thou shall make no images’—this does not only cover a resistance
to idolatry. With incomparable force, the ban on depictions of the
body guards against the semblance that a sphere can be depicted in
which the moral essence of human beings can be perceived.51
The citation makes clear against just what Benjamin’s critique of the
aestheticization of life is directed: against a dissolution of the moral
into the aesthetic. He derives the task of philosophical critique from
this, in a shift of perspective: the task consists of demonstrating that
every depiction of the moral essence of human beings—precisely
their unique quality—necessarily fails. Benjamin offers his argument
in order to construct a refuge for morality by way of following the
law, in the sense of his understanding of the Jewish ban on images.
We can now understand the emphasis with which Benjamin insists
on the system’s discontinuous structure: such discontinuity grounds
both the objection to Lebensphilosophie’s fusion of life and aesthetics
and his reservations regarding the modern effort at immanent sal-
vation through the sciences. And herein, precisely, lies the actuality
of Benjamins’s continuation, indeed radicalization, of Cohen’s linkage
of cognitive critique and Judaism. His stance was directed against
both a sacralization of the sciences and the effort at a rehabilitation
or invocation of mythic powers, whether for the sake of the life of
art, of the German Volk—or indeed of the Jews. Just this cognitive-
theoretical resistance to immanent and genuinely modern concepts

51
GS I.1, p. 284.
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the ties between walter benjamin and hermann cohen 143

of salvation, centered around art, or science, or nation, distinguished

Benjamin from both mainstream Jewish and non-Jewish authors.
His resistance rendered his thinking irreconcilable with that of
the “Jewish Nietzscheans,” among whom numbered Micha Josef
Berdyczevsky, Saul Tschernichovsky, and Martin Buber—the latter
with his essay, published in 1900, “A Word over Nietzsche and Life-
Centered Values.”52 Their call for a vitalist national myth of Judaism
gained entry to Germany’s Zionist youth movement by way of Bubers’
“Three Talks on Judaism,” published in 1911.53 In his letters to
Strauß written in the fall of 1912, Benjamin had already turned
against a Zionism “with nationalism as the final value”54 as deci-
sively as against a Buberian Jewish “experience” (Erlebnis).55 His highly
critical view of Buber’s “mysticism” would continue to stamp his
relation to Zionism. It would also encourage his later friend Scholem
to distance himself from both Buber and the form of Zionism cur-
rent in Prague. From the intensive conversations the two men had
over Judaism and Jewish questions in the summer of 1916, Scholem
noted Benjamin’s remark that Zionism had to be weaned from three
things: “the agricultural propensity, the racial ideology, and the
Buberian blood, and experience (Erlebnis) argumentation.”56

52
Cf. Daniel Krochmalnik, “Neue Tafeln. Nietzsche und die jüdische Counter-
Historie,” in Jüdischer Nietzscheanismus, ed. Werner Stegmaier and Daniel Krochmalnik.
Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung Vol. 36, Berlin, New York 1997,
pp. 53–82.
53
Hanna Delf has pointed to the influence of Landauer’s understanding of
Nietzsche on Buber’s “renewal of Judaism” and Buber’s Nietzschean cultural zion-
ism on Landauer (Hanna Delf, “Nietzsche ist für uns Europäer. . . . Zu Gustav
Landauers früher Nietzsche-Lektüre,” in Jüdischer Nietzscheanismus, ed. Werner Stegmaier
and Daniel Krochmalnik, Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung vol.
36, Berlin, New York 1997, pp. 209–28, p. 227). Delf correctly stresses that Landauer’s
internationalist focus represents a main difference with both the Volkish and Social
Darwinist Nietzsche-reception. She thus proposes understanding the doctrine Landauer
draws from Nietzsche not as Lebensphilosophie, but as “life praxis” (Lebenspraxis)
(p. 226). In any event, the strong debt this “praxis” owes to Lebensphilosophie
emerges in the following observation of Landauer regarding the international com-
munity of humanity, “where the human beings is most at home, his most inner
and hidden quality, his inassailable possession, is the great community of the liv-
ing in him, it is his bloodline and blood community. Blood is thicker than water;
the community that the individual turns out to be is mightier and nobler and more
primeval than the thin influences of state and society.” Gustav Landauer, Skepsis
und Mystik. Versuche im Anschluß an Mauthners Sprachkritik. Berlin 1905, p. 37.
54
Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe I, p. 82.
55
Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe I, p. 75.
56
Scholem, Walter Benjamin—Geschichte einer Freundschaft, p. 41.
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144 astrid deuber-mankowsky

In any case, one thing becomes clear from Scholem’s “Reflections

on Wissenschaft des Judentums,” written in 1944: despite his cri-
tique of Buber, he never really broke with the idea of a “religion
of myth from the sources of Judaism”57: an idea, hovering behind
the counter-history of the Jewish Nietzscheans, that was overtly
directed against the equation of Judaism with ethical monotheism.
Scholem thus reproaches the Jewish Wissenschaft of the second half
of the nineteenth century for having essayed a “removal of the irra-
tional thorn and an expulsion of the demonic glow from Jewish his-
tory through exaggerated theologizing and spiritualizing.”58 Scholem
did not tie the reactivization of demonic powers to a flight into myth.
Rather, he derives from it a reflection on the “specially dialectic ten-
sion”59 inherent in Wissenschaft des Judentums. An activating of Judaism’s
demonic energies thus corresponds to a revision of scholarly self-
understanding. Emphatically, Scholem invokes a “science in all its
severity and with no readiness for compromise”60—a science that,
instead of constituting itself through a demarcation against myth,
would take up the mythic powers and reinforce them.61
Scholem may well not have been aware how far this burdening
of Wissenschaft des Judentums with vitalist powers emerging from Nietzsche
and Lebensphilosophie removed him from the thinking of his friend,
Benjamin. More specifically: from a fidelity, grounded in cognitive

57
Krochmalnik describes the relation of the Jewish Nietzscheans—among whom
he counts Scholem—to the representatives of Wissenschaft des Judentums in pointed
fashion, “The liberal program can be pithily summed up in the title of Cohen’s
religious-philosophical magnum opus (Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism); by
the same token, the antiliberal program of the generation of 1900—which, to be
sure, not only consisted of Nietzscheans—can be expressed in the inverse formula
(‘religion of myth from the sources of Judaism’)”. (Krochmalnik, “Neue Tafeln,”
p. 71.)
58
Scholem, Überlegungen zur Wissenschaft des Judentums, in idem, Judaica 6.
Die Wissenschaft des Judentums. Ed. Schäfer, Peter. Frankfurt a.M. 1997, pp. 7–53;
p. 44.
59
Scholem, Überlegungen, p. 36.
60
Scholem, Überlegungen, p. 13.
61
The special appeal of Scholem’s work emerged from this linkage of revolu-
tionary expectation and rational scholarship. In this regard, Funkenstein speaks of
Scholem’s “scholarly charisma.” In an illuminating essay casting fresh light on the
history of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Funkenstein has explored the question of
the particular approach taken by Scholem “in founding a new discipline like no
one else” (p. 15). (Funkenstein, Amos, “Gershom Scholem, Charisma, Kairos und
messionaische Dialektik,” in Gershom Scholem. Zwischen den Diziplinen, ed. Peter
Schäfer and Gary Smith, Frankfurt a.M. 1995, pp. 14–32.
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the ties between walter benjamin and hermann cohen 145

criticism, to a Judaism he saw, with Hermann Cohen, as having eth-

ical monotheism as its most inner essence. In this manner, what
evaded the younger friend was precisely the conjunction through which
Benjamin remained close to Cohen, despite all critique: a conjunction
of law, the Jewish ban on images, monotheism, and cognitive criti-
cism, together forming a “philosophy of Judaism” understanding itself
as universal.
A diametrically opposing reception of Max Horkheimer’s essay
“The Jews and Europe,” written in 1940, is characteristic of the
difference between Scholem and Benjamin. The essay’s problematic
nature is encapsulated in its last three sentences: “The Jews were
once proud of an abstract monotheism, the rejection of a belief in
images, a refusal to make something finite into something infinite.
Their plight points the way back to this for them. The lack of respect
before an existent straddling itself out to God is the religion of those,
within the Europe of the iron heel, who do not desist from turning
their lives toward a preparation for something better.”62 For Scholem,
the last of these sentences was simply (I quote) a “cheap closing
phrase with a horrid allegorization of monotheism, with nothing to
say to the non-allegorizable Jew and his standing in humanity, which
in fact is obvious.”63 For Benjamin, who here reveals his intense con-
cern with the concept of ethical monotheism, the sentence was the
expression of a political analysis impressing him to a degree none
other had for years.64

62
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1939, p. 115
63
Scholem, Walter Benjamin—Geschichte einer Freundschaft, p. 278.
64
Benjamin, Briefe II, herausgegeben und mit Anmerkungen versehen von Gershom
Scholem und Theodor Adorno, Frankfurt a.M. 1978, p. 840.