The acclaimed and now-classic biographical novel of Walter Benjamin's last days--adapted into screenplay by Jay Parini. It is 1940. For the past decade, Walter Benjamin--the German-Jewish critic and philosopher--has been writing his masterpiece in a library in Paris, a city he loves. Now Nazi tanks have overrun the suburbs, and Benjamin is forced to flee. With a battered briefcase that contains his precious manuscript of a thousand handwritten pages, he sets off for the border and is led by chance to a young anti-Nazi who is taking Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they may (with luck) make their way to freedom in Portugal or South America. Beloved biographical novelist Jay Parini's thrilling tale of escape is beautifully interwoven with vignettes of Benjamin's complex, cosmopolitan past: his privileged childhood in Berlin, his years with the German Youth Movement, his university days. His close friendship with Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, and many other well-known artists and intellectuals who were part of Benjamin's intimate circle between the two world wars. Part tragedy, part dark comedy, this sharply realized historical novel tells one of the great and most moving peripheral stories of the Holocaust.
A leading theorist on literature and media reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing on the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work.
" The first full-length biography of Litten, the book also explores the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic and the terror of Nazi rule in Germany after 1933. [in sidebar] Winner of the 2007 Fraenkel Prize for outstanding work of ...
10 Jay Parini fictionalizes the loss of the ' manuscript ' in his novel Benjamin's Crossing , where the child José , who crossed into Spain with Benjamin , accidentally leaves it on a train after being given it for safekeeping : José ...
In this context is situated the desvairismo, as he calls his representation of madness and his dialogue with it. The poem cycle Paulicéia desvairada (Hallucinated City of São Paulo or São Paulo, City of Madness), published in 1922, ...
In this study Karen Remmler explores the relationship between public and private forms of memory in the late prose of Ingeborg Bachmann by reading her Todesarten as exemplary attempts to...
The Way of Jesus invites us to think again about how we want to or ought to live our lives, although it's worth pondering what the “Jesus” element adds. In the early decades of the first century, there were other “ways" that attracted ...
English military officer . Fought at Waterloo , and went on to become a London dandy and gambler . Resided in Paris from the late 1830s . Published four volumes of reminiscences ( 1861-1866 ) . Gropius , Karl Wilhelm ...
Above all, I am grateful for the loving support of Susannah Gottlieb and the indispensable insights of Inbo Gottlieb Fenves and Zoli Gottlieb Fenves, who have given me an impression of what it's like to see colors.
Offers a portrait of the complex, often contradictory figure of Benjamin Franklin, a man who was at once the quintessential American and a cosmopolitan lover of Europe, and a one-time loyalist turned revolutionary.
In this volume scholars and practitioners from different countries address these questions, offering a representative sample of ongoing research into community interpreting in the Western world, of interest to all who have a stake in this ...