Berlin—Paris—Marseille: Walter Benjamin and Les Cahiers du Sud

Abstract

Abstract:My article focuses on Walter Benjamin's long-standing relationship with Les Cahiers du Sud, a literary review founded in 1925 in Marseille by Jean Ballard. I argue that the support Benjamin s work received from Ballard and his colleague, writer and critic Marcel Brion, was integral to Benjamin s success and survival as an exiled intellectual in France in the 1930s. Benjamin's publications in the journal—"Hachich a Marseille" (1935) and "L'angoisse mythique chez Goethe" (1937)—are thereby analyzed within the context of his status as a transnational critic, operating at the margins of the media industries in both Paris and Berlin. By doing so, I examine the manner in which the collaborative work rooted in the network surrounding Les Cahiers du Sud intersects with Benjamin s wider conceptual concerns and his reception by a French readership, thus providing an alternative critical lens through which to view his journalistic endeavors as an emigre writer. (SC)