Critique and Sacrifice: Benjamin-Kommerell

ECKART GOEBEL

New York University

Trans. JEROME BOLTON

New York University

Critique and Sacrifice: Benjamin–Kommerell1

Nicht eher als gereinigt kann diese Erde wieder Deutschland werdenund nicht im Namen Deutschlands gereinigt werden,

geschweige denn des geheimen [...].

–– Walter Benjamin (1930)

Introduction

It has become impossible to read Max Kommerell’s habilitation thesis from

1928 without associating it immediately with Adolf Hitler; the book bears the title:

Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik. In his comprehensive review of the

work, Walter Benjamin pays compliments to Kommerell; indeed, he offers the

highest extolment possible from a Goethe-philologist.With regard to a section that

addresses Goethe’s relations with Napoleon and Byron, Benjamin states that the

work “zu dem wenigen Erleuchteten gehört, das über Goethes Leben geschrieben

wurde” (257). In his appraisal of Kommerell’s closing words, Benjamin chooses—

apparently in earnest—to include a ceremonially delicate phrase occasionally found

in Goethe’s writings: “Das ist wahr,schön und bedeutend”(258).Immediately after-

ward,he even refers to the vocabulary of Jean Paul, the flamboyant German novelist

beloved by both Benjamin and Kommerell. Adapting Jean Paul’s phraseology, he

considers Kommerell’s stellar view on the constellations of the Goethezeit as a

“blumenhaft offenen,blumenhaft flammenden”gaze (258).Benjamin confirms “die

Qualität des Werkes, die Stilform, die Befugnis des Verfassers” (252) and believes

that Kommerell’s “Reichtum echt anthropologischer Einsichten” is “zum Erstau-

nen” (253). What is astonishing, then, too, is Benjamin’s review—notwithstanding

his condemnation of the George Circle’s “gefährliche[n] Anachronismus” (255) as

well as his final repudiation of Kommerell, as a member of the Circle, and of the

“Secret Germany.”

The German Quarterly 87.2 (Spring 2014) 151

©2014, American Association of Teachers of German

The words of praise by Benjamin—who viewed most of contemporary Goethe

scholarship critically—are reason enough to re-read Kommerell and to reexamine

Benjamin’s over-determined relationship to him.Unlike Benjamin,whose habilita-

tion treatise on the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels was rejected in Frankfurt,

Kommerell’s Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik was accepted in Marburg.

And while Benjamin devoted his work to the Baroque, an epoch of German litera-

ture then not held in high esteem, Kommerell devoted extensive attention to “dem

edelsten Erbe des Volkes”(258).Both works appeared in print in 1928.Read in light

of the contemporary political situation of the Weimar Republic, the political dou-

ble-meaning of each title cannot be overlooked: Benjamin traces the reasons for the

origin of the serious problems of Germany after the First World War by going back

to the historically momentous Thirty Years’War, which tore the medieval German

Empire apart. Political theology in Germany does not begin with Carl Schmitt; it

starts with Martin Luther and the political consequences of the Reformation. In

accordance with the main purpose of German Classicism—whose representative

writers understood themselves as inaugurating a new literary epoch after overcoming

the consequences of the Thirty Years’War2—Kommerell calls for an alternative that

promises a different future.This option is the Führerprinzip,which became a politi-

cal reality in Europe after Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy in 1922. In 1930,

Kommerell became an adjunct professor in Frankfurt am Main,the university where

Benjamin had failed academically.It is significant that Kommerell began his studies

initially as a student of Friedrich Gundolf, a literary critic whose Goethe (1916)

Benjamin had subjected to scathing critique in his essay from 1921, Goethes Wahl-

verwandschaften.

In order to comprehend both the complex and allusive mode of argumentation

in Benjamin’s review and the articulate ambivalence in the title Wider ein Meister-

werk, it is necessary to approach the following readings of the text with Stefan

George in mind.

The Glut

Ihr tratet zu dem herdeWo alle glut verstarb.

Licht war nur an der erdeVom monde leichenfarb.

Ihr tauchtet in die aschenDie bleichen finger einMit suchen tasten haschen—Wird es noch einmal schein!

152 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 2014

Seht was mit trostgebärdeDer mond euch rät:Tretet weg vom herde.

Es ist worden spät. (165)

For Theodor W. Adorno, this untitled poem by Stefan George—the leader of

Secret Germany,3 who was nearly forgotten after 1945—ranked among the

“höchsten Gedichten;” he included it in his imaginary collection of verses by the

“Meister.” According to Adorno’s slightly vague judgment, this poem, taken from

Das Jahr der Seele, is “mit geschichtlichen Innervationen verwachsen”(529).Further,

Adorno believes that the feeling of an entire eon is retained and clustered to silence

in its final verse and that it “gedrängt bis zum Schweigen, das Gefühl eines

Weltalters auf[speichert], das den Gesang schon verbietet, der noch davon singt”

(529).Thus,he reads the poem neither as a demonstration of George’s skills as a cook

nor as a scene portraying a failing marriage.Rather,he reads it as a declaration of the

end of Romantic art, a declaration, moreover, that is formulated in the forms of

Romantic art and which takes hold of European décadence: pale fingers in the gray

ash, lit by the moon of Salomé.

Situated on the threshold between Neo-Romanticism and the Avant-Garde,

George’s poem illustrates the ever-newly blazing quarrel over the estimation of

literary décadence around 1900 in exemplary fashion. Depending on the point of

view, décadence appears either as the last offshoot of Romanticism or as the begin-

ning of radical modernity. The latter was declared, since Charles Baudelaire, as the

absolutely new, and was sundered from all sources of tradition. With his poem,

George is committed to Romanticism in technique; in regard to its content, how-

ever, the poem is clearly distanced from that period. Following the demise of the

Romantic sun in Baudelaire’s work, the romantic moon receives its funeral compli-

ments of Baudelaire’s translator, George.

The “geschichtliche Innervation”Adorno observes can be traced philologically.

The poem can be deciphered as a thinly veiled re-writing of two famous poems from

Germany’s Kunstperiode,and thus as a literary historical positioning.George’s poem

combines elements from Goethe’s “Prometheus” of 1774 and Joseph von Eichen-

dorff ’s “Mondnacht” from 1837—the years marking the beginning and the end of

the Goethezeit. Yet, at the same time, the poem emancipates itself from the extinct

“Glut” of Goethe and from Eichendorff ’s moon, now as deathly pale as a corpse.

The “Herd”is the center of the home,the guarded fire of archaic culture,the place

of narrative as the sharing of experience,and the place of sacrifice.The acquisition of

fire and the long-term conservation of “Glut”marks at the same time,however,also

the liberation of humans from the gods,who are henceforth dying.In an act of irony

and hubris, the young Spinozian Goethe offers a sequence of blasphemous

fire-words as a final sacrifice to these gods.The “Glut”is no longer the medium of the

GOEBEL: Benjamin and Kommerell 153

sacrifice but a proud torchlight of human autonomy. All that remains of the gods is

their envy of humans:

“Prometheus”

Bedecke deinen Himmel,Zeus,Mit Wolkendunst!Und übe,dem Knaben gleich,Der Diesteln köpft,An Eichen dich und Bergeshöhn!Mußt mir meine ErdeDoch lassen stehn,Und meine Hütte,Die du nicht gebaut,Und meinen Herd,Um dessen GlutDu mich beneidest. (44)

George’s anonymous collective—“Ihr”—steps to the “Herd”of the enlightened fire

thief,and the “Glut”is now extinguished.For George,house and earth remain stand-

ing as a museum bathed in a corpse-colored moonlight.If one were to read George’s

poem as a reference to “Prometheus,”then the unnamed collective of his anonymous

poem would address initially the generation of forgotten epigones who rummage

around nervously in the ashes of the extinguished “Glut”of Goethe’s remnants until

they themselves succeed in generating some “schein.”However, the term “schein”is

ambiguous in George’s work.Indeed,it suspends the ambivalent center between the

false and bare glow and the idealistic concept of art as an alleged “Scheinen der Idee,”

which still exerts distinctive influence on the contradictory aesthetic theory of poetic

Realism after 1848 (Plumpe 16).The council or advice (Rat) for those who have be-

come nervous and pale-fingered to withdraw from the ashes of God, or of Goethe,

and to leave the old house of (literary) tradition is given by the moon in a silent ges-

ture. It comes, that is, from the mild, resistant glow of the enlightened sun, and the

dreary back-light of late German Romanticism.In a literary-historical manner, the

poem leads the way from Goethe to the epigones to Romanticism, and to

Eichendorff ’s Romanticism in particular.

George establishes proximity to Eichendorff ’s poem not only by evoking the

motif of the moon, but also by mediating its form. In organizing the poem in three

stanzas with iambic trimeter and cross,or alternate, rhyme,George writes in 1897 a

new version of Eichendorff ’s poem from 1837, the latter now without a title and

thus “decapitated” and, consequently, corpse-colored:


“Mondnacht”

Es war, als hätt’der HimmelDie Erde still geküßt.Daß sie im BlütenschimmerVon ihm nun träumen müßt’.

Die Luft ging durch die Felder,Die Ähren wogten sacht,Es rauschten leis die Wälder,So sternklar war die Nacht.

Und meine Seele spannteWeit ihre Flügel aus,Flog durch die stillen Lande,Als flöge sie nach Haus. (271)

George’s poem brings a hope to a hopeless end,a hope already famously announced

as unreal in the first and last verse of Eichendorff ’s poem.The union of heaven and

earth in the kiss is as illusory as the religious experience of the world as a home for the

soul.Already in Eichendorff, the experience of unity is but the experience of an “als

ob.” George is nonetheless able to draw solace from the Romantic illusion, and

therein persists the subtlety of his rewriting of Eichendorff ’s poem. The

somnambulism of Romanticism transforms the searching,groping, seizing fixation

on the ashes of tradition into a longing for something else,something that is beyond

both the house and the extinguished hearth.

The Void

The poet of modernity is outside (draußen) in the empty night.The turn inward

that distinguished the Biedermeier period,poetic Realism,and the writings of Søren

Kierkegaard in the middle of the nineteenth century is no longer possible for

George. In another poem from Das Jahr der Seele, the so-called transcendental

homelessness of George’s reader Georg Lukács is set emblematically into view:

Die blume die ich mir am fenster hegeVerwahrt vorm froste in der grauen scherbeBetrübt mich nur trotz meiner guten pflegeUnd hängt das haupt als ob sie langsam sterbe.

Um ihrer frühern blühenden geschickeErinnerung aus meinem sinn zu merzenErwähl ich scharfe waffen und ich knickeDie blasse blume mit dem kranken herzen.


Was soll sie nur zur bitternis mir taugen?Ich wünschte dass vom fenster sie verschwände..Nun heb ich wieder meine leeren augenUnd in die leere nacht die leeren hände. (129)

Shielded from the “froste” of industrialization and imperialism, the inwardness of

the German bourgeois nineteenth century, with its small, neat, and petty world of

nursing, comes to represent the scene of the murder of a dying flower that neither a

deathly pale moon nor the stars shine upon.For George,the blue flower of Romanti-

cism becomes the ailing potted plant, and the moonlit night turns murderous.

In his book,Jean Paul,Kommerell formulates a characteristic of the Biedermeier

period,later discussed by Benjamin,which can also be read as a reference to George’s

murder poem.According to Kommerell,the Biedermeier period begins the moment

the bourgeoisie ceases “Symbole zu haben,und der reinen Innerlichkeit anheimfällt

[...].Erst mit dieser gibt es auch die reine Äußerlichkeit.Zwischen beidem liegt der

Stil” (Benjamin 414). This is an appropriate commentary on George’s poem: the

scene portraying a safely guarded flower on a windowsill recalls a widespread image

of sheltered, narrow-minded German inwardness which extends to Hermann

Hesse’s Steppenwolf.The form of the poem,however,has become “grau”as ash,frag-

mented, and smashed to a “scherbe.” In the “blume,” one may recognize what

Kommerell calls cryptically the “symbol”that has faded and is dying in modernity.In

the “scharfe waffen,”on the other hand, flashes the new style of George’s lyrical po-

etry.Bitterly,the poet of modernity puts—as “Täter”4—the dying symbol to a brutal

end.In the words of Benjamin—who glimpsed in the Biedermeier period the return

of the Baroque and the transition from the spirit to the ghostly—the former agents

of care for the dying tradition become “Gerätschaften des Verhängnisses” (415).

Decisive and eminently consequential, however, is Kommerell’s observation

that,along with the conceptualization of inwardness,its antonym is created,trigger-

ing an unprecedented horror. This antonym is revealed as the perfect void of pure

externality,which is exposed impressively in the last twoversesofGeorge’spoem:

Nun heb ich wieder meine leeren augenUnd in die leere nacht die leeren hände.

Against the background of George’s scantily drafted development,Benjamin’s com-

ments on George—as articulated in his first review of Kommerell—become intelli-

gible:

Die Romantik steht im Ursprung der Erneuerung deutscher Lyrik,die George vollzog.Sie steht auch im Ursprung der philosophischen und kritischen Entwicklung, die sichheute gegen dies Werk erhebt. […] Jede dialektische Betrachtung der GeorgeschenDichtung wird die Romantik ins Zentrum stellen, jede heroisierende, orthodoxe kannnichts Klügeres tun, als sie so nichtig wie möglich zeigen. (253–54)


George inherits Romanticism in two decisive ways: he adopts its motifs and he

applies the theory of reflection of Early Romanticism, which was the subject of

Benjamin’s dissertation.The quoted poems potentiate critically the literary heritage

from Goethe to Eichendorff and the Biedermeier period. Further, they operate at

the margin of linguistic articulation, at the edge of silence—the silent gesture of

solace,or “trostgebärde”—and before complete emptiness.Poetry becomes, fully in

the sense of Friedrich Schlegel, the historical critique of itself.

With his poem about the figure in the void, George arrives at a crossroads that

either opens the gate to a theoretically reflected,progressive art or marks the path to a

mythically heroic self-stylization.After the Siebente Ring,George—and,with him,

the Circle—advances on the latter path. Accordingly, the polarity between Ben-

jamin and Kommerell becomes clearly identifiable: while Benjamin highlights the

reflexive moment of George—thereby legitimating his own work and his critique of

George in particular—Kommerell describes the reflexive side as being as irrelevant

as possible. Kommerell states that “jede Art von geistiger Lüge irgendwie an

Romantisches [erinnert]”(97),and he wants to demonstrate that the converse of this

sentence is also true.

For Kommerell,Friedrich Schlegel does not rank among the leaders of German

Classicism but represents the “den urbestimmten Feind” of his heroes (269).

Benjamin comments in regard to Kommerell’s habilitation treatise that very little is

“aufschlussreicher als die Vernichtung der beiden Schlegel in einer Konfrontation

mit Schiller”(253).Kommerell passes over literary history in outrage.He character-

izes the Schlegel brothers, and especially Friedrich, with the following terms and

descriptions: “große Spitzbuben,” “Unehrenhaftigkeit,” “Unverschämtheit,” “ihr

Teuflisches,”“innerlichst verlogen”, spitting “Gift”(270–72). Kommerell wishes to

eradicate an “Erb-Fehler des deutschen Geistes” (272): namely, critical reflection.

The elevation of critique to “den höchsten Rang” (259)—done by, among others,

Benjamin in his review of Kommerell’s work and elsewhere—returns in Kommerell

as a ridiculous caricature.The critic,formerly the romantic king of German intellec-

tual life, becomes Germany’s smallest bird, the wren: “Schlegel ergriff dasselbe

Höhere,um es sich zunutze zu machen—er zerlegte es,um daran die Feinheit seines

Geistes zu genießen und schließlich sich zaunkönighaft drüberzustellen” (270). In

the final verse of his poem about the murdered flower of Romanticism, George

announces and institutes a change he had already signaled in his poem about the

extinguished “Glut,” specifically during the silent “Trostgebärde.”Accordingly, the

path does not lead in the direction of critique, reflection, and theory. Rather, the

Gebärde, the attitude, and the Geste itself become a purely self-referential symbol

which no longer signals itself as transcendent, but as pure externality instead.

The end of the poem is articulated from the perspective of a priest in complete

darkness,without the celestial object of worship that had once authenticated the lost


symbol.This leads to an inversion at the moment when traditional forms are lost and

bourgeois life is destroyed. The poem documents the birth of modern charismatic

authority as the fruit and consequence of the loss of all faith. The powerful and

extraordinary “Ich” becomes manifest in the attitude of the priest with elevated

hands. Itself empty and fixed in the void, this “Ich”becomes the potential object of

worship on its own behalf; it is the saving light in the darkness. The untitled poem

displays charismatic leadership “in statu nascendi” (Weber 143), in an ideal purity.

Following the disappearance of the stars that orient life—the sky is completely

“leer”—the exposed I itself becomes the Stern des Bundes.It becomes the star of a new

community: The “leeren augen” become an emptied projection screen on which

religious longing is mirrored. With George and his Kreis in mind, Max Weber for-

mulated the theory of charismatic authority:

Die charismatische Herrschaft ist, als das Außeralltägliche, sowohl der rationalen,insbesondere der bureaukratischen,als der traditionalen,insbesondere der patriachalenund patriomonalen oder ständischen, schroff entgegengesetzt. [...] [Die charismati-sche Herrschaft] stürzt (innerhalb ihres Bereichs) die Vergangenheit um und ist indiesem Sinn spezifisch revolutionär. […] [L]egitim ist sie nur soweit und solange, alsdas persönliche Charisma kraft Bewährung “gilt,”das heißt: Anerkennung findet, und“brauchbar” ist der Vertrauensmann, Jünger, Gefolge nur auf die Dauer seiner charis-matischen Bewährtheit. (141)

Weber also alludes to a paradoxical effect in his concise definition of charismatic

authority, the birth of which George’s poem records in ideal fashion. In order to

prove its value and attain stabilization,charismatic authority is required to constitute

social relations with a community of followers and disciples who need managing.

The duration of this relationship,however, stands in contradiction to the extraordi-

nary character of charisma,which manifests itself either as an epiphany in a void or as

an empty epiphany. Thus, the phenomenon—aptly termed the “Veralltäglichung

des Charisma” by Weber (142), whereby the character of charismatic authority

changes substantially—is unavoidable: “sie wird traditionalisiert oder rationalisiert

(legalisiert)” (143). The epiphany must evaporate in order to be obtained.

Against the background of this contradiction,the literary and cultural composi-

tions of the George Circle—itself composed, following Weber’s diagnosis, of the

economically independent or “Rentnern” (142)—can be described as attempts to

stabilize the charismatic authority of the master in such a manner that the discredit-

ing impressionof routinizationcanbeavoided throughanothergesture:namely,that

gesture of absolute authority.


Being German

Benjamin’s review bears an ambivalent and ironic title that relativizes the

usurped authority: “Wider ein Meisterwerk.” The title is ambivalent,because, in it,

Benjamin attributes mastery to the book even as he abruptly turns away from it.The

title is ironic,as it cannot be decided—at the level of pure sound—whether the Ger-

man term for “against”(wider) is written with an “i”or with an “ie.”In the latter case,

the title would read: “Wieder ein Meisterwerk.” It is also ironic, in that “Meister-

werk” can also mean “a work from the school of the Meister,” i.e., a work from the

George Circle.In that case,the title would have to be read as a weary dismissal of the

works of Kantorowicz, Gundolf, and even Kommerell: “yet another work from the

circle of the Meister.”

This completes the irony of Benjamin’s review:books from the George Circle are

announced as an event, as an act of legislation with the authority of sacred writings.

The gesture is undermined,however,as the monuments are produced as if on a run-

ning belt, are stamped, become standardized in mass production, and thus corre-

spond to the mode of production of industrialized modernity.“Meisterwerk”is a la-

bel, much like “Siemens” or “IG-Farben;” that is, they are products of solid work-

manship “Made in Germany”: Friedrich der Zweite, Goethe, Caesar, and now, Der

Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik.

As the numerous books of the George Circle were produced in the industrially

organized publishing houses of the German Empire, they fit into the context of the

culture industry,within which products are evaluated and also fed inevitably into the

apparatus of public criticism.The “masterpieces”are presented with the entitlement

of holy books,open to servile commentary,but certainly not the form of criticism the

big city newspapers deliver. Yet the masterpiece-series was available in the open

market of the Weimar Republic, as goods among others. As Benjamin’s review of

Kommerell’s book is presented, not as a commentary, but formally, as critique, it

is—prior to any substantive discussion of content—a critical response to the ideol-

ogy of the George Circle. In his work, Kommerell praises Herder for teaching “die

Deutschen [...] was kein anderes Volk mehr begreifen kann: den Unterschied von

Dichtung und littérature” (103). He also praises him for reserving—wholly in the

spirit of the chauvinistic turn of the George Circle—German literature exclusively

for Germans. To the contrary, Walter Benjamin attempts to teach Germans a cos-

mopolitism they increasingly turn away from in hostility.His review appears in the

middle of the disenchanted world—in the Literarische Welt—on the fifteenth of

August in 1930.It is published the same year that Thomas Mann—who,on his own

accord, had a dispute with his brother Heinrich about poetry and littérature—gave

his lecture PariserRechenschaft.In this andotherpublic lectures,Mannrenounces the

Conservative Revolution and supports the fragile Weimar Republic.


In the title of his review, Benjamin identifies with great irony the most current

problem of the intellectuals in the Circle: the disciples writing for George face the

impossible task of bridging dead tradition with empty charisma.The symbol is lost,

tradition—in that it has become reflexive—has forfeited its binding force, and

worship has lost its object. In order to preserve his charisma, the poet and master

must remain in the background and expect his disciples to solve this unsolvable

problem.With Goethe in mind,Kommerell reveals George’s strategy: “Dichter sein

heißt geheim sein” (113). And Benjamin illustrates brilliantly, with reference to

Islam, the quasi-religious gesture of Kommerell:

Selten ist so Geschichte der Dichtung geschrieben worden: ihre vielseitigen Darlegun-gen, die scharf gekantete, undurchdringliche Oberfläche jener symmetrischen, dia-mantenen Gewissheit, die wir seit langem als den schwarzen Stein der Kaaba in derGeorgischen Schule kennen. (252).

The emptying out of transcendence leads to a politically meaningful turn: a turn

from the black stone to the fascist black shirt, and, finally, to the “Preis des Blutes”

(103). Initially meant as a humiliation and rejection of the early Romantics, mem-

bers of the George Circle—above all, Kommerell—turned their backs on theory.

Not only do they reject empirical historical research, but also any philosophy of

history in Hegel’s tradition. Benjamin responds to this rejection of theory and his-

tory in two ways.On the one hand,he claims the right to conduct sober literary his-

torical research. Benjamin carries out this research with an eye to “Sachgehalt”and

presents Weimar Classicism not as a legend of heroes, but as a “resignierende

Geisteshaltung”(256).Yet,with regard to the specific case of Goethe,Benjamin goes

even further back than Kommerell—as he had already done in his critique of

Friedrich Gundolf. By perceiving the poet as being attached to an archaic sphere

much older than the nation-state, which is modern, Goethe is wrested from the

George Circle. While Kommerell wishes to promote Goethe as the great Ger-

man-Greek,Benjamin assigns him to the pre-historical emancipation of man from

nature, to the sphere of actual myth. In light of this observation, the motivation be-

hind Benjamin’s praise of Kommerell becomes intelligible. Unlike writers such as

Emil Ludwig, who offers contemporaries a psychologically accessible Goethe—an

inner Goethe—Kommerell alienates Goethe from the present in his portrait of the

poet.Even so, this is not going far enough for Benjamin.The image of Goethe is it-

self a myth of modernity, and it obscures the pre-civilized stratum of experience,

which, according to Benjamin, can be traced in Goethe:

Goethe aber—sein Gegensatz gegen das Zeitalter war der einer restaurativen Herr-schernatur. Deren Quellen flossen nicht aus irgendeiner antiken Vergangenheit, son-dern aus dem Urgestein ältester Macht—ja ältester Naturverhältnisse selber. (256)


In the modern myth of Kommerell, “die große Plutarchische Linie der Biographik”

is revived, and the poets of German Classicism are presented as paragons removed

from historical time (256). The prerequisite for this model of description is, as

Benjamin explains,radical exteriority.By this he means that the self-reflexive aspect

of human existence must be carefully dimmed in favor of the representation of types.

For a reflexive distance to one’s own identity would always produce an ironic slant

and a fragile performance.A reflexive hero exposed to mauvaise foi would no longer

be an ideal figure, but a latently comical one. A thinking Siegfried is no longer

Siegfried.For Benjamin,this is the reason why “die physiognomische,im strengsten

Sinne unpsychologische Sehart” is consistently applied by Kommerell (253).

It is with great subtlety that Benjamin notes that the purely external, phy-

siognomic mode of presentation had been forged “in der Glut einer Erfahrung”

(253).Kommerell desires to rekindle the “Glut”of the young Goethe for the George

Circle—the “umschmelzende Weltmitte für das erstarrte Jahrhundert”(Der Dichter

als Führer 108)—as though the ultimate extinguishment of the divine fire, which

George himself observed,had never occurred.Benjamin turns the over-determined

talk of “Glut”on its head: the experience of “Glut” in modernity consists in experi-

encing its disappearance in the world center. In modernity, “Glut” is either electric

lighting; the kitsch of Melchior Lechter, the art nouveau artist and illustrator of

George’s volumes;or even the rise of German fascists,performing torchlight proces-

sions:

Denn Rune,Deute,Ewe,Blut,Geschick, sie stehen nun,nachdem die Lechter-Sonne,die sie einst in ihre Glut getaucht hat, zur Rüste ging,als eben so viele Gewitterwolkenam Himmel. (Benjamin 254)

The “Sendung Griechenlands”is the “Geburt des Heros,”who,ageless and always in

unison with himself, fulfills his fate without a reflexive and ironical tear. For

Kommerell, the German becomes the “Erbe der griechischen Sendung,” whereby

the great German poets become the paragons of the torn nation (Benjamin 254).

And in his mode of presentation, Kommerell stresses the pictorial. In his book, he

creates images of the “Barde;”the “Wanderer;”the “Verschwörer;”the “Helfer;”and,

ultimately, the “Heros.” Each is kept free of reflexive, psychological, and ironic as-

pects. For his portraits of Goethe and Schiller, Kommerell benefits from the

monumentalization of the two authors in the nineteenth century. In cases where

such monumental externality is difficult to construct, he attempts to transform the

reflexive psychology of the poets into a type, for whom the Germanic fibber-god

Loki evidently provided a model. Even Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi can be, in this

manner, formed into an image, a standardized cliché:


Die große gebogene Nase, die scharf einziehende Mundfalte verriet das ungelebteBöse,ehe man im überblauen Auge und der hohen rein gewölbten Stirn Glaube MildeVergeistigung, die Dreiheit seiner lichtern Kräfte erkannte. (128)

In the case of Goethe’s friend Merck—the personification of sneering intellectuals

and one of the actual models for Mephistopheles—Kommerell relies on an allegori-

cal reading of the name to allow Merck (‘the Observer’) to turn into a mythical im-

age:

Wer so sehr wie Graf Leopold nur als Begeisterter schön war, bot dem schonungslosbespähenden Merker stündlich und überall Blößen. Mercks Name sagt sein Wesen:dieser fraglos Bedeutendste der Freunde des jungen Goethe war mit seiner der Formnach spielenden, aber hellen und scharfen Ungläubigkeit unter allen am meisten Ge-stalt der Zeit. (142)

Should one prove the inconsistencies in Kommerell’s work—in the sense of accurate

empirical historiography—one would fail to grasp his intention. Opposed to in-

quiring about what actually happened, Kommerell aimed to construct German

Classicism so that the charismatic leader of the twentieth century could be justified

as an authoritarian figure:

Ganz kann man dieses Buch nur verstehen aus einer grundsätzlichen Betrachtung desVerhältnisses, das die Sekten zur Geschichte haben. Nie ist sie ihnen Gegenstand desStudiums,stets Objekt ihrer Ansprüche.Als Ursprungstitel oder Paradigma suchen siedas Gewesene sich zuzuschlagen. So wird hier die Klassik zum Vorbild. (Benjamin255)

Benjamin demonstrates eventually that fabricating a contact between German

Classicism and contemporary,pre-fascist Germany requires a mediating third term:

the assumption that sheer Germanness constitutes a substantial bond between the

ancestral and the today.This insight is crucial for understanding the political thrust

of Kommerell:

Es ist das große Anliegen des Verfassers,an der Klassik den ersten kanonischen Fall ei-nes deutschen Aufstands wider die Zeit, eines heiligen Kriegs der Deutschen gegen’sJahrhundert, wie ihn George später ausrief, zu konstruieren. (255)

The alleged ideal construction is, as a matter of fact, based solely on citizenship, all

that remained after 1918.As a result of the metaphysical abashment common in the

period (that is,the disappearance of transcendent religious ties),the inescapably real

and banal bond between (extinguished) tradition and (empty) rule in modernity

comes forth as the new object of worship and acquires a holy name. Kommerell

speaks in the name of Germany. It is not the material economic relations,which are

thinkable only internationally and globally, that become a substance to which no

form of critique can be applied. It is the allegedly concrete and exclusively tangible


Germanness—the belonging to a group,which assembles as a community under the

banner of its heroes.And as opposed to being reestablished on the basis of theology,

socio-economics, philosophy, or critique, social bonds should be renewed through

supposedly unassailable material mediums: through the “Kraft des Stammes Blutes

Bodens”and the German language (Dichter als Führer 107).Elke Siegel has summa-

rized carefully Kommerell’s strategy and thus that of the Circle:

Die entscheidende Konstruktion einer außerhalb von Gesetzmäßigkeiten stehendendeutschen Geschichte muss zur Erzählung von wundersamen Augenblicken werden[…]. Konstitutiv für diese Augenblicke ist es bei Kommerell, den Freund oder dieFreunde zu finden. Im Falle Klopstocks meint dies der kommerellschen Deutungzufolge dann die Fähigkeit den Freundeskreis zu entdecken oder zu formen, der denErsatz für das fehlende “Volk” als Wurzel und Adressat der Dichtung bildet.

Der konstruierte Gegensatz einer “normalen” Geschichte, die entlang einer gesetz-mäßigen Bahn verlaufe, und dem Ausnahmestatus der “deutschen” Geschichte lässtentscheidende Züge von Kommerells Projekt in diesem Buch hervortreten: DieErzählung einer Geschichte der Deutschen oder des Deutschen eben als Ausnahme,erscheint doch das Besondere der Geschichte der Deutschen ihre Geschichtslosigkeit.Es gäbe dann keine Tradition, nur Neuanfänge. Aus dieser Prämisse folgt, dass “Ge-schichte” dann nur als Geschichte der Taten von großen Einzelnen erzählt werdenkann, die ex nihilo, ohne Tradition und ohne “Gemeinschaft,” zuallererst dieselbenimmer wieder erschaffen müssen. (53–54)

German literary history may not be described as the loss of tradition against the

background of a national revival based upon blood, soil, and language.Nor can it be

conceived as an access to a constantly critical and crisis-stricken modernity, the key

word for which has been “critique”since Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schlegel.As

the narration of great deeds,German literary history must be rewritten with a teleo-

logical intent—as preparation for the extraordinary event of Stefan George. The

classic writers become the “Stifter eines heroischen Zeitalters der Deutschen”

(Benjamin, “Der eingetunkte Zauberstab” 410); literary history mutates into the

“Heilsgeschichte der Deutschen”(Benjamin, “Wider ein Meisterwerk”254). After

the defeat of the First World War, the following intensifies in delusive validity: a

German who has lost everything still has this one thing—his or her allegedly in-

alienable, substantial Germanness. This quality, though disgraced in the war,

supposedly brings salvation upon its glorious renewal. Godless, international mo-

dernity turns into local, aggressive Chauvinism. A contingent feature—that is, the

incidental predicate,Germanness—becomes the new absolute. In 1928, Immanuel

Kant, who had perfected the European Enlightenment, consequently becomes the

“größten Zersetzer”(Kommerell,Dichter als Führer 65),and the culture of France,so

influential for German development, becomes, following the image evoked by

Johann Gottfried Herder, a repulsive cadaver:


Die einheitliche Geltung von Geschmack Übereinkunft Verständigkeit beruht daraufdaß Phantasie Zartheit Leidenschaft,daß die Seele des Ganzen tot ist.Wo die Aufklä-rung Selbstzweck wird folgt unwiderruflich ein Zeitalter von Nachbetern und Aus-legern, dem “Ungeziefer aus der Fäulnis eines edlen Pferdes.” (75)

The encounter between Goethe and Herder in Strasbourg—the city that France

and the German Empire fought over for centuries—turns “das Schicksal des

deutschen Geistes zur Sage” (79), which Kommerell constructs for his readers as a

crude foretelling of salvation.In 1919,Strasbourg became part of France,as a conse-

quence of the Treaty of Versailles. According to Kommerell, Strasbourg, the city

where Herder and Goethe met by chance, will “[dem deutschen] Volke einst heilig

heißen[,] weil dort der Täufer den Gesalbten fand” (79). Fragments of Christian

mythology,Wagnerian alliteration—e.g.,“heilig heißen”—and anti-French resent-

ment are blended together.For its authority, the George Circle feeds on the grudge

of the defeated Germans. Against this background, Kommerell makes the clearly

political attempt in his book from 1928 “die Dichter darin auftreten zu lassen als

Vorbilder einer Gemeinschaft” (7).

The Daemon

In his politically oriented book about the leader, Kommerell speaks disparag-

ingly of the United States,whose entry into the war in 1917 had ensured the defeat of

the German Reich:

Die Flucht ins Überweltliche durch Aberwitz war eine notwendige Folge der Aufklä-rung nach demselben Gesetz nach dem heute der Amerikaner: der Mensch ohne Gottohne Kunst ohne Himmel und Boden, der betriebsamste Tischrücker und Gespens-terlocker ist. Der Gläubige, dem das Wunder Lebensluft ist, bedarf nicht solcher ab-sonderlicher Fallen fürs Übersinnliche ..nur dem ausgeleerten Vernunftmenschen,deres aus der Welt warf, überkommt es hinterrücks, da es als Erscheinung von außen, alsEmpfänglichkeit von innen, dem Menschen untrennbares Geleite ist. (120)

This passage is significant, as it demonstrates that Kommerell pursued his literary

historical project with a clear sense of the contemporary dimension of the problem

and with knowledge of relevant sociological writings. Kommerell is therefore also

important for Benjamin,in that he designs his German project as an inevitable conse-

quence of Max Weber’s diagnosis of the so-called mental situation of the time;

Kommerell’s book is on a par with the sociological debate of the Weimar Republic.

He responds implicitly to Weber’s famous speech from 1919,Vom inneren Beruf zur

Wissenschaft, in which he formulated the concept of the disenchanted world. Ac-

cording to Weber, because humans find their lives almost unbearable in the disen-


chanted world, it follows that the dead gods are resurrected as ideology, delusion,

lunacy, and superstition:

Die alten vielen Götter, entzaubert und daher in Gestalt unpersönlicher Mächte, ent-steigen ihren Gräbern, streben nach Gewalt über unser Leben und beginnen unterein-ander wieder ihren ewigen Kampf. (330)

It would be difficult, especially for the youth, “einem solchen Alltag gewachsen zu

sein” (330), which stands in tension between disenchantment and longing without

an object.Weber demanded from the German professoriate that its members refuse

the temptation to produce “einen Führer und nicht: einen Lehrer”: “Aber nur als

Lehrer sind wir auf das Katheder gestellt” (330). With old European irony, Weber

presented democratic American universities—institutions with which he was fa-

miliar through personal experience—as a counterexample to the German professor

with the attitude of Leader:

Der junge Amerikaner hat vor nichts und niemand, vor keiner Tradition und keinemAmt Respekt, es sei denn vor der persönlich eigenen Leistung des Betreffenden: das

nennt der Amerikaner “Demokratie.” […] Der Lehrer, der ihm gegenübersteht, vondem hat er die Vorstellung: er verkauft mir seine Kenntnisse und Methoden für meinesVaters Geld, ganz ebenso wie die Gemüsefrau meiner Mutter den Kohl. Damit fertig.(331)

Where Max Weber ends energetically, Max Kommerell creates a new beginning

only a decade later.The title of his book itself proves to be a direct rebuttal to the late

Max Weber’s criticism of the “Führer.”From Kommerell’s remark about the United

States, it becomes possible to conclude what he wants to put forth against Weber.

Initially,he follows Weber’s diagnosis that the disenchanted world is filled with foul

magic.This diagnosis is also formulated in a similar fashion in the critical theories of

Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer, albeit for other purposes. But Kommerell’s

agreement ends there—for Weber described the course to the disenchanted world as

irreversible and, further, held nothing but contempt for those who attributed to

themselves “Würde mystischen Heilsbesitzes[,] mit dem sie auf dem Büchermarkt

hausieren gehen.Das ist einfach:Schwindel und Selbstbetrug”(337).Like Sigmund

Freud, Max Weber—the other committed atheist of the twentieth century—also

offered a dry remedy as indicated by Goethe: “an unsere Arbeit gehen und der

‘Forderung des Tages’gerecht werden—menschlich sowohl wie beruflich”(339). In

the preface to his Gesammelten Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, he writes: “Wer

‘Schau’ wünscht, gehe ins Lichtspiel” (14).

For Kommerell,the Enlightenment is not irreversible.Rather,from the perspec-

tive his new myth opens, it is only the product of “ausgeleerter Vernunftmenschen,”

an expression of a crisis and of an “überkluge[n] Zeit” (65), which George’s poetic


description of the void also brings to view. For Kommerell, the American is “der

Mensch ohne Gott ohne Kunst ohne Himmel und Boden” (120). From these re-

marks,one can deduce indirectly what leads,according to Kommerell,out of the void

of modernity: “eine neue Unmittelbarkeit”(97).The United States is,historically, a

product of the Enlightenment; Benjamin Franklin was a friend of Voltaire. As a

community of people from diverse backgrounds,the United States marks the transi-

tion from a nation-state to a constitutional state and thus also initiates, potentially,

the transition to Kant’s enlightened world-state, as conceived in his Anthropologie.

Against the Enlightenment and its political consequences—the rupture of the

“Einheit von Mensch und Boden” by “Übergeistung” (94), for instance—Kom-

merell places the “Wende von Geist zu Leben”(71), a change forced by “[Ekel] vor

den Mißgebilden aus siechen Seelen” (71). Kommerell condemns the so-called

multi-ethnic United States,which became,as a form of valid and free life in the New

World, a politically real manifestation of Enlightenment principles. And because

Kommerell does not allow it to be considered as the model of a modern constitu-

tional state, he himself falls pray to the daemon that arose from the grave after the

First World War: the daemon of nationalist ideology. As a German leader and the

poet of legends,the professor leads from out of the godless void into the fulfilled life

of a people, into the German ethnic community, or “Volksgemeinschaft.” In 1930,

the year his review is published, Max Kommerell writes to Hedwig Kommerell:

Den ersten Band Hitlers Mein Kampf las ich. Borniert, bäurisch ungeschlacht, aber inden Instinkten gesund und richtig. Die Leistung nötigt zum Respekt und in unsermbreiigen Zeitalter ist so eine Faust immerhin eine Wohltat. (Nägele 366)

In his compelling study of the relationship between Benjamin and Kommerell,

Rainer Nägele has demonstrated that “Die Karte von Kommerells weltliterarischer

Geographie bleibt judenfrei”(358).Nägele’s observation is correct with regard to the

missing reception of obviously Jewish authors in Kommerell’s work. It must be

added,however, that in Kommerell’s account of Kantian philosophy and the theory

of the early Romantic period,in his caricature of the United States,and in his attacks

against Enlightenment in general, one can discover the vocabulary of Nazi propa-

ganda. In view of the prominent publications on Kant and the Enlightenment—by

Hermann Cohen or Ernst Cassirer, for instance—as well as Benjamin’s dissertation

on the Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik,Kommerell’s denunciations

of the “Zersetzer”(333),the “Überklugen”(120),and the “Ungeziefer aus der Fäulnis

eines edlen Pferdes”(75),exhibit an only slightly disguised anti-Semitism,as well as

an eagerness to eliminate the “Erb-Fehler des deutschen Geistes” (272). Excluded

from the world of German literature are all those who are not considered German

according to the criteria of blood and soil.It is in this light that one must understand

the closing words of Benjamin on the Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik, in


which he turns against a Germany that threatens to transform from a state into an il-

legitimate “Name”:

Nicht eher als gereinigt kann diese Erde wieder Deutschland werden und nicht imNamen Deutschlands gereinigt werden, geschweige denn des geheimen, das von demoffiziellen zuletzt nur das Arsenal ist, in welchem die Tarnkappe neben dem Stahlhelmhängt. (259)

The Sacrifice

How are Benjamin’s words of praise, which also characterize his review, to be

read in light of his sharp critique of Kommerell in the quotation above? Beyond the

deep love shared by the two authors for Goethe and Jean Paul, and beyond Stefan

George’s influence on each,the closeness results initially from their common meth-

odology. Like Benjamin, Kommerell alienates middle-class contemporaries from

the heritage of German Classicism, but with the opposite intention: “Kommerells

Bild der Klassik, sofern es bleibend ist, lebt aus dem Herrschaftsanspruch,den er in

ihr erkennt”(258).Benjamin loosens the effect of alienation and estrangement from

this picture and reformulates it according to his own political intention—namely,

that of the melancholic collector of disjointed fragments from the past. The trans-

mission of tradition, or Überlieferung, becomes plainly visible only in the moment

when the false life of empathy and identification is abandoned:

Der Verfasser nimmt gelebte Stunden zur Hand wie der große Sammler Altertümer.Es ist nicht, daß er darüber redet; man sieht sie, weil er sie so wissend, forschend,andächtig, gerührt, abschätzend, fragend in der Hand dreht, sie von allen Seitenanblickt und ihnen nicht das falsche Leben der Einfühlung, sondern das wahre derÜberlieferung gibt. (257)

Kommerell’s method of reordering and reinterpreting old documents overlaps

methodologically with the perspective of the collector of fragments from the past.In

Kommerell’s work,his preoccupation with the past submits neither to the positivist

attempt to reconstruct the lost connection empirically nor to the bid to make it

consumable for the present,which would obliterate its alterity.Just as Benjamin pro-

posed,following Hofmannsthal,to read what was never written,Kommerell gives an

account of what happened, when he reports what could also have happened.

Benjamin writes of Kommerell:

Der Verfasser hielt sich nicht an das Gewesene allein: auch was sich nicht ereignet hat,entdeckt er. Wohlverstanden, er erfindet es nicht—etwa als Phantasiebild—sondernschlicht und deutlich entdeckt er’s,nämlich der Wahrheit nach als ein Nichtgeschehe-


nes. Sein Geschichtsbild taucht aus dem Hintergrunde des Möglichen auf, gegen dendas Relief des Wirklichen seine Schatten wirft. (253)

By studying the documents of the past,Kommerell brings them into a new constel-

lation. As a result, what has most likely happened becomes more recognizable: for

instance,Goethe’s idea of authority,or Schiller’s dispute with the Schlegel brothers.

Kommerell’s work also attests to the inevitable constructivist trend of all historiog-

raphy of the Goethezeit,which,for the nineteenth century after the Franco-Prussian

War from 1870–71,had to confirm the “Vereinbarkeit des Geistes von Weimar und

Sedan,” and which now is abused in Kommerell’s construction of a new German

myth (258).

The logical contradiction between myth and history gives rise to the initial sep-

aration between Benjamin and Kommerell. Kommerell employs a constructive

method with the aim of stopping constructivism once and for all. As Kommerell

looks back on the Goethezeit with an “blumenhaft offenen, blumenhaft flam-

menden”gaze (258),he proceeds in accordance with the early Romantic idea of open

interpretation.However,if this construction were to be the final and definitive one,it

would be in conflict with the open process. This contradiction can be eliminated

only by forbidding further reflection. Benjamin’s allegory, as written in a letter to

Scholem on 7 July 1929, is therefore precise:

In San Gimignano habe ich mir die Hände an den Dornen eines allerdings stellenweiseüberraschend schön blühenden Rosenbusches aus Georges Garten zerschunden.Es istdas Buch ‘Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik.’ (641)

Facing Kommerell’s aggressive inaccessibility, Benjamin does not limit himself to

justifying historiography and pointing out logical contradictions at the end of his

review.In one of his most daring turns,he insists on the archaic dimension of theory

itself, and thus challenges Kommerell at the level of myth:

Das echte Bild mag alt sein,aber der echte Gedanke ist neu.Er ist von heute.Dies Heu-te mag dürftig sein, zugegeben. Aber es mag sein wie es will, man muss es fest bei denHörnern haben, um die Vergangenheit befragen zu können. Es ist der Stier, dessenBlut die Grube erfüllen muss, wenn an ihrem Rande die Geister der Abgeschiedenenerscheinen sollen. Diese tödliche Stoßkraft des Gedankens ist es, welche den Werkendes Kreises fehlt. Statt es zu opfern, meiden sie das Heute. In jeder Kritik muss einMartialisches wohnen, auch sie kennt den Dämon. Eine, die nichts als Schau ist,verliert sich, bringt die Dichtung um die Deutung, die sie ihr schuldet, und um ihrWachstum. Nicht zu vergessen, dass die Kritik, um etwas zu leisten, sich selbst unbe-dingt bejahen muss. Ja, vielleicht muss sie—man denke an die Theorien der BrüderSchlegel—sich selbst den höchsten Rang geben. (259)


With this startling change of register, Benjamin undermines Kommerell’s main

opposition, where blood, soil, and Volk stand against sapient, uprooted, sickly, and

bloodless theorizing. The proof of logical inconsistency would be an “überkluges”

argument “heute.”As a reviewer in the disenchanted literary world,Benjamin serves

this need.But not as a theorist: the “Heute”will itself be sacrificed to the sign of the

“Dämon.” With reference to the “Dämon;” “tödliche Stoßkraft;” and, finally,

“unbedingte Bejahung,”Benjamin articulates his intimate proximity to Kommerell.

Both share the suffering caused by a “dürftigen Heute,”that is, the suffering of Ger-

many around 1930.While Kommerell avoids the sober view of the “heutigen”Ger-

many,he falls victim to nationalist ideology.Benjamin,on the other hand, sacrifices

the German ideology of his time so that the “Geister der Abgeschiedenen”can ap-

pear and testify that the Germany of 1930 is not theirs.As he sacrifices the “Heute,”

Benjamin remains loyal to the remnants of tradition:

Ein Mahnmal deutscher Zukunft sollte aufgerichtet werden. Über Nacht werdenGeisterhände ein großes “Zu Spät” draufmalen. Hölderlin war nicht vom Schlagederer, die auferstehen, und das Land, dessen Sehern ihre Visionen über Leichen er-scheinen, war nicht das seine. (259)

Notes

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. George. Noten zur Literatur. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1991.

Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels. Vol. 3. Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1991.

Eichendorff, Joseph von. Werke. Ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch, Munich: Hanser, 1959.George, Stefan. Werke, Bd. 1, Düsseldorf und Munich: Küpper/Bondi, 1976.Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Werke. Ed. Erich Trunz. Vol. 1. Munich: Beck, 1982.


1 I want to express my gratitude to Jerome Bolton, who translated this essay from the Ger-man. I also want to thank Dan J. Poston for helping me with the final editing of the text.

2 It was during the lifetime of Goethe and Schiller, and not before, that the population ofthe German states recovered from the bloodshed of the Thirty Years War, which had led tothe death of one third of the people of those states. Schiller’s Geschichte des dreißigjährigen

Krieges, as well as his trilogy, Wallenstein, deal explicitly with this traumatizing war. For thepremiere of Wallenstein, the actors used real armor from that war, which still could be found inthe castle in Weimar.

3 See Robert Norton’s brilliant standard work, Secret Germany, for a detailed account ofthe topic.

4 See George’s programmatic poem, “Der Täter.”

Kommerell,Max.Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik. 2nd ed.Frankfurt: Klostermann,1982.

Nägele, Rainer. “Vexierbild einer kritischen Konstellation. Walter Benjamin und MaxKommerell.”Max Kommerell.Leben.Werk.Wirkung.Ed.Walter Busch and Gerhart Pickerodt.Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003. 349–67.

Norton, Robert E. Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002.Plumpe, Gerhard. “Introduction.” Theorie des bürgerlichen Realismus. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985.

9–44.Siegel, Elke. Entfernte Freunde. Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka und die Freundschaft der Moderne.

Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009.Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. 5th ed. Tübingen:

Mohr, 1980.———. “Vom inneren Beruf zur Wissenschaft.” Soziologie. Universalgeschichtliche Analysen.

Politik. Ed. Johannes Winckelmann. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1971. 311–39.———. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Vol. 1. Tübingen: Mohr, 1972.


Documents

Critique and Sacrifice: Benjamin-Kommerell