From Library Journal A German critic and essayist best known for his studies of language, Benjamin also wrote and broadcast radio scripts for children in the early 1930s. Mehlman (modern foreign languages and literature, Boston Univ.) has undertaken an analysis of the 30 surviving scripts, attempting to use them to provide a greater understanding of Benjamin's rather difficult philosophy. The analysis permits some understanding of the writer's psyche, his challenges to fellow Jews (Mehlman is also the author of Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France , Univ. of Minnesota, 1983), and the bases of his literary criticism. A well-researched work of limited interest to those outside the field of literature. For academic libraries.- Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. In light of the legendary difficulty of Walter Benjamin's works, it is a strange and intriguing fact that from 1929 to 1933 the great critic and cultural theorist wrote-and broadcast-numerous scripts, on the order of fireside chats, for children. Invited to speak on whatever subject he considered appropriate, Benjamin talked to the children of Frankfurt and Berlin about the destruction of Pompeii, an earthquake in Lisbon, and a railroad disaster at the Firth of Tay. He spoke about bootlegging and swindling, cataclysm and suicide, Faust and Cagliostro. In this first sustained analysis of the thirty surviving scripts, Jeffrey Mehlman demonstrates how Benjamin used the unlikely forum of children's radio to pursue some of his central philosophical and theological concerns.InWalter Benjamin for Children, readers will encounter a host of intertextual surprises: an evocation of the flooding of the Mississippi informed by the argument of "The Task of the Translator;" a discussion of scams in stamp-collecting that turns into "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction;" a tale of bootlegging in the American South that converges with the best of Benjamin's essays on fiction. Mehlman superimposes a dual series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one hand, and fraud, on the other, that resonate with the false-messianic theology of Sabbatianism as it came to focus the attention and enthusiasm of Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem during the same years. The radio scripts for children, that is, offer an unexpected byway, on the eve of the apocalypse, into Benjamin's messianic preoccupations.A child's garden of deconstruction, these twenty-minute talks-from the perspective of childhood, before an invisible audience, on whatever happened to cross the critic's mind-are also by their very nature the closest we may ever come to a transcript of a psychoanalysis of Walter Benjamin. Particularly alive to that circumstance, Mehlman explores the themes of the radio broadcasts and brilliantly illuminates their hidden connections to Benjamin's life and work.This lucid analysis brings to light some of the least researched and understood aspects of Walter Benjamin's thought. It will interest and provoke literary theorists and philosophers of culture, as well as anyone who hopes to understand one of this century's most suggestive and perplexing critics. From Publishers Weekly Between 1929 and 1933 Benjamin, the German literary and cultural critic, wrote and broadcast a series of radio scripts for children, consisting of deceptively simple stories and fireside chats. He narrated tales about catastrophes--the destruction of Pompeii, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, a Scottish railway disaster--as well as parables about fraud, including tales of philatelic forgeries and of mountebanks like Count Cagliostro, the 18th-century mystic who was revered as a saint. In a rigorous, dense scholarly study, Mehlman, professor of foreign languages at Boston University, persuasively argues that Benjamin's radio scripts for children--some 30 of which survive--reveal his preoccupation with the theme of a "false mes
