Werke und Nachlass-Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Band 19): Werke und Nachlass. Kritische Gesamtausgabe

Walter Benjamin's notes on the concept of history, on which he wrote until the spring of 1940, are both a sober assessment of a passionate intellectual and a steep construction of a cool theorist. The intellectual gives an account of the venerable enterprise of transforming the world into a more humane one - especially at a time when the forces that had previously been believed capable of doing so are crumbling and hopes are destroyed. The theorist takes this as an opportunity to expose the devastating consequences of the philosophy of history to date and to sketch an alternative that no longer leaves the criticism of linear progress to irrationalism alone. This critique has not lost any of its topicality to this day, just as little as the realization derived from it that the catastrophe is not the fault of the Au.