Walter Benjamin remains a singular figure in the constellation of the Frankfurt School. Though never a formal member of the Institute for Social Research, his influence on its most important thinkers—especially Adorno—was profound and enduring. A literary critic, philosopher, and cultural theorist, Benjamin’s writing defies categorization. He moved between Jewish mysticism and Marxist materialism, between Surrealist aesthetics and historical theology, between scholarly rigor and poetic fragmentation.
His thinking, always on the margins—geographically, intellectually, spiritually—pushed critical theory toward an encounter with the limits of secular modernity. Nowhere is this clearer than in his reflections on history, where Benjamin developed a radical alternative to the prevailing idea of historical progress: a messianic, fractured, and ethically urgent vision of time.
Against the Continuum of History
Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), composed in the shadow of Nazi terror and shortly before his tragic death, opens with an image: Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, an angel blown backwards into the future while staring at the wreckage of the past. This “angel of history” sees what progress conceals—namely, the accumulating catastrophe of human suffering.
Benjamin’s target is not only fascism, but the dominant conception of history as a linear, cumulative process—what he calls "empty, homogeneous time." Whether liberal or Marxist, modern narratives often depict history as a march toward improvement. But for Benjamin, this idea of progress is a myth that pacifies the oppressed and justifies the victors.
True historical understanding, he argues, is not the passive recording of facts, but a seizing of memory in moments of danger. The past is not safely behind us; it is full of unrealized possibilities that can still be redeemed.
Messianic Time and the Now
At the heart of Benjamin’s thinking is the notion of Jetztzeit—"now-time" or "the now of recognizability." Unlike chronological time, Jetztzeit is ruptural and charged with potential. It is the moment when history flashes up—not as a smooth continuation, but as a jagged interruption that reconfigures meaning.
This moment has messianic intensity. Benjamin, drawing on Jewish mystical thought, sees in every oppressed generation the latent power to bring redemption—not by fulfilling history’s laws, but by breaking them open. The Messiah, for Benjamin, is not a final deliverer waiting at history’s end, but a principle of interruption that can arrive at any moment.
This theological metaphor serves a political function. It resists the fatalism of “it had to be this way,” and it denies that history belongs to those who win. Against both historicist resignation and revolutionary impatience, Benjamin proposes a third stance: waiting without passivity, remembering without nostalgia, acting in time without surrendering to time.
The Historian as a Fighter
Benjamin’s philosophy of history transforms the historian into something more than an archivist. The task of historical materialism is not to recount events, but to rescue the defeated from oblivion. “Even the dead,” he writes, “will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”
For Benjamin, the historian must brush history “against the grain,” recovering the silenced voices and forgotten struggles of the past—not to glorify them, but to illuminate the present. It is an ethical and political responsibility. Every present carries the responsibility to remember not just what happened, but what could have happened—and to carry forward the unfulfilled hopes of those who came before.
This is the messianic demand of critical memory: to refuse the closure of history, and to keep open the space of possibility.
A Philosophy for the Ruins
Benjamin’s philosophy of history is not utopian in the conventional sense. It does not offer a blueprint for progress or a rational plan for emancipation. Instead, it teaches attentiveness to cracks in the dominant narrative, sensitivity to moments when the continuum of time falters, and courage to act in those fragile intervals.
His messianism is not about waiting for salvation from above, but recognizing that even in disaster, a different world may still be glimpsed. Redemption, for Benjamin, is not a triumph; it is a reclamation. It is the act of refusing to let the past be buried by the present, and the insistence that history is not finished.
In a time when history again seems to move backwards, Benjamin remains a thinker for the moment of danger—a philosopher of interruption, memory, and possibility.
Next article: Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetic Dimension of Politics
