When Walter Benjamin submitted his doctoral dissertation in 1919, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, he was not merely interpreting a school of thought — he was redefining what it means to think critically. For the young Benjamin, criticism was not judgment from above but participation from within: a creative act that continues the unfinished work of art itself. In this, he drew upon the Jena Romantics — Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and their circle — but transformed their insights into the blueprint of his own intellectual project.
Criticism Beyond Judgment
To the Romantics, art was not a self-contained object but a living process — a fragment of the infinite striving of spirit. Benjamin took this seriously. He rejected the idea of the critic as a detached evaluator who measures success or failure by external standards. Instead, he proposed that criticism should reveal a work’s truth-content — its hidden striving toward the absolute — by immersing itself in the work’s inner movement.
This conception already contains the seeds of his later thought. Just as history for Benjamin is not a chronology but a constellation of meanings flashing across time, so a work of art contains within it an unfulfilled potential waiting to be realized by interpretation. The critic’s task is therefore messianic in miniature: to redeem the work from its material limitations and reveal its latent truth.
Romanticism and Modernity
Benjamin’s fascination with the early German Romantics was not nostalgic. He saw in them a radical anticipation of modernism — thinkers who turned reflection itself into art. Schlegel’s aphorisms, Novalis’s fragments, and their notion of irony as endless self-questioning all pointed toward the fractured consciousness of the twentieth century. Where others saw sentimentalism, Benjamin saw an unfinished revolution in thought: the moment when philosophy became aware of its own poetic nature.
In recovering this Romantic heritage, Benjamin also defined his own method: a form of thinking that resists closure, preferring fragments, quotations, and constellations to systems. To interpret the Romantics was, for him, to continue their work — to write philosophy in the language of art.
The Birth of Benjamin’s Critique
Behind this vision lies a conviction that would guide Benjamin throughout his life: that truth appears only indirectly, through the mediation of form. Every genuine work of art is a dialectic between Sachgehalt (its historical and material content) and Wahrheitsgehalt (its truth-content). The critic must extract the latter from the former — not by explaining the work away, but by letting it speak.
In this sense, Benjamin turned criticism into a spiritual vocation. To interpret was to awaken. The Romantic critic becomes, in his hands, the prototype of the historian and philosopher — one who listens for the faint, surviving echoes of truth in the unfinished fragments of culture.
More on Benjamin:
