Benjamin’s estranged-Heim

A.Z. Brooks
Ich bin von zuhause fort und muß immerfort nachhause schreiben,
auch wenn alles Zuhause längst fortgeschwommen sein sollte in die Ewigkeit.
- Kafka to Max Brod, July 12, 1922.1
Introduction

This paper examines the constellation formed, in Walter Benjamin’s works surrounding 1921, by the motif of Heim, Walter Benjamin’s relationship with Fritz Heinle, and the unrealized journal Angelus Novus. Through an analysis of Benjamin's writings and personal correspondence, the study reveals how these elements interconnect to reflect his philosophical ambition to integrate poetics, politics, and criticism through the transformative potential of translation. Central to this exploration is Benjamin's intense intellectual relationship with Heinle and the profound impact of World War I on his thought. The paper argues that these intertwined aspects symbolize Benjamin’s quest for a pure language and an ideal intellectual community.

In exploring the interconnected themes of Walter Benjamin’s intellectual pursuits, a central motif that emerges is that of Heim. In Benjamin's work, Heim symbolizes an idealized intellectual and spiritual community. However, following the disintegration of this ideal—marked by personal tragedies and the broader historical crises of his time—Heim evolves in Benjamin's thought. It becomes an atopos, a speculative and transcendental ideal that resists traditional categorization and remains ever-elusive2. This rhetorical atopos signifies a shift from the tangible to the abstract, reflecting Benjamin's philosophical journey from seeking a pure, unblemished community to embracing the fragmented, unclassifiable nature of language and thought.

This constellation is presented as a manifestation of Benjamin’s broader philosophical and political tensions, highlighting the role of translation during times of catastrophe and its potential to create anew communities.

Benjamin’s Heim and “The Task of Translator":

1921 was bookended by two compositions from Walter Benjamin: “The Critique of Violence” (January 1921) and “The Task of the Translator” (fall of 1921); and so, according to Michael Jennings, the year was spent with attempts at “integrating the idea of pure language into politics” (SW 1,503).” During the months in between, Benjamin’s time is consumed by various projects, including the never actualized journal Angelus Novus, which gave (in theory) a central role to translation. The first edition was to consist of excerpts from Fritz Heinle’s papers, poems by Wolf Heinle, a critical essay by Rang, a short story by Agnon, a translation of the mystical Judaic text ‘Bahir’ by Scholem, and Benjamin’s own “The Task of the Translator” (C 186-200).

Angelus Novus:

In the official announcement of the journal Benjamin writes:

Once again, German writing in its current state stands in need of a genre that has always had a beneficial effect on it in its periods of great crisis: translation. In the present instance, however, the translations of the journal wish to be understood not just as providing models to be emulated, as was the case in earlier times, but also as the strict and irreplaceable school of language-in-the-making. (SW 1, 294). 3

Translation became a central motif during such periods of “great crises.” What translation offers in such moments is an understanding of the integration between word and politics, and a possibility of a remaking of language and politics.

On August 4th, 1921 Walter Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem: “[Angelus Novus] will be structured entirely and unconditionally keeping with my conception of the journal when I first thought of it many years ago (to be exact, in July 1914 when Fritz Heinle and I first seriously considered starting a journal)” (C 186). This seemingly quotidian parenthetical aside carries an odd allegorical weight.

Strange-Friendships:

The intimate intellectual relationship between C.W. Heinle and Benjamin lasted only around one year, (1913-1914) during which time they would develop (alongside others) a meeting-home in Berlin for intellectual symposium: consisting of literary, political, and philosophical/critical discussion, surrounding the youth movement. Arguably, “das Heim" (GS vi 476)—as it is called by Benjamin nearly two decades later—and Heinle encapsulates a prelapsarian-like space and time of youth, hope, commune: an impossible ideal between poetry/politics/criticism. In a letter from Benjamin to Carla Seligman from November 17, 1913, the depth of Benjamin and Heinle’s friendship is felt:

. . . it has become very difficult for both of us to be apart . . . He confronted me in the name of love, and I countered with the symbol . . . it is inevitable that each must remain true to his own spirit . . . I want the fulfillment that one can only anticipate but that he can satisfy. But fulfillment is something too serene and divine for it to issue from anything other than a burning wind . . . 'No friendship between brothers and comrades, but rather a friendship among friends who are strangers’ (C 56-57) 4

Benjamin’s words speak of a strange unity between poetics and criticism, being manifested as a strange friendship. Bernd Witte writes, “there is much evidence that Benjamin saw in the interaction between the two of them the desired archetypal realization of a pure spiritual community” (31).

Benjamin reflecting back on this time two decades later in “Berlin Chronicle,” describes Heinle and Heim as entangled in his memory—”die Gestalt meines Freundes Fritz Heinle, um die all jene Geschehnisse im Heim sich ordnen und mit dem sie verschwinden” [“the figure of my friend Fritz Heinle, around whom all the happenings in the ‘Heim’ order themselves and with whom they vanish” (GS vi 477).] Tensions in the “Home” were always present. Through the early months of 1914 a serious dispute between two conflicting groups involved in the journal Anfang occurred: two sides disagreeing about the direction of the journal—politics or poetry. Heinle fell on the poetic side and a group led by George Barbizon on the political. Benjamin, having been elected president of the “Freien Studentenscahft” played the part of the mediator between the two sides, though it is written that he was covertly on the side of the poetic (Witte 33). Within the constellation of Home-Heinle is where Benjamin first considered starting a journal—where and with whom, he thought of creating a journal; where and with whom, poetics and criticism and politics could stand together as strange-friends.

Humanity and catastrophic self-destruction:

And then:
August 1, 1914: Germany declared war on Russia. August 3, 1914: Germany declared war on France. Between August 4th and 7th: Benjamin and friends attempt to enlist in the German Military – “not out of enthusiasm for the war but to anticipate the ineluctable conscription” (Scholem 17).
And yet, on August 8th, 1914, in the Heim, Fritz Heinle, with Rika Seligson, committed suicide. Benjamin awoke to a letter:

Sie werden uns im Heim liegen finden. (GS vi 478)

(...how to translate a suicide note?...)

1. Domesticating: “You will find us lying in the home.”

2. Foreignizing: “You will us in the Heim lying find."

What, as the translator, is one striving to capture: the raw information or the fractured experience? What does one make of a poet’s suicide note/political statement—its finality, its weight? More urgently, what is the experience embedded in it? And how did Benjamin encounter it?

Was he fully awake, or still suspended in half-sleep? Did he parse the words slowly, word by word, or did they wash over him in a single, devastating whole? For a fleeting moment, did the phrase “Sie werden uns im Heim . . .” [you will-be us in the home] conjure the impossible—did it spark the imagined fulfillment of an ideal symposium, a unity of “you” with “we” and Heim?

And then, did the words “. . . liegen finden” shatter that fragile image, retroactively altering “werden” into a harbinger of loss? Did the symbolic unity of Heim collapse, leaving “lying” there to “find”—real bodies, irreducible death, and the inescapable silence of allegory…the ruins of Heim?

The local Vossische Zeitung translated the act as “Liebesgram” [love-grief], framing it within the conventions of romantic tragedy, while Benjamin’s friends translated it as a protest against the war’s inescapable violence. Benjamin himself, seemingly overcome by a lamenting muteness, translated nothing explicit about the act at the time. A home of attempted pure spiritual and intellectual communing—a fragile space of shared aspiration and meaning—was translated into silence, an impenetrable act/event against the backdrop of a world burning.
[“And the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth and they left off building the city.” (Gen. 11:9, Trans. Robert Alter)]
And yet, days before Heinle’s suicide, Benjamin and friends had attempted to enlist in military service— “the double suicide put a stop to any desire to fight” (SW 1, 498). Benjamin would actively attempt to fail military physical examines (faking palsy with mass consumption of caffeine, using hypnosis to fake symptoms of sciatica, and eventually leaving for Bern to study and wait out the war.) This moment marks a significant shift in thinking for Benjamin.

From Real-Ideal to Rhetorical-Ideal:

Heinle and Heim never leave him entirely: Benjamin took over the literary works of Heinle, attempting to publish them for many years; until in 1933 the papers were lost when, while fleeing the Nazis, Benjamin went into exile (Scholem 17). References to the “Heinle Papers” occur frequently throughout his correspondences. Benjamin was compiling, reading, and writing an introduction to Heinle’s work until 1923 actively; Benjamin continues to try to access the papers left in Berlin from Paris for well into the 1930s—in a letter from November 1st 1938 he writes to Gretel Adorno that “As of now, the only thing yielded by my persistent efforts to get some more of my books, but above all my papers, out of Berlin is the virtual certainty that the following things have been destroyed: the complete papers of the two Heinle’s . . . “ (C 578). Eiland and Jennings write: “ . . . one of the most enigmatic episodes in Benjamin’s enigmatic life. At once epochal and impenetrable, the encounter with Heinle would leave a deep mark on Benjamin’s intellectual emotional physiognomy for years to come” (53).

Shortly after the suicide in the winter of 1914-1915, Benjamin dedicated his “Essay on Two Poems by Hölderlin” to Heinle. Two years later in the summer of 1917, in his essay on Dostoevsky’s Idiot, he writes: “in the absence of both nature and childhood, humanity becomes conceivable only through a catastrophic self-destruction” (SW 1, 81). Bernd Witte argues that “Benjamin’s friends read these sentences correctly ‘as an esoteric comment about Fritz Heinle’” (Witte 32). [Moreover, it can only be coincidental that, though falling into a deep depression, shortly after the suicide, in winter 1914-1915, Benjamin under the tutelage of philologist Ernst Lewy, studied the language theories of Humboldt (and I would imagine also Hamann, and Herder), which would become prevalent to his theory of translation.]

The ruthless reality of Heinle’s suicide, the years of world war, the events of Benjamin’s exile and own suicide speak to the impossibility, the impassable, and utter failing—while the sheer volume of Benjamin’s writings, planning, correspondences, friendships, and attempting despite, speak to what Eiland and Jennings describe as Benjamin’s “impulse to symposium—the gathering of like-minded thinkers and writers— [] an inextinguishable propensity of his philosophic sensibility,” (5). Such a propensity seemed to reach back to idyllic Heim, even while knowing from experience the fractured and allegorical, the necessity of languaging.

This constellation of impossible ideal symposium, death, and language would rise to the surface again in September of 1921, when Benjamin and Scholem met with Lewy to discuss the plans for Angelus Novus, while simultaneously Benjamin is amid working on his “The Task of the Translator” (Eiland 154). Though “The Task of the Translator” would end up published as an introduction to the Benjamin’s translation of Baudelaire’s “Tableaux parisiens” (1923); it is also listed in a letter to Gerhard Scholem from November 8, 1921, as one of the items for the first edition of Angelus Novelus.5

Hidden Home

“The Task of the Translator” has a hidden Heim—though it is a Heim that no longer believes in the possibility of an actualized “realization of a pure spiritual community.” Such conceptions have become solely rhetorical, marking the Sehnsucht toward such an ideal. 6 This longing, rooted in absence yet forward-reaching, reflects Benjamin’s broader philosophical engagement with the irretrievable yet speculative nature of home and community. For Benjamin, Heim as an actual, pure community dissolves into a rhetorical construct—pure language, a speculative transcendental ideal. Yet, this construct continues to strive for the possibility of a “pure community,” holding out potentiality and the chance to create anew. Benjamin’s personal estrangement and grief infuse this linguistic meditation with affective resonance. Heim appears in The Task of the Translator exactly, and insufficiently, twice. In paragraph two, Benjamin writes:

Was aber außer der Mitteilung in einer Dichtung steht—und auch der schlechte Übersetzer gibt zu, daß es das Wesentliche ist—gilt es nicht allgemein als das Unfaßbare, Geheimnisvolle, ›Dichterische‹? (2.7)

But is it not generally held that what stands apart from the Impartation in the Dichtung—and even a bad translator will admit that it is the essential—is the unfathomable, enigmatic, “Dichterische?” (my translation) 7

The “Dichtung” loses its dichterische quality—the poetic density, the material thickness—in the parting that occurs through Mitteilung. This essential quality corresponds via the em-dash to “das Unfaßbare, Geheimnisvolle, Dichterische.” And here, one finds the rhetorically hidden Heim: “Ge-heim-nis-volle.” The prefix Ge- implies both a collective and a repetitive aspect. According to Fluge’s Etymological Dictionary, Geheim carries meanings such as ‘private,’ ‘secret,’ and ‘hidden,’ but also evokes “belonging to the house” (110). This duality suggests something repeating, mysterious, yet home-full—an enigmatic paradox: to be home and yet hidden. In the original German, Heim has parted from its dichterische essence and transformed into Geheimnisvolle, which nonetheless retains the -volle suffix, pointing toward what might be romantically imagined as Heim.

Likewise, in paragraph nine sentence six Benjamin writes:

Wenn anders es aber eine Sprache der Wahrheit gibt, in welcher die letzten Geheimnisse, um die alles Denken sich müht, spannungslos und selbst schweigend aufbewahrt sind, so ist diese Sprache der Wahrheit—die wahre Sprache. (9.6)

If, in-another-way, however a language of truth exists, in which the latest Geheimnisse, which all thinking strive for, are kept tensionless and even in-silence, so is this language of the truth – the true language. (my translation)

Heim cloaked again in its strange “Geheimnisse,” is the a-topos/a-temporal which “all thinking strives for”; The “letzten” could imply “ultimate” in a teleological coloring (Both Zohn and Rendall choose “ultimate”); but could also here imply “latest” in a historical sense, not an end but a halting along. In which case Heim maybe understood in the form of “Geheimnisse” as one particular transcendental infinity, functioning as an a-topos/a-temporal ideal towards which one’s thinking strives, which in turn marks the hidden Heim speculative and immanently present(ed).

Endnotes

  1. Kafka’s words to Brod, “I am away from home and must always write home, even if all Home has long since floated away into Eternity” (my translation), marks the paradox of writing as both connection and disconnection. “Zuhause” signifies an intimate and lived sense of belonging, made expansive by “alles,” which evokes a totality of comfort, memory, and ideality that Kafka feels irretrievably lost. The prefix zu- adds a sense of movement, framing “Zuhause” as not static but something perpetually sought after—a destination as much as a memory. In Kafka’s phrasing, “Zuhause” is suspended between presence and absence: it has “längst fortgeschwommen” (long since floated away), placing it in an irretrievable past, yet it remains a vital orientation for the act of writing—“muß immerfort nachhause schreiben” (must always write home). This tension is not merely a lament but an acknowledgment of the necessity of writing. Writing becomes both a striving toward reconnection and an encounter with irreparable estrangement, a gesture that sustains the possibility of meaning even when the ideal of home has dissolved. This duality is reinforced in the structure of Kafka’s sentence itself, where acts of connection and acknowledgment of disconnection intertwine. For example, “Ich bin von zuhause fort und muß immerfort nachhause schreiben” links the state of estrangement (“von zuhause fort”) with the persistent necessity to respond through writing (“immerfort nachhause schreiben”), suggesting connection through the mere act of signaling/writing. However, the reflective pivot introduced by “auch wenn” (even if) leads to the acknowledgment of irreparable loss in “alles Zuhause längst fortgeschwommen sein sollte in die Ewigkeit”. Thus, the rhythm of the sentence alternates between definitive statements and pauses for reflection, mirroring the unresolved yet necessary nature of writing as both an act of hope and a recognition of absence. Back to text
  2. Benjamin’s Heim occupies a paradoxical position as both a real place and a rhetorical a-topos. As an actual meeting space in Berlin, Heim represented an attempt at creating an intellectual and spiritual community, where poetry, politics, and criticism could converge. With WW1, however, Heim became estranged, ceasing to function as a concrete place and transforming into something unattainable. It became a speculative ideal, a space of longing and potentiality that resists resolution. This dual nature of Heim—as both a real place and a rhetorical construct—resonates with Ilka Kressner’s exploration of “atopos” in Sites of Disquiet. Kressner develops “atopos” as a concept that challenges conventional spatial frameworks by defying categorization or fixed delineation. Discussing spaces in literature that resist being topoi (real, identifiable spaces) or utopoi (imagined ideal spaces), she writes:
    [Spaces of a-topos] cannot be subsumed entirely under one of the previously discussed spatial conceptions. They are too vague to be topoi. Likewise, they are not clearly projected, non-existent utopias or dystopias. I also do not consider them to be mere symbolic spaces, concrete entities that refer to abstract elements, psychic drives, or experiences. The spaces designed in the short narratives are much more ambiguous and potentially active. They are disquieting; this is perhaps the adjective that characterizes all of them best. (11)
    Benjamin’s estranged Heim reflects this ambiguity and activity, as it ceases to function as a concrete, real location but retains its force as a speculative construct. The transformation of Heiminto a rhetorical a-topos mirrors Kressner’s observation that atopos spaces “negate common spatial characteristics” while paradoxically remaining generative. In Benjamin’s work, Heim as an a-topos disrupts the conventional boundaries of spatial and intellectual belonging, becoming a site of estrangement that also enables the possibility of alternative forms of community. Back to text
  3. Von neuem ruft die Lage des deutschen Schrifttums eine Form hervor, welche seit jeher heilsam seine großen Krisen begleitete: die übersetzung. Freilich wollen die übersetzungen der Zeitschrift nicht sowohl als Vermittlung von Vorbildern verstanden werden, wie dies früher Brauch war, denn als unersetzlicher und strenger Schulgang werdender Sprache selbst. (GS II, 243). Back to text
  4. “ . . . es uns beiden sehr schwer wurde, uns zu trennen” . . . “er stellte sich mir gegenüber im Namen der Liebe und ich setzte ihm das Symbol entgegen” . . . “trotzdem jeder der andere ist, muß er aus Notwendigkeit bei seinem eignen Geist bleibe” . . . “Ich will die Erfüllung, die man nur erwarten kann und er erfullen. Aber die Erfüllung ist etwas Ruhiges und Göttliches, als dass sie anders, als aus brennendem Winde folgen könnte” . . . “keine Freundschaft der Bruder und Genosse, sondern eine Freundschaft der Fremden Freunde” (Briefe 95-95). Back to text
  5. Lukács’s reflections in The Metaphysics of Tragedy, a text Benjamin was familiar with, align closely with this transformation. Lukács writes:
    The essence of these great moments is the pure experience of self. In ordinary life, we experience ourselves only peripherally—our motives and our relationships. Our life ordinarily has no real necessity, only the necessity of being empirically present, entangled by a thousand accidental bonds and relationships. The basis of the whole network of necessities is accidental and meaningless; everything that is, could just as well be otherwise, and the only thing that seems really necessary is the past, simply because nothing more can be done to change it. But is even the past really necessary? Can the accidental flow of time, the arbitrary displacement of one’s point of view vis-à-vis one’s lived experience, change the essential nature of that experience? Can it make something necessary and essential out of the accidental? Can it transform the periphery into the center? It often seems that it can, but that is only an illusion. Only our momentary and accidental knowledge makes something rounded and changeless of the past. The smallest modification of that knowledge, such as any accident may occasion, sheds new light upon the “unchangeable” past, and suddenly, in that new light, everything acquires a different meaning and actually becomes different. (180)
    This resonates with Benjamin’s reflections on passivity and rupture in Origin of the German Trauerspiel , (translated by Howard Eiland and Julie Ng) where he writes:
    It is almost a paradox that this function becomes manifest in all its clarity at the moment when the hero is completely passive, when tragic time bursts open, like a flower whose calyx emits the astringent perfume of irony. Not infrequently it is in moments of complete calm—during the hero’s sleep, as it were—that the fatality of his time fulfills itself, and likewise the meaning of fulfilled time in the tragic fate emerges in the great moments of passivity: in the tragic decision, in the retarding moment, in the catastrophe. (263)
    Both Lukács and Benjamin emphasize the accidental and passive as sites where the coherence of time and necessity is disrupted, allowing for a shift in meaning. Lukács’s observation that “the smallest modification of [momentary and accidental knowledge]” can shed new light on the unchangeable past parallels Benjamin’s understanding of how ruptures in tragic time—or historical time—create conditions for reinterpretation. This fragility of time’s coherence connects with Benjamin’s estranged Heim. The intellectual community of Heinle and the Heimcollapses under historical catastrophe, becoming instead an allegorical space of longing. Where Lukács sees these moments of transformation as an exposure of illusion, Benjamin discerns the potential for renewal. His reflections on translation similarly reveal this tension: translation, like the estranged Heim, is both an encounter with the irreducibility of difference and a speculative gesture toward the possibility of a shared, though fractured, community. The "great moments" of passivity and rupture, for Benjamin, do not resolve into coherence but instead open a space for renewal—where fragments gesture toward an as-yet-unrealized unity. Back to text
  6. “Sehnsucht” resists direct translation. Zohn and Rendall, in their translations of Benjamin, render it as “longing” and “yearning,” respectively, while Gandillac, Blanchot, and Berman’s French translations opt for “nostalgie.” These terms, however, only partially capture its meaning. While “nostalgia” shares the affective resonance of Sehnsucht, it is primarily retrospective—a desire to return to a lost past. Sehnsucht, however, encompasses both a backward gaze and a forward-reaching, existential yearning that is directional yet indeterminate. As the Dictionary of Untranslatables notes, “the idea associated with it is primarily that of a departure” (938). This duality—of absence rooted in the past yet driving toward an unattainable future—aligns with Benjamin’s conceptual framework, where longing often blurs temporal boundaries. In Benjamin’s thought, Sehnsucht intertwines with ideas like the “messianic end of history,” “pure language,” and “nowhere,” concepts that transcend linear temporality and inhabit an über-temporal or a-topos space. Moreover, Sehnsucht parallels Benjamin’s use of Mitteilbare/Mitteilung as impartation: it evokes a painful recognition of lack while simultaneously propelling a striving for connection or completion. (Mitteilung” as Samuel Weber explains, “suggests ‘partitioning with,’ or also, ‘sharing.’ But to share, I must first divide, and it is precisely this double movement that is reflected in the English word, to impart.” (Weber 40-41).) Romanticism’s association of Sehnsucht with an unending yearning for the absolute also resonates here. However, in Benjamin’s work, this yearning transforms into a philosophical and rhetorical force. His Darstellung enacts Sehnsucht not as a resolution but as a continual process of reorientation toward the unattainable. This generative tension—between absence and potentiality, rupture and striving—is central to Benjamin’s exploration of Heim and the fractured ideals it represents. Back to text
  7. Benjamin’s use of Dichtung underscores the layered materiality of language, where density (dicht) signifies not only thickness but also the entanglement of meaning and form. In “The Task of the Translator,” Dichtung is not merely “literary” but implies a prelapsarian, thickened mode of language that resists emaciation through Mitteilung. As Benjamin asks, “Was teilt sie mit?” (“What does it impart?”), Mitteilung emerges as both the act of imparting and the parting from the essential. Geheimnisvolle, with its etymological root in Heim, furthers this paradox: the “secretive” or “hidden” quality of language belongs to the house, yet it obscures the very home it signifies. Thus, Dichtung loses its dichterische essence in translation, echoing the loss of Heim as a tangible reality, leaving only the speculative potential for reconnection. This interplay reflects Benjamin’s broader philosophical concerns with the incommunicable within language, where every impartation gestures toward what exceeds it, a "thick-literary" residue of the unattainable. Back to text

    8. Works Cited

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