Books like Walter Benjamin — picked by fans

This book, unique in its construction, gave me a deeper insight into this leading author of the 20th century. We all know and may use the term “Kafkaesque” we don’t necessarily know from whence the term and its experience comes. This biography, drawing from Kafka’s own writings, documents his life in his own words. Glatzer has masterfully edited excerpts from the writer’s diaries, letters, and published works to create an autobiography that Kafka “contemplated but never wrote.” Kafka’s world view, the Kafkaesque, is vividly evoked.

I met Svetlana in the last two years of her life and was deeply impressed by her brilliance in literature and the history of ideas and cultures. She died, tragically, in her mid 50s cutting short her extraordinary career, from childhood and youth in Soviet Russia to her stellar career as a Harvard professor of comparative literature. Of her seven books, this highly original study of nostalgia has been particularly important.

A ground breaking study about longing in its positive and negative forms, focusing on post-communist cities such as St. Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin, and writers Nabokov, Brodsky, and Kabakov. Erudite, brilliant, and witty, this is a great cross-genre study of our modern condition.

Paul Mendes-Flohr is a great scholar of modern German Jewish philosophy. A man of extraordinary erudition and humanity, I am always moved by his deeply insightful books. His work means very much to me.

This is a superb biography of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, conveying the range of his thought in the context of his life and times. Mendes-Flohr captures the complexities of this influential thinker, who many know for his revolutionary concept of “I and Thou” in religion and human relations.

In this time of violence and rise of racism, authoritarianism, the Holocaust, the question of evil, its sources, its manifestations matter to me, and anyone of conscious. Glatzer lived through the rise of Nazism and Communism, and, as a person of religious faith, had to contend with the question of evil in our world today, and its challenges to religious belief. This book grew out of a course Prof. Glatzer taught over the years to thousands of students.

Job and the problem of evil was a central concern for Glatzer, as a scholar and as a humanist. In this book he compiles modern commentaries on the theme of Job, from Judaic, Christian and general philosophical tradition, including Kierkegaard and Martin Buber. In his lengthy introduction, Glatzer traces the interpretations from the Church Fathers, the medieval rabbis, and classical philosophers. 

For my study, Benjamin succeeds in showing how the dominant social forms in each capitalist society can be debunked and that the official narrative that perpetuates the logic that supports the current system can be seriously questioned.

Benjamin’s goal was not to build another totality, another theoretical system that would bring certainty and stability to those who want to change the world radically towards socialism.

Rather, his philosophy encourages us to continue fighting to open the cracks in capitalism, to create multiple ruptures in the capitalist system, even though we do not have all the answers and are aware that our struggle will have an uncertain result.

This is how we redeem and vindicate past generations who spilled their blood for another world. This is how we redeem Benjamin himself, who dedicated his life's work to this purpose.

There are many books about the glitz and the cultural icons that we associate with Weimar Berlin. This one gives us a broader and deeper picture. Instead of concentrating on a few writers and artists, it anchors the city’s creative explosion in mass-market newspapers and their readers, turning our eyes to people in the streetcars and cafés and the stories they read about their own lives. We can read about sensational crimes just as Berliners did, and we find the prototypes of modern art in the layout and content of newspapers and in the chaos of the streets where they are hawked.

If you are Jewish and have ambivalent feelings about visiting Berlin, then this could be the book for you. Leonard Barkan is a professor at Princeton where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature. A Jewish American, growing up in a secular New York family, his book is a personal reflection on traveling in the city. 

Berlin for Jews is part history and part travel guide. Barkan shows how, in the early nineteenth century, Jews dominated the arts, sciences, and public life and the way in which, despite the horrors of the Nazi era, they left an indelible imprint on the Berlin of today. The book, described as a “love letter” to the city, takes the reader through some of the most iconic locations of Jewish life and describes the long-lost elegant Jewish suburbs, salons, writers, artists, politicians, philanthropists, art collectors, and intellectuals. And throughout, Barkan muses on what… show more.

This is the work of a cultural sage with deep wisdom to offer on how political issues affect culture, especially literature.

It illuminated to me how significant cultural artifacts of high modernity like the short story as a phenomenon, the work of Charles Baudelaire in relation to the city, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, and the stories of Franz Kafka - that I had once been uncomfortable with because of their density - mattered and needed to be engaged with to make sense of the intellectual currents of the age.

To take my place among a culturally aware Benjamin is a writer I could not sidestep.  

This text, along with Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History, introduces the notions of historical mutiversum and temporal strata.

Bloch develops these concepts to rethink the Marxist theory of history in relation to anticolonial struggles. He questions the idea of progress without abandoning it. Instead, he revisits progress from the perspective of complementary differentiations. This a crucial text for thinking about the plurality of times without falling into cultural relativism.

Not strictly centered on translation and not exactly a conventional book, this collection of essays is often considered the birthplace of the now widely-used (though often misunderstood) concept of “cultural translation.”

Bhabha is a notoriously demanding author, and reading this book can, at times, feel like entering a conversation already in progress. Bhabha will move from Salman Rushdie, through Joseph Conrad or Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida, often within the space of a single paragraph or page. But Bhabha’s intellectual rigour justifies the effort. This challenging but rewarding book unleashes the radical potential of translation studies.

For Bhabha, translation transcends mere linguistic or even cultural exchange to become a tool for grappling with cultural transformation and difference more generally. It is a way of thinking about resistance and religion, innovation and imitation, politics and power. This book was love at first sight for me, and although I… show more.