Fighting for the “language of youth”

The First World War had a double significance for Walter Benjamin’s life and work: besides being seen – as Experience and Poverty testifies – as the historical catastrophe of the impossibility of experience, it was also the reason why he lost his most important friend of his youth, Christoph Friedrich Heinle, whom he mourned for the rest of his life. However, we cannot ignore the chronological relationship between these two aspects: Experience and Poverty was written fifteen years after the war, and in the Berlin Chronicle Benjamin himself recounts the long time it took him to turn to the materialism that dominated the second half of his life’s work. This paper will examine the works of his youth and seek to answer the question of how the young Benjamin related to the outbreak of war and Heinle’s death. It is important, however, that it does not do so without taking account of the historical dimension of the First World War. Among other things, it attempts to show that Heinle’s death cannot be seen as a personal trauma: the death of Heinle, who were – for Benjamin – the embodiment of the idea of youth, is a shattering of this idea and a radical questioning of Benjamin’s early idealism. The consequences of death, mourning, lamentation and silence, are not, however, signs of loss of hope or resignation: as constitutive categories of Benjamin’s early philosophy of language and community, they are precisely the means of saving hope in an age characterized by the impossibility of hope and redemption.