Critique and Resignation

The aim of this paper is to map the main political and philological trends in the Hungarian reception of Walter Benjamin’s works from the beginnings until 1989. This reception history, which is almost entirely confined to the Kádár era, is reconstructed through oral history and relevant primary and secondary literature to illustrate the historical, personal, and professional opportunities and obstacles involved. In doing so, our research has uncovered anomalies in publishing Benjamin, such as the excerpt from The Origin of German Tragic Drama that appears in the first translations under a made-up title, the partial publication of the first Hungarian monograph on Benjamin, Krédó és rezignáció (Creed and Resignation), or the editorial struggle over the afterword to the collection Angelus Novus. In critically reconstructing the circumstances described in the interviews, we examined not only the impact of party leadership decisions and power struggles on the publication of Benjamin’s works, but also how translations and interpretations were shaped by the personal relationships of those involved. Additionally, we sought to contextualize this reception by exploring contemporary issues in debates among Marxist philosophers, as well as the tensions between the public sphere, as defined by the party-state framework, and the relative autonomy of the institutions responsible for publishing.