I chose to read this book out of a deep-seated guilt that has remained with me ever since I left grad school and stopped reading scholarly books as a regular activity. Walter Benjamin was a theorist I heard of in several courses in grad school, and I was intrigued with what I heard of his work, though I had never read anything he wrote. So, I figured reading an advanced copy of this book (provided to me free in exchange for a fair review) would be worth doing.

I was very pleasantly surprised by the first half of this book. The second half is a bit dry and while no doubt of great interest to scholars in German studies, history, media studies and other fields, was not highly entertaining. For the last 150-200 pages I did feel like I was reading an assigned book for a class, which is what I would expect given the nature of the book. The first half, however, was delightful, a selection of radio shows Walter Benjamin wrote out, essentially essays that would have guided the actual radio broadcasts like a script. These essays/shows cover a very broad range of topics and describe a version of Europe, and especially of Germany, that we don't quite get post-WW2. Walter Benjamin, a Jewish intellectual working in radio in the early 1930's, did not know about concentration camps, and did not have the weight of the knowledge of what the Nazi's were up to, let alone knowledge of the terrible chaos that would tear Europe apart shortly after these radio shows were created.

For the modern reader, there are traces of interesting tension in some of Benjamin's choices of subject matter, but all quite subtle. He is talking about the vanishing art of puppeteers, the architecture of Berlin, and travels in Naples, among many other topics. There is a lot in these shows to interest the scholar, but in part because they were written for a youth audience these shows are also pleasant, easy reading that anyone outside academia could also enjoy. I read a few of these essays each night before bed, and they worked quite well for such a purpose. I would love to see them repackaged for the general public, actually. In the meantime, this is one book that academics might hang onto and read parts of to their kids once their research needs are satisfied.


(I received my copy of this book free in exchange for a fair review.) ( )