Walter Benjamin in the European East

Caroline Adler is a scholar of Cultural History and Theory and research associate at the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force at Hamburg University. From 2020 to 2023 she was part of the DFG-Research Training Group The Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms at Humboldt-University Berlin, where she completed her dissertation on Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Moscow’ and its literary construction (forthcoming with Kadmos, 2026). Her research focuses on genealogies of modernity, method and literarization in the works of Walter Benjamin, epistemologies of the aesthetic, and theory and critique of scientific exhibition practice. Alongside her academic work, she curates both discourse and exhibition programs, serves as an editor of the Berlin Review, and is a board member of the Berlin collective diffrakt. Sophia Buck is a literary scholar and comparatist specialising in modern German and European intellectual history, and she is currently Montgomery Fellow in Modern German Literature at the University of Oxford. She studied German literature and philosophy in Heidelberg, Prague, and Oxford, and completed her DPhil at Merton College, Oxford (2019–2024) on Walter Benjamin’s “New Optic” and his Soviet-French connections, with visiting positions in Paris and Berlin and prizes from Merton in 2022 and 2023. Her work focuses on European intellectual networks, twentieth-century literary criticism across German, French, and Russian contexts, material philology, and the history of the humanities in times of war, and she has published in English and German and is a member of the International Walter Benjamin Society.

• Prologue: Side Alleys of Benjamin’s Modernity Part I: Benjamin’s European East 1. ‘Nothing ever happens as planned or expected’: Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Adventure 2. A Neglected Interview: Walter Benjamin in the Soviet Newspaper Vecherniaia Moskva 3. Walter Benjamin’s reception of the East, or: Mediating Sergei Tretʹiakov’s operative practice 4. Franco-Romanian Entanglements: An Archeology of Walter Benjamin’s Early Reception in Romania Part II: Theorizing (with) Benjamin – Editions, Scholarship, Philosophy 5. Gerhard Seidel and Walter Benjamin in the GDR: Lost Possibilities of an East German Counter Legacy? 6. ‘The Shattering of the Aura as a Moment of Communist Revolution’: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin’s Work in the Scientific Aesthetics of the GDR 7. ‘The Most Significant Art Theorist of Avant-Gardism’: Lukács reads Benjamin 8. Angelus Novus in Budapest: The Possibilities and Vicissitudes of Walter Benjamin’s Reception in Hungary before 1989 9. With radical tolerance for communal culture: Benjamin-inspired aesthetic alternatives in Hungarian dissident thought 10. ‘A rather secretive affair’: Walter Benjamin in post-1968 Czechoslovakia 11. Walter Benjamin travels to Romania: Quotations as ‘Wayside Robbers’ Part III: Translating (with) Benjamin – Artistic Adaptation, Activist Transformation, Linguistic Transfer 12. Before-after: Benjaminian Thought and the Photomontage Practice of Sanja Iveković 13. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Metamodern Reproduction: Walter Benjamin in Late Socialist Yugoslavia 14. When the ‘Angel of History’ Encounters the Russophone Migrant: Haïm Sokol’s Artistic Reading of Walter Benjamin 15. Walter Benjamin and Radu Jude: Bucharest as the Capital of the 21st Century in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn 16. Oaths, Crypto-mining, and Divine Violence in the Caucasus: Benjamin at Work in the Worlds of Post-Soviet Georgia 17. Polish Translation History: Benjamin and the Polish Editor as Tormentor 18. Romanian Translation History: Benjamin and the Romanian Transition 19. Ukrainian Translation History: Benjamin and the Ukrainian Task of Revisiting (Translation) Canon