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Nothing that has had a great effect can really be judged any longer." Walter Benjamin approved of this remark of Goethe's-about Shakespeare-which anticipates the Borgesian recognition that poets create their own precursors. A writer of "great effect" is one who has had such profound influence on those who want to understand him that they are already entangled in his thought before even beginning. They can no longer view him disinterestedly; believing themselves to be interpreting him, they describe themselves, only ever rewriting him in their own image. Benjamin would have recognized this as an effect of what he called aura-the nimbus of "uniqueness and permanence" surrounding the most powerful works and their makers. The aura of the great thinker is another instance of that "strange weave of space and time" in which distance and propinquity become so enmeshed that the thinker's allure resides in just this impossibility of possessing his thought.
Benjamin has become such a thinker, at least for many of his readers. Is it possible to approach him with less reverence while still taking the measure of the seriousness of his thought? One tactic might be by way of travesty-for instance, by staging Benjamin's career as a romantic farce in which Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem feud over their claims on their friend, who in turn pursues the self-absorbed Bertolt Brecht, who only notices him in passing. Brecht is generally seen as having affected Benjamin's thinking more deeply than vice versa. Thus Gershom Scholem; "Brecht was the harder nature and made a deep impact upon the more sensitive Benjamin who entirely lacked athletic qualities." Günther Anders-Hannah Arendts first husband and a cousin of Benjamin's as well as a friend of Brecht's-recalled between them "conversations with explosive content, from which the uninitiated involuntary witnesses could only receive the impression that two gentlemen were conducting a Confucian ritual." His judgment: "Benjamin understood Brecht far better than Brecht understood Benjamin. Benjamin was used to interpreting literature; Brecht, although bubbling over with enthusiasm, was not used to the complexities of the brooding WB. Their friendship' was therefore probably, as one might say, asymmetrical." Despite Anders's evident bias against Brecht and his catty disparagement of the poet/playwrights intellectual depth, his point about the asymmetry of the relationship is...