Walter Benjamin in the European East Networks, Conflicts, and Reception

Note on Transliteration

Abbreviations

Prologue: Side Alleys of Benjamin’s Modernity
Caroline Adler & Sophia Buck

Part I: Benjamin’s European East

1.     ‘Nothing ever happens as planned or expected’: Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Adventure
Sergei A. Romashko

2.     A Neglected Interview: Walter Benjamin in the Soviet Newspaper Vecherniaia Moskva
Caroline Adler & Sophia Buck

3.     Walter Benjamin’s reception of the East, or: Mediating Sergei Tretʹiakov’s operative practice
Pavel Arseniev

4.     Franco-Romanian Entanglements: An Archeology of Walter Benjamin’s Early Reception in Romania
Markus Bauer

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?
Robert Pursche

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
Martin Küpper

7.     ‘The Most Significant Art Theorist of Avant-Gardism’: Lukács reads Benjamin
Konstantin Baehrens

8.     Angelus Novus in Budapest: The Possibilities and Vicissitudes of Walter Benjamin’s Reception in Hungary before 1989
Anna Zsellér & Károly Tóth

9.     With radical tolerance for communal culture: Benjamin-inspired aesthetic alternatives in Hungarian dissident thought
Gábor Gángó

10.  ‘A rather secretive affair’: Walter Benjamin in post-1968 Czechoslovakia
Anna Förster

11.  Walter Benjamin travels to Romania: Quotations as ‘Wayside Robbers’
Bogdan Popa

Part III: Translating (with) Benjamin – Artistic Adaptation, Activist Transformation, Linguistic Transfer

12.  Before-after: Benjaminian Thought and the Photomontage Practice of Sanja Iveković
Deirdre Madeleine Smith

13.  The Work of Art in the Age of Its Metamodern Reproduction: Walter Benjamin in Late Socialist Yugoslavia
Isabel Jacobs

14.  When the ‘Angel of History’ Encounters the Russophone Migrant: Haïm Sokol’s Artistic Reading of Walter Benjamin
Elena Korowin

15.  Walter Benjamin and Radu Jude: Bucharest as the Capital of the 21st Century in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
Anna Migliorini

16.   Oaths, Crypto-mining, and Divine Violence in the Caucasus: Benjamin at Work in the Worlds of Post-Soviet Georgia
Luka Nakhutsrishvili

17.  Polish Translation History: Benjamin and the Polish Editor as Tormentor
Adam Lipszyc

18.  Romanian Translation History: Benjamin and the Romanian Transition
Christian Ferencz-Flatz

19.  Ukrainian Translation History: Benjamin and the Ukrainian Task of Revisiting (Translation) Canon
Kateryna Mishchenko

Index

Biography

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.