“The War and Transcendental Order: Critique of Violence in Benjamin, Canetti, and Daniel Paul Schreber.” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 43 (2015): 115–144 (original) (raw)

The great impression made by the violence and turmoil of the Great War and its aftermath in Germany inspired both Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti to theorize about the relationship between violence and political order, Benjamin in “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (Critique of violence, 1921) and Canetti in Masse und Macht (1960). Benjamin and Canetti also shared a fascination for the memoirs of the retired judge and former psychiatric patient Daniel Paul Schreber, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, identifying them with totalitarianism. This paper argues that beneath Benjamin and Canetti's critical identification of Schreber with (German) totalitarianism lurks a great kinship between their writings and those of Schreber, and by reading these three works together as texts of (pathological) affinity a fascinating culprit emerges from Germany's violence of World War I and its aftermath that cannot be easily detected when these texts are analyzed individually, namely the German Idealist change towards making rather than the traditional maintaining or confirming of 'transcendental order.’