Introduction : "Sparks Will Fly"

Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger were almost contemporaries, born in the last decade of the nineteenth century. But their life trajectories were very different. Benjamin failed in his attempt to obtain a position at a university and subsequently concentrated on essay writing, initially in the form of reviews. When that became impossible in 1933 and Benjamin was forced to exile in Paris, he started writing for academic journals published outside Germany. Heidegger became an academic star in Germany with the publication of Being and Time (1927). The following year, he succeeded his former teacher, Edmund Husserl, as professor at Freiburg University and five years later"”at the same time that Benjamin was ostracized because of his Jewish background"”Heidegger was joining the Nazi Party in order to be elected Rector. The troubled years of exile ended in Benjamin's death under unclear circumstances at the Spanish borders in 1940. Heidegger was "denazified" after World War II and allowed to return to teaching. Given their life histories, then, Benjamin, the cosmopolitan Jew, and Heidegger, who preferred his peasant hut in remote Todtnauberg to city life, seem hardly to have anything in common. And yet, the two figures have gradually been brought closer together since the 1960s. The first move was the rediscovery of the work of Benjamin when his old friend, Theodor Adorno, started republishing his work. But the decisive move that brought Heidegger and Benjamin into contact was Hannah Arendt's introduction to Illuminations. Arendt, who knew both men, suggested that Benjamin's concept of truth is similar to Heidegger's concept of aletheia. Arendt also pointed out that they both shared a concern with the destruction of tradition, and concluded that "without realizing it," Benjamin had a lot in common with Heidegger.1 According to Arendt, then, the two contemporary thinkers, who were quite revolutionary on their own"”Benjamin as a reformer of a "crude" Marxist tradition and Heidegger as precipitating in the renewal of phenomenology and hermeneutics"”and who seemed to be unaware of each other's' work, were nevertheless working on philosophical platforms that can be aligned.