The Letters of Martin Buber by Martin Buber

Author:Martin Buber [Buber, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5013-2
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2013-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

357. Walter Benjamin to Martin Buber

« Berlin, February 23, 1927 »

My esteemed Herr Buber,

My stay in Moscow turned out to be somewhat longer than I supposed.219 When I arrived in Berlin, I had to struggle with a bout of influenza. Now I have been at work for a number of days, but cannot send you the article by the end of February.220 Would you be so kind as to write me when you are planning to leave Germany?221 Come what may, I shall try to get the manuscript to you about a week before that. One thing I can definitely promise you, and it is negative: my presentation will be devoid of all theory. This, I hope, is precisely what will enable me to give voice to the creaturely aspect [das Kreaturliche]—to the extent that I have succeeded in grasping and preserving this very new, strange language which loudly resounds through the acoustical mask of an environment that has been utterly transformed. I want to give a depiction of the city of Moscow at the moment in which “everything factual is already theory,” a portrait that thus refrains from any deductive abstraction or prognosis and, within certain limits, even from any judgments. It is my absolute conviction that such abstractions, prognoses, or judgments can in this instance be given not on the basis of “intellectual” data but only on the basis of economic facts, and even in Russia very few people have a sufficient grasp of these facts. Moscow, as constituted at this particular time, lets one recognize all possibilities in schematic abridgment—above all, the possibilities of the failure and the success of the revolution. In either case, however, there will be something unforeseeable, and its portrait will differ greatly from all programmatic portraits of the future. Today this is becoming harshly and clearly evident in the people and the world about them. […]

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