Walter Benjamin and the German „Reproduction Debate“

Abstract

“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproduction” is undoubtedly the best known, most widely discussed and referred to writing of Benjamin. The editors of a recently published volume dealing specifically with this essay go significantly further in their assessment of its impact. The Artwork essay, they write in their Foreword, “is probably the most frequently cited and most intensely debated essay in the history of the academic humanities in the twentieth century” (Gumbrecht XIII). To this, however, they immediately add: “[T]he past seven decades have shown that almost none of Benjamin’s central predictions have proven to be right.” (Gumbrecht XIII-XIV) The aura has not disappeared, but conquered even the field of art’s technical reproduction; film has not developed along the lines indicated by him into a critical medium for the “masses”; politicisation of art hardly seems to be a relevant practical proposal against its misuses today. These are, one should acknowledge, at least quite plausible critical remarks, to which probably one could add several more.