I

In 1915 young Walter Benjamin, at the time a prominent student activist with the German Youth Movement, broke publicly with his mentor and leader Gustav Wyneken over the latter’s support of the First World War. “Dear Herr Doctor Wyneken,” Benjamin’s open letter begins, “I ask you to accept the following lines with which I entirely and without reserve disassociate myself from you as a final demonstration of loyalty, and only as that.” The paradox is almost too cute, were its indignation not so passionately felt. “Loyalty,” Benjamin continues, “because I could not utter a word to the man who wrote those words on war and youth [referring to Wyneken’s bellicose 1914 essay “Youth and War”] and because I nonetheless would speak to you, to whom I have never freely said—I know this—that he was the first to lead me into the life of the spirit.” Benjamin then goes on to recall a gathering of Wyneken’s disciples in the context of the First Free German Youth Day more than a year earlier, in October 1913. He had wanted, he writes, to speak candidly to Wyneken then about the significance of the youth movement, but the presence of other student activists had prevented him. He then proceeds to recount the words he would have said.

The specifics of Benjamin’s break with Wyneken and the youth movement are of biographical and historical interest, but what continues to have philosophical resonance is the strange imbrication of dialogic expression and temporal dislocation to which Benjamin’s letter testifies. The difficult turn of thought at work in Benjamin’s missive here is not only the paradox that an unconditional renunciation might be the purest evidence of loyalty, but that precisely the occasion that ends all linguistic dialogue might provide the belated opportunity to express in written form the vital principle of linguistic dialogue. For the words Benjamin would have said to Wyneken concern precisely the impossible possibility of expression: “This time has no form at all that would allow us silent expression [die uns schweigenden Ausdruck gestattet]. Yet we feel ourselves enslaved by this expressionlessness. We scorn the easy irresponsible written expression” (GB, 1:263). The modality of genuine expression is essentially a past perfect conditional; it is now in the present what one would have said at a past moment but did not.