It’s always been hard to pin Benjamin down. Aberrant Marxist, heretical Jew, maverick social theorist, deconstructive spirit—he has been many things to many people. It is equally hard to describe what he did, in part because Americans don’t really make intellectuals like him. Benjamin, whose most important work was written in Berlin during the ’20s and then in Paris during the ’30s, wasn’t just a book reviewer, although he wanted to be the best one in Germany. He was hardly a journalist, but a good deal of his considerable production was written for newspapers. He was not a philosopher, but he is treated like one. To use a quaint expression, he was a man of letters. Even that does not do him justice.

Uwe Steiner’s new book on Benjamin—which attempts to put Benjamin in his historical place—doesn’t really do him justice either. Steiner traces Benjamin’s mature work to the thinker’s early days as a radical student before the First World War, when Nietzsche was all the rage. Fair enough. Steiner also has a larger goal: He wants us to stop trying to bend Benjamin to our intellectual will—be it Marxist, deconstructive, or religious. A laudable goal but also slightly perverse, because Benjamin had no trouble trying on others’ thoughts to see if they fit. Even worse, Steiner’s approach scants Benjamin’s intellectual and emotional allure.

Benjamin’s remarkable endurance derives as much from his style as from his ideas. Or rather, his brilliant, damnably esoteric critique of capitalist culture is one with the pathos and indirectness of his prose. His sentences suggest. They imply. At their best, they radiate. Hence the remarkable bursts of scholarship his work has seen over the last few decades. He reminds people of what they might think.

His most famous set piece comes from his last work, a series of aphorisms called “On the Concept of History.” Written in the short period before he killed himself while trying to flee from the Nazis, this paragraph gains some of its considerable melancholy from retrospect, from the fact that it has been taken as his last will and testament:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

A beautiful piece of writing that gets an extra kick from its pessimistic counter-intuitive punch line. Progress doesn’t progress in the slightest. It is a steady march through disaster. And there is nothing, it seems, we can do about it.

Bleak stuff. But Benjamin’s ability to arrest you with the solidity of an abstraction can tempt you away from the thin thread of his argument. On its own, this paragraph presents us with a picture of fallen and unredeemable history. In the context of the other paragraphs of the essay in which it appears, we can see that the Angel of History does not have the last word. History, Benjamin maintains, is permanently, if elusively, susceptible to revolutionary change.

Benjamin claimed that his work was saturated with theology, even—or rather especially—when it appears to be at its most secular. In the piece that contains the Angel, the revolution fulfills a theological mandate by making “whole what has been smashed.” Benjamin imagines that it will enact tikkun olam in a very literal sense. Benjamin’s colleague, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, once accused him of believing all too squarely in the Last Judgment. Though Benjamin tried to recast his thought into more acceptably materialist terms, Horkheimer had a point. Benjamin might have talked about redemption as the historical fulfillment of squandered hopes, but at heart he was always listening for the final trump. He was waiting for the glorious resurrection of the dead.

Benjamin’s thought was essentially religious. It clung to the twin promises of redemption and transcendence. The man worked from the clearly Jewish intuition that justice cannot be derived from the world as it is. Justice is precisely that small break from nature instituted by the Law. Our problem is not that nature is sinful. Our problem lies with the fact that on its own, nature just isn’t enough. It needs to be transcended, if only just a bit. As his friend T. W. Adorno was fond of reminding us, the Talmud says that the redeemed world will be like this one, but a little different. And that tiny shift means everything.

But what happens when we, as the children of modernity, have lost the Law? That is where Benjamin’s messianic politics slip in. Gershom Scholem, the magisterial historian of Kabbalah, always maintained that Benjamin was a Jewish thinker and not really a Marxist. For his part, Benjamin argued that he pursued a single goal—the radical transformation of the world, a utopian strike against suffering. His was not the tikkun olam of good deeds and incremental improvements, but of bold risks and decisive moves.

Sure, sure, there is a great deal of Romanticism in all this (as Steiner would be the first to point out) and a sentimentalizing anarchism that speaks of another era. Even so, Benjamin proposes a heresy we might want to consider: redemption without faith. He refuses to give up the rigors and promises of theology for a more amenable, even amiable ethical Judaism. He therefore cuts a different path for the post-religious. Just as Scholem, however unwittingly, presents us with a Kabbalah without halakhah, so Benjamin quite wittingly addresses a theology without God. An intractable contradiction? Perhaps. Nevertheless, it is a historical conundrum that we have yet to overcome.

We’ll begin with the discipline with the least modifiers: concrete poetry is poetry whose appearance has been made integral to meaning; poetry whose typography, not always justified to the left margin, is at least as important to comprehension as word-meaning, rhythm, and rhyme. The best examples are the worst classics from grade-school English: the poem about the word “and” in the shape of an ampersand; the poem about a jug shaped like a jug; the poem about a boy’s blue eyes printed in blue font. I’ve fantasized about writing a positive, even effusive review of a book that would be arranged on the page into the outlines of a toilet or to form the word “NOT!”

Of course, concrete poems also exist in situ, or in nature—they can be found, or discovered, and this process of discovery, the founding poets tell us, is the most moral way “to write.” This process gets at not what can be made, but what is. And so, a stop sign says stop but take that sign off a streetcorner and hang it on a museum wall and the meaning has changed with context. A celebrity’s signature is “an autograph,” and is worth something; its provenance gives value, and its connotative appearance means more than the denotative content of that appearance, which is, after all, only scribbled with pen. These fetishistic concerns come into play particularly on occasions for which traditional verse seems inadequate: the most moving tribute I’ve encountered to the victims of 9/11 was hearing their names read over a loudspeaker on a windy anniversary in downtown Manhattan—doomed name after name without pause, the sheer mass and the mass of their different heritages overwhelming; and it’s glib but accurate to say that Auschwitz, that deathcamp that has “inspired”—a terrible verb—so much of the most inferior poetry of the 20th century, is itself a sort of concrete poem (which is to say: a poem in concrete, and in wood and wire).

CREDIT: round and round by ratterrell / Robert Terrell; some rights reserved.

But if, as Theodor Adorno maintained, after Auschwitz poetry was immoral (though he later repented of that statement), what were writers of the 1950s to write? Novels that avoided mentioning anything that happened in occupied Poland? Radio dramas of Nazi apologetics? Tens of millions were dead, cities were razed, and German-language literature was somehow corpse and city at once: a corpus first killed, then looted of its vitals, defiled. Also, it didn’t help that many of Germany and Austria’s finest writers were Jews. In the wake of that loss it became apparent that no ideal literature could reconstitute culture because it was just such literary idealism that had collaborated in culture’s destruction: Hitler was a noted memoirist; Goebbels, a literature Ph.D. from Heidelberg, wrote novels and poetry; and good Nazis were supposed to read Goethe between bouts of Jew-killing under the shade of Goethe’s oak tree at Buchenwald.

The 1950s and ’60s avant-garde decided to aid that destruction by destroying the destroyers, and what that meant, especially, was giving them their say—again. By changing context one changed content, as Bäcker and the writers published by neue texte, the name of the journal he edited and publishing house he led (writers comprising the Vienna Group, including Friedrich Achleitner, H.C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener), “wrote” by quotation and juxtaposition. Bäcker called his technique “System nachschrift,” literally the system of writing-after, or after-writing, but a word commonly used to mean “postscript.” His transcript is made only of documents pertaining to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust (other texts, like nachschrift, nachschrift 2, and EPITAPH, occasionally have recourse to visual material). At the same time that Günter Grass was trying to write a future for Germany by repoliticizing the novel, at the same time Peter Handke was denouncing Grass’s outward approach to politics and was instead writing inward, Bäcker invented a terminus for both: the personal and political. His genre, which would be called Dokumentarliteratur (documentary literature), or dokumentarische dichtung (documentary poetry), signaled a formal contribution as original as Thomas Bernhard’s unbreakable paragraphs, but it is as moral contribution that it remains incomparable.

Here the banality of evil becomes the sublimity of a poem; here Bäcker incriminates by verse:

if jews required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is not required to wear the insignia, then they are required to have a separate nameplate on the apartment entrance and the insignia immediately next to it
if persons not required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is required to wear the insignia, then they are entitled to a separate nameplate without the insignia
the affixation of nameplates and insignia is to be completed in such a way that every doubt is eliminated and so that it is clearly evident that

That is a quotation from an announcement “concerning official assignments,” from Vienna’s Jüdischen Nachrichtenblatt of March 3, 1942. Other pages of transcript make more explicit use of concrete, or spatial, properties, such as the excerpts below, which turn the list-poem, that repetitive staple of modern verse, back into the functionally repetitive list, or into something rhetorically between:

auschwitz telephones

no. 18
no. 45
no. 17
no. 33
no. 21

no. 41
no. 76
no. 16
no. 74
no. I
no. F III/2
no. 32
no. 62

no. 315
no. 55

***

7/1 19 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/3 25 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/4 13 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/5 32 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/6 12 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/7 14 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/8 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/10 22 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/11 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/12 25 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/13 15 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/14 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/15 13 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/18 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/19 29 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/20 30 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/21 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/22 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/23 1 prisoner in hartheim reported as having died
7/24 30 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/25 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/26 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/27 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/28 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/29 19 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/31 26 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died

Reading this list is arduous but typing it, retyping it for this review, is even worse. If the most moral way to write about the Holocaust is to quote it, perhaps the most moral way to read about it is to copy the quotations, and so Bäcker, like Victor Klemperer, author of The Language of the Third Reich, and like America’s Charles Reznikoff, who performed a similar palimpsest of testimony with Holocaust, might be best understood as a reader who wrote. In my own reading-writing of this passage, I had the following thoughts: do the days skipped, such as July 2 and July 9, represent Sundays, or other “days-off,” and what did the executioners do then? Also, why was only one prisoner executed on the 23rd, and who was that singular man? He had a name, certainly, and perhaps a family, etc. This type of questioning leads to the type of writing Bäcker sought to avoid—we ask, and because the dead are dead we can only, but barely, imagine the answers. Only if we flip to the back of the book, because Bäcker never clutters the pages of his poem with notes, do we find some brief jot—a true postscript—that this list of Hartheim prisoners was obtained from prosecutorial documents in the possession of the state attorney in Linz, dated 1948.

Casual appreciations of Bäcker’s achievement often forgo the terror while embracing technique: certainly there are a number of websites that compare the quotation method—“appropriation”—to the Web itself, and discourse on the ease with which writers today can ape postmodernity with just a click of the mouse, copying ‘n’ pasting “poems,” or arranging Google results into verse. From the pecia system of the Middle Ages, which broke manuscripts into sections, or peciæ, assigning each to a different scribe, to the highlight and drag I’ve used to rearrange the very sentence you’re reading now, we’ve lately arrived in the time of the home use version, the no-muss, no-fuss version, of monkish copying; in which one makes a text one’s own not through holy transcription but by impulsive download. Bäcker was no mere technician, however, and his almost religious transcription was necessary for reasons of renewal: not so much literary as of the soul. Bäcker, born 1925, dead in 2003, was active in the press and photography office of the Linz Hitlerjugend, serving ultimately as a cadre unit leader (Gefolgschaftsführer), and joined the Nazi Party as soon as he turned 18. He spent the rest of his life atoning for this, forcing himself to read his moral failure into every sentence he quoted, into every word he excised from primary sources as if they were his own, his primary, flesh.

No wonder that after the 1960s, as Thomas Wheatland writes in his impressive new study The Frankfurt School in Exile, “ambitious young sympathizers with the New Left” in the academy turned en masse to the Frankfurt School, a scholarly subject that they could explore “without having to disguise or hide their intellectual and political orientations.” It is strange that it took until the 1960s for the Frankfurters to make a major impact on America, however, since from 1934 to 1949 they were actually living in the United States. The Institute for Social Research—the institutional home of the Frankfurt School thinkers—had to uproot itself from Germany in 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power. After a brief period in Geneva, it relocated to Morningside Heights, where it formed an uneasy partnership with Columbia University.

From its headquarters at 428 West 117th Street, the Institute struggled with the intellectual and practical challenges involved in doing European-style Critical Theory in America. While the members of the Institute eventually scattered—Horkheimer and Adorno moved to Los Angeles, joining the German émigré colony there, while after Pearl Harbor Marcuse and others went to Washington, applying their skills to the war effort—New York remained the Institute’s official home until 1949, when Horkheimer moved it back to the University of Frankfurt.

In his book, an unusually thorough blend of intellectual and institutional history, Wheatland sheds new light on this phase of the Frankfurt School’s existence. Wheatland is interested in the ideas of the School, but he is also interested in the ways that less intellectual factors—like money, personality clashes, and opportunism—shaped those ideas’ development and reception. In a sense, Wheatland has subjected the Frankfurt School to a genuinely Marxist analysis—he shows how the group’s economic substructure affected its ideological superstructure. In the process, he brings these often idolized figures back to human scale, and offers an object lesson in the unedifying ways that intellectual careers are made.

The Jewish dimension to this story is only occasionally Wheatland’s explicit subject, but it is absolutely central nonetheless. After all, the reason the Institute had to leave Frankfurt in the first place was that, in addition to being radicals and Marxists, the members of the group were almost all Jewish. The Institut für Sozialforschung was created by Herman Weil, a German Jew who had made a fortune importing grain from Argentina, and his son Felix, who like many young men was radicalized after Germany’s defeat in World War I. In 1923, still in the early days of the Weimar Republic, the Weils created the Institute as an independent think tank with a lavish endowment. Their plan was to bring together scholars from different fields, who would work together to develop comprehensive new theories about how modern society functioned and how it might be transformed.

Not coincidentally, as Wheatland shows, almost all the Institute’s hires were, like the Weils, highly assimilated Jews from bourgeois families. Max Horkheimer, the philosopher who became head of the Institute in 1931 and guided it for the next several decades, was the son of a textile manufacturer from Stuttgart; his relationship with his father was destroyed when the son married the father’s Christian secretary. Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, the most brilliant thinker associated with the Institute, was the son of a Jewish wine merchant and a Catholic woman from Corsica. (He eventually dropped the Jewish half of his last name and went simply by Adorno.) Erich Fromm, a sociologist turned psychoanalyst, was unusual in being raised in an Orthodox family; he “maintained a strong religious identity into adulthood,” Wheatland writes. Similar stories could be told of most of the scholars who came to work at Frankfurt.

Among the tidal wave of academic refugees from Hitler’s Germany, the members of the Institute were actually very lucky. Horkheimer, with a prescience all too rare among German Jews, had already shifted the Institute’s endowment out of German banks and shipped its library out of the country. The scholars reassembled in Geneva, but this could only be a temporary respite, since most of them could not get permanent Swiss visas. As Wheatland shows in the first of the book’s four sections, Horkheimer embarked on a well-thought-out campaign to find a new home for the Institute in the United States, sending out a pamphlet with testimonials to sociology departments at American universities.

Wheatland makes clear just why Columbia took the bait. Robert MacIver, the head of Columbia’s sociology department, was looking for a way to establish a social research bureau, which would provide quantitative data to support the work of theorists. In 1929, MacIver had applied to the university for $50,000 to create such a bureau, writing in his proposal that “the situation with reference to research through quantitative measurement may really be described as a crisis. If this crisis is not met in a large way, achievement on the part of universities cannot be expected.” But the Depression made such an expensive program impossible. When the Institute for Social Research came calling—with its private endowment, and its experience doing field research and surveys—it seemed like a perfect match for Columbia’s needs.

In fact, as Wheatland goes on to show, the fit was not ideal, and grew even less so over time. The Institute did design and fund several important research projects, including a study of the effect of unemployment on family life in Newark, New Jersey, and a study of adolescent attitudes toward authority. But these studies were not really what Horkheimer cared about. Rather, he was interested in developing a total theory of late-capitalist society, which would encompass politics, economics, culture, and society. This would eventually bear fruit in Horkheimer and Adorno’s magnum opus, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

To keep the Institute running, however, Horkheimer needed American allies and funders, who were mainly interested in empirical problem-solving. This dilemma became acute in the later 1930s, when a series of bad investment decisions cost the Institute a large chunk of its endowment, and forced Horkheimer to lay off a number of associates. As Wheatland shows, this process was handled badly, with Horkheimer antagonizing Erich Fromm, the most popular member of the Institute among its American patrons. (Fromm would eventually go on to write bestselling psychology books like The Art of Loving.) In fact, Horkheimer comes across in Wheatland’s account as a ruthless academic infighter, not afraid to use his money and power to punish his enemies. The contrast between the Frankfurt School’s dreams of social liberation and its actual dependence on such all-too-human motives is a melancholy and ironic one.

In subsequent sections of The Frankfurt School in Exile, Wheatland shows how the Institute came into contact with two important segments of the American Jewish community. The first were the New York Intellectuals, who were in many ways the perfect American counterpart to the Frankfurters: Jewish radical intellectuals with an interest in politics and culture. While the two groups never engaged as deeply as they might have—in part, Wheatland shows, due to the Frankfurters’ policy of staying aloof from American politics—some relationships did form, and New Yorkers like Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer became aware of Critical Theory.

More unlikely, on its surface, was the bond the Institute formed with the establishment American Jewish Committee, which turned out to be the patron the struggling exiles badly needed. In 1943, the Committee gave the Institute a $10,000 grant to produce a report on the causes of anti-Semitism. This eventually grew into the landmark five-volume report Studies in Prejudice, published in 1950, which brought the Institute its first real mainstream recognition. Wheatland notes the irony that it should be a specifically, not to say parochially, Jewish project that made the Institute’s name in America.

After all, it is possible to see the whole endeavor of Critical Theory as being a way for these brilliant German Jews, assimilated to German culture yet rejected by Germany itself, to imagine a place for themselves outside of Jewishness and Germanness. Yet “the anti-Semitism project,” as Wheatland writes, “suggested an abandonment of revolutionary utopianism and the temporary adoption of American liberalism.” His important book ought to bring new attention to this highly suggestive part of the Frankfurt School’s story.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

His origins lie before industry certainly, before widespread centralization. He began, in fact, when people stopped working for themselves and started working for others; when individual or familial subsistence gave way to earning a living. Work, in the 19th century, became largely an indoor activity, making daily labor—not in the fields and farmlands, but behind four walls in a plant—seem contained, a place where behavior could be scrutinized, and surveilled. Then, with the demise of the aristocracy and church estates as the markets opened to the previously disenfranchised, a middle-class emerged, grown out of the ranks of lowly employees promoted off the factory floor and behind desks.

At this juncture, deskwork had become almost totally detached from the real physical work it controlled. The European bourgeoisie never made much of anything, ultimately: they administered, administrated, directed. The typical officeworker or bureaucrat made nothing, but he made money, whereas his son, who would become an artist, made “something”—an artwork—that was worth “nothing.” The typical generational reaction to the values of the fin de siècle middle-manager was just this—art.

This was Kafka’s reaction, but he would have it both ways. He would be doubly representative, both of his generation, and of the generation earlier. Throughout the 19th century, merchant-managerial fathers groomed their sons to take over their businesses, but Karl Marx’s father was a lawyer; Gustav Mahler’s father managed a distillery; Walter Benjamin’s father was a banker and a dealer in antiques; Gershom Scholem’s father was a printer, and Karl Kraus’ father manufactured the paper on which his son wrote. The redoubtable head of the Wittgenstein dynasty was an industrialist, with interests in iron and steel.

Here then, is Kafka, the last of the line. As Theodor Adorno noted, the last of the Modernists were also the last of the bourgeoisie; Adorno’s father sold, but did not make, wine. Kafka would become another sort of last, too: He became the representative writer of the last generation of continuous Jewish life and art in Europe, almost two centuries after the beginning of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, when Jews first began clawing out of the ghettos. Kafka was an administrator who could not stand up to his parents (he was especially afraid of his father), whose relatives’ reputations—as Benjamin might have put it, their “auras”—intimidated him. He was the petit, clerkish son of a family that had had physical power (Kafka’s paternal people were schochets, Jewish ritual slaughterers from Osek, or Wossek, in provincial Bohemia), and spiritual authority (his mother’s side were rabbis). Hermann Kafka, pater familias, was a small business owner, the supervisor of a dozen employees; his shop on the Zeltnergasse (now Celetná ulice) sold haberdashery, gloves, slippers, and umbrellas. He also founded an asbestos factory, the Prager Asbestwerke Hermann & Co. His son, however, was devoid of a proprietor’s practicalities. Kafka didn’t just live in his head—he lived two lives in his head.

Into these bifurcations we should cleave two more: not just Kafka’s Judaism but the officially sanctioned anti-Semitism of Austro-Hungary, and then the exigencies of Kafka’s later Prague life, split between German, which he wrote in, and Czech, which he spoke fluently, and which became, after the War, his employer’s primary language. After the Empire’s fall, and Czech independence, Kafka stayed on at his reorganized company, known as The Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for Czechoslovakia. Just like with women—Kafka was engaged three times, to two different women—he was a willing slave, and would serve any master.

As for anti-Semitism, it nearly prevented his career. Kafka thought himself lucky to have made it into Prague’s Charles University despite an unofficial numerus clausus—“the closed number” that imposed a quota on a university’s Jews—and so felt compelled to comport himself with respect and attention to his studies. That sense of election and duty would quickly disappear. Kafka began his study of law with an almost theological seriousness, only to degenerate in his practice into routine prosecutions of corrupt hotel owners in Marienbad. This disconnect between the Law’s authority and the law’s application bred cynicism, as did the bias of a modern social welfare state that supported workers’ equality but not equality for Jews; such contradictions had to be daily resisted for Kafka to function at either one of his desks. The initial idealism, even optimism, that characterized his university study also characterized his first attempts at writing stories; tellingly, Kafka began his writing life in earnest at the same time as he began his coursework in law. Once employed, however, that youthful energy was suffocated, destroyed.

Soon, the utopian, picaresque spirit of his first novel, America (also known as The Man Who Disappeared), was deadened, numbed by the grind. Work constantly obtruded on Kafka’s enthusiasms, as his most private occupation—the writing of stories, the invention of worlds—found itself annulled in the selflessness of legalistic formulations. Such technical prose matured Kafka, which is to say it also leeched from him any plentitude of spirit. While legalisms allowed him to strip his stories, along with his personality, permitting him to present his fictions along with his terrible depressions and psychosomatic illnesses as mere recountings of the “facts,” the law’s recursive, casuistical constructs also served to entangle Kafka more terminally in his loneliness, and his failure. Need anyone be reminded that none of Kafka’s novels were ever finished? Why? Because they could never be proven. They could never be definitively adjudged.

Kafka’s career finally ended in 1922, when he retired early due to illness, on a miserly pension of 10,608 Czech crowns per annum. Toward the end of his tenure, friends had begun calling him František, the Czech version of Franz; he was still one of two Jews allowed to work at the Institute (he did not enjoy the company of the other). Meanwhile, the world had fallen apart. Forty million people had died throughout Europe, millions more had lost limbs in accidents amid the workplace of history, and, above all, literature now had the movies to contend with: Kafka enjoyed The White Slave Girl, The Heartbreaker, The Thirsty Gendarme, and Theodor Körner. We are far from the first fields, and the eclogues of pastoral poets.