Walter Benjamin in the European East : Networks, Conflicts, and Reception

This book explores how Walter Benjamin’s work circulated, was translated, contested, and creatively reworked across socialist and post-socialist Europe, shifting the focus from canonical Western reception to Benjamin’s Eastern afterlives.

Walter Benjamin in the European East offers the first comprehensive account of how Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) work circulated, was translated, contested, and creatively reworked across socialist and post-socialist Europe, shifting the focus from canonical Western reception to Benjamin’s Eastern afterlives. Bringing together scholars, translators, artists, editors, and activists, the volume reconstructs a wide range of overlooked material: newspaper notices, unpublished correspondence, censored or delayed translations, samizdat editions, editorial disputes, artistic appropriations, and political reuses. Its case studies historicize Benjamin’s reception in specific local, linguistic, and institutional contexts, while showing how his concepts moved across theory, literature, visual culture, and activism. In doing so, the book challenges center–periphery models of intellectual history and rethinks the East/West divide as a historical and epistemological problem rather than a fixed geography. This volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in literary and cultural studies, intellectual history, translation studies, art history, and East European studies, as well as to readers working on Walter Benjamin, materialism, socialism and post-socialism, and the transnational circulation of critical theory.