Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
Reply to @johnrobb

@johnrobb Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Then again, where planetary eco-social unraveling isn't as yet evenly distributed, its disavowal mostly is. As Benjamin noted, this response isn't happenstance as much as an ontic inevitability constitutive to our very era. Deny that fundamental, and die.

Copy of tweet here: "That things 'just go on' is the catastrophe." ~ Walter Benjamin thanks to
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Copy of tweet here: "That things 'just go on' is the catastrophe." ~ Walter Benjamin thanks to

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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Paul Holdengraber quoting Walter Benjamin Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. Copy of tweet here: "That things 'just go on' is the catastrophe." ~ Walter Benjamin thanks to

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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Paul Holdengraber quoting Walter Benjamin Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. Copy of tweet here: "That things 'just go on' is the catastrophe." ~ Walter Benjamin thanks to

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Nick Routledge@nick_routledge · 13 Feb 2025

@trippfuller 🧵1/12 'Opening up a revolutionary chance.' A question. Did Benjamin's messianic/revolutionary thesis ultimately succumb to a Franco-Vichy-Nazi storm uncannily paralleling the global, fascist surge of our time? The gas chambers were, of course, but a year ahead. Context, then.

Only in the posthumously published letters of Gershom Scholem have I come across the same note of helpless clear-sightedness and warning. Over and over, even prior to 1933, my father labored to warn, to alert, to awaken to refuge not only those whom he and my mother had left behind in Prague or in Vienna, but the French political-military establishment with which his international dealings had brought him into contact. His “pessimism,” his “alarmist prognostications” elicited only officious dismissal or hostility. Family and friends refused to move. One could come to reasonable terms with Herr Hitler. The unpleasantness would soon pass. The age of pogroms was over. In diplomatic and ministerial circles, my father was regarded as a tedious Cassandra, prone to well-known traits of Jewish hysteria. Papa lived those rancid 1930s like a man trapped in cobwebs, lashing out and sick at heart. There was also, however, a more private and constant regret. George Steiner
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Only in the posthumously published letters of Gershom Scholem have I come across the same note of helpless clear-sightedness and warning. Over and over, even prior to 1933, my father labored to warn, to alert, to awaken to refuge not only those whom he and my mother had left behind in Prague or in Vienna, but the French political-military establishment with which his international dealings had brought him into contact. His “pessimism,” his “alarmist prognostications” elicited only officious dismissal or hostility. Family and friends refused to move. One could come to reasonable terms with Herr Hitler. The unpleasantness would soon pass. The age of pogroms was over. In diplomatic and ministerial circles, my father was regarded as a tedious Cassandra, prone to well-known traits of Jewish hysteria. Papa lived those rancid 1930s like a man trapped in cobwebs, lashing out and sick at heart. There was also, however, a more private and constant regret. George Steiner

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