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As Germany's wartime atmosphere of violence and fear yielded to a hopeful season of revolutionary ideas in 1918, a new firestorm ignited postwar philosophy, burning inward. Germans had lost faith in all political systems, opening a wide gap that was quickly filled by revolutionaries of all kinds, prewar aesthetic revolutionaries among them. Within this context a high-ranking reactionary writer took an interest in a young Jewish philosopher, or, more precisely, a Nazi Lebensphilosopher took an interest in Walter Benjamin's own fascination with Lebensphilosophie as a tool to reach a total critique. This interest was registered in a still unpublished document that Alfred Baeumler, one of the key ideologues of the radical right wing, sent to Klages, while naming Benjamin as a mutual "foe."² (This document is analyzed in detail at the end of this chapter.) Baeumler's interest, negative as it may be, proves a direct response to the challenge of Benjamin's critique and a serious attempt to destroy it. At the center of this document, which may shed some light on an old debate concerning Benjamin's attraction to reactionary thinkers, as Gershom Scholem argued, stands the alternative counterhistory of the late romantic thinker Johann Jakob Bachofen.³ The context surrounding Benjamin's elaborate commentary on the subject reveals his interest in Bachofen's matriarchical, antiimperialist, anti-Roman, and anti-Prussian theory of history.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137342065_4

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