Walter Benjamin in the European East

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artists, editors, and activists, the volume reconstructs a wide range of overlooked material: newspaper notices, unpublished correspondence, censored or delayed translations, samizdat editions, editorial disputes, artistic appropriations, and political reuses.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.

Caroline Adler is a scholar of Cultural History and Theory and research associate at the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force at Hamburg University. From 2020 to 2023 she was part of the DFG-Research Training Group The Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms at Humboldt-University Berlin, where she completed her dissertation on Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Moscow’ and its literary construction (forthcoming with Kadmos, 2026). Her research focuses on genealogies of modernity, method and literarization in the works of Walter Benjamin, epistemologies of the aesthetic, and theory and critique of scientific exhibition practice. Alongside her academic work, she curates both discourse and exhibition programs, serves as an editor of the Berlin Review, and is a board member of the Berlin collective diffrakt. Sophia Buck is a literary scholar and comparatist specialising in modern German and European intellectual history, and she is currently Montgomery Fellow in Modern German Literature at the University of Oxford. She studied German literature and philosophy in Heidelberg, Prague, and Oxford, and completed her DPhil at Merton College, Oxford (2019–2024) on Walter Benjamin’s “New Optic” and his Soviet-French connections, with visiting positions in Paris and Berlin and prizes from Merton in 2022 and 2023. Her work focuses on European intellectual networks, twentieth-century literary criticism across German, French, and Russian contexts, material philology, and the history of the humanities in times of war, and she has published in English and German and is a member of the International Walter Benjamin Society.