Requiem for a Dream
Walter Benjamin and the Hitler-Stalin Pact
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The Hitler-Stalin pact struck many West European intellectuals like a bolt of lightening. It destroyed their belief in the Soviet Union as a bulwark of anti-fascism and island of bliss. Walter Benjamin’s historical-philosophical legacy, his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” is one of the first theoretical reactions to this loss of utopia.
(Osteuropa 7-8/2009, pp. 149–156)