“The Angel of History,” philosopher Walter Benjamin claims, is witness not to a “chain of events” but rather “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage … in front of his feet.” No doubt this “pile of debris ... [which] grows skyward” consists mainly of human wreckage, the dead; but, as John Schad’s weird and hallucinatory new book, Walter Benjamin’s Ark, demonstrates, it also includes language, texts, the very ability of human beings to communicate. The catastrophe that is mid-twentieth-century history, in particular, reduced texts to a “huge-and-disorderly-heap-of-unsorted BOOKS, a kind of rubble,” such that “words had been muddled,” often in disastrous ways.
Walter Benjamin’s Ark brilliantly picks its way through that rubble, trying to salvage something from the cataclysm. It pieces together an upcycled collage of historical fragments, philosophical and literary texts, impossible conversations, in order to tell the imagined story of Walter Benjamin’s son, Stefan, and his journey as a deportee from England during the Second World War. In 1940, Stefan was forced onto the HMT Dunera and deported, ultimately, to Australia – along with 2000 other “enemy aliens,” some of whom were devoted Nazis, but the majority of whom were Jewish refugees.
Herein lies the first sign of the disintegration of language: the disastrous collapse of the words “German,” “Nazi,” “enemy,” “alien,” “immigrant” and “Jew” into one another. Many other instances of linguistic collapse and miscommunication follow: a Jewish author’s unfinished novel is discovered by the British soldiers on board, and thrown into the Mersey; the letters between Stefan and his mother are lost; Stefan loses touch with his father, Walter; a manuscript Walter claims to have in his suitcase (“a manuscript more valuable than I am,” he says) disappears on his death; his final letter to his son is mysteriously destroyed; a Jewish poet, Gertrud Kolmar, is silenced – initially by being forced to work in a German munitions factory, and subsequently by deportation to Auschwitz.
The deportation of the Jews, whether to Auschwitz or to Australia, is itself facilitated by failed communication. As Schad points out, on 8 August 1942, the World Jewish Congress sent a telegram from Geneva to New York warning about the Final Solution. “This telegram,” Schad notes, “would, initially, be dismissed as a falsehood.” As Schad suggests, miscommunication and misreading can have deadly consequences: excommunication all too easily slips into extermination.
There is still hope, though, according to Schad: “in all its desperation,” Stefan’s situation, is “not devoid of hope.” And Schad’s quasi-biography itself represents an act of hope, in its piecing together of a new kind of language, its revelling in Joycean-Woolfian streams of consciousness, its staging of impossible dialogues, its textual and generic contortions, its bizarre juxtapositions of slapstick with horror. After the war, Stefan became an antiquarian bookseller; and towards the end of Walter Benjamin’s Ark, he is seen straightening the books with “the gentlest touch,” as if rescuing them from the rubble, “lest they topple, fall, and crash” once more. Texts, language, communication persist, just about, and Stefan is doing his bit to restore them, saving them from the wreckage of war.
Jonathan Taylor’s most recent books are A Physical Education (Goldsmiths, 2025) and Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.
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