ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show how in the 1930s Walter Benjamin resisted the fascist aesthetization of politics, not only with a critical theory of the politicisation of aesthetics—a well-known theory that will be summarized briefly in the following—but also with a positive practice of writing. I will take Benjamin’s text entitled The German People— called “a Jewish ark” by its author—as an underrated example of such a political technique of writing which defends, at the same time, a certain conception of Europe. In this book, Benjamin gathers marginal fragments of letters from German writers from the eighteenth and the nineteenth century in order to oppose a laconic, first European humanism to a Nazi and fascist homogenisation of politics.
