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"What does the good Luxemburg want? She […] would certainly have liked, if it had been possible for her, to preach revolution to the buffaloes, to found them a buffalo republic, possibly with the beautiful sounds of birds and the melodic calls of shepherds"—Karl Kraus, "Response to Rosa Luxemburg from Someone Unsentimental"
In a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem from December 29, 1920, Walter Benjamin reports on his ongoing work on a project that he refers to simply as his "Politics."1 After referring to the completion of one of the three texts that were to make up this planned project—the lost essay on the figure of the "true politician"—he expresses his intention to write the two remaining parts at the start of the new year (Benjamin, Briefe 250). At the end of the same letter, having already concluded with an apology for its "variegated" character, Benjamin returns to the subject of this project with a brief remark. "Now I only want to say," he writes, "that my brother has gifted me the letters that Rosa Luxemburg has written from prison during the war"—the Briefe aus dem Gefängnis that she wrote to her friend Sophie Liebknecht between 1915 and 1918—and goes on to add that he was struck by their "unbelievable beauty and significance" (250-51). How this "unbelievable" significance may be understood is not explicitly stated but suggested by the remainder of Benjamin's remark, which evokes a dispute where precisely the Bedeutung of these letters, their meaning and significance, is at stake. "Karl Kraus," he continues, has written a "significant polemic" (bedeutende Polemik) targeting a recent "unashamed attack on the spirit of these letters" (251). This bellicose rescue operation, presented as an attack against an attack on the "spirit" of Luxemburg's letters, appears to bear some relation to the work on politics that Benjamin is immersed in at the same moment. The latest texts in Kraus' journal, Die Fackel, Benjamin goes on to remark, show that he is "wholly on the way to becoming a great politician" (ganz auf dem Wege zum großen Politiker, 251). These recent writings, including the "significant polemic" regarding the "unbelievable significance" of Luxemburg's prison letters, thus seem to have harbored a political tendency for Benjamin: they point...