Reader's Digest: August 26, 2023

Before he was an iconic cultural critic, Walter Benjamin made radio broadcasts for stations in Frankfurt and Berlin. His first, March 23, 1927, was about young Russian writers. The last, in early 1933—as the Nazis seized power in Germany—was a psychedelic radio play about moon aliens who make a study of human misery. In between, Benjamin spoke about market halls in Berlin, reading E.T.A Hoffman as a child, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and more. Hannah Arendt “once likened her late friend to a pearl diver who possessed a gift for diving into the wreckage of bourgeois civilization and emerging into the sunlight with the rarest of treasures.”

Benjamin made around ninety radio broadcasts, but no recordings of his voice—“described as beautiful, even melodious”—now survive. Thankfully, many of the transcripts do, published by Verso as Radio Benjamin, and reviewed by Peter E. Gordon in The Nation.

“Like a man climbing to his roof,” Gordon writes, “Benjamin reports on the flood that threatens…