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Book cover for Walter Benjamin’s Ark open access

Publication date: 1 November 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089709

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Walter Benjamin’s Ark

A departure in biography

John Schad (Author)

In July 1940, amidst fear of Nazi invasion, HMT Dunera left England. On board were a few British soldiers guarding over 2000 interned male Enemy Aliens, mostly Germans. Some of the internees were passionate Nazis, but most were Jewish refugees. Among them was Stefan Benjamin, the estranged child of the German-Jewish intellectual, Walter Benjamin.

Walter Benjamin’s Ark re-reads the life and work of Walter Benjamin via the curious life of his only child, Stefan Rafael Benjamin. The focal point is Stefan’s dramatic voyage from England to Australia in 1940, a voyage rich in intellectual suggestion, shared as it was with obscure men with famous names such as Wittgenstein, Kafka, Marx and Wilde. Central to the book is the one substantive text that can be ascribed to Stefan, namely, Benjamin’s meticulous transcription of Stefan’s utterances as an infant. This fascinating text has been largely overlooked, despite the insistence of Benjamin’s biographers that ‘it continued to play a role in Walter Benjamin’s writing until the end of his life’. This book thus seeks not only to bring into view the intriguing figure that is Stefan but also to identify him as that most crucial of Benjaminian spectres, namely, the secret ‘you’ or addressee of Benjamin’s writings.

List of figures
List of abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 (Unknown)

2 (Unseen)

3 (Unless)

4 (Untold)

5 (Untoward)

Postface

Afterword
Mona Benjamin

DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800089709

Publication date: 01 November 2025

PDF ISBN: 9781800089709

EPUB ISBN: 9781800089716

Hardback ISBN: 9781800089679

Paperback ISBN: 9781800089693

John Schad (Author)

John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at University of Lancaster and author of several works of experimental criticism, including *Someone Called Derrida* (Sussex, 2007), The Late *Walter Benjamin* (2012), *Paris Bride* (2020) and (with Fred Dalmasso) *Derrida | Benjamin. Two Plays for the Stage* (2021).

Walter Benjamin’s Ark is the story of a imaginary voyage spun out of a real one, of the ship Dunera that that carried Walter Benjamin’s son Stefan from Britain to Australia. The voyage is a compound of many other voyages, on different fictional and historical wavelengths, its passengers a collection of stowaways. stand-ins, impostors, understudies, namesakes and doppelgängers, including a Wittgenstein, a Kafka and a trio of Wildes. By turns séance, vaudeville routine and somnabulistic seminar, and constantly invaded by refugee voices from the written words of Benjamin and others, this is a haunting, haunted voyage through a dream history of the Second World War. Once more, John Schad has come up with a wholly new, and utterly unforgettable way of writing history.’
Steven Connor, King’s College London

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