‘Those readers familiar with Walter Benjamin’s work will enjoy the recognisable current of references woven into John Schad’s book. Others will appreciate the author’s playful use of literary references while being encouraged to discover an important philosopher (Benjamin himself rejected the term) who will make them see our world afresh’

The Morning Star

‘“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.’

Everybody’s Reviewing

‘A piece of innovative and meticulous scholarship.’

Inside Story

‘Walter Benjamin’s Ark is the story of a imaginary voyage spun out of a real one, of the ship Dunera 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