ZfL INFO 09/2026: Neuerscheinung: The Opportunities of Laughter: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Humour in Walter Benjamin

At first sight, Walter Benjamin and laughter may seem to be an unlikely connection, particularly when humour is understood as a personal disposition, a receptivity for the comic. The image of Benjamin ingrained in collective memory is undoubtedly that of the melancholic intellectual. This is how he appears in the iconic photos taken of him by Germaine Krull and Gisèle Freund: deeply immersed in thought, often with his head resting on his fist or absorbed in old folios at the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is tempting to describe these images as surrounded by an aura, whose decay Benjamin even saw at work in portrait photography. Such auratic perception would be partly due to self-staging, partly to the œuvre’s reception. On the one hand, the images convey something of a ‘secretiveness bordering on eccentricity’ that Benjamin is said to have cultivated around his person. On the other hand, scholarship has identified a hidden self-portrait in Benjamin’s preoccupation with the melancholy figure of the allegorist.

Table of contents

• Thinking with Laughter: Notes on Walter Benjamin’s Humour
  Kevin Drews, Szilvia Gellai | 193–222
• Der Humor
  Walter Benjamin, Joel Golb | 223–225
• Metaphysical Laughter: Walter Benjamin’s Engagement with Viennese Satire
  Sebastian Kugler | 226–249
• Reading, Laughter and Intoxication: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Story of a Hashish Intoxication’ in the Magazine UHU
  Lotta Ruppenthal | 250–272
• Laughter, Lament, Prayer: Walter Benjamin’s Bucklicht MäNnlein and Franz Kafka’s Odradek
  Ulrich Mathias Gerr | 273–288
• Ludic Barbarity and a Butterfly Hunt: Humour in Walter Benjamin’s Mimetic Impulse or the Laughter of Lepidoptera
  Gabriella Teresa Moreno | 289–311
• Walter Benjamin’s ‘nachtönendes Gelächter’ as a Cultural-Critical Category: Reading Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Politics of Laughter Across Europe in 1926–28
  Sophia Buck | 312–337
• Humour as an Act of Judgment-Free Execution: Bertolt Brecht’s Die Maßnahme
  Mattias Engling | Pages 338–352
• Reviews
  353–361