Walter Benjamin’s Maritime Imaginaries

This article examines the significance of maritime imaginaries in the work and life of Walter Benjamin, arguing that the various references to the sea and ships across his writings serve as more than mere metaphorical content. Drawing on Benjamin’s personal experiences of sea travel, the article contends that his conceptual framework, particularly his historical method of rescue ( Rettung ), is intimately tied to the materiality and embodied experience of mobility at sea. The analysis contrasts Benjamin’s position – as one clinging to the mast of a shipwreck – with the classical philosophical tradition of detached spectatorship, asserting that he mobilizes the unstable maritime space as a theatre of crisis and a source of alternative knowledge. It explores how Benjamin saw maritime oral cultures and the sailor’s perspective as providing an essential counter-discourse to bourgeois notions of travel and a key to understanding the decline of storytelling ( Erzählung ) in the modern age.