The Tangle of Evolution: Walter Benjamin as a Reader of Edgar Dacqué's Natural Philosophy

Abstract: Because Walter Benjamin's main articulation of natural history is speculative and disseminated across a number of major texts, starting with the study of the Trauerspiel and the unfinished Passagenwerk, his engagement with natural history as a corpus of scientific knowledge has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. Against the backdrop of the recursive popularity of natural history as a literary genre for assessing "what we are and where we are going"—from Yuval Harari's overarching narrative of homo sapiens to Meike Stoverock's feminist evolutionary history—this essay takes a literal, epistemological, and historically situated approach to natural history as a Weimar-era discipline for investigating human evolution from animal to man. In particular, I provide an account of the thought of Edgar Dacqué, who was a leading geologist and paleontologist of National Socialism, the intellectual milieu in which he worked, the reasons for his popularity; not secondarily, the utility for Benjamin of critiquing this esoteric natural history and thus transferring the fascination with the "grotesque" from the realm of science to that of literature.