Walter Benjamin on natural history and place

Taking his radio broadcast on the Mississippi flood of 1927 as a point of departure, this article argues that Walter Benjamin has much to contribute to current debates concerning space, nature, and place. Benjamin’s episode on the devastating flood in the American South was his final transmission for Berlin Radio’s Youth Hour in 1932, and it concludes a series of episodes on disasters that are both natural and social at once. This article situates the radio broadcast in relation to two catastrophic ways of seeing: first, in Benjamin’s work on the German mourning play , where the spatializing function of allegory transposes the temporal events of history into a spatial image, and second, in the weakly messianic vision of history as “one single catastrophe.” Drawing on these reorienting modes of vision, I argue that Benjamin’s curation of ancient and recent catastrophes across the world prompts his young listeners to recognize interlinked moments of danger spanning both historical time and global space.