An excellent book, finally Banjamin on photography and cinema is available in english. Reading his essay on Chaplin is extremely illuminating concerning the question of the passage from silent film to sound film. His concept of critique, as well as his concept of "making history" lies in this text.

The place for a full review of this book is in an academic journal of some sort.-Consequently, this is not my task here. I'm limiting my critique to what I find most fascinating and controversial in the work, contained in the first chapter, The Prose of Apocalypse, where Bullock finds marked similarities between a passage of Junger's and Shelley's "Mount Blanc." Bullock (perhaps because he is a professor of German?) finds that Junger and his teutonic colleague Benjamin plumb greater depths than Shelley. Thus, for Bullock, what look at first to be similarities merely point to the greater depth of Junger's metaphysics. Here is the difference: Junger says, "...the unity and multiplicity of our so mysterious world are hidden"; while Shelley says, "The secret strength of things which governs thought, and to the infinite dome of heaven is a law, inhabits thee! And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, if to the human mind's imaginings silence and solitude were vacancy?" The last question of Shelley's poem is clearly rhetorical and it is clear that Shelley sees a "secret stength of things" in this poem where Junger feels only only hidden, perhaps dark, mystery.-But this comparison, meant to show that Junger is the more profound, is hardly fair to Shelley and, in fact, sets the great English poet up as a foil.-What, if instead of "Mount Blanc," Bullock had chosen Shelley's ironic, despairing poem, "The Triumph of Life," unfinished because Shelley drowned himself before completion? Its images are darker by far than Junger's, a parade of grotesque twisted shapes ravaged by time, and Shelley's last line, after a lifetime and a mass of work delving into these dark metaphysical matters is heartshattering, " 'Then what is life?' I cried."-Bullock, in fairness to him, later in the book seems to imply not so much that the Germans gazed deeper into the abyss than a poet like Shelley. But that Junger's "auratic prose" is somehow better writing. The reader must, of course, be the judge of this. I personally find what Bullock calls (not altogether complimentarily) Shelley's attachment to the "sublime" and Junger's manly confrontation with the abyss a more than somewhat nonsensical and tendentious semantic wordplay.-Both men were interested in the sublime and both courageously confronted the abyss.-Bullock more or less admits this later on.-One should always be careful using terms like "the sublime" and "the abyss." They've been the subjects of so much academic doublespeak over the years that one hardly knows what one means by using them anymore.-Enough said, anyone interested in Junger (or Shelley, for that matter) should read this book. Anything that provokes thought and meditation is so rare these days.