Scott Stedman '99 plans to spend next year following the footsteps of German literary critic Walter Benjamin and then writing a screenplay about the man he says is “emblematic of the generation of people who adored literature the way that I do.”
The English major is one of sixty graduating seniors from forty-nine colleges and universities who received a $22,000 grant from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. Stedman is the forty-third Union student to earn a Watson since the program began in 1969.
His topic, “Linking Past and Present Through a Screenplay Based on the Life of Walter Benjamin,” will take Stedman on a journey through Europe, where Benjamin studied and wrote. From September through May, he will follow the writer's travels from Berlin to Switzerland (Bern, Zurich, and St. Moritz), Austria, Naples, Moscow, Paris, and Marseilles. Then, from May through September, he will return to Berlin to write a screenplay based on Benjamin's life.
Benjamin may not be as well known as some of his contemporaries, such as Kafka. But his writings, many of which were published posthumously, have earned him a reputation as one of the most influential literary critics in the first half of this century. He cultivated friendships with some of the most important figures of the time — Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Gershom Scholem.
While he traveled extensively, Benjamin lived almost exclusively in Berlin until 1933, when he fled to Paris. In 1940, at the urging of his friends and sister, he joined a group leaving occupied Paris for Spain. Only a few hours before his arrival at the border, Spanish authorities had closed the crossing, and they threatened to turn the group over to the Nazis. In despair, Benjamin took his life with an overdose of morphine. The next morning, in a cruel irony, the rest of the group was allowed to cross to freedom.
Lost with Benjamin's life was a final manuscript that some speculate may have been his most important work. “The manuscript must be saved at all cost,” he had told a traveling companion. “It is more important than my own person.” The manuscript disappeared after the encounter with the border patrol; whether it was confiscated is unknown. “We will never know if Benjamin took his life terrified of the Nazis or devastated by the loss of his manuscript,” wrote Stedman in his Watson proposal.
“Benjamin's life and work retain an almost undefinable uniqueness all the while remaining tied to the cultural milieu of the European Jewish community,” Stedman says. “These unique elements of Benjamin's character, when matched with the bold, Jewish, intellectual tradition represented by such figures as Kafka and Proust, create an irresistible portrait.”
Stedman says that he always thought Benjamin would make a great screenplay. “This life has so many rich elements that anyone with any artistic sensibility could take these and mold them into a magnificent story.”
Stedman, of Wellesley, Mass., is a founding member of the Coffeehouse, a forum for performance and intellectual exchange. He was a tutor in the College's Writing Center, did a Term Abroad in Barbados in 1998, and participated with the Union team in the National Model United Nations recently at Harvard University.