Walter Benjamin, Oscar Wilde, Australia, w. John Schad

Wednesday 25 June 2025, 3pm-4:30pm
Ian Maxwell Room (E261),  John Medley Building,  University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus

In this seminar, Professor John Schad will talk about his forthcoming book Benjamin’s Ark and read some extracts from a chapter focused on Walter Benjamin, his son, three men called Wilde, and their arrival in Australia in 1940.

Benjamin’s Ark. A Departure in Biography

In July 1940, amidst fear of Nazi invasion, HMT Dunera, a prison-ship, of sorts, left England. On board were a few British soldiers guarding over two-thousand interned male Enemy Aliens  – mostly Germans. Some of the internees were passionate Nazis, but most were Jewish refugees. Among them was Stefan Rafael Benjamin, the estranged child of the German-Jewish intellectual, Walter Benjamin. Stefan was not, though, the only “name” aboard, there also being one man called Kafka, another called Freud, yet another called Wittgenstein, still another called Karl Marx, and three called Wilde. After surviving a U-boat attack, the ship headed south, and far from Europe. And, with no word as to how the world and its War was going, fights broke out, one sad man jumped overboard, lectures were organised, questions were asked, and both fathers and women (killed and un-killed) were dreamt of. Cue Benjamin’s Ark which, just like those aboard, swears, prays, and, above all, quotes wildly as she goes. And, all the while, she is hell-bent on learning why we are here, who is here, and where are we heading. New world? Next world? Or (dear God) the end of the world? … On September 6, 1940, HMT Dunera finally docked in Sydney.

John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at University of Lancaster.  His books include: Someone Called Derrida. An Oxford Mystery (Sussex, 2007); The Late Walter Benjamin. A False Novel (Bloomsbury, 2012); Paris Bride. A Modernist Life (Punctum, 2020); Derrida | Benjamin. Two Plays for the Stage (Palgrave, 2021), co-authored with Fed Dalmasso; and Benjamin’s Ark. A Departure in Biography (UCL Press, forthcoming). He has had two retrospectives published, Hostage of the Word (2013) and John Schad in Conversation (2015), has read his work on BBC Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’ and at various festivals, and his plays have been performed at The Oxford Playhouse, Watford Palace Theatre, HowTheLight GetsIn, and the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford.