When he was working on his study of German tragedy, he boasted a collection of “over 600 quotations very systematically and clearly arranged”; like the later notebooks, this collection was more than an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of the study but constituted the main work, with the writing as something secondary. The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d’être in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage. Benjamin’s idea of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text, may strike one as whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot, but it was not, any more than were the contemporaneous surrealistic experiments which arose from similar impulses.
--Hannah Arendt, introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Schocken Books, 1969)
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