Walter Benjamin's work is central to the debate on the crisis of remembrance in modern aesthetics. The study shows how, although Benjamin's poetics of remembrance is couched in terms of the traditional constellation of memory and writing, it increasingly turns against constructive actualizations. The first analysis of the author's entire literary oeuvre from this point of view traces the development of his »poetics of de-struction« as reflected by intertextuality and the rejection of autobiographic reading. The 'unwritability' of the »Passagen« documents a non-conclusive form of commemoration as the only adequate response to the task of representing the silent memory of the mute victims of history.