Walter Benjamin: Biography from Answers.com

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a German philosopher and critic, published widely on such topics astechnology, language, literature, the arts, and society. He left a large body of mostly unfinished work that has been slowly published in his native country. Since the 1980s, this fragmented work has elicited much commentary, including several thousand studies.

"W^emust expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art," wrote the French poet and essayist, Paul Valery, in his work Pieces Sur L'Art. Benjamin used that thought as the basis for what became one of his most famous essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It served as a foundation for the evolution of thought that emerged from the Postmodern school philosophy. In the face of Nazi oppression, the world lost Benjamin to suicide at the age of 48. Those who study the work of Benjamin can only speculate about how much more he might have produced had he not died at such an early age.

A Prosperous Family

Walter Benjamin was born into an affluent Jewish family in Berlin, Germany on July 15, 1892, the son of an art dealer. He was a perennial student until the age of 28, studying philosophy at universities in Berlin, Freiburg, and Munich, Germany. Benjamin graduated from the University of Bern, in Switzerland, earning a Ph.D. in 1919. He had a certain expectation of what his family's wealth could provide. Had events not altered plans for many German Jews during the Nazi era, he might have remained a privileged scholar in his parents' home. Gershom Scholem, the leading authority on Jewish Mysticism and a longtime friend of the philosopher, recalled his first encounter with Benjamin at a 1964 lecture at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. The experience is described in his book, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, published in 1976. "I first set eyes on Walter Benjamin late in the autumn of 1913 at a discussion between the Zionist youth and Jewish members both of Wynecken's 'Anfang' and the Free German Student Association, which he attended as the main spokesman of the latter group. I have forgotten what he said but I have the most vivid memory of his bearing as a speaker. This left a lasting impression because of his way of speaking extempore without so much as a glance at his audience, staring with a fixed gaze at a remote corner of the ceiling which he harangued with much intensity, in a style incidentally that was, as far as I remember, ready for print … he was considered the best mind in that circle in which he was fairly active during the two years before the First World War, for awhile as president of the Free Student Association at Berlin University." By the time the two men met and began their friendship, Scholem said, Benjamin had abandoned that social circle and was living almost entirely in seclusion, harshly casting aside his former friends without warning. He was completely absorbed in his studies by then. "What thinking really means I have experienced through his living example," noted Scholem.

In 1920, Benjamin began work as a literary critic and translator in Berlin. He had considered an academic career, but that pursuit was cut short when the University of Frankfurt rejected his doctoral thesis, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, in 1928. The rise of Hitler in 1933, caused Benjamin to leave Germany permanently and settle in Paris, where he wrote radio scripts, as well as essays and criticism for literary journals. He married at this time and had a son. The marriage was not successful, however, and the couple eventually divorced. Benjamin's decision to remain in Paris in 1939 rather than join friends in Palestine proved to be a fateful one when German troops invaded France. He soon found himself in German-occupied territory.

Benjamin and a group of refugees managed to escape from an increasingly hostile Paris and travel to Spain en route to the United States. When the group was not allowed to board a boat and a local official threatened him with extradition to France, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine and refused medical attention. He died on September 27, 1940 in Port Bou, Spain. As he lived his life in seclusion, so, too, did he die - without hinting to the others of his intentions.

Fascination with Judaism

Benjamin was an avid student of Marx and traveled to the Soviet Union in 1927 in order to view the communist system firsthand. Yet his efforts to understand his own faith and culture remained his persistent passion. Benjamin's Zionist leanings led him to consider resettling in Palestine for many years. By 1930, however, his attempts to immerse himself in the study of historical materialism as a basis for his literary work, kept him from doing so. Still, his love of books, particularly children's books, occupied much of his attention. Benjamin felt that it was the French novelist, Marcel Proust, whose work most exemplified the point at which the child and the adult came together. In the 1930s, his own book, A Berlin Childhood Around 1900, which appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung, dealt with his own recollections of childhood. In discussing his work, Scholem had these recollections of Benjamin: "Though lacking in all the attributes of a German patriot, Benjamin had a deep love for Berlin. It was as a Jewish child whose forefathers had settled in the regions of Mark, Brandenburg, Rhineland, and West Prussia that he experienced his native city. In his description the city flagstones and its hidden corners, which open themselves up before the child's eye, are transformed back into a provincial island in the heart of the metropolis." As a scholar who would generate thousands of commentaries on his work decades after his death, that reflection provided a glimpse into the way his logic was formed. "In my childhood I was a prisoner of the old and the new West, the two city quarters my clan inhabited at the time in an attitude of defiance mingled with self-conceit. This attitude turned the two districts into a ghetto upon which the clan looked as its fief." Benjamin's small and self-contained world of his childhood prepared him for the solitary life of a thinker, traversing cultures, eras, and a future in which he would lay the groundwork for others to understand.

In 1921, Benjamin obtained Angelus Novus, a painting by Paul Klee. It would remain his most precious possession for the next 20 years. As early as July 1932, when he considered taking his own life, Benjamin bequeathed that picture to Scholem. According to Scholem, it represented more than an object of meditation, or memento of a spiritual vocation: "… the Angelus Novus also represented something else for him: an allegory in the sense of the dialectical tension uncovered in allegories by Benjamin in his book about tragic drama." Benjamin spoke and wrote about the picture often. "If one may speak of Walter Benjamin's genius, then it was concentrated in this angel," remarked Scholem.

Prolific Writer

Benjamin is best known in the United States for his literary and cultural criticism, though his political, philosophical, and religious essays have been studied in greater detail by European commentators. Benjamin was first introduced to the American public in 1968 by Hannah Arendt in a lengthy New Yorker article. According to R. Z. Sheppard in Time, Arendt claimed that he "… was the most important German critic between the world wars." In addition to those noted previously, his many works included, [titles here translated into English, noting the original German publication date, not the later publication of the English translations] One-Way Street, and Other Writings, 1928; A Short History of Photography, 1931; Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1942; Illuminations, 1961; Understanding Brecht, 1966; Moscow Diary, 1968. His works that have not yet been translated into English are, Goethes "Wahiverwandtschaften", 1924-25 (title translated as: "Goethe's 'Elective Affinities"'); Berlliner Kindheit un Neunzehnhundert, (memoirs) 1950; and Derr Beegriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romaantik, (criticisms) 1973. The full scope of his work was not realized even 60 years after his death, in part due to the slowness in publishing and translating hundreds of his works. Critics are in general agreement that Benjamin possessed a uniquely intuitive and keen mind. He was perhaps the most brilliant intellectual of his generation.

Walter Benjamin

Full name	Walter Benjamin
Born	15 July 1892(1892-07-15) Berlin, German Empire
Died	26 September 1940(1940-09-26) (aged 48) Portbou, Catalonia, Spain
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophers
School	Western Marxism
Main interests	Literary theory, Aesthetics, Technology, Epistemology, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of history
Influenced by Adorno · Bachofen · Baudelaire · Brecht Kierkegaard · Lukács · Marx · Nietzsche Proust · Schmitt · Scholem
Influenced Adorno · Agamben · Arendt · Derrida · Merquior · Scholem · Sontag · Taussig · Calasso · Žižek · Löwy · Bhabha

Life

Frankfurt School
Part of a series on the

Major works
Reason and Revolution The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Eclipse of Reason The Fear of Freedom Dialectic of Enlightenment Minima Moralia Eros and Civilization One-Dimensional Man Negative Dialectics The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere The Theory of Communicative Action
Notable theorists
Max Horkheimer · Theodor Adorno Herbert Marcuse · Erich Fromm · Friedrich Pollock Leo Löwenthal · Jürgen Habermas
Important concepts
Critical Theory · Dialectic · Praxis Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism Popular culture · Culture industry Advanced capitalism · Privatism Non-Identity · Communicative Rationality Legitimation Crisis
v d e

Walter Benjamin and his younger brother, Georg (1895–1942), and younger sister, Dora (1901–46), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Jews^[4] in the Berlin of the German Empire (1871–1918). The patriarch, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader in Berlin; he later married Pauline Schönflies. He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks. In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled to the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. Personally, Walter Benjamin was a boy of fragile health, so, in 1905, the family sent him to boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in 1907, returned to Berlin, his schooling resumed at the Kaiser Friedrich School.

In 1912, at the age of twenty, he enrolled at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, but, at summer semester's end, returned to Berlin, then matriculated into the Humboldt University of Berlin, to continue studying philosophy. Elected president of the Freie Studentenschaft (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change.^[5] When not re-elected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg University, and studied, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert; in that time he travelled to France and Italy.

In 1914, as Germany and France fought each other in the First World War (1914–18), the intellectual Walter Benjamin began faithfully translating the works of the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67). The next year, 1915, he moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem; the latter became a friend. In that year, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843).

In 1917 he transferred to the University of Bern; there, he met Ernst Bloch, and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner) (1890–1964), whom he later married, and they had a son, Stefan Rafael (1918–72). In 1919 Benjamin earned his doctoral degree cum laude with the dissertation essay Begriff der Kunstkritik in der Deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism). Later, unable to support himself and family, the Benjamins returned to Berlin, and resided with his parents; in 1921, he published the essay Kritik der Gewalt (The Critique of Violence). At this time, Benjamin first became socially acquainted with Leo Strauss, and would remain an admirer of him and of his work throughout his life.^[6]^[7]^[8]

In 1923, when the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) was founded, and later became home to the Frankfurt School, he published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens. In that time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács, whose The Theory of the Novel (1920) much influenced him. Meanwhile, the inflation in the Weimar Republic, consequent to the First World War, made it difficult for the businessman Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his intellectual son's family, Walter, Dora, and Stefan. At year's end of 1923, his best friend, Gershom Scholem, emigrated to Palestine, a country ruled under the British Mandate of Palestine; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Walter Benjamin (and family) to leave the Continent for the Middle East.

In 1924, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, in the Neue Deutsche Beiträge magazine, published Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe’s Elective Affinities), by Walter Benjamin, about Goethe’s third novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). Later that year, Benjamin and Ernst Bloch resided in the Italian island of Capri; Benjamin wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), as an habilitation dissertation meant to qualify him as a tenured university professor in Germany. He also read, at Bloch’s suggestion, History and Class Consciousness (1923), by Georg Lukács. In the event, he also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis, then residing in Moscow; she became his lover and was a lasting intellectual influence upon him.

A year later, in 1925, the Goethe University Frankfurt, at Franfurt am main, rejected The Origin of German Tragic Drama as Benjamin’s qualification for the habilitation teaching credential; he was not to be an academic instructor. Working with Franz Hessel (1880–1941), he translated the first volumes of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), by Marcel Proust. The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers Frankfurter Zeitung (The Frankfurt Times) and Die Literarische Welt (The Literary World), that paid enough for him to reside in Paris for some months. In December 1926 (the year his father, Emil Benjamin, died), Walter Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Asja Lācis, and found her ill, in a sanatorium.^[9]

In 1927, he began Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), his incompleted magnum opus, a study of 19th-century Parisian life. The same year, he saw Gershom Scholem in Berlin, for the last time, and considered emigrating from Continental Europe (Germany) to Palestine. In 1928, he and Dora separated, then divorced two years later, in 1930; he published Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street), and a revision of his habilitation dissertation Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama). In 1929 Berlin, Asja Lācis, then assistant to Bertolt Brecht, socially presented the intellectuals to each other. In that time, he also briefly embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg.

In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler’s assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany, Walter Benjamin left Germany for the Spanish island of Ibiza for some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered killing himself. Perceiving the socio-political and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) as the de facto Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, he moved to Paris, but, before doing so, he sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertold Brecht's house, and at Sanremo, where his ex-wife Dora lived.

As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer, and received funds from the Institute for Social Research, later going permanently into exile. In Paris, he met other German artists and intellectuals refuged there from Germany; he befriended Hannah Arendt, novelist Hermann Hesse, and composer Kurt Weill. In 1936, L'Œuvre d'Art à l'Époque de sa Reproductibilité Technique (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) was first published, in French, by Max Horkheimer in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung journal of the Institute for Social Research.

In 1937 Benjamin worked on Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the Arcades Project manuscript), and joined the College of Sociology. In 1938 he paid a last visit to Bertolt Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi Régime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Benjamin was arrested by the French government and incarcerated for three months in a prison camp near Nevers, in central Burgundy.

Returning to Paris in January 1940, he wrote Über den Begriff der Geschichte (Theses on the Philosophy of History). As the Wehrmacht defeated the French defence, on 13 June, Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes, a day before the Germans entered Paris (14 June 1940), with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the US that Max Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin planned to travel to the US from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via fascist Spain, then ostensibly a neutral country.

The historical record indicates he safely crossed the French-Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou, in Catalonia. The Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish refugee group Benjamin had joined. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Walter Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets on the night of 25 September 1940; the official Portbou register records 26 September 1940 as the official date of death.^[10]

Works

Among Walter Benjamin’s works are:

Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence, 1921).
Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe’s Elective Affinities, 1922).
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928).
Einbahnstraße (One Way Street, 1928).
"Karl Kraus" (1931 in the Frankfurter Zeitung).
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936).
Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900, 1950).
Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History / Theses on the Philosophy of History), 1940.
Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, 1938).

Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer, even from their New York City residence. The competing influences — Brecht’s Marxism, Adorno’s critical theory, Gerschom Scholem’s Jewish mysticism — were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover, the critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin’s writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplar synthesis is "On the Concept of History" (Theses on the Philosophy of History).

Paul Klee's 1920 painting Angelus Novus, which Benjamin compared to "the angel of history"

The ninth thesis in the essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” presents:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Main article: The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928), is a critical study of German baroque drama, as well as the political and cultural climate of Germany during the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648). Benjamin presented the work to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 as the (post-doctoral) dissertation meant to earn him the Habilitation (qualification) to become a university instructor in Germany.

Professor Schultz of University of Frankfurt found The Origin of German Tragic Drama inappropriate for his Germanistik department (Department of German Language and Literature), and passed it to the Department of Aesthetics (philosophy of art), the readers of which likewise dismissed Benjamin's work. The faculty, among them Max Horkheimer, recommended that Benjamin withdraw Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as a Habilitation dissertation to avoid formal rejection and public embarrassment. He heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a book.^[11]

The Arcades Project

Main article: Arcades Project

The Passagenwerk (Arcades Project, 1927–40), was Walter Benjamin’s final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century, especially about the Passages couverts de Paris the covered passages that extended the culture of flânerie (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather made flânerie infeasible in the boulevards and streets proper.

Writing style

Susan Sontag said that in Walter Benjamin’s writing, sentences did not originate ordinarily, do not progress into one another, and delineate no obvious line of reasoning, as if each sentence “had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes”, a “freeze-frame baroque” style of writing and cogitation. “His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct”.^[12] The difficulty of Benjamin's writing style is essential to his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, his goal in later works was to use intertexts to reveal aspects of the past that cannot, and should not, be understood within greater, monolithic constructs of historical understanding.

Walter Benjamin’s writings identify him as a modernist for whom the philosophic merges with the literary: logical philosophic reasoning cannot account for all experience, especially not for self-representation via art. He presented his stylistic concerns in The Task of the Translator, wherein he posits that a literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text. Moreover, in the deformed text, otherwise hidden aspects of the original, source-language text are elucidated, while previously obvious aspects become unreadable. Such translational mortification of the source text is productive; when placed in a specific constellation of works and ideas, newly revealed affinities, between historical objects, appear and are productive of philosophical truth.

Death

Walter Benjamin's grave in Portbou

Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis. The people he was with were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France, which would have hampered Benjamin's plans to get to the United States. While staying in the Hotel de Francia, he apparently took some morphine pills and died on the night of 25/26 September 1940.^[13]^[14]^[15]

The fact that he was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery would indicate that his death was not announced as a suicide. The others in his party were allowed passage the next day, and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. A manuscript of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" was passed to Theodor Adorno by Hannah Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, and was subsequently published by the Institute for Social Research (temporarily relocated to New York) in 1942.

A completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. Some critics speculate that it was his Arcades Project in a final form; this is very unlikely as the author's plans for the work had changed in the wake of Adorno's criticisms in 1938, and it seems clear that the work was flowing over its containing limits in his last years. As the last finished piece of work from Benjamin, the Theses on the Philosophy of History (noted above) is often cited; Adorno claimed this had been written in the spring of 1940, weeks before the Germans invaded France.

While this is not completely certain, it is clearly one of his last works, and the final paragraph, about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a harrowing final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up the interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, to try to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."

Legacy

Since the publication of Schriften (Writings, 1955), fifteen years after his death, the work of Walter Benjamin, especially the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), is of seminal importance to academics in the humanities disciplines.

References

^ Duden Aussprachewörterbuch (6 ed.). Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut & F.A. Brockhaus AG. 2006.
^ Witte, Bernd (1991). Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography (English translation). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. pp. 9. ISBN 0-8143-2018-X.
^ p. 170, "The Reconciliation of Myth: Benjamin's Homage to Bachofen". Mali, Joseph. Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 60, No. 1. (January 1999) pp. 165-87
^ Jeffries, Stuart (8 July 2001). "Did Stalin's killers liquidate Walter Benjamin?". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/jul/08/humanities.internationaleducationnews.
^ Experience, 1913
^ Jewish philosophy and the crisis of modernity (SUNY 1997), Leo Strauss as a Modern Jewish thinker, Kenneth Hart Green, Leo Strauss, page 55
^ Scholem, Gershom. 1981. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Trans. Harry Zohn. Page 201
^ The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-40, New York 1989, page 155-58
^ Moscow Diary
^ Jay, Martin The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950.
^ Introducing Walter Benjamin, Howard Cargill, Alex Coles, Andrey Klimowski, 1998, p. 112
^ Susan Sontag Under the Sign of Saturn, p. 129.
^ Leslie, Esther (2000). "Benjamin's Finale". Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism. Modern European Thinkers. Pluto Press. p. 215. ISBN 9780745315683. http://books.google.com/books?id=FXUN34lH-jgC&pg=PA215. Retrieved August 28, 2009.
^ Lester, David (2005). "Suicide to Escape Capture: Cases". Suicide and the Holocaust. Nova Publishers. p. 74. ISBN 9781594544279. http://books.google.com/books?id=R1nkj-xSzYgC&pg=PA74. Retrieved August 28, 2009.
^ Witte, Bernd (1991). Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography (English translation). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. pp. 9. ISBN 0-8143-2018-X.

External links

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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft. In English and German. (Defunct)
Walter Benjamin at Marxists.org
Fragments of the Passagenwerk: The Arcades Project, Giles Peaker
Aufklärung für Kinder, by Walter Benjamin. 30 broadcasts for German Radio between 1929-1932 specifically for children, maybe 7-14 or so, each consisting of a 20 minute talk or monologue.
One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1993), by Jon Hughes. This documentary provides clear and accessible introductions to some of the central ideas in Benjamin's writings.
Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline Translated by Scott J. Thompson, copyright March 25, 1997
From 'Rausch' to Rebellion An introductory essay by Scott J. Thompson
Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle In French
Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate
"Walter Benjamin for Historians", American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 5. December 2001.
Who Killed Walter Benjamin..., (Spain/The Netherlands/Germany, 2005, 73 min.) a documentary film about the circumstances of Benjamin's death by David Mauas
Paris, capital of 19th century, an essay/experimental film about the Passagen-Werk by Benjamin Bardou, France, 2010, 10'
The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin, Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard, Volume 006, Issue 37, 11 June 2001
Through the Trapdoor: review of The Narrow Foothold by Carina Birman describes Benjamin's final days
The Arcades Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext, Heather Marcelle Crickenberger
The Dialectics of Allegoresis: Historical Materialism in Benjamin's Illuminations, John Parker
Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project - The Passagenwerk

Persondata
Name	Benjamin, Walter
Alternative names
Short description	German philosopher
Date of birth	15 July 1892
Place of birth	Berlin, Germany
Date of death	27 September 1940
Place of death	Portbou, Spain

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Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Life

Works

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

The Arcades Project

Writing style

Death

Legacy

See also

References

Further reading

Primary literature

Secondary literature

External links

	Jay Parini (literature)
	Les Français peints par eux-mêmes
	Frankfurt School (organization, Germany – in philosophy, sociology, history)

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