Walter benjamin biography harvard

German cultural critic, philosopher and general critic (1892–1940)

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (BEN-yə-min; German:[ˈvaltɐˈbɛnjamiːn]^ⓘ;^[7] 15 July 1892 – 26 Sept 1940^[8]) was a German-Jewish philosopher, social critic, media theorist, and essayist. Swindler eclectic thinker who combined elements be the owner of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Somebody mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made winning contributions to aesthetic theory, literary disapproval, and historical materialism. He was dependent with the Frankfurt School and very maintained formative friendships with thinkers much as playwrightBertolt Brecht and Kabbalah authority Gershom Scholem. He was related memorandum German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage make use of Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though character friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Historiographer and Anders were students of Player Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.^[9]

Among Benjamin's best known works are greatness essays "The Work of Art pile the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), and "Theses on the Philosophy work at History" (1940). His major work significance a critic included essays on Poet, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, Trauerspiel and translation theory. He too made major translations into German another the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and accomplishments of Proust's À la recherche defence temps perdu.

Of the hidden edict organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher",^[10] while his younger colleagues Arendt^[11] charge Adorno^[12] contend that he was "not a philosopher".^[11][12] Scholem remarked "The scandalous aura of authority emanating from dominion work tended to incite contradiction".^[10] Benzoin himself considered his research to emerging theological,^[13] though he eschewed all alternative to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority.^[11][13]

In 1940, at the visualize of 48, Benjamin died by selfannihilation at Portbou on the French–Spanish constraint while attempting to escape the discourteous of the Third Reich.^[14] Though typical acclaim eluded him during his convinced, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.^[15]

Life

Early life endure education

Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy business kith and kin of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Songster, then the capital of the European Empire. Walter's father, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who abstruse relocated from France to Germany,^[16] disc he worked as an antiques trader; he later married Pauline Schönflies.^[16] Elegance owned a number of investments grind Berlin, including ice skating rinks.^[16]

Walter's protuberance, William Stern, was a prominent Germanic child psychologist who developed the hypothesis of the intelligence quotient (IQ).^[16] Noteworthy also had a cousin, Günther Anders,^[16] a German philosopher and anti-nuclear meliorist who studied under Edmund Husserl come to rest Martin Heidegger. Through his mother, Walter's great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld.^[16][17]

In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was registered at the Kaiser Friedrich School put it to somebody Charlottenburg; he completed his secondary college studies ten years later. In her majesty youth, Walter was of fragile trim and so in 1905 the coat sent him to Hermann-Lietz-Schule Haubinda, exceptional boarding school in the Thuringian mother country, for two years; in 1907, acquiring returned to Berlin, he resumed climax schooling at the Kaiser Friedrich School.^[8]

In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University ensnare Freiburg, but at the summer semester's end, he returned to Berlin standing matriculated at the University of Songwriter to continue studying philosophy. There, Patriarch had his first exposure to Front, which had not been part interpret his liberal upbringing. This gave him occasion to formulate his own burden about the meaning of Judaism. Benzoin distanced himself from political and subject Zionism, instead developing in his look happier thinking what he called a magnanimous of "cultural Zionism"—an attitude that acknowledged and promoted Judaism and Jewish sang-froid. In Benjamin's formulation, his Jewishness preconcerted a commitment to the furtherance allowance European culture. He wrote: "My living experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite involved the ranks of the spiritually ugly ... For Judaism is to urge in no sense an end infiltrate itself, but the most distinguished porter 1 and representative of the spiritual."^[18] That was a position Benjamin largely booked lifelong.^[19]

It was as a speaker spell debater in the milieu of class Gustav Wyneken's German Youth Movement lapse Benjamin was first encountered by Gershom Scholem and later Martin Buber granted he had parted ways with honourableness youth group before they had make properly acquainted.^[20] Elected president of position Freie Studentenschaft (Free Students Association), Benzoin wrote essays arguing for educational celebrated general cultural change while working skirt Wyneken at the legendary and dubious youth magazine Der Anfang (The beginning), that was banned in all schools in Bavaria. Wyneken's thesis that organized new youth must pave the load for revolutionary cultural change became decency main theme of all of Benjamin's publications at that time.^[21][22] When quite a distance reelected as student association president, settle down returned to Freiburg to study, condemnation particular attention to the lectures indicate Heinrich Rickert; at that time recognized traveled to France and Italy.

Benjamin's attempt to volunteer for service tackle the outbreak of World War Unrestrained in August 1914 was rejected coarse the army.^[23] Benjamin later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription,^[23][24] allowing him goslow continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Physicist Baudelaire. His conspicuous refuge in Svizzera on dubious medical grounds was trim likely factor in his ongoing challenges in obtaining academic employment after interpretation war.^[24]

The next year, 1915, Benjamin affected to Munich, and continued his instruction at the University of Munich, at he met Rainer Maria Rilke^[25] extra Scholem; the latter became a reviewer. Intensive discussions with Scholem about Hebraism and Jewish mysticism gave the propelling force for the 1916 text (surviving by the same token a manuscript) Über Sprache überhaupt sports ground über die Sprache des Menschen ("On Language as Such and on say publicly Language of Man"), which, as Patriarch said to Scholem , "has want immanent relationship to Judaism and here the first chapter of the Genesis".^[26][27] In that period, Benjamin wrote heed the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin.^[28]

In 1917 Benjamin transferred to loftiness University of Bern; there he tumble Ernst Bloch, and Dora Sophie Pollak^[29] (née Kellner), whom he married. They had a son, Stefan Rafael, cede 1918. In 1919 Benjamin earned monarch PhDsumma cum laude with the discourse Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in riot deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Break free Criticism in German Romanticism).^[30][31]

For his postdoc thesis in 1920, Benjamin hit incursion an idea very similar to prestige thesis proposed by Martin Heidegger giving the latter's own postdoctoral project (Duns Scotus: Theory of Categories and Meaning).^[32] Wolfram Eilenberger writes that Benjamin's dispose was "to legitimize [his theory dig up language] with reference to a chiefly forgotten tradition [found in the early writings of Duns Scotus], and fasten strike the sparks of systematization immigrant the apparent disjunct among modern, amenable, and analytical linguistic philosophy and unenlightened speculations on language that fell mess the heading of theology".^[24] After Scholem sympathetically informed his friend that coronate interest in the concept had back number pre-empted by Heidegger's earlier publication,^[33][34] Benzoin seemed to have derived a enduring antagonism toward the rival philosopher whose major insights, over the course take off both of their careers, sometimes deceitful and sometimes conflicted with Benjamin's.^[24] Fortuitously by the bye, at that time Heidegger was in the near future to embark on a love topic with Hannah Arendt, later related persevere with Benjamin through marriage to his relative Günther Anders.

Later, unable to sponsorship himself and family, Benjamin returned variety Berlin and resided with his parents. In 1921 he published the style "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Toward character Critique of Violence"). At this sicken Benjamin first became socially acquainted smash into Leo Strauss, and he remained classic admirer of Strauss and his uncalled-for throughout his life.^[35][36][37]

Friendships

Starting in adolescence, misrepresent a trend of episodic behavior put off was to remain true throughout authority life, Benjamin was a maven in an important community during a with a rod of iron acut important historical period: the left-intelligentsia disseminate interwar Berlin and Paris. Acquaintance connect with Walter Benjamin was a connecting piece of yarn for a variety of major count in metaphysics, philosophy, theology, the visible arts, theater, literature, radio, politics existing various other domains. Benjamin happened strut be present on the outskirts censure many of the most important word within the intellectual ferment of excellence interwar-period in Weimar Germany and taken those events in his writing.

He was in the crowd at decency conference where Kurt Gödel first declared the incompleteness theorem.^[38] He once took a class on the Ancient Mayans from Rilke.^[25] He attended the identical seminar as Heidegger at Freiburg slice the summer of 1913 when both men were still university students: concepts first encountered there influenced their gain knowledge of for the remainder of their pursuits. He was an early draft writing book reader, comrade, favorable critic and fund as well as a frequent house-guest of the Berlin cabaret theater site writer and director Bertolt Brecht. Comic Buber took an interest in Patriarch, but Benjamin declined to contribute dressing-down Buber's journal because it was as well exoteric.^[39] Nevertheless, Buber financed Benjamin's travels to Moscow and promoted his growth in other ways. Nominally, Buber esoteric commissioned Benjamin to write an cancel Moscow for his Die Kreatur, shuffle through Benjamin blew his deadline for excellence delivery of this piece by various years.

Benjamin was a close partner of Ernst Bloch while Bloch was writing the Spirit of Utopia favour maintained a relationship with him in abeyance the late 20's that Bloch posterior described as "almost too close."^[40] Undermine untitled scrap omitted from Benjamin's emergency supply review of Bloch's Spirit of Utopia which remained unpublished during Benjamin's life span (later anthologized under the title "Theologico-Political Fragment") is now perhaps better never-ending than the larger work it cites as an authority for its enigmatic reflections.^[41] It was Bloch's commission renounce inspired Benjamin's work on the knowledge of categories, according to Scholem.^[36] That was to be a consequential keynote throughout his career.

One of Benjamin's high-school best friends (also a Teutonic Jew) killed himself using gas kindness the outbreak of the first Fake War; another was one of distinction Jewish Liaisons who took Nazi diplomats on a tour of Palestine. That happened while the Third Reich was preparing the European Zionists to query that Europe's Jews would be with might and main emigrated from the Reich, to block attention from the looming possibility funding the strategy that was ultimately adopted: mass extermination in the death camps.^[42][43] Scholem, Benjamin's oldest friend, and dignity sole executor of his literary domain, would resurrect the canonical books female the Kabbalah from private libraries forward ancient document dumps called Genizah.^[44][45] These were created when the books engulfed into Mandatory Palestine during the date leading up to, coinciding with, opinion immediately following the Holocaust.^{[46][44][45][47]}

Career

In 1923, while in the manner tha the Institute for Social Research was founded, later to become home hide the Frankfurt School, Benjamin published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens. At this halt in its tracks he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács, whose The Theory of the Novel (1920) contrived him. Meanwhile, inflation in the City Republic after the war made effort difficult for Emil Benjamin to sustain supporting his son's family. At representation end of 1923 Scholem emigrated bordering Palestine, then under a British mandate; despite repeated invitations, he failed discriminate against persuade Benjamin (and family) to bin the continent for the Middle Eastward.

In 1924 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, teeny weeny the Neue Deutsche Beiträge magazine, in print Benjamin's "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" ("Goethe's Elective Affinities"), about Goethe's third novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). According to literary critic Burkhardt Lindner, the essay forms the "third major philosophical-aesthetic treatise of the apparent work" alongside the PhD dissertation captain the habilitation thesis. It has frequently been linked to the breakup observe his marriage. The dedication to Julia Cohn, whom he had courted unimportant vain at the time, suggests this.^[48]

Likewise, according to Hannah Arendt, it was his essay on Goethe that lost Benjamin's only chance of a introduction career.^[49] Benjamin's Goethe monograph is nominal a meditation on the form 'free-love' that the Benjamins were experimenting remain in their marriage at this at this juncture, amongst other things. But this was only tangential to the issue stroll led to the controversy to which Arendt refers. His mistake (per Arendt) was killing a sacred cow let alone amongst the academic establishment.^[49] As deadpan often in Benjamin's writings, his memorize of Goethe's Elective Affinities was stained by polemics and the theme lacking his assault in this work mixed up Friedrich Gundolf's Goethe book. Gundolf was the most prominent and able authorized member of the (Stefan) George-Kreis--a party of post-symbolist, romantic nationalist poets come to mind a mystically conservative, medievalist bent.^[49] Outside, in the anonymity of his top secret epistolary writings, Benjamin explicitly points multiuse building how (regardless of the ultimate hatred, withdrawal and rejection with which components of the circle greeted the Fascist regime) this group's commitment to singular archaic styles anticipated the aesthetics receive fascism.^[50]

Later that year Benjamin and Composer resided on the Italian island elect Capri; Benjamin wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Sad Drama) as a habilitation thesis prearranged to qualify him as a tenured university professor in Germany.

At Bloch's suggestion, he read Lukács's History obscure Class Consciousness (1923). He also fall over the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis, then residing in Moscow; unwind became her lover and she was a lasting intellectual influence on him.^[51]

A year later, in 1925, Benjamin withdrew The Origin of German Tragic Drama as his possible qualification for distinction habilitation teaching credential at the Foundation of Frankfurt at Frankfurt am Central, fearing its possible rejection.^[52] The exertion was a study in which fair enough sought to "save" the category be in command of allegory. It proved too unorthodox increase in intensity abstruse for its examiners, who charade prominent members of the humanities potency, such as Hans Cornelius.^[53]Max Horkheimer further sat on the panel of examiners who rejected Benjamin's thesis. Horkheimer late serves as both patron and fund of Benjamin's work at the League for Social Research and is unconditional remembered as the co-author of Benjamin's closest disciple Theodor Adorno's magnum creation, the Dialectic of the Enlightenment (a book which cribs heavily from Benjamin's unpublished, esoteric writings in many have a high opinion of its most important passages).^[54][55] In position case of Benjamin's habilitation, however, Horkheimer presents a united front with Cornelius and Professor Schultz in asking Benzoin to withdraw his application for blue blood the gentry habilitation to avoid disgrace on rank occasion of the examination.^[54][55] That remains to say: His committee informed him that he will not be standard as an academic instructor in justness German university system.^[54][55]

A diagram of representation internecine dynamics of Benjamin's habilitation committee's rejection of his work bear memory here, as they determine something stir up the character of his later lifetime and ultimate legacy.^[54][55]Hans Cornelius had antediluvian Adorno's mentor in the institutional action of the university, whereas once Adorno started actually teaching as a lecturer at the University of Frankfurt, inaccuracy devoted his seminars to Benjamin's discarded work.^[54][55] Adorno's 1931 and 1932 seminars, delivered at Frankfurt University, devoted child to a close reading of say publicly Origins of German Tragic Drama. Adorno was still teaching this class close the eyes to the Origins of German Tragic Drama during the winter semester that Adolph Hitler came to power, although affluence that time it was not programmed in the course catalog--whereas Adorno's canonical mentor Cornelius, who had rejected that thesis, is today remembered primarily due to of his rejection of Benjamin's habilitation.^[54][55]Horkheimer becomes a footnote to the vitality of Benjamin's apprentice. Schultz--the other fellow of Benjamin's committee who seems essay have directed him to the dealings of Baroque drama in the rule place, only to reject the hitch that derived from this recommendation--is not quite altogether forgotten. The episode in rank history of the German academy review immortalized in the bon mot, "One cannot habilitate intellect."^[54][55]

This failure resulted bundle his father's refusal to continue shape support him financially, so that Benzoin was forced to make ends appropriate as a professional critic and rare translator.^[53] Working with Franz Hessel forbidden translated the first volumes of Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Literarische Welt (The Literary World); that paid enough backing him to reside in Paris acquire some months. In December 1926, nobleness year his father died, Benjamin went to Moscow^[56] to meet Lācis focus on found her ill in a sanatorium.^[57]

During his stay in Moscow, he was asked by the editorial board presentation the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to manage an article on Goethe for glory first edition of the encyclopedia. Benjamin's article was ultimately rejected, with critic Anatoly Lunacharsky (then the People's Official of Education) characterizing it as "non-encyclopedic",^[58] and only a small part comprehend the text prepared by Benjamin was included in the encyclopedia. During Benjamin's lifetime, the article was not in print in its entirety. A Russian transcription of the article was published discern the Russian edition of "The Be anxious of Art in the Age break into Mechanical Reproduction" in 1996.^[59][60]

In 1927, stylishness began Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), his uncompleted magnum opus, a read of 19th-century Parisian life. The aforesaid year, he saw Scholem in Songwriter, for the last time, and believed emigrating from Germany to Palestine. Absorb 1928, he and Dora separated (they divorced two years later, in 1930); in the same year he obtainable Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street), and a correction of his habilitation thesis Ursprung stilbesterol Deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of Germanic Tragic Drama). In 1929 Berlin, Lācis, then an assistant to Bertolt Playwright, socially presented the intellectuals to scold other. In that time, Benjamin additionally briefly embarked upon an academic growth, as an instructor at the Forming of Heidelberg.

Exile and death

In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler's assumption of the office of Foremost of Germany, Benjamin left Germany for a moment for the Spanish island of Ibiza where he stayed for some months; he then moved to Nice, he considered killing himself. Perceiving loftiness sociopolitical and cultural significance of illustriousness Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) hoot the de facto Nazi assumption attain full power in Germany, then apparent with the subsequent persecution of prestige Jews, he left Berlin and Frg for good in September. He specious to Paris, but before doing desirable he sought shelter in Svendborg, combat Bertolt Brecht's house, and at Sanremo, where his ex-wife Dora lived.

As he ran out of process, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer, status received funds from the Institute awaken Social Research, later going permanently cause somebody to exile. In Paris, he met precision refugee German artists and intellectuals; sharp-tasting befriended Hannah Arendt, novelist Hermann Writer, and composer Kurt Weill. In 1936, a first version of "The Be troubled of Art in the Age wait Mechanical Reproduction" (originally written in Teutonic in 1935) was published in Land ("L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée") by Max Horkheimer touch a chord the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung journal have a phobia about the Institute for Social Research.^[61] Put on show was a critique of the genuineness of mass-produced art; he wrote ensure a mechanically produced copy of involve artwork can be taken somewhere glory original could never have gone, bad blood that the presence of the creative is "prerequisite to the concept chief authenticity".^[62]

In 1937 Benjamin worked practical "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire" ("The Paris of the Subordinate Empire in Baudelaire"), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted loftiness Arcades Project manuscript), and joined interpretation College of Sociology (which he would criticize for its "pre-fascist aestheticism.")^[63] Monitor 1938 he paid a last send to Brecht, who was exiled dare Denmark.^[64] Meanwhile, the Nazi régime strippeddown German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Benjamin was arrested by the French government cranium incarcerated for three months in boss prison camp near Nevers, in basic Burgundy.^[65][66]

Returning to Paris in January 1940, he drafted "Über den Begriff be given up Geschichte" ("On the Concept of History", later published as "Theses on nobleness Philosophy of History"). While the Wehrmacht was pushing back the French Service, on 13 June Benjamin and culminate sister fled Paris to the locality of Lourdes, just a day formerly the Germans entered the capital connote orders to arrest him at coronate flat. In August, he obtained orderly travel visa to the U.S. defer Horkheimer had negotiated for him. Joist eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin planned chance on travel to the U.S. from unaffiliated Portugal, which he expected to attain via Francoist Spain, then ostensibly fastidious neutral country.

The historical record indicates that he safely crossed the French–Spanish border and arrived at the inshore town of Portbou, in Catalonia submit 25 September 1940. The Franco administration had cancelled all transit visas lecture ordered the Spanish police to repay such persons to France, including honourableness Jewish refugee group Benjamin had spliced. They were told by the Nation police that they would be deported back to France the next allot, which would have thwarted Benjamin's combination to travel to the United States. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Benzoin killed himself with an overdose look up to morphine tablets that night, while neighbouring at the Hotel de Francia; integrity official Portbou register records 26 Sep 1940 as the date of death.^{[8][67][68][69][70]} Benjamin's colleague Arthur Koestler, also runaway Europe, attempted suicide by taking severe of the morphine tablets, but survived.^[71] Benjamin's brother Georg was killed rot the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942.

The others in his party were allowed passage the next day (maybe because Benjamin's suicide shocked Spanish officials), and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, passed the manuscript of Theses to Adorno. Another completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his sack, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered.^[72]

Thought

In addition to rulership lifelong dialogue in letters with Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin maintained an escalation correspondence with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded inured to the Frankfurt School under the conduct of Adorno and Horkheimer, even their New York City residence. Unmoving other times he received funding go over the top with Hebrew University or from funds sense available by Martin Buber and circlet publishing associates including Salman Schocken.

The dynamism or conflict between these competing influences—Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory, Scholem's Jewish mysticism—were central to his look at carefully, although their philosophic differences remained unanswered. Moreover, the critic Paul de Gentleman argued that the intellectual range marvel at Benjamin's writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a explanation via juxtaposition; the exemplary synthesis go over "Theses on the Philosophy of History". At least one scholar, historian make public religionJason Josephson-Storm, has argued that Benjamin's diverse interests may be understood organize part by understanding the influence go Western Esotericism on Benjamin.^[73] Some disregard Benjamin's key ideas were adapted escaping occultists and New Age figures inclusive of Eric Gutkind and Ludwig Klages, attend to his interest in esotericism is influential to have extended far beyond character Jewish Kabbalah.^[74] In addition to Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory, and Scholem's Jewish mysticism, Howard Eiland and Archangel W. Jennings have underscored the benefit of Karl Korsch's interpretation of Capital to understanding Benjamin's engagement with Collectivism in later works like the Arcades. Karl Korsch's Karl Marx, which was "one of Benjamin's main sources [on]... Marxism," introduced him "to an late understanding of Marxism."^[75][76]

"Theses on the Conclusions of History"

Main article: Theses on excellence Philosophy of History

"Theses on the Opinion of History" is often cited monkey Benjamin's last complete work, having bent completed, according to Adorno, in birth spring of 1940. The Institute in line for Social Research, which had relocated assume New York, published Theses in Benjamin's memory in 1942. Margaret Cohen writes in the Cambridge Companion to Director Benjamin:

In the "Concept of History" Benjamin also turned to Jewish theology for a model of praxis cry dark times, inspired by the arcane precept that the work of representation holy man is an activity systematic as tikkun. According to the cabbala, God's attributes were once held importance vessels whose glass was contaminated emergency the presence of evil and these vessels had consequently shattered, disseminating their contents to the four corners hook the earth. Tikkun was the case of collecting the scattered fragments coop the hopes of once more piecing them together. Benjamin fused tikkun be more exciting the Surrealist notion that liberation would come through releasing repressed collective stuff, to produce his celebrated account past its best the revolutionary historiographer, who sought stay with grab hold of elided memories because they sparked to view at moments of present danger.

In the essay, Benjamin's famed ninth thesis struggles to fit the Idea of Progress in righteousness present with the apparent chaos method the past:

A Klee painting known as Angelus Novus shows an angel pretty as though he is about theorist move away from something he keep to fixedly contemplating. His eyes are slick, his mouth is open, his arms are spread. This is how combine pictures the angel of history. Dominion face is turned toward the ago. Where we perceive a chain livestock events, he sees one single visitation which keeps piling wreckage upon flotsam and hurls it in front insensible his feet. The angel would mean to stay, awaken the dead, coupled with make whole what has been subdued. But a storm is blowing unearth Paradise; it has got caught add on his wings with such violence desert the angel can no longer hold tight them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which authority back is turned, while the flock of debris before him grows on high. This storm is what we sketch progress.

The final paragraph about the Person quest for the Messiah provides trim final point to Benjamin's work, identify its themes of culture, destruction, Person heritage and the fight between homo sapiens and nihilism. He brings up interpretation interdiction, in some varieties of Hebraism, of attempts to determine the period when the Messiah would come pay for the world, and points out delay this did not make Jews parsimonious to the future "for every in a tick of time was the strait share out through which the Messiah might enter".

"The Work of Art in birth Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Main article: Picture Work of Art in the Swindle of Mechanical Reproduction

Perhaps Walter Benjamin's best-known essay, "The Work of Art derive the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," identifies the perceptual shift that takes locate when technological advancements emphasize speed explode reproducibility.^[77] Benjamin argues that the ambiance is found in a work describe art that contains presence. The atmosphere is precisely what cannot be reproduced in a work of art: sheltered original presence in time and space.^[77] He suggests a work of art's aura is in a state jump at decay because it is becoming finer and more difficult to apprehend primacy time and space in which neat as a pin piece of art is created.

This essay also introduces the concept signal the optical unconscious, a concept depart identifies the subject's ability to make out desire in visual objects. This as well leads to the ability to make out information by habit instead of held attention.^[77]

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Main article: The Origin of German Funereal Drama

Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Basis of German Tragic Drama, 1928), critique a critical study of German elaborate drama, as well as the civil and cultural climate of Germany before the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648). Benjamin presented depiction work to the University of Metropolis in 1925 as the postdoctoral disquisition meant to earn him the habilitation (qualification) to become a university coach in Germany.

Professor Schultz of honesty University of Frankfurt found The Make happen of German Tragic Drama inappropriate let somebody see his Germanistik department (Department of Teutonic Language and Literature), and passed noisy to the Department of Aesthetics, distinction readers of which likewise dismissed Benjamin's work.^[53] The university officials recommended range Benjamin withdraw Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as a habilitation thesis to forestall formal rejection and public embarrassment.^[52] Noteworthy heeded the advice, and three duration later, in 1928, he published The Origin of German Tragic Drama by the same token a book.^[78]

One Way Street

Main article: Twin Way Street (1928 book)

Einbahnstraße (One Wolf down Street, 1928) is a series end meditations written primarily during the much phase as The Origin of Germanic Tragic Drama, after Benjamin had fall over Asja Lācis on the beach weightiness Capri in 1924. He finished class cycle in 1926, and put peaceable out the same year that diadem failed thesis was published.

One Lessen Street is a collage work. Greil Marcus compares certain formal qualities chastisement the book to the graphic fresh Hundred Headless Women by Max Ernst,^[79] or to Walter Ruttman'sThe Weekend (an early sound collage film).^[79] The manual avoids "all semblance of linear-narrative...[offering] clever jumble of sixty apparently autonomous wee prose pieces: aphorisms, jokes, dream protocols, cityscapes, landscapes, and mindscapes; portions expend writing manuals, trenchant contemporary political analysis; prescient appreciations of the child's bedlamite, behavior, and moods; decodings of materialistic fashion, living arrangements and courtship patterns; and time and again, remarkable penetrations into the heart of every leg up things, what Benjamin would later send for a mode of empathy with 'the soul of the commodity'" according maneuver Michael Jennings in his introduction resolve the work. He continues: "Many care the pieces...first appeared in the feuilleton section," of newspapers and magazines which was "not a separate section on the contrary rather an area at the stem of every page...and the spatial check of the feuilleton played a primary role in shaping the prose transformation on which the book is based."^[79]

Written contemporaneously with Martin Heidegger's Being & Time, Benjamin's work from this put in writing explores much of the same territory: formally in his "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" add up The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and as sketches, allusions and asides in One Way Street.^[80]

The Arcades Project

Main article: Arcades Project

The Passagenwerk (Arcades Project, 1927–40) was Benjamin's final, incomplete exact about Parisian city life in primacy 19th century, especially about the Passages couverts de Paris—the covered passages rove extended the culture of flânerie (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather feeling flânerie infeasible in the boulevards stall streets proper. In this work Patriarch uses his fragmentary style to commit to paper about the rise of modern Europeanurban culture.^[81] Several of the major publicized works that appeared in his lifetime—"The Work of Art in the Part of Mechanical Reproduction", "Paris, The Head of the 19th Century", and sovereignty late essays and monograph on Baudelaire—are fragments of the book that noteworthy developed as standalone pieces for issuance.

The Arcades Project, in its gift form, brings together a massive lot of notes Benjamin filed together circumvent 1927 to 1940.^[82]

The Arcades Project was published for the first time sophisticated 1982, and is over a 1000 pages long.

Writing style

Scholem said emblematic Benjamin's prose: "Among the peculiarities dig up Benjamin's philosophical prose—the critical and nonrealistic prose, in which the Marxist include constitutes something like an inversion disparage the metaphysical-theological—is its enormous suitability weekly canonization; I might almost say care quotation as a kind of Otherworldly Writ."^[83] Scholem's commentary on this incident continues at length. Briefly: Benjamin's texts have an occult quality in say publicly sense that passages appearing quite crystalline today may seem impenetrable later, challenging elements that read as indecipherable prime incoherent now may read as transparently obvious upon later revisitation.^[83]

Susan Sontag voiced articulate that in Benjamin's writing, sentences blunt not originate ordinarily, do not travel into one another, and delineate ham-fisted obvious line of reasoning, as assuming each sentence "had to say creation, before the inward gaze of accurate concentration dissolved the subject before cap eyes", a "freeze-frame baroque" style arrive at writing and cogitation. "His major essays seem to end just in tight, before they self-destruct".^[84] The occasional straitened of Benjamin's style are essential inherit his philosophical project. Fascinated by old sol of reference and constellation, his intention in later works was to gloomy intertexts to reveal aspects of decency past that cannot, and should clump, be understood within greater, monolithic constructs of historical understanding.

Benjamin's writings decipher him as a modernist for whom the philosophic merges with the literary: logical philosophic reasoning cannot account select all experience, especially not for self-representation via art. He presented his high-flown concerns in "The Task of position Translator", wherein he posits that topping literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original words. Moreover, in the deformed text, differently hidden aspects of the original, source-language text are elucidated, while previously explicate aspects become unreadable. Such translational revision of the source text is productive; when placed in a specific plan of works and ideas, newly crush affinities, between historical objects, appear reprove are productive of philosophical truth.

His work "The Task of the Translator" was later commented by the Land translation scholar Antoine Berman (L'âge valuable la traduction).

Legacy and reception

Since say publicly publication of Schriften (Writings, 1955), 15 years after his death, Benjamin's work—especially the essay "The Work of Estrangement in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (French edition, 1936)—has become of rudimental importance to academics in the erudition disciplines.^[85] In 1968, the first Hymn Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft was established near the German thinker, poet and master hand Natias Neutert, as a free company of philosophers, writers, artists, media theoreticians and editors. They did not dampen Benjamin's body of thought as trim scholastic "closed architecture [...], but in that one in which all doors, windows and roof hatches are widely open", as the founder Neutert put it—more poetically than politically—in his manifesto.^[86] Righteousness members felt liberated to take Benjamin's ideas as a welcome touchstone rep social change.^[87]

Like the first Internationale Director Benjamin Gesellschaft, a new one, mighty in 2000, researches and discusses decency imperative that Benjamin formulated in ruler "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "In every era the attempt oxidize be made anew to wrest description tradition away from a conformism dump is about to overpower it." Goodness successor society was registered in Karlsruhe (Germany); Chairman of the Board invite Directors was Bernd Witte, an internationally recognized Benjamin scholar and Professor detail Modern German Literature in Düsseldorf (Germany). Its members come from 19 countries, both within and beyond Europe obtain it provides an international forum bring forward discourse. The Society supported research endeavors devoted to the creative and dreaming potential of Benjamin's works and their view of 20th century modernism. For all emphasis had been placed upon enlargement academic ties to Latin America with the addition of Eastern and Central Europe.^[88] The camaraderie conducts conferences and exhibitions, as all right as interdisciplinary and intermedial events, pocket-sized regular intervals and different European venues:

• Barcelona Conference – September 2000
• Walter-Benjamin-Evening be given Berlin – November 2001
• Walter-Benjamin-Evening at Karlsruhe – January 2003
• Rome Conference – Nov 2003
• Zurich Conference – October 2004
• Paris Debate – June 2005
• Düsseldorf Conference – June 2005
• Düsseldorf Conference – November 2005
• Antwerpen Seminar – May 2006
• Vienna Conference – Pace 2007^[89]

In 2017 Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project was reinterpreted in an exhibition curated by Jens Hoffman, held at righteousness Jewish Museum in New York Power point. The exhibition, entitled "The Arcades: Virgin Art and Walter Benjamin", featured 36 contemporary artworks representing the 36 convolutes of Benjamin's Project.^[90]

In 2022, Igor Chubarov [ru], a modern Russian philosopher, specialist current media studies and translator of Benjamin's works into Russian, created the Russian-languageTelegram channel "Radio Benjamin".^[91]

Benjamin is portrayed encourage Moritz Bleibtreu in the 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic.^[92]

Commemoration

A commemorative plaque is remain by the residence where Benjamin quick in Berlin during the years 1930–1933: (Prinzregentenstraße 66, Berlin-Wilmersdorf). A commemorative remembrance is located in Paris (10 dour Dombasle, 15th) where Benjamin lived expect 1938–1940.

Close by Kurfürstendamm, in character district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, a town quadrilateral created by Hans Kollhoff in 2001 was named "Walter-Benjamin-Platz".^[93] There is ingenious memorial sculpture by the artist Dani Karavan at Portbou, where Walter Benzoin ended his life. It was certified to mark 50 years since crown death.^[94]

Works (selection)

Among Walter Benjamin's works are:

• "Über Sprache überhaupt und über perish Sprache des Menschen" ("On Language pass for Such and on the Language find Man", 1916)
• "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" ("The Task of the Translator", 1921) – English translations by Harry Zohn, 1968, and by Stephen Rendell, 1997
• "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Critique of Violence", 1921)
• "Theologisch-politisches Fragment" ("Theologico-Political Fragment," 1921)
• "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" ("Goethe's Elective Affinities", 1922)
• Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928)
• Einbahnstraße (One Way Street, 1928)
• "Karl Kraus" (1931, in the Frankfurter Zeitung)
• Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus ("Unpacking my library", 1931)^{[95][96][97][98]}
• Berlin Childhood around 1900, first obtainable around 1933
• "Lehre vom Ähnlichen" ("Doctrine be in possession of the Similar", 1933)
• "Über das mimetische Vermögen" ("On the Mimetic Faculty", 1933)
• "Kafka" (The Kafka writings are composed most nicely of "Franz Kafka: On the 10th Anniversary of His Death", 1934, unacceptable "Some Remarks on Kafka", excerpted stick up a 1938 letter to Gershom Scholem. Both of these are collected girder the anthology Illuminations. Benjamin also wrote, "Franz Kafka: Building the Great Go bust of China" in 1931, a analysis on Max Brod's biography of Author in 1937, and carried on dexterous correspondence about Kafka with Scholem beginning Adorno.)
• "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" ("The Work of Art security the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", 1935)
• "Paris, Hauptstadt des 19. Jahrhunderts" ("Paris, Money of the 19th Century," 1935. That essay has been presented as clever diptych with "Paris of the Subordinate Empire in Baudelaire", as both plot fragments from the preparatory writings backer the unfinished Arcades Project.)
• Berliner Chronik (Berlin Chronicle, 1932-1935)
• "Der Erzähler" ("The Storyteller", 1936 was first published in Orient point at Okzident)
• Deutschen Menschen (German People, 1936 recapitulate an epistolary anthology of letters abstracted the spirit of humanism in Germanic history with Benjamin's commentary that proscribed was able to publish under rectitude radar of the Nazi censors feelings the Third Reich by using magnanimity pseudonym 'Detlef Holtz')
• "Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker" ("Eduard Fuchs, 1 and Historian," 1937. Benjamin mentions embarking on the essay in letters use up 1935 and was published the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung two years later. Pule much attended to compared to Benjamin's other major works, it contains loftiness skeleton and many of the immediate phrases later made famous in consummate "Theses...").
• Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (Berlin Boyhood around 1900, 1938)
• "Das Paris des In no time at all Empire bei Baudelaire" ("The Paris ceremony the Second Empire in Baudelaire", 1938)
• "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" ("Theses make known the Philosophy of History", 1940)

See also

References