Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; German:
[ˈvaltɐ ˈbɛnjamiːn]; 15 July 1892 – 26
September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher,
cultural critic and essayist.
An eclectic thinker, combining elements of
German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism,
and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring
and influential contributions to aesthetic
theory, literary criticism, and historical
materialism.
He was associated with the Frankfurt School,
and also maintained formative friendships
with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht
and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem.
He was also related by law to German political
theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through
her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin, Günther
Anders.
Among Benjamin's best known works are the
essays "The Task of the Translator" (1923),
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" (1936), and "Theses on the Philosophy
of History" (1940).
His major work as a literary critic included
essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus,
Leskov, Proust, Walser, and translation theory.
He also made major translations into German
of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's
Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À
la recherche du temps perdu.
In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin committed
suicide at Portbou on the French–Spanish
border while attempting to escape from invading
Nazi forces.
Though popular acclaim eluded him during his
life, the decades following his death won
his work posthumous renown.
== Life ==
=== Early life and education ===
Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942)
and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy
business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews
in the Berlin of the German Empire (1871–1918).
The patriarch of Walter Benjamin's family,
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.
Benjamin's uncle William Stern (born Wilhelm
Louis Stern; 1871-1938) was a prominent German
child psychologist who developed the concept
of the intelligence quotient (IQ), and Benjamin's
cousin Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund
Stern; 1902-1992) was a German philosopher
and anti-nuclear activist who studied under
Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.
Through his mother, his great-uncle was the
classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld.
In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled
to the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg;
he completed his secondary school studies
ten years later.
Walter Benjamin was a boy of fragile health
and so in 1905 the family sent him to Hermann-Lietz-Schule
Haubinda, a boarding school in the Thuringian
countryside, for two years; in 1907, having
returned to Berlin, he resumed his schooling
at the Kaiser Friedrich School.In 1912, at
the age of twenty, he enrolled at the University
of Freiburg, but, at summer semester's end,
returned to Berlin, then matriculated into
the University of Berlin, to continue studying
philosophy.
Here Benjamin had his first exposure to the
ideas of Zionism, which had not been part
of his liberal upbringing.
This exposure gave him occasion to formulate
his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism.
Benjamin distanced himself from political
and nationalist Zionism, instead developing
in his own thinking what he called a kind
of "cultural Zionism"—an attitude which
recognized and promoted Judaism and Jewish
values.
In Benjamin's formulation his Jewishness meant
a commitment to the furtherance of European
culture.
Benjamin expressed "My life experience led
me to this insight: the Jews represent an
elite in the ranks of the spiritually active
... For Judaism is to me in no sense an end
in itself, but the most distinguished bearer
and representative of the spiritual."
This was a position that Benjamin largely
held lifelong.Elected president of the Freie
Studentenschaft (Free Students Association),
Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational
and general cultural change.
When not re-elected as student association
president, he returned to Freiburg University
to study, with particular attention to the
lectures of Heinrich Rickert; at that time
he travelled to France and Italy.
In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World
War (1914–1918), Benjamin began faithfully
translating the works of the 19th-century
French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867).
The next year, 1915, he moved to Munich, and
continued his schooling at the 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.
They had a son, Stefan Rafael (1918–1972).
In 1919 Benjamin earned his Ph.D. cum laude
with the dissertation Begriff der Kunstkritik
in der Deutschen Romantik (The Concept of
Art Criticism in German Romanticism).
Later, unable to support himself and family,
he 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 Benjamin
would remain an admirer of Strauss and of
his work throughout his life.
=== Career ===
In 1923, when the Institut für Sozialforschung
(Institute for Social Research) was founded,
later to become home to the Frankfurt School,
Benjamin published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux
Parisiens.
At 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 father Emil Benjamin to
continue supporting his son's family.
At the end of 1923 his best friend Gershom
Scholem immigrated to Palestine, a country
under the British Mandate of Palestine; despite
repeated invitations, he failed to persuade
Benjamin (and family) to leave the Continent
for the Middle East.
In 1924 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in the Neue
Deutsche Beiträge magazine, published Goethes
Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities),
by Walter Benjamin, about Goethe's third novel,
Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809).
Later that year Benjamin and Ernst Bloch resided
on the Italian island of Capri; Benjamin wrote
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin
of German Tragic Drama), as a 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.
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, Benjamin withdrew The
Origin of German Tragic Drama as his possible
qualification for the habilitation teaching
credential at the University of Frankfurt
at Frankfurt am Main, fearing its possible
rejection; 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.In 1927, he began Das Passagen-Werk
(The Arcades Project), his uncompleted 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 (they divorced
two years later, in 1930); in the same year
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.
=== Exile and death ===
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 Bertolt 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, refugees there from Germany;
he befriended Hannah Arendt, novelist Hermann
Hesse, and composer Kurt Weill.
In 1936, a first version of The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (L'œuvre
d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée)
was published, in French, by Max Horkheimer
in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung journal
of the Institute for Social Research.
It was a critique of the authenticity of mass-produced
art; he wrote that a mechanically produced
copy of an artwork can be taken somewhere
where the original could never have gone,
arguing that the presence of the original
is "prerequisite to the concept of authenticity".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 (On the Concept
of History, later published as Theses on the
Philosophy of History).
While the Wehrmacht was pushing back the French
Army, on 13 June Benjamin and his sister fled
Paris to the town of Lourdes, just a day before
the Germans entered the capital 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 Francoist Spain,
then ostensibly a neutral country.
The historical record indicates that 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.
They tried to cross the border on 25 September
1940, but were told by the Spanish police
that they would be deported back to France
the next day, which would have destroyed Benjamin's
plans to travel to the United States.
Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Walter
Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of
morphine tablets that night, while staying
in the Hotel de Francia; the official Portbou
register records 26 September 1940 as the
official date of death.
Benjamin's colleague Arthur Koestler, also
fleeing Europe, attempted suicide by taking
some of the morphine tablets, but he survived.
Benjamin's brother Georg was killed at the
Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942.
Despite his suicide, Benjamin was buried in
the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic
cemetery.
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.
Hannah 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 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.
== Thought ==
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 exemplary synthesis is Theses on the Philosophy
of History.
At least one scholar, historian of religion
Jason Josephson-Storm, has argued that Benjamin's
diverse interests may be understood in part
by understanding the influence of Western
Esotericism on Benjamin.
Some of Benjamin's key ideas were adapted
from occultists and New Age figures including
Eric Gutkind and Ludwig Klages, and his interest
in esotericism is known to have extended far
beyond the Jewish Kabbalah.
=== Theses on the Philosophy of History ===
Theses on the Philosophy of History is often
cited as Benjamin's last complete work, having
been completed, according to Adorno, in the
spring of 1940.
The Institute for Social Research, which had
relocated to New York, published Theses in
Benjamin's memory in 1942.
Margaret Cohen writes in the Cambridge Companion
to Walter Benjamin:
In the "Concept of History" Benjamin also
turned to Jewish mysticism for a model of
praxis in dark times, inspired by the kabbalistic
precept that the work of the holy man is an
activity known as tikkun.
According to the kabbalah, God's attributes
were once held in vessels whose glass was
contaminated by the presence of evil and these
vessels had consequently shattered, disseminating
their contents to the four corners of the
earth.
Tikkun was the process of collecting the scattered
fragments in the hopes of once more piecing
them together.
Benjamin fused tikkun with the Surrealist
notion that liberation would come through
releasing repressed collective material, to
produce his celebrated account of the revolutionary
historiographer, who sought to grab hold of
elided memories as they sparked to view at
moments of present danger.
In the essay, Benjamin's famed ninth thesis
struggles to reconcile the Idea of Progress
in the present with the apparent chaos of
the past:
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 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."
=== 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 university officials 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.
=== The 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.
The Arcades Project, in its current form,
brings together a massive collection of notes
which Benjamin filed together over the course
of thirteen years, from 1927 to 1940.The Arcades
Project was published for the first time in
1982, and is over a thousand pages long.
=== 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".
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 modification 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.
His work The Task of the Translator was later
commented by the French translation scholar
Antoine Berman (L'âge de la traduction).
== Legacy and reception ==
Since the publication of Schriften (Writings,
1955), 15 years after his death, Benjamin's
work—especially the essay "The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936)—has
become of seminal importance to academics
in the humanities disciplines.
In 1968, the first Internationale Walter Benjamin
Gesellschaft was established by the German
thinker, poet and artist Natias Neutert, as
a free association of philosophers, writers,
artists, media theoreticians and editors.
They did not take Benjamin's body of thought
as a scholastic "closed architecture [...], but
as 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.
The members felt liberated to take Benjamin's
ideas as a welcome touchstone for social change.Like
the first Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft,
a new one, established in 2000, researches
and discusses the imperative that Benjamin
formulated in his Theses on the Philosophy
of History: "In every era the attempt must
be made anew to wrest the tradition away from
a conformism that is about to overpower it."
The successor society was registered in Karlsruhe
(Germany); Chairman of the Board of Directors
was Bernd Witte, an internationally recognized
Benjamin scholar and Professor of Modern German
Literature in Düsseldorf (Germany).
Its members come from 19 countries, both within
and beyond Europe and represents an international
forum for discourse.
The Society supported research endeavors devoted
to the creative and visionary potential of
Benjamin's works and their view of 20th century
modernism.
Special emphasis had been placed upon strengthening
academic ties to Latin America and Eastern
and Central Europe.
The society conducts conferences and exhibitions,
as well as interdisciplinary and intermedial
events, at regular intervals and different
European venues:
Barcelona Conference – September 2000
Walter-Benjamin-Evening at Berlin – November
2001
Walter-Benjamin-Evening at Karlsruhe – January
2003
Rome Conference – November 2003
Zurich Conference – October 2004
Paris Conference – June 2005
Düsseldorf Conference – June 2005
Düsseldorf Conference – November 2005
Antwerpen Conference – May 2006
Vienna Conference – March 2007In 2017 Walter
Benjamin's Arcades Project was reinterpreted
in an exhibition curated by Jens Hoffman,
held at the Jewish Museum in New York City.
The exhibition, entitled "The Arcades: Contemporary
Art and Walter Benjamin", features 36 contemporary
artworks representing the 36 convolutes of
Benjamin's Project.
== Commemoration ==
A commemorative plaque is located by the residence
where Benjamin lived in Berlin during the
years 1930–1933: (Prinzregentenstraße 66,
Berlin-Wilmersdorf).
A commemorative plaque is located in Paris
(10 rue Dombasle, 15th) where Benjamin lived
in 1938-1940.
Close by Kurfürstendamm, in the district
of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, a town square
created by Hans Kollhoff in 2001 was named
"Walter-Benjamin-Platz".
There is a memorial sculpture by the artist
Dani Karavan at Portbou, where Walter Benjamin
ended his life.
It was commissioned to mark 50 years since
his death.
== 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 (The 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)
== See also ==
Gertrud Kolmar
Michael Heller
List of people from Berlin
== 
References ==
== Further reading ==
=== Primary literature ===
=== Secondary literature ===
Urbich, Jan (2011).
"Darstellung bei Walter Benjamin.
Die 'Erkenntniskritische Vorrede' im Kontext
ästhetischer Darstellungstheorien der Moderne",
Berlin: De Gruyter.
ISBN 978-3-11-026515-6
Libero Federici, Il misterioso eliotropismo.
Filosofia, politica e diritto in Walter Benjamin,
Ombre Corte, Verona 2017
Kishik, David.
(2015).
"The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City."
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
ISBN 978-0-80478-603-4 (cloth) – ISBN 978-1-50360-277-9
(paper)
== External links ==
Works by Walter Benjamin at Open Library
Walter Benjamin Archive at marxists.org
Walter Benjamin, at the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy
The Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft.
In English and German.
(Defunct)
