Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. He was an eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and Neo-Kantianism. He 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 related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders. Benjamin was born in 1892 into a prosperous Jewish family in Berlin. He studied philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg im Breisgau, Munich, and Bern. He settled in Berlin in 1920 and worked as a literary critic and translator. He also wrote essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, and other writers. He developed his own style of literary criticism that combined historical materialism, philosophical speculation, and psychoanalytic insights. He also explored the topics of art, technology, language, history, and politics in his writings. In 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, Benjamin fled to Paris. He continued to write and publish his works, such as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), and The Arcades Project (unfinished). He also collaborated with the Institute for Social Research and became a close friend of Theodor W. Adorno. He maintained contact with Brecht, Scholem, Arendt, and other exiled intellectuals. In 1940, as the Nazi occupation of France intensified, Benjamin attempted to escape to the United States via Spain. He joined a group of refugees who crossed the Pyrenees on foot. However, when they reached the border town of Portbou, they were told by the Spanish authorities that they would be deported back to France. Desperate and hopeless, Benjamin took his own life by overdosing on morphine pills in his hotel room. He was buried in a common grave in the Portbou municipal cemetery. Benjamin's death was a tragic loss for the intellectual world. His writings were scattered and endangered by the war. Some of his manuscripts were destroyed or lost; others were smuggled out of Europe by his friends or hidden in archives. His work was largely ignored or misunderstood by his contemporaries. It was only after the war that his writings began to be rediscovered and appreciated by a wider audience. His essays and books have influenced many fields of study, such as literary theory, cultural studies, media studies, critical theory, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and art history. He is now regarded as one of the most original and influential thinkers of the 20th century.