Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, in Berlin, the eldest of three children in a prosperous assimilated Jewish family ^[1]. His father, Emil Benjamin, worked as an antiques dealer and auctioneer, and later as an investor, which gave the household in Berlin's affluent western districts a comfortable, art-filled character that Benjamin would recall decades later in his memoir 'Berlin Childhood around 1900' ^[2].

A sickly child, he was educated partly by private tutors before attending the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg. Two formative years at a progressive boarding school in Haubinda, Thuringia, brought him under the influence of the education reformer Gustav Wyneken, whose ideas about youth culture shaped Benjamin's earliest published essays ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Walter Benjamin in these years would have found an intense student activist: he joined the German Youth Movement, wrote for its journals, and in 1914 was elected president of the Free Students' Union in Berlin ^[3].

The First World War broke these attachments. Benjamin evaded military service, and the suicide of his close friend, the poet Fritz Heinle, in August 1914 darkened his outlook permanently. He publicly broke with Wyneken in 1915 over the older man's support for the war ^[1]. That same year he began a friendship with Gershom Scholem, the future historian of Jewish mysticism, a relationship that lasted the rest of his life and pulled his thinking toward theological questions even as his politics moved left ^[3].

Benjamin studied philosophy at universities in Freiburg, Berlin, Munich and finally Bern in neutral Switzerland, where in 1919 he completed a doctoral dissertation on the concept of art criticism in German Romanticism ^[1]. In Munich he had attended lectures alongside the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and in Bern he began a long, argumentative friendship with the philosopher Ernst Bloch ^[3].

An academic career was the obvious next step, and its failure became the decisive fact of any Walter Benjamin biography. In 1925 he submitted a habilitation thesis, 'The Origin of German Tragic Drama', a dense study of seventeenth century baroque mourning plays, to the University of Frankfurt. The faculty found it incomprehensible, and Benjamin withdrew the work rather than face formal rejection ^[4]. The book appeared in print in 1928 and is now treated as a landmark of criticism, but at the time the episode shut him out of a professorship and forced him into the insecure life of a freelance writer ^[1].

Through the later 1920s he built a reputation in the German press as a reviewer, essayist and translator. He produced German versions of Baudelaire and of several volumes of Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time', wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung and Die literarische Welt, and made pioneering radio broadcasts, including programs for children ^[2]. A 1924 stay on Capri introduced him to Asja Lacis, a Latvian Bolshevik theater director who sharpened his turn toward Marxism, and through her he later met the playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose spare, practical intelligence became a lasting influence ^[3]. A 1926 to 1927 winter in Moscow, recorded in a remarkable diary, left him sympathetic to communism but unwilling to join the party ^[4].

Benjamin's most famous single work is the 1935 to 1936 essay known in English as 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. In it he argued that photography and film strip artworks of what he called their aura, the sense of unique presence attached to an original object, and that this loss opens art to new political uses by mass audiences ^[5]. The essay, first published in French in the Frankfurt Institute's journal, remains one of the most assigned texts in film studies, art history and media theory ^[1].

His largest undertaking was the Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk), begun in 1927 and still unfinished at his death. Working for years in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Benjamin gathered thousands of quotations and observations on the glass-roofed shopping arcades of nineteenth century Paris, treating fashion, advertising, iron construction, gambling and the figure of the flâneur as clues to the dreamlife of capitalism ^[6]. The surviving mass of notes was published long after his death and has since fed research across urban studies, literary criticism and cultural history ^[4].

Among Walter Benjamin achievements, critics also rank the 1928 aphorism collection 'One-Way Street', the autobiographical 'Berlin Childhood around 1900', major essays on Goethe, Kafka, Proust, Baudelaire and the storyteller Nikolai Leskov, and the late 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', completed in 1940. That final text, with its image of the angel of history blown backward into the future by the storm of progress, an image he drew from a Paul Klee painting he owned, has become one of the most quoted passages in modern thought ^[5].

In 1917 Benjamin married Dora Sophie Kellner, an intellectually formidable woman he had met in student circles; their son Stefan was born in 1918 ^[1]. The marriage strained under Benjamin's chronic money troubles and his attachments to other women, above all Asja Lacis, and ended in a bitter divorce in 1930 ^[3].

Benjamin never held a steady post, and his adult life was a sequence of borrowed rooms, small advances and appeals to friends. He was a compulsive collector of books and children's literature, a lover of travel who wrote memorably about Naples, Marseille and Ibiza, and an experimenter who recorded his trials with hashish in careful protocols ^[2]. Friends remembered his tiny, almost microscopic handwriting and his habit of composing in cafés.

His friendships did much of the work institutions refused to do. Scholem, who emigrated to Jerusalem in 1923, urged him toward Hebrew and Palestine. Brecht offered him refuge in Danish exile. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Institute for Social Research provided a modest stipend in the exile years and published his essays, though Adorno's editorial criticisms of the Baudelaire work stung him deeply ^[4]. Hannah Arendt, a fellow refugee in Paris, became a friend and later did more than anyone to establish his reputation in the English-speaking world ^[5].

Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933 ended Benjamin's ability to publish in Germany under his own name. In March 1933 he left Berlin for Paris, beginning seven years of exile marked by poverty, isolation and relentless work on the Arcades Project and the Baudelaire studies ^[1]. He spent long stretches with Brecht in Svendborg, Denmark, and with his former wife Dora in San Remo, Italy, but Paris and its great library remained his base ^[3]. The German government stripped him of his citizenship in 1939, leaving him stateless ^[4].

When France declared war on Germany in September 1939, Benjamin was interned for several months as an enemy alien at a camp near Nevers. Released through the intervention of French friends, he returned to Paris, but the German invasion of May 1940 forced him to flee south to Lourdes and then Marseille, where he obtained an emergency United States visa arranged through Horkheimer and the Institute in New York ^[4]. Before leaving Paris he entrusted the Arcades manuscripts to the librarian Georges Bataille, who hid them in the Bibliothèque Nationale ^[6].

Lacking a French exit permit, Benjamin joined a small party led by Lisa Fittko that crossed the Pyrenees on foot in late September 1940. Exhausted and in poor health, he reached the Spanish frontier town of Portbou on September 25, only to be told that Spain had closed the border to travelers without exit visas and that the group would be returned to France the next day. That night Benjamin took a fatal overdose of morphine tablets, and he died on September 26, 1940, at the age of 48 ^[1]. The rest of his party was allowed through the following day. He was buried in the cemetery at Portbou, where a memorial by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan, titled 'Passages', now honors him ^[7].

Benjamin died almost unknown outside a circle of friends, and his afterlife is one of the strangest publishing stories of the century. Adorno and Scholem edited German collections of his writings in the 1950s, and Hannah Arendt's 1968 English anthology 'Illuminations', with her long introductory essay, introduced him to a vast new readership ^[5]. The Arcades Project appeared in German in 1982 and in English translation in 1999, and Harvard University Press has issued his selected writings in four substantial volumes ^[6].

His influence now runs through disciplines he could not have foreseen. Media theorists read the artwork essay as an early map of mass culture; historians and literary scholars borrow his methods of montage and quotation; urbanists cite his flâneur; theologians and political thinkers argue over the messianic turn of the final theses. Basic Walter Benjamin facts, such as his rejected habilitation and his death at a closed border, have themselves become emblems of the outsider intellectual and of Europe's catastrophe ^[4].

Commemoration has followed. Portbou maintains his grave and the Karavan memorial, Berlin named a square, the Walter-Benjamin-Platz, after him, and his archive is preserved at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin ^[7]. Detailed modern biographies, above all the 2014 study 'Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life' by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, continue to reconstruct a life that produced no system, only essays, fragments and letters, yet changed how the modern world reads itself ^[3].