Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ; German: ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940 was the German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic & essayist.

An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, as well as Jewish mysticism, Benjamin gave enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with a Frankfurt School, and also submits formative friendships with thinkers such(a) as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was also related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her number one marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders.

Among Benjamin's best known workings are the essays "The relieve oneself of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" 1935, and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" 1940. His major work as a literary critic planned essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, and translation theory. He also filed major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens constituent 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 the invading Wehrmacht.

Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.

Thought

Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the dominance 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 argud 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 required to have extended far beyond the Jewish Kabbalah.