Walter Benjamin Add a review

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( BEN-yə-min; German: [ˈvaltɐ ˈbɛnjamiːn] ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. "The medium is the message," is a famous formula with broad applications that was derived from Benjamin's work by one of his readers. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western Marxism, and post-Kantianism, he made contributions to the philosophy of history, metaphysics, historical materialism, criticism, aesthetics and had an oblique but overwhelmingly influential impact on the resurrection of the Kabbalah by virtue of his life-long epistolary relationship with Gershom Scholem.

Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological, though he eschewed all recourse to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority.

He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative relationships with thinkers and cultural figures such as the cabaret playwright Bertolt Brecht (friend), Martin Buber (an early impresario in his career), Nazi constitutionalist Carl Schmitt (a rival), and many others. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.

Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a critic included essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, Trauerspiel and translation theory. He translated 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 died during his flight into exile on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Having remained in Europe until it was too late, as Cynthia Ozick puts it, Benjamin took his own life to avoid being murdered as a Jew. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.