Walter benjamin a critical biography

This environment provided Benjamin with a stable and nurturing early life filled with intellectual stimulation and cultural exposure. Early on, he demonstrated an acute intellectual capacity and a profound interest in literature and the arts. After completing his secondary education, Benjamin enrolled at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin to study philosophy, German literature, and psychology.

His university years were crucial for his intellectual development; it was during this period that he was first introduced to the works of German Romantics and began to engage with the ideas of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, which would play a significant role in his later work. This connection exposed him to a diverse range of intellectual and cultural currents, from German Romanticism to contemporary political and social theories.

Walter Benjamin is best known for his critical work in literary theory, cultural studies, and the philosophy of history. After completing his education, he struggled to find a stable academic position, largely due to the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany and his Jewish background. Despite these challenges, Benjamin established himself as a prolific writer and thinker.

He contributed to various literary and cultural journals , where he explored topics ranging from literary criticism to political theory. His early works, including essays on German Romanticism and critical pieces on contemporary literature and art, showcased his wide-ranging intellectual interests and innovative theoretical approaches.

He developed a close association with the Frankfurt School, a group of critical theorists who shared his interest in combining Marxist philosophy with other social and cultural theories. Although Benjamin never formally joined the group, his collaboration with figures like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer influenced the development of Critical Theory.

Through this work, he sought to develop a method of historical analysis that combined elements of Marxism, surrealism, and Jewish mysticism. A deep engagement with the aesthetic and political dimensions of modern life characterizes his writings. Benjamin was particularly interested in the ways that technological and social changes affect art and culture.

He explored these themes through critical examinations of literature, art, and historical phenomena, employing methodologies that intersected Marxist theory, Jewish mysticism, and German idealism. His work sought to illuminate the complexities of modernity, making him a central figure in the study of 20th-century culture. In his early academic career, Walter Benjamin focused on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, with a particular emphasis on the concept of experience.

His interest in Kantian philosophy stemmed from a desire to understand the conditions of knowledge and perception in the modern world. In these early writings, he began to develop a critical approach that emphasized the historical and material conditions of knowledge. Sure to become the standard reference biography of this seminal thinker, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life will prove a source of inexhaustible interest for Benjamin scholars and novices alike.

Walter Benjamin : A Critical Life. Howard Eiland , Michael W. Berlin and Freiburg Berlin Munich and Bern Benjamin W. The Storyteller. Theses on the Philosophy of History. One-Way Street and Other Writings. New York: Verso. Benjamin, W. PhD Dissertation. Bern: University of Bern. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Angelus Novus. Gesammelte Schriften 7 vols.

Walter benjamin a critical biography

Tiedermann, H. Schweppenhauser, with T. Selected Writings in 4 vols. The Arcades Project. Berlin Childhood around Early Writings: — Eiland and others. Cambridge, MA:. Radio Benjamin. Lutes, L. London: Verso. Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Adorno, G. Adorno mit F. Podszus eds. Bloch, E. Tiedemann Eds. DeLoughrey, E. They were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France the next day, which would have thwarted Benjamin's plans to travel to the United States.

Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets that night, while staying at the Hotel de Francia ; the official Portbou register records 26 September as the date of death. 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.

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. In addition to his lifelong dialogue in letters with Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin maintained an intense correspondence 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.

At other times he received funding from Hebrew University or from funds made available by Martin Buber and his publishing associates including Salman Schocken. The dynamism or conflict between these competing influences—Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory , 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.

Jennings have underscored the importance of Karl Korsch 's interpretation of Capital to understanding Benjamin's engagement with Marxism in later works like the Arcades. Karl Korsch's Karl Marx , which was "one of Benjamin's main sources [on] Marxism," introduced him "to an advanced understanding of Marxism. 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 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, of attempts 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". Perhaps Walter Benjamin's best-known essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," identifies the perceptual shift that takes place when technological advancements emphasize speed and reproducibility.

The aura is precisely what cannot be reproduced in a work of art: its original presence in time and space. This essay also introduces the concept of the optical unconscious, a concept that identifies the subject's ability to identify desire in visual objects. This also leads to the ability to perceive information by habit instead of rapt attention.

Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels The Origin of German Tragic Drama , , is a critical study of German baroque drama, as well as the political and cultural climate of Germany during the Counter-Reformation — Benjamin presented the work to the University of Frankfurt in as the postdoctoral dissertation meant to earn him the habilitation qualification to become a university instructor in Germany.

Professor Schultz of the 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 , the readers of which likewise dismissed Benjamin's work. He finished the cycle in , and put it out the same year that his failed thesis was published.

One Way Street is a collage work. Greil Marcus compares certain formal qualities of the book to the graphic novel Hundred Headless Women by Max Ernst , [ 79 ] or to Walter Ruttman's The Weekend an early sound collage film. He continues: "Many of the pieces In this work Benjamin uses his fragmentary style to write about the rise of modern European urban culture.

The Arcades Project , in its current form, brings together a massive collection of notes Benjamin filed together from to The Arcades Project was published for the first time in , and is over a thousand pages long. Scholem said of Benjamin's prose: "Among the peculiarities of Benjamin's philosophical prose—the critical and metaphysical prose, in which the Marxist element constitutes something like an inversion of the metaphysical-theological—is its enormous suitability for canonization; I might almost say for quotation as a kind of Holy Writ.

Briefly: Benjamin's texts have an occult quality in the sense that passages appearing quite lucid today may seem impenetrable later, and elements that read as indecipherable or incoherent now may read as transparently obvious upon later revisitation. Susan Sontag said that in 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.

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. 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. Since the publication of Schriften Writings , , 15 years after his death, Benjamin's work—especially the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" French edition, —has become of seminal importance to academics in the humanities disciplines.

They did not take Benjamin's body of thought as a scholastic "closed architecture [ Like the first Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft, a new one, established in , 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.

Its members come from 19 countries, both within and beyond Europe and it provides 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 exhibition, entitled "The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin", featured 36 contemporary artworks representing the 36 convolutes of Benjamin's Project. In , Igor Chubarov [ ru ] , a modern Russian philosopher, specialist in media studies and translator of Benjamin's works into Russian, created the Russian-language Telegram channel "Radio Benjamin".

Benjamin is portrayed by Moritz Bleibtreu in the Netflix series Transatlantic. A commemorative plaque is located in Paris 10 rue Dombasle, 15th where Benjamin lived in — It was commissioned to mark 50 years since his death. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version.

In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. German cultural critic, philosopher and social critic — Berlin , German Empire. Portbou , Catalonia , Francoist Spain. Life [ edit ]. Major works. Notable theorists. Important concepts. Related topics. Early life and education [ edit ]. Friendships [ edit ]. Career [ edit ].

Exile and death [ edit ]. Thought [ edit ]. Main article: Theses on the Philosophy of History. The Origin of German Tragic Drama [ edit ]. One Way Street [ edit ]. Main article: One Way Street book. The Arcades Project [ edit ]. Main article: Arcades Project. Writing style [ edit ]. Legacy and reception [ edit ]. Commemoration [ edit ].