Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), German writer, Marxist theorist, and aesthetician. Benjamin was born in Berlin to a middle-class Jewish family, and studied philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg, Munich, and Bern. From 1920 he settled in Berlin, working as a literary critic and translator. His hopes of an academic career were dashed when the University of Frankfurt rejected his doctoral thesis, a brilliant if esoteric study of 17th-century German baroque drama, Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (1928; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1978).

During the 1920s Benjamin developed Marxist leanings, under the influence of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch and the Marxist critic György Lukács; he also became a close friend of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and helped to champion his vision of “epic theatre”. In 1933 Benjamin fled Germany for France during the rise of Nazism, and there began a monumental and unfinished work on Charles Baudelaire, translated and published in 1973 as Charles Baudelaire: a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. The work Benjamin is best known for, and which brought him a great deal of attention later in the 20th century, were his essays Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936) in Illuminationen (1961; Illuminations, 1968), and “The Author as Producer”, (1934; trans. 1966). These were classic Marxist essays on aesthetic and literary topics, and have been highly influential. In the former, Benjamin argues that the rise of fascism and mass society are symptoms of a debased age in which art is merely a source of gratification to be consumed, but Communism could politicize art and thus politicize the masses.

Benjamin fled France in 1940 when the Nazis invaded, hoping to escape through Spain to the United States. Turned away on the Franco-Spanish border, he committed suicide.