Background
Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, in Berlin, Germany, to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, and raised in a controlled and protected environment.
Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
Benjamin entered the University of Freiburg in 1912.
Hochschulstrasse 6, 3012 Bern, Switzerland
Benjamin completed a doctorate at the University of Bern in 1919.
(The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and...)
The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674008022/?tag=2022091-20
1982
(Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings; Here Benjam...)
Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings; Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080520802X/?tag=2022091-20
1986
(On Photography presents a new translation of that essay a...)
On Photography presents a new translation of that essay along with a number of other writings by Benjamin, some of them presented in English for the first time.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1780235259/?tag=2022091-20
2017
(The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and ...)
The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1784783048/?tag=2022091-20
Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, in Berlin, Germany, to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, and raised in a controlled and protected environment.
Benjamin was privately schooled, attending the elite preparatory school, Haubinda, where one of his teachers was Gustav Wyneken, a radical reformer in education. Under Wyneken’s influence, he joined and became active in a German youth movement. He then entered the University of Freiburg in 1912. Seven years later, Benjamin completed a doctorate at the University of Bern, for which he wrote a dissertation on German Romantic art and literature. Although he decried the bourgeoise existence he was a part of, he aspired to a university position. In order to procure one, he wrote a second study, this time on German tragic drama of the seventeenth century. This work was incomprehensible to the faculty at the University of Frankfurt, and his application was rejected.
On the first day of World War I, Benjamin joined his friends in volunteering for service in the Prussian army. Soon, however, he became disenchanted by the youth movement’s acceptance of the war and in 1915 broke off his relationship with the movement. On the whole, thereafter, he tended to avoid politics and to retreat into the world of the intellect, concentrating on philosophy, literature, and linguistics, rather than on social issues.
Benjamin moved to Berlin in 1920 after his studies and remained there until 1933, working as a critic, translator, and reviewer for various magazines. He contributed to many influential journals of his day. He espoused Marxism, yet declined to become an “official” member of any political party. He admired the work of Bertolt Brecht, an avant-garde German dramatist whose plays reflected the communism of the time, and in 1927 Benjamin traveled to Moscow to view communism first-hand.
Benjamin later toyed with the idea of immigration to Palestine and accepted a fellowship obtained with Gershom Scholem's help, to study Hebrew prior to accepting a teaching job in Jerusalem. In 1930, however, he wrote to his old friend, explaining that he intended to stay in Germany.
As Jewish, Benjamin saw the danger of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and in 1933 he left Germany permanently. In Paris and in Denmark, Benjamin eked out a living by writing radio scripts and reviews and essays for various periodicals. In 1935 he accepted a stipend from the Institute for Social Research to write essays for their Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung. Benjamin and the editors of the review, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, often disputed the content of the essays and they required him to rework them endlessly. Despite the pleas of friends to relocate to Palestine, Benjamin settled in Paris in 1939, where he soon found himself in German-occupied territory. As reported by Jay F. Bodine in the Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th century, Benjamin and a group of refugees managed to escape from an increasingly hostile Paris and travel to Spain en route to the United States. When the group was not allowed to board a boat, and were instead turned over to the Gestapo, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine, feigned illness so no one would suspect what he had done, and refused medical attention, dying a short while later.
A prolific writer of essays, articles and reviews, he wrote only a few books (one of them a seminal study on the origin of German drama), though various posthumous collections of his work appeared, including one by Gershom Scholem with Theodor Adorno (1966). His work can be loosely grouped into autobiographical, metaphysical, and leftist writing as well as translations from French to German.
The essay Theses on the Philosophy of History or On the Concept of History, written in early 1940, is composed of twenty numbered paragraphs. Benjamin wrote the brief essay shortly before attempting to escape from Vichy France, where French collaborationist government officials were handing over Jewish refugees like Benjamin to the Nazi Gestapo. Theses is the last major work Benjamin completed before fleeing to Spain where, fearing Nazi capture, he committed suicide in September 1940. In the essay, Benjamin uses poetic and scientific analogies to present a critique of historicism.
The Origin of German Tragic Drama was the postdoctoral major academic work (Habilitation) submitted by Benjamin to the University of Frankfurt in 1925, and not published until 1928. The book is a study of German drama during the baroque period and was meant to earn Benjamin the qualification of a university instructor. The academic community rejected the work, and Benjamin withdrew it from consideration. In spite of this early rejection, the book was rediscovered in the second half of the 20th century and has come to be considered a highly influential piece of philosophical and literary criticism.
Benjamin's The Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished project, written between 1927 and 1940. An enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, it was especially concerned with Paris' iron-and-glass covered "arcades" (known in French as the passages couverts de Paris). Benjamin's Project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his suicide. The Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections.
Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", published in 1936, became one of his other important writings.
(Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings; Here Benjam...)
1986(The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and...)
1982(The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and ...)
(On Photography presents a new translation of that essay a...)
2017(An attempt to analyze the changed experience of art in mo...)
1936(Volume 2: Part 2: 1931-1934)
(Volume 2: Part 1: 1927-1930)
(Volume 1: 1913-1926)
(Volume 4: 1938-1940)
In his latter years, Benjamin tended toward Marxism and was close to Bertolt Brecht.
Benjamin employed many different methodologies, including modernist, structuralist, and materialist approaches. Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production and his cultural archaeology of nineteenth-century Paris anticipate and inspire the richest cultural criticism of recent years.
Critics have debated heatedly the depth of Benjamin’s conversion and commitment to communism. For example, according to Kermode, “There are many varieties of Marxism that can now be tried on Benjamin. But the approach is certainly wrong, as wrong as calling him a Cabbalist. Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and much else helped him to express his primary intuitions.” Several commentators purported that Benjamin chose Marxism as the “lesser of two evils,” when compared with fascism. Donald Marshall, writing in Partisan Review asserted, “I think he is [Marxist]. His writings have the immense merit of reminding us of the potential variety of legitimate Marxist approaches to cultural phenomena.”
Quotations:
"The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope."
"Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom."
"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories."
Quotes from others about the person
"If Benjamin’s works are notoriously difficult even for the cultivated reader, it is not because of any critical jargon. The primary difficulty seems intrinsic to his enterprise. It may well reside, I think, in that inner vision that could not itself be articulated, but that underlies the abrupt leaps of thought, the often baffling connections, the lapidary formulations. There are passages that can drive even mystics or Marxists to despair, and others that yield themselves suddenly and become luminous. Studies of Benjamin abound; only a handful are helpful. In the end, as with Kafka, one must grapple with Benjamin directly." - Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
"Essays on surrealism, the mimetic faculty, Brecht and the Austrian polemicist Karl Kraus support Hannah Arendt’s claim that Benjamin was the most important German critic between the world wars." - R. Z. Sheppard
"There are more steadily systematic minds, and finer analytic minds; but there are few to match ... [Benjamin’s] intuitive power—the informing eye, the inquiring spirit." - Kermode
A woman named Dora was Benjamin's wife, but the couple divorced. Benjamin had a son Stefan.