Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin | |
---|---|
Marxist hermeneutics[1] | |
Main interests | Literary theory, aesthetics, philosophy of technology, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of history |
Notable ideas | Auratic perception,[2] aestheticization of politics, dialectical image,[3] the flâneur |
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (
Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "
Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought
In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at
Life
Part of a series on the |
Frankfurt School |
---|
Early life and education
Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, then the capital of the German Empire. Walter's father, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who had relocated from France to Germany,[16] where he worked as an antiques trader; he later married Pauline Schönflies.[16] He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks.[16]
Walter's uncle,
In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled at the Kaiser Friedrich School in
In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg, but at the summer semester's end, he returned to Berlin and matriculated at the University of Berlin to continue studying philosophy. There, Benjamin had his first exposure to Zionism, which had not been part of his liberal upbringing. This gave him occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism. Benjamin distanced himself from political and nationalist Zionism, instead developing in his own thinking what he called a kind of "cultural Zionism"—an attitude that recognized and promoted Judaism and Jewish values. In Benjamin's formulation, his Jewishness meant a commitment to the furtherance of European culture. He wrote: "My life experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active ... For Judaism is to me in no sense an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and representative of the spiritual."[18] This was a position Benjamin largely held lifelong.[19]
It was as a speaker and debater in the milieu of the Gustav Wyneken's German Youth Movement that Benjamin was first encountered by Gershom Scholem and later Martin Buber although he had parted ways with the youth group before they had become properly acquainted.[20] Elected president of the Freie Studentenschaft (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change while working alongside Wyneken at the legendary and controversial youth magazine Der Anfang (The beginning), that was banned in all schools in Bavaria. Wyneken's thesis that a new youth must pave the way for revolutionary cultural change became the main theme of all of Benjamin's publications at that time.[21][22] When not reelected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg to study, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert; at that time he traveled to France and Italy.
Benjamin's attempt to volunteer for service at the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was rejected by the army.[23] Benjamin later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription,[23][24] allowing him to continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Charles Baudelaire. His conspicuous refuge in Switzerland on dubious medical grounds was a likely factor in his ongoing challenges in obtaining academic employment after the war.[24]
The next year, 1915, Benjamin moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at the
In 1917 Benjamin transferred to the
For his
Later, unable to support himself and family, Benjamin returned to Berlin and resided with his parents. In 1921 he published the essay "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Toward the Critique of Violence"). At this time Benjamin first became socially acquainted with Leo Strauss, and he remained an admirer of Strauss and his work throughout his life.[35][36][37]
Friendships
Starting in adolescence, in a trend of episodic behavior that was to remain true throughout his life, Benjamin was a maven within an important community during a critically important historical period: the left-intelligentsia of interwar Berlin and Paris. Acquaintance with Walter Benjamin was a connecting thread for a variety of major figures in metaphysics, philosophy, theology, the visual arts, theater, literature, radio, politics and various other domains. Benjamin happened to be present on the outskirts of many of the most important events within the intellectual ferment of the interwar-period in Weimar Germany and interpreted those events in his writing.
He was in the crowd at the conference where Kurt Gödel first described the incompleteness theorem.[38] He once took a class on the Ancient Mayans from Rilke.[25] He attended the same seminar as Heidegger at Freiburg in the summer of 1913 when both men were still university students: concepts first encountered there influenced their thought for the remainder of their careers. He was an early draft script reader, comrade, favorable critic and promoter as well as a frequent house-guest of the Berlin cabaret theater scene writer and director Bertolt Brecht. Martin Buber took an interest in Benjamin, but Benjamin declined to contribute to Buber's journal because it was too exoteric.[39] Nevertheless, Buber financed Benjamin's trip to Moscow and promoted his career in other ways. Nominally, Buber had commissioned Benjamin to write an article Moscow for his Die Kreatur, though Benjamin blew his deadline for the delivery of this piece by several years.
Benjamin was a close colleague of
One of Benjamin's high-school best friends (also a German Jew) killed himself using gas at the outbreak of the first World War; another was one of the Jewish Liaisons who took Nazi diplomats on a tour of Palestine. This happened while the Third Reich was preparing the European Zionists to believe that Europe's Jews would be forcibly emigrated from the Reich, to deflect attention from the looming possibility of the strategy that was ultimately adopted: mass extermination in the death camps.[42][43] Scholem, Benjamin's oldest friend, and the sole executor of his literary estate, would resurrect the canonical books of the Kabbalah from private libraries and ancient document dumps called Genizah.[44][45] These were created when the books flooded into Mandatory Palestine during the period leading up to, coinciding with, and immediately following the Holocaust.[46][44][45][47]
Career
In 1923, when the
In 1924
Likewise, according to Hannah Arendt, it was his essay on Goethe that ruined Benjamin's only chance of a university career.[49] Benjamin's Goethe monograph is partly a meditation on the form 'free-love' that the Benjamins were experimenting with in their marriage at this time, amongst other things. But this was only tangential to the issue that led to the controversy to which Arendt refers. His mistake (per Arendt) was killing a sacred cow from amongst the academic establishment.[49] As so often in Benjamin's writings, his study of Goethe's Elective Affinities was marked by polemics and the theme of his assault in this work concerned Friedrich Gundolf's Goethe book. Gundolf was the most prominent and able academic member of the (Stefan) George-Kreis--a cult of post-symbolist, romantic nationalist poets with a mystically conservative, medievalist bent.[49] Elsewhere, in the anonymity of his private epistolary writings, Benjamin explicitly points out how (regardless of the ultimate horror, withdrawal and rejection with which members of the circle greeted the Nazi regime) this group's commitment to particular archaic styles anticipated the aesthetics of fascism.[50]
Later that year Benjamin and Bloch resided on the Italian island of Capri; Benjamin wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) as a habilitation thesis meant to qualify him as a tenured university professor in Germany.
At Bloch's suggestion, he read Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923). He also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis, then residing in Moscow; he became her lover and she was a lasting intellectual influence on him.[51]
A year later, in 1925, Benjamin withdrew The Origin of German Tragic Drama as his possible qualification for the habilitation teaching credential at the
A diagram of the internecine dynamics of Benjamin's habilitation committee's rejection of his work bear recollection here, as they determine something of the character of his later career and ultimate legacy.
This failure resulted in his father's refusal to continue to support him financially, so that Benjamin was forced to make ends meet as a professional critic and occasional translator.[53] Working with Franz Hessel he translated the first volumes of Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Literarische Welt (The Literary World); that paid enough for him to reside in Paris for some months. In December 1926, the year his father died, Benjamin went to Moscow[56] to meet Lācis and found her ill in a sanatorium.[57]
During his stay in Moscow, he was asked by the editorial board of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to write an article on Goethe for the first edition of the encyclopedia. Benjamin's article was ultimately rejected, with reviewer Anatoly Lunacharsky (then the People's Commissar of Education) characterizing it as "non-encyclopedic",[58] and only a small part of the text prepared by Benjamin was included in the encyclopedia. During Benjamin's lifetime, the article was not published in its entirety. A Russian translation of the article was published in the Russian edition of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in 1996.[59][60]
In 1927, he began
Exile and death
In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler's assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany, Benjamin left Germany temporarily for the Spanish island of Ibiza where he stayed for some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered killing himself. Perceiving the sociopolitical and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) as the de facto Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, he left Berlin and Germany for good in September. He moved to Paris, but before doing so he sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertolt Brecht's house, and at Sanremo, where his ex-wife Dora lived.
As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with
Returning to Paris in January 1940, he drafted "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" ("On the Concept of History", later published as "Theses on the Philosophy of History"). While the Wehrmacht was pushing back the French Army, on 13 June Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes, just a day before the Germans entered the capital with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the U.S. that Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin planned to travel to the U.S. from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via Francoist Spain, then ostensibly a neutral country.
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.[72]
Thought
In addition to his lifelong dialogue in letters with
The dynamism or conflict between these competing influences—Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's
"Theses on the Philosophy of History"
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" is often cited as Benjamin's last complete work, having been completed, according to Adorno, in the spring of 1940. The Institute for Social Research, which had relocated to New York, published Theses in Benjamin's memory in 1942. Margaret Cohen writes in the Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin:
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
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".
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
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.[77] Benjamin argues that the aura is found in a work of art that contains presence. The aura is precisely what cannot be reproduced in a work of art: its original presence in time and space.[77] He suggests a work of art's aura is in a state of decay because it is becoming more and more difficult to apprehend the time and space in which a piece of art is created.
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.[77]
The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (
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.[53] The university officials recommended that Benjamin withdraw Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as a habilitation thesis to avoid formal rejection and public embarrassment.[52] He heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a book.[78]
One Way Street
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).[79] The book avoids "all semblance of linear-narrative...[offering] a jumble of sixty apparently autonomous short prose pieces: aphorisms, jokes, dream protocols, cityscapes, landscapes, and mindscapes; portions of writing manuals, trenchant contemporary political analysis; prescient appreciations of the child's psychology, behavior, and moods; decodings of bourgeois fashion, living arrangements and courtship patterns; and time and again, remarkable penetrations into the heart of every day things, what Benjamin would later call a mode of empathy with 'the soul of the commodity'" according to Michael Jennings in his introduction to the work. He continues: "Many of the pieces...first appeared in the feuilleton section," of newspapers and magazines which was "not a separate section but rather an area at the bottom of every page...and the spatial restrictions of the feuilleton played a decisive role in shaping the prose form on which the book is based."[79]
Written contemporaneously with Martin Heidegger's Being & Time, Benjamin's work from this period explores much of the same territory: formally in his "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and as sketches, allusions and asides in One Way Street.[80]
The Arcades Project
The
The Arcades Project, in its current form, brings together a massive collection of notes Benjamin filed together from 1927 to 1940.[82]
The Arcades Project was published for the first time in 1982, and is over a thousand pages long.
Writing style
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."[83] Scholem's commentary on this phenomenon continues at length. 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.[83]
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. "His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct".[84] The occasional difficulties of Benjamin's style are essential to his philosophical project. 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.
His work "The Task of the Translator" was later commented by the French translation scholar Antoine Berman (L'âge de la traduction).
Legacy and reception
Since the publication of Schriften (Writings, 1955), 15 years after his death, Benjamin's work—especially the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (French edition, 1936)—has become of seminal importance to academics in the humanities disciplines.[85] In 1968, the first Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft was established by the German thinker, poet and artist Natias Neutert, as a free association of philosophers, writers, artists, media theoreticians and editors. They did not take Benjamin's body of thought as a scholastic "closed architecture [...], but as one in which all doors, windows and roof hatches are widely open", as the founder Neutert put it—more poetically than politically—in his manifesto.[86] The members felt liberated to take Benjamin's ideas as a welcome touchstone for social change.[87]
Like the first Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft, a new one, established in 2000, 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." The successor society was registered in Karlsruhe (Germany); Chairman of the Board of Directors was Bernd Witte, an internationally recognized Benjamin scholar and Professor of Modern German Literature in Düsseldorf (Germany). 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.[88] The society conducts conferences and exhibitions, as well as interdisciplinary and intermedial events, at regular intervals and different European venues:
- Barcelona Conference – September 2000
- Walter-Benjamin-Evening at Berlin – November 2001
- Walter-Benjamin-Evening at Karlsruhe – January 2003
- Rome Conference – November 2003
- Zurich Conference – October 2004
- Paris Conference – June 2005
- Düsseldorf Conference – June 2005
- Düsseldorf Conference – November 2005
- Antwerpen Conference – May 2006
- Vienna Conference – March 2007[89]
In 2017 Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project was reinterpreted in an exhibition curated by Jens Hoffman, held at the Jewish Museum in New York City. The exhibition, entitled "The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin", featured 36 contemporary artworks representing the 36 convolutes of Benjamin's Project.[90]
In 2022,
Benjamin is portrayed by Moritz Bleibtreu in the 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic.[92]
Commemoration
A commemorative plaque is located by the residence where Benjamin lived in Berlin during the years 1930–1933: (Prinzregentenstraße 66,
Close by Kurfürstendamm, in the district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, a town square created by Hans Kollhoff in 2001 was named "Walter-Benjamin-Platz".[93] There is a memorial sculpture by the artist Dani Karavan at Portbou, where Walter Benjamin ended his life. It was commissioned to mark 50 years since his death.[94]
Works (selection)
Among Walter Benjamin's works are:
- "Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen" ("On Language as Such and on the Language of Man", 1916)
- "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers" ("The Task of the Translator", 1921) – English translations by Harry Zohn, 1968, and by Stephen Rendell, 1997
- "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Critique of Violence", 1921)
- "Theologisch-politisches Fragment" ("Theologico-Political Fragment," 1921)
- "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" ("Goethe's Elective Affinities", 1922)
- Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928)
- Einbahnstraße (One Way Street, 1928)
- "Karl Kraus" (1931, in the Frankfurter Zeitung)
- Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus ("Unpacking my library", 1931)[95][96][97][98]
- Berlin Childhood around 1900, first published around 1933
- "Lehre vom Ähnlichen" ("Doctrine of the Similar", 1933)
- "Über das mimetische Vermögen" ("On the Mimetic Faculty", 1933)
- "Kafka" (The Kafka writings are composed most famously of "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death", 1934, and "Some Remarks on Kafka", excerpted from a 1938 letter to Gershom Scholem. Both of these are collected in the anthology Illuminations. Benjamin also wrote, "Franz Kafka: Building the Great Wall of China" in 1931, a commentary on Max Brod's biography of Kafka in 1937, and carried on a correspondence about Kafka with Scholem and Adorno.)
- "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", 1935)
- "Paris, Hauptstadt des 19. Jahrhunderts" ("Paris, Capital of the 19th Century," 1935. This essay has been presented as a diptych with "Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire", as both are fragments from the preparatory writings for the unfinished Arcades Project.)
- Berliner Chronik (Berlin Chronicle, 1932-1935)
- "Der Erzähler" ("The Storyteller", 1936 was first published in Orient und Okzident)
- Deutschen Menschen (German People, 1936 is an epistolary anthology of letters reflecting the spirit of humanism in German history with Benjamin's commentary that he was able to publish under the radar of the Nazi censors inside the Third Reich by using the pseudonym 'Detlef Holtz')
- "Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker" ("Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian," 1937. Benjamin mentions embarking on the essay in letters from 1935 and was published the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung two years later. Not much attended to compared to Benjamin's other major works, it contains the skeleton and many of the crucial phrases later made famous in his "Theses...").
- Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (Berlin Childhood around 1900, 1938)
- "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire" ("The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire", 1938)
- "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" ("Theses on the Philosophy of History", 1940)
See also
- Gershom Scholem
- Kabbalah
- Hannah Arendt
- Theodor Adorno
- Bertolt Brecht
- Leo Strauss
- Martin Buber
- Georges Bataille
- The Frankfurt School
- Rohwohlt Verlag
- Carl Schmitt
- Martin Heidegger
- Heinrich Rickert
- Giorgio Agamben
- Gertrud Kolmar
- Michael Heller
- List of people from Berlin
References
- ^ Erasmus: Speculum Scientarium, 25, p. 162: "the different versions of Marxist hermeneutics by the examples of Walter Benjamin's Origins of the German Tragedy [sic], ... and also by Ernst Bloch's Hope the Principle [sic]."
- ^ Walter Benjamin, "L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée", 1936: "The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura." [Die Einzigkeit des Kunstwerks ist identisch mit seinem Eingebettetsein in den Zusammenhang der Tradition. Diese Tradition selber ist freilich etwas durchaus Lebendiges, etwas außerordentlich Wandelbares. Eine antike Venusstatue z. B. stand in einem anderen Traditionszusammenhange bei den Griechen, die sie zum Gegenstand des Kultus machten, als bei den mittelalterlichen Klerikern, die einen unheilvollen Abgott in ihr erblickten. Was aber beiden in gleicher Weise entgegentrat, war ihre Einzigkeit, mit einem anderen Wort: ihre Aura.]
- ^ a b "Walter Benjamin" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
- ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
- OCLC 55738500.
- ^ Duden Aussprachewörterbuch (6 ed.). Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut & F.A. Brockhaus AG. 2006.
- ^ ISBN 0-8143-2018-X.
- ISBN 978-0-226-04238-1.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8052-0588-6.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7126-6575-9.
- ^ a b Adorno, Theodor. "A Portrait of Walter Benjamin" (PDF). Prism: 229.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-226-04238-1.
- ISBN 978-0-226-92451-9.
- ISBN 978-0-8052-0802-3.
- ^ a b c d e f Scholem, Gershom (1982). "Ahnen und Verwandten Walter Benjamins". Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts. 61: 29–55.
- ^ Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, Harvard University Press (2014), p. 20
- ^ Benjamin, Walter (1955). Gesammelte Schriften II (in German). Suhrkamp. p. 839.
- ^ Witte, Bernd. (1996) Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Verso. pp. 26–27
- ISBN 0-8052-0870-4.
- ISBN 978-0-571-11970-7.
- ISBN 978-0-674-05186-7. Chapter II: 'Metaphysics of Youth' (Berlin and Freiburg: 1912–1914).
- ^ JSTOR 42800179.
- ^ OCLC 1127067361.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ^ ISBN 978-0-571-11970-7.
- ISBN 978-0-226-04238-1.
- ^ Witte, Bernd (1985). Walter Benjamin mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten [W. Benjamin with self-testimonies and photo documents] (in German). Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. p. 28.
- ISBN 978-0-571-11970-7.
- ISBN 978-0-571-11970-7.
- ISBN 978-0-674-01588-3.
- ISBN 978-0-674-01588-3.
- ISBN 978-0-226-04238-1.
- ISBN 978-0-226-04238-1.
- ISBN 978-0-525-55966-5.
- ^ Jewish philosophy and the crisis of modernity (SUNY 1997), Leo Strauss as a Modern Jewish thinker, Kenneth Hart Green, Leo Strauss, page 55
- ^ a b Scholem, Gershom. 1981. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Trans. Harry Zohn, page 201, page 79
- ^ The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–40, New York 1989, page 155-58
- ISBN 978-0-691-16490-8.
- ISBN 978-0-226-04238-1.
- ISBN 978-0-262-19268-2.
- ISBN 978-0-571-11970-7.
- ^ Scholem, Gershom (1969). The Story of a Friendship. Schocken. pp. 14–15.
- ^ Mandel, Jonah. "When a Nazi Toured the Holy Land". Times of Israel.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-571-11970-7.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8052-0005-8.
- ISBN 978-1-58988-073-3.
- ISBN 978-0-226-92451-9.
- ^ Lindner, Burkhardt (2011). Benjamin Handbook. Leben - Werk - Wirkung [Benjamin handbook. Life - work - effect] (in German). Stuttgart: Metzler. pp. 472–493.
- ^ a b c Arendt, Hannah (1969). Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books. pp. 8–9.
- ISBN 978-1-84467-570-8.
- ^ Mark Lilla, "The Riddle of Walter Benjamin" in The New York Review of Books, May 25, 1995.
- ^ a b Jane O. Newman, Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque, Cornell University Press, 2011, p. 28: "university officials in Frankfurt recommended that Benjamin withdraw the work from consideration as his Habilitation."
- ^ ISBN 0520917510.
- ^ a b c d e f g Steiner, George; Benjamin, Walter (1928). "George Steiner's Introduction to Walter Benjamin's 'Origin of German Tragic Drama'". The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Verso. pp. 7–27.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7456-3109-7.
- ^ Seits, Irina S. Invisible Avant-Garde and Absent Revolution: Walter Benjamin's New Optics for Moscow Urban Space of the 1920s, in Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art: Collection of articles, vol. 8. St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg Univ. Press, 2018, pp. 575–582. ISSN 2312-2129.
- ^ Moscow Diary
- ^ Lunacharsky, Anatoly (1929). "On Walter Benjamin's Goethe article". On Literature and Art. Translated by P., Anton. Moscow.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ "Вальтер Беньямин - Московский дневник » Страница 48 » Книги читать онлайн бесплатно без регистрации". Knigogid.com. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
- ^ "(1996, Вальтер Беньямин) Произведение искусства в эпоху его технической воспроизводимости.pdf". Vk.com. Retrieved 2022-03-16.
- ^ various. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5. Jg (in German). pp. 40–68.
- ^ Benjamin, Walter (1968). "The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction". Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. pp. 217–253.
- ^ Nguyen, Duy Lap (2022). Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy. London: Bloomsbury academic. pp. 216–223.
- ISBN 978-0-571-11970-7.
- ISBN 978-0-226-92451-9.
- ISBN 978-0-674-05186-7.
- ^ Arendt, Hannah (1968). "Introduction". In Walter Benjamin (ed.). Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. pp. 23–24.
- ^ Jay, Martin The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950.
- ISBN 978-0-7453-1568-3. Retrieved August 28, 2009.
- ISBN 978-1-59454-427-9. Retrieved August 28, 2009.
- ^ "Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, [Koestler] borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn't die." Anne Applebaum, "Did The Death Of Communism Take Koestler And Other Literary Figures With It?" Huffington Post, 28 March 2010, URL retrieved 15 March 2012.
- ^ van Straten, Giorgio. "Lost in migration". aeon.co. Retrieved 4 April 2019.
- ISBN 978-0-226-40322-9.
- ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
- ^ Eiland, Howard (2016). Walter Benjamin : A Critical Life. Cambridge Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 465.
- ^ See also Nguyen, Duy Lap (2022). Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy. London: Bloomsbury academic. pp. 142–159.
- ^ a b c Manuel, Jessica S. (2019-05-13). "How Time and Space Converge to Evoke Walter Benjamin's Aura". Book Oblivion. Retrieved 2019-05-13.
- ^ Introducing Walter Benjamin, Howard Cargill, Alex Coles, Andrey Klimowski, 1998, p. 112
- ^ )
- OCLC 928782460.
- ^ Caves, R. W. (2004). Encyclopedia of the City. Routledge. p. 40.
- ^ Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. The MIT Press, 1991, p. 5.
- ^ OCLC 709681212.
- ^ Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 129.
- ^ Wengrofsky, Jeffrey , "On the Occasion of Walter Benjamin's 119th Birthday". Coilhouse Magazine. Archived from the original on 07-2011. Retrieved 2020-05-20.
- ^ Cf. Mit Walter Benjamin. Gründungsmanifest der Internationalen Walter-Benjamin-Gesellschaft. Copyleft Verlag, Hamburg, 1968, p. 6.
- ISBN 3-927623-05-9
- ^ "International Walter Benjamin Society". walterbenjamin.info.
- ^ Cf. WalterBenjamin.info
- ^ "The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin (March 17 - August 6, 2017)". The Jewish Museum. thejewishmuseum.org. Retrieved July 29, 2017.
- ^ "Radio Benjamin", since 2022 (Telegram channel in Russian): We criticize a lot - we doubt everything: a channel about freedom in the conditions of its impossibility.
- ^ "How the Stars of Transatlantic Compare to Their Real-Life Counterparts". 14 April 2023.
- ^ Stadtplatz aus Stein: Eröffnung der Leibniz-Kolonnaden in Berlin. (in German). May 14, 2001. BauNetz. baunetz.de. Retrieved July 29, 2017.
- ^ "Walter Benjamin a Portbou". walterbenjaminportbou.cat.
- ISBN 978-0-547-54065-8.
- ^ Manguel, Alberto (February 2018). "The Art of Unpacking a Library". The Paris Review.
- ^ Cronon, William (November 2012). "Recollecting My Library ... And My Self | Perspectives on History | AHA".
- ^ Heidt, Sarah (24 August 2006). "Unpacking my library: On book-moving and Benjamin « Kenyon Review Blog".
Further reading
Primary literature
- The Arcades Project, ISBN 0-674-00802-2
- Berlin Childhood Around 1900, ISBN 0-674-02222-X
- Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet In The Era Of High Capitalism. ISBN 0-902308-94-7
- The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ISBN 0-674-15427-4
- The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940. ISBN 0-226-04237-5
- The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. ISBN 0-674-17415-1
- Illuminations. ISBN 0-8052-0241-2
- Moscow Diary, ISBN 0-674-58744-8
- One Way Street and Other Writings. ISBN 0-86091-836-X
- Reflections. ISBN 0-8052-0802-X
- On Hashish, ISBN 0-674-02221-1
- The Origin of German Tragic Drama. ISBN 0-86091-837-8
- Understanding Brecht. ISBN 0-902308-99-8
- Selected Writings in four volumes Harvard University Press:
- The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ISBN 0-674-02287-4
- The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ISBN 0-674-02445-1
- Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs. Ed. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla. ISBN 978-1-84467-196-0
- The Sonnets of Walter Benjamin. Trans. Andrew Paul Wood, bilingual edition German/English, Kilmog P., Dunedin, 2020.
- Toward the Critique of Violence: a Critical Edition. Ed. Peter Fenves and Julia Ng. Stanford, Stanford U.P., 2021. ISBN 978-0-8047-4953-4
Secondary literature
- ISBN 978-0-262-51025-7(paper)]
- Victor Malsey, Uwe Raseh, Peter Rautmann, Nicolas Schalz, Rosi Huhn, Passages. D'après Walter Benjamin / Passagen. Nach Walter Benjamin. Mainz: Herman Schmidt, 1992. ISBN 3-87439-251-1
- ISBN 978-1-903083-08-6(paper)]
- ISBN 978-0-262-52164-2(paper)
- Betancourt, Alex. (2008). Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud: Between Theory and Politics. Saarbrücken, Germany: ISBN 978-3-8364-3854-4
- ISBN 978-1534911451.
- ISBN 978-0-415-92401-6
- Caygill, Howard. (1998) Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. London: Routledge.
- ISBN 0-8166-1294-3
- Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings. (2014). Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-05186-7
- __________. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Cambridge: ISBN 0-521-79724-1(paper)
- Eilenberger, Wolfram (2020). Time of the magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the decade that reinvented philosophy. New York: Penguin Press. ISBN 978-0-5255-5966-5(cloth)
- Ferris, David S., ed. (1996). Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions. Stanford: ISBN 978-0-8047-2570-5(paper)
- ISSN 1388-4441.
- Jacobs, Carol. (1999). In the Language of Walter Benjamin. Baltimore: ISBN 978-0-8018-6669-2(paper)
- Jennings, Michael. (1987). Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism. Ithaca: ISBN 978-0-8014-2006-1(cloth)
- Jacobson, Eric. (2003). Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-12657-1, S. 352ff.
- Kermode, Frank. "Every Kind of Intelligence; Benjamin", New York Times. 30 July 1978.
- Kirst-Gundersen, Karoline. Walter Benjamin's Theory of Narrative. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989
- Kishik, David. (2015). "The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City." Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1-50360-277-9(paper)
- Leslie, Esther. (2000). Walter Benjamin, Overpowering Conformism. London: ISBN 978-0-7453-1568-3(paper)
- Libero Federici, Il misterioso eliotropismo. Filosofia, politica e diritto in Walter Benjamin, Ombre Corte, Verona 2017
- Lindner, Burkhardt, ed. (2006). Benjamin-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung Stuttgart: ISBN 978-3-476-01985-1(paper)
- Löwy, Michael. (2005). Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's 'On the Concept of History.' Trans. Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso.
- Marchesoni, Stefano. (2016). Walter Benjamins Konzept des Eingedenkens. Über Genese und Semantik einer Denkfigur. Berlin: ISBN 978-3-86599-328-1
- Marder, Elissa (May 2016). "Inhuman beauty: Baudelaire's bad sex". .
- Menke, Bettine. (2010). Das Trauerspiel-Buch. Der Souverän – das Trauerspiel – Konstellationen – Ruinen. Bielefeld: ISBN 978-3-89942-634-2.
- Missac, Pierre (1996). Walter Benjamin's Passages. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-63175-4(paper)
- Neutert, Natias : Mit Walter Benjamin! Poeto-philosophisches Manifest zur Gründung der Internationalen Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft. Lüdke Verlag, Hamburg 1968.
- Nguyen, Duy Lap. (2022). Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy : A New Historical Materialism. London UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Perret, Catherine "Walter Benjamin sans destin", Ed. La Différence, Paris, 1992, rééd. revue et augmentée d'une préface, Bruxelles, éd. La Lettre volée, 2007.
- Perrier, Florent, ed., Palmier, Jean-Michel (Author), Marc Jimenez (Preface). (2006) Walter Benjamin. Le chiffonnier, l'Ange et le Petit Bossu. Paris: Klincksieck. ISBN 978-2-252-03591-7
- Pignotti, Sandro (2009). Walter Benjamin – Judentum und Literatur. Tradition, Ursprung, Lehre mit einer kurzen Geschichte des Zionismus. Rombach, Freiburg ISBN 978-3-7930-9547-7
- Plate, S. Brent (2004). Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-96992-5
- Roberts, Julian (1982). Walter Benjamin. London: Macmillan.
- Rudel, Tilla (2006) : Walter Benjamin L'Ange assassiné, éd. Menges – Place Des Victoires, 2006
- Rutigliano, Enzo: Lo sguardo dell'angelo, Bari, Dedalo, 1983
- Scheurmann, Ingrid, ed., Scheurmann, Konrad ed., Unseld, Siegfried (Author), Menninghaus, Winfried (Author), Timothy Nevill (Translator) (1993). For Walter Benjamin – Documentation, Essays and a Sketch including: New Documents on Walter Benjamin's Death. Bonn: AsKI e.V. ISBN 3-930370-00-X
- Scheurmann, Ingrid / Scheurmann, Konrad (1995). Dani Karavan – Hommage an Walter Benjamin. Der Gedenkort 'Passagen' in Portbou. Homage to Walter Benjamin. 'Passages' Place of Remembrance at Portbou. Mainz: Zabern. ISBN 3-8053-1865-0
- Scheurmann, Konrad (1994) Passages Dani Karavan: An Environment in Remembrance of Walter Benjamin Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Bonn: AsKI e.V. ISBN 3-930370-01-8
- Schiavoni, Giulio. (2001). Walter Benjamin: Il figlio della felicità. Un percorso biografico e concettuale. Turin: ISBN 88-06-15729-9
- ISBN 1-59017-032-6
- Steinberg, Michael P., ed. (1996). Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-8257-1(paper)
- Steiner, Uwe. (2010). Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought. Trans. Michael Winkler. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-77221-9
- Singh, Iona (2012) Vermeer, Materialism and the Transcendental in Art, from Color, Facture, Art & Design. Hampshire: Zero Books ISBN 978-1-78099-629-5
- Taussig, Michael. (2006). Walter Benjamin's Grave. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-79004-6.
- Tedman, Gary. (2012). the Art Aesthetic State Apparatuses - from Aesthetics & Alienation. Hampshire : Zero Books. ISBN 978-1-78099-301-0.
- Weber, Samuel. (2008). Benjamin's -abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-04606-4(paper)
- ISBN 978-0-804-78059-9
- Witte, Bernd. (1996). Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Verso. ISBN 978-1-85984-967-5
- Wizisla, Erdmut. 2009. Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht — The Story of a Friendship. Translated by Christine Shuttleworth. London / New Haven: Libris / Yale University Press. ISBN 978-1-870352-78-9[Contains a complete translation of the newly discovered Minutes of the meetings around the putative journal Krise und Kritik (1931)].
- Wolin, Richard, Telos 43, An Aesthetic of Redemption: Benjamin's Path to Trauerspiel. New York: Telos Press Ltd., Spring 1980. (Telos Press).
- Wolin, Richard, Telos 53, The Benjamin-Congress: Frankfurt (July 13, 1982). New York: Telos Press Ltd., Fall 1982. (Telos Press).
In other media
- Transatlantic (2023 TV series)
- Les Unwanted de Europa (2018 film on Benjamin's last days
- 13, a ludodrama about Walter Benjamin, a cinematic essay by Carlos Ferrand and Thomas Sieber Satinsky, 2018, 77 min.
- The Passages of Walter Benjamin (2014 documentary)
- Who Killed Walter Benjamin? (2005 documentary)
- One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1992 documentary)
External links
- Works by Walter Benjamin at Open Library
- Walter Benjamin Archive at Marxists Internet Archive
- "Walter Benjamin" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- The Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft (in English and German) at Internet Archive
- "Radio Benjamin". Telegram channel of modern Russian philosopher Igor Chubarov (in Russian)