Walter Benjamin
A brilliant Weimar cultural critic associated with the humanist Marxist Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin connected a seemingly limitless range of interests (Baroque theater, film theory, the history of Paris, the psychology of gambling, Proust, storytelling, color theory, Kafka) to a profoundly original investigation of how capitalism was reshaping human culture and an idiosyncratic Marxism that flirted with Jewish messianic tropes as it became ever more urgently revolutionary. Born into a wealthy, assimilated, and progressive family in Berlin, Walter Benjamin had a largely secular childhood with little place for Judaism. He did, however, take intermittent interest in Jewish questions as these bubbled up in German public life, as exemplified by his striking letter to Ludwig Strauss amid the “Quentin” debate regarding Jewish overrepresentation and overinvestment in German cultural life (see this volume’s section “Cultural Thought and Pedagogy”). In 1915, Benjamin met Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem just as the latter was beginning his own idiosyncratic journey toward Zionism and the enthusiastic study of Jewish mysticism. Deepening their friendship during their university years (and creating a kind of imaginary university of their own while refusing to serve in the madness of World War I), they would remain lifelong friends and interlocutors, with Scholem serving as Benjamin’s only substantial connection to organized Jewish life and thought in the interwar period.
In the interwar period, after his brilliant but inaccessible dissertation on German baroque tragedy elicited mixed reactions from German academicians, Benjamin lived a tenuous (and rather dissolute) life as a critic and journalist. Amid an almost endless series of brilliant critical essays, he worked on a vastly ambitious and methodologically idiosyncratic history of nineteenth-century Paris; named the Arcades project for the arcades that characterized Paris’s late-century redevelopment at the intersection of capitalist takeoff and repressive statecraft, the project aimed to capture the nature of modern capitalist society through a kind of vast fragmentary history of everyday life.
Benjamin fled Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933, and—already identified with the group of Marxian thinkers under Max Horkheimer’s leadership colloquially named the Frankfurt School—began working for Horkheimer’s (now) Parisian Institute for Social Research. In 1940, while trying to escape from Nazi-occupied France to Portugal, from where he hoped to sail to the United States, Benjamin committed suicide. After the war, admirers as diverse as Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Gershom Scholem worked to make his essays available to the English-language public. Since then, his influence has grown enormously. In particular, his essays on aesthetic theory, especially “The Task of the Translator” (1923) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), have become foundation texts of contemporary literary theory and media studies.