Creator Bio
Walter Benjamin
1892–1940
Born into a wealthy business family in Berlin, the critical theorist Walter Benjamin went into exile in 1932 during the turmoil preceding the Nazi seizure of power. He committed suicide in 1940 while trying to escape from France, via Spain, to Portugal, where he hoped to sail to the United States. His essays on aesthetic theory, especially “The Task of the Translator” (1923) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), became foundational texts in university humanities departments in the late twentieth century.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
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Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death
Some time ago it became known that Knut Hamsun was in the habit of expressing his views in an occasional letter to the editor of the local paper in the small town near which he…
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On Language as Such and on the Language of Man
If in what follows the nature of language is considered on the basis of the first chapter of Genesis, the object is neither biblical interpretation nor subjection of the Bible to objective…
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Letter to Ludwig Strauss on Zionism
October 10, 1912Berlin-GrunewaldDelbrückstr. 23 Dear Mr. Strauß!That Jewishness is an inner substance is also my assessment, which, like all reflections and insights concerning my attitude toward…