Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 – 27 September 1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist philosopher-sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His Marxism was more influenced by Bertolt Brecht, who had developed his own critical aesthetics, which asked for the emotional distancing of the spectator (Verfremdungseffekt). An important earlier influence and friend was Gershom Scholem, who founded the modern, academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism. Over the last half-century the regard for his work and its influence have risen dramatically, making Benjamin one of the most important twentieth century thinkers about literature and about modern aesthetic experience. As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was a novel contribution to Western Marxism and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he wrote his most famous essays on Charles Baudelaire, he translated the Tableaux Parisiens edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal as well as Proust's In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Influenced by Bachofen, Benjamin gave the name "auratic perception" to the aesthetic faculty through which civilization would recover a lost appreciation of myth.

Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946) were born and raised in a wealthy Jewish household in Berlin. The father, Emil, was a banker in Paris and subsequently moved to Berlin where he became an antiques trader and married Pauline Schönflies. In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled in Kaiser Friedrich school in Charlottenburg, concluding his secondary studies ten years later. The boy's health was fragile and, in 1905, his parents sent him to a country boarding school in Thuringia, where he spent two years. In 1907, upon his return to Berlin, he resumed studies at Kaiser Friedrich.

In 1912, at the age of twenty, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg, but at the end of the summer semester returned again to Berlin and enrolled at the Humboldt University of Berlin to continue his studies of philosophy. Elected president of the students' association, Freie Studentenschaft, he devoted his time to writing essays arguing for the need of educational and general cultural change. Failing to be re-elected, he once again turned his attention to his studies in Freiburg, paying particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert. During this period, he also visited Paris and parts of Italy.

In 1914, as World War I pitted Germany against France, Benjamin began translating with great care and interest the French poet Charles Baudelaire. The following year he moved to Munich, continuing his studies at the University of Munich (aka LMU), where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem, the latter of whom would become a lifelong friend. The same year he wrote a paper on the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin.

In 1917 he transferred to the University of Bern where he met Ernst Bloch and married Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner) (1890–1964), with whom he had a son, Stefan Rafael (1918–1972). In 1919 Benjamin earned his Ph.D. cum laude with the essay Begriff der Kunstkritik in der Deutschen Romantik [The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism]. Beset with financial problems, he returned with his wife to Berlin, to live with his parents and, in 1921, published Kritik der Gewalt ["Critique of Violence"].

In 1923, as the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) was being founded, he published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens. He also became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács, whose The Theory of the Novel, published in 1920, strongly influenced him. The postwar inflation in the Weimar Republic caused his father to have serious difficulty in continuing to give financial support. At the end of 1923 his best friend, Gershom Scholem, immigrated to what would later become the state of Israel, but was at the time the British Mandate of Palestine and, over the succeeding years, tried to persuade Benjamin to join him.

In 1924, Benjamin's paper, "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" "Goethe's Elective Affinities" was published by Hugo von Hoffmansthal in the magazine Neue Deutsche Beiträge. Together with Ernst Bloch, Benjamin spent a few months on the Italian island of Capri, writing his habilitation thesis, on The Origin of German Tragic Drama. There he read, on Bloch's suggestion, Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness, and first met Asja Lācis, a Bolshevik Latvian actress living in Moscow. She would become an important and lasting intellectual and erotic influence on him.

A year later, The Origin of German Tragic Drama was rejected by Frankfurt University, effectively closing the door to an academic career for the 33-year-old scholar. Working with Franz Hessel (1880–1941), he translated the first volumes of Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu [In Search of Lost Time]. The next year he began writing for the German newspapers Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Literarische Welt, enabling him to afford living several months in Paris. In December 1926, the year of his father's death, he made a trip to Moscow to meet Asja Lācis, and found her in a sanatorium, suffering from an illness.

In 1927, he started work on Das Passagen-Werk [The Arcades Project], his monumental and unfinished study which he continued to work on until his death. The same year in Berlin he saw Gershom Scholem in person for the last time, and considered moving to Palestine. In 1928 he separated from his wife, Dora (they were divorced two years later), and published Einbahnstraße [One-Way Street] and Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels [The Origin of German Tragic Drama]. In Berlin, the following year, Asja Lācis, at the time, Bertolt Brecht's assistant, introduced the two authors. Also that year, he briefly attempted an academic career as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg.

In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler's election as Chancellor, Walter Benjamin left Germany to spend a few months on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Then he moved to Nice, where he considered committing suicide. With the Reichstag fire, in 1933, as Hitler assumed power and started the persecution of the Jews, Benjamin sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertold Brecht's, and Sanremo, where his ex-wife lived, before moving to Paris.

As his financial situation deteriorated, he collaborated with Max Horkheimer and received some funds from the Institut für Sozialforschung [Institute for Social Research] which, by this time, had relocated to New York. He met other German artists and intellectuals who became refugees in Paris and befriended Hannah Arendt, Hermann Hesse and Kurt Weill. In 1936, L'Œuvre d'Art à l'Époque de sa Reproductibilité Technique ["The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"] was first published in French by Max Horkheimer in the Institute for Social Research's journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.

In 1937 Benjamin worked on Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire [The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire], met Georges Bataille and joined the College of Sociology. In 1938 he paid a last visit to Bertolt Brecht, now in Danish exile. Within a few months, Hitler stripped Jews of their German citizenship, and Benjamin, now stateless, was incarcerated by the French authorities for three months in a camp near Nevers.

Returning to Paris in January 1940, he wrote his Über den Begriff der Geschichte [Theses on the Philosophy of History]. In June, as the Wehrmacht broke through the French defenses, Benjamin fled to Lourdes with his sister, one day before the Germans entered Paris. In August, he obtained a visa to the United States, which had been negotiated by Max Horkheimer. Attempting to elude the Gestapo, Benjamin planned to depart for America from neutral Portugal, which he had hoped to reach via Spain. Through the nearly seven decades that followed, researchers have been unable to establish a clear timeline of the succeeding events, which culminated in his death. Sketchy and incomplete historical records seem to indicate that he reached Portbou, a French-Spanish border town in the Pyrenees, but the group of Jewish refugees he joined was intercepted by the Spanish Police and Benjamin apparently committed suicide by taking an overdose of a form of morphine.

Walter Benjamin (1892. július 15., Berlin, Németország – 1940. szeptember 26., Portbou, Spanyolország) német filozófus, irodalomkritikus, esszéista. Művei utóélete révén a 20. század egyik legnagyobb hatású művészetteoretikusa.

Jómódú zsidó családban született. Kereskedő apjával folyamatos a konfliktusa. A húszas évek derekán Goethe Vonzások és választások című regényéről készült habilitációs írását a frankfurti irodalomtörténész bizottság „homályosnak” találja és elutasítja, így nem sikerül akadémiai pályára lépnie.

A harmincas évek közepétől barátja, Theodor W. Adorno segítségével több írása megjelenik a Frankfurti Iskola társadalomfilozófiai lapjában, a Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung-ban. Francia írókról, nyelvszociológiáról, a műgyűjtő személyiségről, a műalkotás technikai reprodukálhatóságának kihatásairól ír. Benjamin „szabad kritikus” és „alkalmi fordító”. Ismeretségi körén túl alig élvez figyelmet és megbecsülést. Angelus Novus című lapja nem tud elindulni. 1926-ban a Szovjetunióba látogat, meglátogatja szerelmét, Aszja Lacisz lett kommunista színésznőt. Utazásáról naplót vezet.

Hitler hatalomra jutása után Franciaországba emigrál. Párizsban, a Bibliotheque Nationale-ban írja nagyszabású fő művét, a Passzázsok-at (Passagen-Werk), amely végül töredékes maradt. Többször felkeresi barátját, Bertolt Brechtet dániai száműzetésében. 1940-ben az előrenyomuló német csapatok elől Spanyolországon keresztül próbál Amerikába jutni, de azután a Pireneusokban lévő határátkelőnél tisztázatlan körülmények között öngyilkos lesz.