Professors of literature claim Walter Benjamin as one of their own, a student of literature and a critic. Philosophers see him as a great modern aesthetician but also as a political philosopher or, more precisely, as a politically oriented philosopher of aesthetics. For his great contribution was to develop a historically and politically grounded materialist aesthetic theory.
Walter Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892 to a prosperous Jewish family living in Berlin. He received his pre-college education at a progressive boarding school in Haubinda, Thuringia, and there formed a relationship with the liberal educational reformer Gustav Wyneken. As a youngster, Benjamin contributed articles to Der Anfang (“The Beginning”), a journal of education inspired by Wyneken.
Benjamin studied at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau and Berlin. In this second institution, he met Gerhard (later Gershom) Scholem, who introduced him to Kabbalism, which influenced Benjamin’s literary interpretations, especially of Franz Kafka. Benjamin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 1919, with a dissertation titled The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism.
Benjamin wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (literally, Origin of the German Mourning-Play, but usually translated as Origin of German Tragic Drama ) as his Habilitationsschrift, a post-doctoral thesis necessary to secure a qualification for teaching at the university level. The thesis was not accepted, however, disqualifying him from an appointment to the University of Frankfurt am Main. Nevertheless, he published a version of the work in 1928 and received considerable acclaim.
He had written Origin of German Tragic Drama in 1924 on Capri, where he also met the Bolshevik Latvian theatrical director Asja Lacis, with whom he commenced a romantic affair and collaborated on some experimental theater works. His association with Lacis and a reading of Georg Lukács brought about his engagement with Marx’s historical materialism, so that, by the opening of the 1930s, he was an intellectual Marxist with a circle of like minded young men, among them the playwright Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, Benjamin formed a warm friendship and collaboration.
Benjamin fled Germany after the ascension of Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship in 1933 and lived in Paris, Ibiza, San Remo, and, as Brecht’s guest, in a house near Svendborg, Denmark. He became associated during the decade of the thirties with the Institute for Social Research, which provided a publishing platform and a living.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Benjamin was briefly interned in a French camp, was soon released, and, after a brief stay in Paris, fled as the German army swept into France in 1940. Unable to escape Vichy France in the early autumn of 1940 and turned back by Spanish customs officers after crossing the Pyrenees, Benjamin committed suicide on September 27, 1940. He was forty-eight.
Benjamin’s final work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” published posthumously in 1942, is a critique of historicism, the significance of historical period, geographical place, and local culture as first developed by the German Romantic philosopher Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel. The work is brief and cryptic, an amalgamation of the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition and Marxist materialism, but is peculiarly suited to the catastrophic time in which it was written, when history had come to seem meaningless, a desperate attempt at holding onto a memory in what Benjamin called a “moment of danger.” “Theses” was, in effect, a philosophical statement on the end of history.
Besides the Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin’s best-known writing is “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which explores the impact of speed and infinite reproducibility on the perception of art, time, place, permanence, and decay for those living in a technological civilization. The essay synthesizes aesthetics, politics, phenomenology, and semiotics, as well as psychology.
Benjamin’s longest work is The Arcades Project, an incomplete collection of writings, from 1927 to the end of the author’s life in 1940, about the life of Paris, especially as manifested in the city’s shopping arcades (passages couverts). In terms of philosophical reflection, Arcades is a thousand-page contemplation of modern urban culture in Europe.
