44 Facts About Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schonflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.

An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and Neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism.

Walter Benjamin was associated with the Frankfurt School, and maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem.

Walter Benjamin was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Gunther Anders.

Walter Benjamin made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.

Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg and Dora, were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in the Berlin of the German Empire.

Walter Benjamin owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks.

In 1902, ten-year-old Walter Benjamin was enrolled to the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later.

Walter Benjamin later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription, allowing him to continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Charles Baudelaire.

Walter Benjamin's conspicuous refuge in Switzerland on dubious medical grounds was a likely factor in his ongoing challenges in obtaining academic employment after the war.

The next year, 1915, Walter Benjamin moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at the University of Munich, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem; the latter became a friend.

Intensive discussions with Scholem about Judaism and Jewish mysticism gave the impetus for the 1916 text Uber Sprache uberhaupt und uber die Sprache des Menschen, which, as Walter Benjamin said to Scholem, "has an immanent relationship to Judaism and to the first chapter of the Genesis".

In that period, Walter Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Holderlin.

In 1917 Walter Benjamin transferred to the University of Bern; there he met Ernst Bloch, and Dora Sophie Pollak, whom he married.

Wolfram Eilenberger writes that Walter Benjamin's plan was, "to legitimize [his theory of language] with reference to a largely forgotten tradition [found in the archaic writings of Duns Scotus], and to strike the sparks of systematization from the apparent disjunct among modern, logical, and analytical linguistic philosophy and medieval speculations on language that fell under the heading of theology".

Later, unable to support himself and family, Walter Benjamin returned to Berlin and resided with his parents.

Walter Benjamin was in the crowd at the conference where Kurt Godel first described the incompleteness theorem.

Walter Benjamin attended the same seminar as Martin 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.

Walter Benjamin was an early draft script reader, comrade and frequent house-guest of Bertolt Brecht's.

Walter Benjamin hung out with Ernst Bloch while the older author was writing the Spirit of Utopia.

In 1923, when the Institute for Social Research was founded, later to become home to the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens.

Walter Benjamin met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lacis, then residing in Moscow; he became her lover and was a lasting intellectual influence on him.

In December 1926, the year his father died, Walter Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Lacis and found her ill in a sanatorium.

Walter Benjamin's article was ultimately rejected, with reviewer Anatoly Lunacharsky characterizing it as "non-encyclopedic", and only a small part of the text prepared by Walter Benjamin was included in the encyclopedia.

In that time, Walter Benjamin briefly embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg.

In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler's assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany, Walter Benjamin left temporarily Germany for the Spanish island of Ibiza for some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered killing himself.

Walter Benjamin 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.

Meanwhile, the Nazi regime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Walter Benjamin was arrested by the French government and incarcerated for three months in a prison camp near Nevers, in central Burgundy.

In eluding the Gestapo, Walter Benjamin planned to travel to the US from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via Francoist Spain, then ostensibly a neutral country.

Walter 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.

Walter Benjamin's eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.

Walter Benjamin 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".

Walter Benjamin 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.

Walter Benjamin presented the work to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 as the dissertation meant to earn him the Habilitation to become a university instructor in Germany.

The university officials recommended that Walter Benjamin withdraw Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as a Habilitation dissertation to avoid formal rejection and public embarrassment.

Walter Benjamin heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a book.

Walter Benjamin finished the cycle in 1926, and put it out the same year that his failed thesis was published.

The Arcades Project, in its current form, brings together a massive collection of notes Walter Benjamin filed together from 1927 to 1940.

Susan Sontag said that in Walter 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.

The occasional difficulties of Walter Benjamin's style are essential to his philosophical project.

Walter 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.

Walter Benjamin 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.

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.

The exhibition, entitled "The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin", featured 36 contemporary artworks representing the 36 convolutes of Benjamin's Project.