A Berlin childhood
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, in Berlin, the eldest of three children in a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family. His father, Emil Benjamin, had worked as a banker in Paris before settling in Berlin, where he dealt in antiques and art and invested in businesses that included an ice-skating rink. His mother, Pauline Schönflies, came from a cultured family; the child psychologist William Stern, who developed the idea of the intelligence quotient, was his uncle, and the philosopher Günther Anders was his cousin.
Walter was a delicate child. He attended the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg and, for two years, a progressive boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, where he came under the influence of the educational reformer Gustav Wyneken. Decades later, in exile, he would recreate the vanished world of his upper-middle-class Berlin boyhood, its apartments, streets, markets and childhood fears, in a series of luminous prose sketches published as Berlin Childhood around 1900. Memory, and the way the past survives in objects and places, would become one of his great themes.
Youth, Judaism and a lifelong friendship
Benjamin enrolled at the University of Freiburg in 1912 and soon moved to Berlin to study philosophy. He became a leader in the student wing of the German Youth Movement, writing essays that demanded a renewal of education and culture. In Berlin he first encountered Zionism, which had played no part in his liberal upbringing. He kept his distance from political Zionism but developed what he called a kind of cultural Zionism, an attachment to Judaism as a bearer of spiritual and ethical values. He broke with Wyneken in 1914 when his mentor praised the war.
In 1915 he met Gershom Scholem, a young Berliner who would become the great historian of Jewish mysticism. Their friendship, carried on largely through letters after Scholem emigrated to Palestine in 1923, lasted the rest of Benjamin’s life. Conversations with Scholem about Judaism and Kabbalah lie behind his 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” which Benjamin said had an inner relationship to Judaism and to the first chapter of Genesis. Scholem urged him repeatedly to come to Jerusalem and learn Hebrew. Benjamin considered it more than once but never went.
Closed doors in the academy
During the First World War Benjamin avoided military service and moved to Switzerland, where in 1917 he married Dora Sophie Kellner; their son Stefan was born in 1918. In 1919 the University of Bern awarded him a doctorate summa cum laude for a dissertation on the concept of art criticism in German Romanticism. He hoped for a university career, the natural path for a scholar of his gifts.
It never came. His essay on Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, published in 1924, attacked one of the most powerful literary circles in Germany. His habilitation thesis, a study of German baroque tragic drama, proved too unorthodox for the examiners at Frankfurt, who advised him in 1925 to withdraw it rather than face rejection. The book, published in 1928 as The Origin of German Tragic Drama, is now regarded as a classic, and Theodor Adorno would later teach seminars on it at the very university that had turned it away. For Benjamin, the rejection meant that he would live by his pen, without security, for the rest of his life.
A critic for hire
From the mid-1920s Benjamin worked as a freelance critic, essayist and translator. With Franz Hessel he translated volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and he had earlier translated Baudelaire’s Parisian poems. He wrote reviews and essays for leading papers such as the Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Literarische Welt, on writers including Kafka, Proust, Karl Kraus and Robert Walser. In 1928 he published One-Way Street, a book of brief, brilliant urban fragments unlike anything else in German prose.
His travels widened his thinking. On Capri in 1924 he met the Latvian theatre director Asja Lācis, who drew him toward Marxism, and in 1926 and 1927 he spent two months in Moscow. From 1929 he became a close friend and supporter of Bertolt Brecht. He also embraced the new medium of radio, writing and presenting broadcasts, including programmes for children. He was one of the first serious thinkers to treat mass media not as a threat to culture but as a new kind of culture that deserved to be understood.
Art in the age of the copy
Benjamin’s most famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in 1935 and first published in French in 1936, asked what happens to art when it can be copied endlessly by photography and film. A traditional artwork, he argued, possesses an “aura,” a unique presence in one place and time that once bound it to ritual and tradition. Mechanical reproduction strips away that aura, and in doing so it carries images into the homes and lives of millions who could never have seen the originals.
Benjamin saw both danger and promise in this shift. Fascism, he warned, was turning politics into spectacle, aestheticising mass rallies and war; his answer was to call for a politics that used the new media to give ordinary people knowledge and a voice. The essay has become one of the most widely read texts in the humanities. Students of photography, film, advertising, design and digital culture still begin with it, because it was among the first to see that technology changes not only how we make art but how we perceive the world.
Exile in Paris
After the Reichstag fire of February 1933, Benjamin understood that there was no future for him in Germany, and in September he left for good. He lived in Paris, with stays in Ibiza, in San Remo with his former wife, and in Denmark at Brecht’s house near Svendborg. The Institute for Social Research, the émigré centre of the Frankfurt School led by Max Horkheimer, gave him a small stipend that became his main income. He was often desperately poor.
In the reading room of the Bibliothèque nationale he worked on the project that consumed his last thirteen years: the Arcades Project, begun in 1927, a vast study of nineteenth-century Paris told through its glass-roofed shopping arcades, fashions, advertisements, street life and the poetry of Baudelaire. It was meant to uncover, in the debris of everyday commercial life, the dreams and illusions of modern society. When the war began in 1939 the French interned him, as a stateless German refugee, in a camp near Nevers for some three months; friends secured his release. In June 1940, as the German army approached Paris, he fled, leaving his Arcades notes with the writer Georges Bataille, who hid them in the library. They survived the war.
The angel of history
In early 1940 Benjamin set down his last major text, “On the Concept of History,” a short sequence of theses written as Europe fell to Hitler. He owned a small watercolour by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, and in one thesis he described it as the angel of history, its face turned toward the past, where it sees a single catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage, while a storm called progress blows it backward into the future.
The theses insist that history is usually written by and for the victors, and that the historian’s duty is to rescue the memory of the defeated and the forgotten. “There is no document of civilization,” he wrote, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Benjamin was not writing about the Holocaust, which had not yet happened, but his insistence on remembering the victims of history has made these pages central to how later generations have thought about memory, memorials and the obligation of the living to the dead.
Portbou
Benjamin fled first to Lourdes with his sister Dora. In August 1940 he obtained an American visa, negotiated for him by Horkheimer, but he had no French exit permit. His plan was to cross into Spain on foot and travel on to Portugal and a ship to New York. In late September the resistance worker Lisa Fittko guided him and a small group of refugees over a mountain path through the Pyrenees. Benjamin, forty-eight, asthmatic and with a weak heart, was so slow that Fittko nicknamed him “Old Benjamin.” A climb that usually takes hours took him two days, and he refused to be parted from a black leather briefcase holding what he called his most valuable manuscripts.
They reached the Spanish border town of Portbou on September 25, only to be told that Spain had stopped honouring transit visas and that they would be sent back to France the next day, where the Gestapo would be waiting. That night, in the Hotel de Francia, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine. His Spanish death certificate gives the date as September 26, 1940. Shaken by his death, the Spanish authorities let the rest of the group continue, and they reached Lisbon safely. What the briefcase held has never been discovered. His brother Georg was murdered at Mauthausen-Gusen in 1942.
A posthumous life
Benjamin died almost unknown outside a small circle. His rescue was the work of friends. Hannah Arendt, who crossed the border at Portbou a few months later, carried the manuscript of the history theses to Adorno in New York. Adorno and Scholem edited his writings, and a German edition appeared in 1955. In 1968 Arendt introduced him to English readers with the collection Illuminations, and his reputation grew until he became one of the most cited thinkers of the twentieth century, read in literature, philosophy, art history, film studies, media studies and Jewish studies alike.
His legacy is a way of seeing. He taught readers to find meaning in the overlooked fragments of everyday life, to ask who is missing from the story of progress, and to take seriously the power of new media to reshape human perception. In 1994 the Israeli artist Dani Karavan’s memorial Passages was dedicated at the entrance to the Portbou cemetery: a narrow steel stairway of eighty-seven steps descending through the rock toward the sea. A plate there carries his words that the construction of history is consecrated to the memory of those who have no name. Benjamin, who died nameless among refugees, has become one of the voices through which the twentieth century remembers them.
Sources & further reading
Walter Benjamin, Wikipedia · Walter Benjamin, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · Passages: an homage to Walter Benjamin, Memorial Museums portal · Walking with Walter Benjamin, Jewish Review of Books · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.