Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( BEN-yə-min; German: [ˈvaltɐ ˈbɛnjamiːn] ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western Marxism, and post-Kantianism, he made contributions to the philosophy of history, metaphysics, historical materialism, criticism, and aesthetics, and had an oblique but overwhelmingly influential impact on the resurrection of the Kabbalah by virtue of his life-long epistolary relationship with Gershom Scholem.
In popular culture and left-wing journalism he often appears as an exemplar whose experience is representative of the tragedy of German Jewish intellectuals under Nazi Germany.
Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked that "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction".
He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative relationships with thinkers and cultural figures such as playwright Bertolt Brecht (friend), Martin Buber (an early impresario in his career), Nazi constitutionalist Carl Schmitt (a rival), and many others. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though his friendship with her flowered in Paris after she separated from Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a critic included essays on Kafka, Baudelaire, Goethe, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, Trauerspiel and translation theory. He translated the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin died during his flight into exile at Portbou on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Having remained in Europe until it was too late, as Cynthia Ozick puts it, Benjamin took his own life to avoid being murdered as a Jew. "Impressed and shaken by his death, the Spanish authorities allowed Benjamin's companions to continue their travel" into Spain, by which route they were able to escape the Third Reich.
Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown. Some German readers and academics encountered Benjamin after his Complete Works began to be released by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1955, but global acclaim came to him when his works were translated into English and introduced to a reading public in the Anglosphere by Arendt in 1968.
Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, then the capital of the German Empire. Walter's father, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who had relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader and art dealer; marrying Pauline Schönflies. He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks.
Walter's uncle, William Stern, was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ). He also had a cousin, Günther Anders, a German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist who studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Through his mother, Walter's great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld.
In 1901, the eight-year-old Walter was enrolled at the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. In his youth, Walter was of fragile health and so in 1905 the family sent him to Hermann-Lietz-Schule Haubinda, part of the German rural boarding school movement in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in 1907, having returned to Berlin, he resumed his schooling at the Kaiser Friedrich School.
In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg, but at the summer semester's end, he returned to Berlin and matriculated at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin to continue studying philosophy. There, Benjamin had his first exposure to Zionism, which had not been part of his liberal upbringing. This gave him occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism. Benjamin distanced himself from political and nationalist Zionism, instead developing in his own thinking what he called a kind of "cultural Zionism"—an attitude that recognized and promoted Judaism and Jewish ethics. In Benjamin's formulation, his Jewishness meant a commitment to the furtherance of European culture. He wrote: "My life experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active ... For Judaism is to me in no sense an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and representative of the spiritual." This was a position Benjamin largely held throughout his life.
It was as a speaker and debater in the milieu of the Gustav Wyneken's German Youth Movement that Benjamin was first encountered by Gershom Scholem and later Martin Buber, although he had parted ways with the youth group before they had become properly acquainted. Elected president of the Freie Studentenschaft (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change while working alongside Wyneken at the legendary and controversial youth magazine Der Anfang (The beginning), that was banned in all schools in Bavaria. Wyneken's thesis that a new youth must pave the way for revolutionary cultural change became the main theme of all of Benjamin's publications at that time. When he was not reelected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg to study, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert; at that time he traveled to France and Italy.
Benjamin's attempt to volunteer for service at the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was rejected by the army. He later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription, allowing him to continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Charles Baudelaire. His 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, Benjamin moved to Munich and continued his schooling at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Scholem; the latter became a lifelong friend. Intensive discussions with Scholem about Judaism and Jewish mysticism gave the impetus for the 1916 text (surviving as a manuscript) Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen ("On Language as Such and on the Language of Man"), which, as Benjamin said to Scholem, "has an immanent relationship to Judaism and to the first chapter of the Genesis". In that period, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin.
In 1917 Benjamin transferred to the University of Bern; there he met Ernst Bloch, and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner), whom he married. They had a son, Stefan Rafael, in 1918. In 1919 Benjamin earned his PhD summa cum laude with the dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism).
For his postdoctoral thesis in 1920, Benjamin hit upon an idea very similar to the thesis proposed by Martin Heidegger in the latter's own postdoctoral project (Duns Scotus: Theory of Categories and Meaning). Wolfram Eilenberger writes that 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". After Scholem sympathetically informed his friend that his interest in the concept had been pre-empted by Heidegger's earlier publication, Benjamin seemed to have derived a lifelong antagonism toward the rival philosopher whose major insights, over the course of both of their careers, sometimes overlapped and sometimes conflicted with Benjamin's.