Keywords

Biography

Walter Benjamin was born on 15 July 1892 in Berlin, Germany, into a prosperous, upper-middle-class family. He studied Philosophy at universities in Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich from 1912 and managed did not serve in the First World War. During this period, he met Gershom Scholem, later philosopher and historian, and developed a friendship which influenced Benjamin until his death. He enrolled at the University of Bern in 1917 and was awarded a PhD in 1919 for a study called ‘The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’ (Benjamin 1919). Its combination of philosophy and literary criticism established the approach taken in his early writing. Benjamin found it difficult to determine a subject and a university for his ‘habilitation’, the qualification necessary to secure an academic position in a German university, not least because of his ambivalence about pursuing this path. The dissertation he submitted to the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1925, ‘The Origin of the German Trauerspiel’ [tragic drama] was rejected for being too difficult to understand by three academics (including Max Horkheimer), and Benjamin withdrew it in August 1925 (Shain 2022).

For the rest of his life Benjamin worked as a writer, journalist, radio broadcaster, and translator. Money was a constant issue. Origin of the German Trauerspiel (Benjamin 1928b/2019) was published as a book in 1928 and received favourably. He worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung and other newspapers from the late 1920s and made 80–90 radio broadcasts between 1927 and 1933 for Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt. Many of these were ostensibly aimed at children and covered a range of subjects including Berlin puppet theatre and witch trials (see Benjamin 2014). In 1928 he also published One-Way Street and Other Writings (Benjamin 1928a/1979), a fragmentary, image-led and self-consciously modernist depiction of the city, which is unlike anything else he published during his lifetime.

The book was dedicated to Asja Lācis, a theatre director and actor from Latvia, whom he had met in 1924. She had increased his exposure to left-wing politics, after which he read Marx for the first time and became interested in communism, although he never made his affiliation formal. During the late 1920s Benjamin also began two important friendships. The first was with Theodor Adorno, whom he had first met at the University of Frankfurt in 1923. Their friendship really began in Berlin in 1928 and Adorno played in an important role in supporting Benjamin’s subsequent writing and establishing its legacy. The second was with Bertolt Brecht, the poet and playwright, whom he met through Lācis in 1929. Conversations with Brecht over the following nine years in Berlin and in exile were crucial in supporting Benjamin’s intellectual development and commitment to Marxism.

Benjamin’s financial difficulties continued through the late 1920s and early 1930s. He suffered from depression but did begin key works such as the unfinished The Arcades Project (Benjamin 1999) and Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Benjamin 2006). He left Berlin for Paris in March 1933 following Hitler’s installation as German Chancellor. He received commissions and a stipend from the Institute for Social Research (usually known as the Frankfurt School), by then located in New York, from 1935, which enabled him to write the key essays, ‘The Storyteller’ (Benjamin 1939/1968) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Benjamin 1939/1968), and to continue his work on The Arcades Project (Benjamin 1999). His financial and health problems persisted and were exacerbated by being interned in a work camp for three months in 1939.

Following the German occupation of France, Benjamin received an entry visa for USA via the Institute for Social Research in August 1940, and had his manuscripts hidden in the Bibliothèque Nationale through his friend Georges Bataille. After failing to secure a transit visa, he travelled to the Spanish border in September 1940, intending to make his way to USA via Spain and Portugal. When he reached Port Bou in Spain with friends on 26 September 1940, they found that the border had been closed to refugees without a transit visa. That night, Benjamin committed suicide in his hotel room by taking an overdose of morphine tablets. The following day, the border was reopened and his friends were allowed to enter Spain.

Influences

Benjamin was influenced primarily by the leading writers and intellectuals of his time, many of whom he knew. His earliest acknowledged influence was Gustav Wyneken, an educational reformer who taught him briefly at a progressive school in Haubinda, in the German state of Thuringia, in 1905–1907. Wyneken was committed to young people’s intellectual independence and echoes of his ideas can be found in Benjamin’s (2011) early writing, especially in relation to education. His early work was influenced by a range of writers and philosophers, including Kant, Lichtenberg, Baudelaire, Goethe, Keller, and Nietzsche. His interest in communism and historical materialism was prompted by his reading of Lukács’ (1972) History and Class Consciousness and Marx, following his meeting Asja Lācis in 1924.

The influence of his close friendships with Scholem, Brecht, and Adorno (alongside other members of the Frankfurt School) has already been noted. What is perhaps most important is that Benjamin’s interest in Marxism seems to have prompted a new interest in contemporary culture, including popular culture, which is most immediately reflected in One-Way Street (Benjamin 1928a/1979) and his radio broadcasts, but which also influenced all his subsequent work. In this, Benjamin’s approach differed significantly from many of his colleagues in the Frankfurt School.

Notable Ideas

Benjamin’s work ranged so widely and interdependently among areas such as philosophy, history, cultural theory, art and aesthetics, literary criticism, and politics that isolating a small number of notable ideas is difficult. The body of work he published during his lifetime was relatively small, but his influence grew after his death as critical editions of his writing emerged. His approach has been described as ‘idiosyncratic Marxism that incorporates elements of Brecht and the Frankfurt School along with a messianic sense of history’ (Ferris 2008). In her introduction to Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (1968: 10) found it easier to identify (at length) what Benjamin was not than what he was, concluding ‘he thought poetically but he was neither a poet or a philosopher’. In Susan Sontag’s (1981: 121) words, ‘he liked finding things where nobody was looking’. Rather than a comprehensive summary of his ideas, two key areas, from two key essays, are presented here in which Benjamin’s influence on contemporary theorists and researchers endures.

Technology and Authenticity

Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Benjamin 1939/1968), may be his most influential single work. The first version of it was written in late 1935, but the third version, completed in 1939, is regarded as definitive and is the basis of translations into English and other languages. The essay offers a model for cultural production and analysis in the face of acute political crisis. Its origins may lie in an observation about the difficulty of living in cities in One-Way Street, in which Benjamin (1928a/1979: 59) suggests that ‘ambiguity displaces authenticity’, although it also draws on The Arcades Project (Benjamin 1999), an attempt to depict nineteenth century Paris in all its complexity, and applies aspects of that approach to twentieth century art.

‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Benjamin 1939/1968) claims that technology-based art forms such as film and photography change the function and effect of art because they are directed towards and received by a mass audience, rather than individual appreciation. For Benjamin, this has important implications for political participation and for the authenticity of art. Adopting the historical perspective central to his work, in the essay he asserts the importance of the aura of an artwork, which derives from its ‘here and now’: its uniqueness and its physical and cultural location. An artwork that is reproduced through the technology of film or photography has no such aura. This changes how not only how art is perceived, but also its authenticity and political function: ‘The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.’ (Benjamin 1939/1968: 215)

Film denies the actor their individual aura and thus broadens and democratizes how it is received by its (potentially much larger) audience: ‘It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert.’ (Benjamin 1939/1968: 225) Furthermore, anticipating our contemporary situation, ‘any man (sic) today can lay claim to being filmed’ (Benjamin 1939/1968: 225). The essay’s epilogue states that technology had contributed to contemporary fascism’s success in transferring politics into aesthetic expression, leading inevitably to war. It concludes by positing that the threat of humanity’s destruction, which fascism’s exploitation of technology supported, can be resisted by communism’s method of ‘politicizing art’. Avoiding destruction is possible, but not inevitable.

These ideas have been repeatedly debated, rejected, and applied to subsequent contexts, not least to our current postdigital condition. Peim (2007: 376) suggests that digital reproduction has accelerated the processes Benjamin identified, which ‘might be said to open up new spaces, social relations and domains of textual play’, renewing the significance of the essay. Snir (2021) applies Benjamin’s focus on the effects of reproduction to assert that digital reproduction has already transformed how we receive and perceive experiences. Hodgson’s (2019) view is that the essay serves as a model for thinking about our postdigital context and how the increasing integration of humans and data can be interpreted and understood. Nichols (2019) sees in the essay a call for us not just to revise and critique our approach to authenticity, our interests, and the world we experience, but also to apply this criticism to ourselves.

This combination of external and internal observation and representation, which were central to Benjamin’s work at least from One-Way Street (Benjamin 1928a/1979) and The Arcades Project (Benjamin 1999), is part of his commitment to challenging orthodoxies (including his own). It anticipates much later developments associated with critical theory and cultural studies (see below), including, as Peim (2007) suggests, the impossibility of separating the essay itself from its own aura.

History and Progress

Benjamin’s ideas about history and progress are most clearly expressed in his final essay, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Benjamin 1940/1968), a provocative collation of 18 theses which challenges the very notion of progress. Despite the existential threat of fascism which overshadowed the essay’s writing and led directly to Benjamin’s death shortly after he had completed it, the theses stand in opposition to fears of decline or collapse. This may be why it has received renewed interest in the face of the environmental crisis in which we find ourselves. In the theses, Benjamin criticises approaches to historicity, which suggest that history progresses linearly and causally. Reflecting the image of the past which ‘flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again’ (Benjamin 1940/1968: 247) in thesis five, the theses adapt the fragmentary form of One-Way Street (Benjamin 1928a/1979) in being structured around a series of unexpected assertions and images.

The most famous image from the theses is the angel of history, borrowed from Klee in the ninth thesis, who regards the past as ‘a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’ (Benjamin 1940/1968: 259). Like the conventional historians Benjamin criticises, the angel wants to ‘make whole what has been smashed’, but a storm, which the angel cannot resist, ‘irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’ (Benjamin 1940/1968: 259–260). This is contrasted with the work of the historical materialist, which is ‘to brush history against the grain’ (Benjamin 1940/1968: 259). This reflects Benjamin’s commitment to unorthodoxy, his ‘sense of the repression of the unacceptable, the embarrassing, the awkward’ (Jeffries 2017: 23).

The theses are full of violence and explosions, which signal the force required to reject accepted notions of history and progress. Although the image of explosion is associated with the need for revolutionary change ‘to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history’ (Benjamin 1940/1968: 265), he anticipates Derridean deconstruction in suggesting that consequently ‘the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time cancelled; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history’. This may offer a means of redeeming and reconciling the past with the present, not through sequentiality but, as he proposes at the end of the theses, through a process in which the historian ‘grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one’ and ‘establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” [Jetztzeit, literally now-time] which is shot through with chips of Messianic time’ (Benjamin 1940/1968: 255).

Importantly, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Benjamin 1940/1968) are opposed to simplistic theories of history, politics, and progress. Benjamin’s achievement is that he was able, even as it tragically forced his own end, to develop an approach to history that regarded it not as progression, but ‘rather a snapshot of now with its contradictions intact’ (Leslie 2000: 198). As DeLoughrey (2019: 8) asserts in Allegories of the Anthropocene, it is through identifying such ‘moments of rupture’, which she explicitly associates with Benjamin’s ‘flash’ of recognition cited above, that we can come to understand the challenges we face in our current context of crisis.

Reception

Benjamin’s reputation grew in the post-war period, initially in German-speaking world, through the support of his colleagues and friends in and outside the Frankfurt School. Ferris (2008) identifies the four phases in his critical reception. The first began with Adorno’s two volume edition of his writings, Schriften (Benjamin 1955), and two selected volumes, Illuminationen (Benjamin 1961) and Angelus Novus (Benjamin 1966). These was followed by the first English-language collection, Illuminations (Benjamin 1968), a shorter version of the German volume, and translations into English continued through the 1970s. The second phase began with the publication of Benjamin’s collected writings, Gesammelte Schriften (Benjamin 1972–1989), in seven volumes. They ran to almost 8000 pages and revealed how much had been left out of the earlier collections (Grossman 1992). This phase emphasised Benjamin’s intellectual connections with critical theory, the Frankfurt School and Marxism.

In the third phase, from the 1980s, Benjamin was drawn on as a cultural theorist and, from the end of the twentieth century, his reception broadened across the humanities and social sciences in a fourth phase (Ferris 2008). This was supported by the appearance of his Selected Writings (Benjamin 1996–2003), which made much more (but not all) of his work available in English. English language publication in particular continues to extend his influence, but there have also been signs of growing interest in the global south (Gilbert 2017).

Legacy

Eiland and Jennings (2014: 1) begin their overview of Benjamin’s life with the observation that he is ‘now generally regarded as one of the most important witnesses to European modernity’ and helped ‘shape a new way of seeing’. His legacy can be detected in a range of fields, primarily critical and cultural theory, but also in relation to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, technology, and philosophy. His endurance is related in part to his association with the Frankfurt School, but also because he pre-empted its work and added a mystical and unorthodox edge that appeals to those unsettled by the Frankfurt School’s theoretical asceticism. Benjamin’s friend Ernst Bloch (1968) identified his ‘feel for the peripheral’ and that may be central to his legacy.

There are also echoes, debts, and oppositions in the critical and philosophical theorists who emerged as Benjamin’s work became more widely available. They include Habermas, Berger, and Derrida, whose Specters of Marx (1994: 228) acknowledges the debt and points the reader back to the ‘dense, enigmatic, burning’ theses on history. Recent years have seen growing interest in applying Benjamin’s theories of history to our current environmental collapse (DeLoughrey 2019; Marks 2021) and, often aligned to this, to the questions of post-neoliberal and postdigital pedagogy and education (Lewis 2020; Johannßen and Zechner 2022). However, Benjamin’s greatest legacy may be his range of interests, his refusal to be categorised, and what McRobbie (1999) called his ‘inability to conform to the traditional requirements of the scholarly mode’, which has allowed his work to be interpreted and applied so widely.

Major Writings

Books

  • Benjamin W. (1968). Illumination. Ed. H. Arendt. Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Schocken.

  • Benjamin W. (1928a/1979). One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. E. Jephcott & K. Shorter. New York: Verso.

  • Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project. Trans. H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Belknap Press.

  • Benjamin, W. (2006). Berlin Childhood around 1900. Trans. H. Eiland. Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Belknap Press.

  • Benjamin, W. (1928b/2019). Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Trans. H. Eiland. Cambridge, MA, & London, UK: Harvard University Press.

  • Benjamin, W. (2014). Radio Benjamin. Trans. J. Lutes, L. Harries Schumann, & D. K. Rees. London: Verso.

Essays

  • Benjamin W. (1921/1979). Critique of Violence. In W. Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (pp. 132–154) Trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter. New York: Verso.

  • Benjamin W. (1935/1968). The Storyteller. In W. Benjamin, Illuminations (pp. 83–107). Ed. H. Arendt. Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Schocken.

  • Benjamin W. (1939/1968). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In W. Benjamin, Illuminations (pp. 211–244). Ed. H. Arendt. Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Schocken.

  • Benjamin W. (1940/1968). Theses on the Philosophy of History. In W. Benjamin, Illuminations (pp. 245–255). Ed. H. Arendt. Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Schocken.

Further Reading

  • Benjamin, A., & Osborne P. (Eds.). (1994). Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203769744.

  • Benjamin, W. (2011). Early Writings: 1910–1917. Trans. H. Eiland and others. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  • Benjamin, W. (2003). Understanding Brecht. Trans A. Bostock. London: Verso.

  • Benjamin, W. (1972–1989). Gesammelte Schriften (7 vols). R. Tiedermann, H. Schweppenhauser, with T. W. Adorno. (Eds.). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

  • Benjamin, W. (1996–2003). Selected Writings in 4 vols. Ed. M. W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  • Leslie, E. (2000). Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism. London: Pluto.

Summary

Walter Benjamin was an intellectual and theorist whose engagement with critical and cultural theory, politics, and philosophy was ahead of its time and continues to have an enduring influence across the humanities and the social sciences. Benjamin’s life was cut short by the history with which he grappled and, although his followers continued to apply and extend his ideas, his work remains uniquely iconoclastic and wide-ranging.

Cross-References