Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

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Europäische und sowjetische Kunst", trans. M. Dewey, Zeitschrift für Slawistik 30:5, 1985, pp 697-700. (German) Evropeyskoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo" [Европейское и советское искусство], Vechernyaya Moskva (Вечерняя Москва) 11, 14 Jan 1927, p 2; repr., Zeitschrift für Slawistik 30:5, 1985, pp 697-700. (Russian) One key to Benjamin's critique of historicism is his rejection of the past as a continuum of progress. This is most apparent in thesis XIII: Arendt tells us in her introduction (Benjamin was her brother-in-law and colleague) that everything was collected and gathered in Benjamin's life and work, and, more importantly, everything mattered. Everything mattered so much that Benjamin was never able to define or limit himself clearly: His erudition was great, but he was no scholar; his subject matter comprised text and their interpretation, but he was no philologist; he was greatly attracted not by religion but by theology and the theological type of interpretation for which the text itself is sacred, but he was no theologian. He was a born writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations.

The next year, 1915, Benjamin moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at the University of Munich, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke [25] and Gershom Scholem; the latter became a 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". [26] [27] In that period, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. [28]

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Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert [A Berlin Childhood Around 1900], afterw. Theodor W. Adorno, postscr. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1950; 1987; 2010, 117 pp. Written during the late 1930s. [5] In 1902, ten-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, a boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in 1907, having returned to Berlin, he resumed his schooling at the Kaiser Friedrich School. [8] In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler's assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany, Benjamin left Germany temporarily for the Spanish island of Ibiza where he stayed for some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered killing himself. Perceiving the sociopolitical and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) as the de facto Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, he left Berlin and Germany for good in September. He 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.

Dialektik des Sehens - Walter Benjamin und das Passagen-Werk, trans. Joachim Schulte, Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. [65] (German) Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Dritte Fassung)", in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I/2, 1980, pp 471-508; repr., 1991; repr. in Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 16: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013, pp 96-163. Written 1936-39. [8] (German) Walter Benjamin's grave in Portbou. The epitaph in German, repeated in Catalan, quotes from Section 7 of "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" Erzählen - Schriften zur Theorie der Narration und zur literarischen Prosa, ed. Alexander Honold, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007, 349 pp. [32]Erasmus: Speculum Scienta A Short History of Photography", trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13:1 (1972), pp 5-26. [6] (English) In the essay, Benjamin's famed ninth thesis struggles to reconcile the Idea of Progress in the present with the apparent chaos of the past: His alternate vision of the past and "progress" is best represented by thesis IX, which employs Paul Klee's monoprint

Wahlverwandtschaften - Aufsätze und Reflexionen über deutschsprachige Literatur, ed. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007, 483 pp. [35] Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, Columbia University Press, 2003. (English) Sarah K. Stanley, "Revolutionary Climatology: Rings of Saturn, Ringed by Red Lightning", Footprint 18, Spring/Summer 2016, pp 91-108. (English)

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In the essay, Benjamin uses poetic and scientific analogies to present a critique of historicism. [4] Walter Benjamin, (born July 15, 1892, Berlin, Ger.—died Sept. 27?, 1940, near Port-Bou, Spain), man of letters and aesthetician, now considered to have been the most important German literary critic in the first half of the 20th century.