Walter Benjamin

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.