Walter Benjamin

• 1. Introduction

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  Walter Benjamin reached the Catalan border town of Portbou on the 25th of September 1940, a German-Jewish philosopher and critic with almost nothing published that the wider world had noticed. He had crossed the French-Spanish frontier with a small party of refugees. They hoped to reach Portugal and, from there, the United States. At the Hotel de Francia, Spanish police told the group that Spain had cancelled all transit visas. They would be sent back into France the next morning. Benjamin was 48, and he expected that return to mean the hands of the Nazis. That night he took his own life. The official register in Portbou gives the 26th of September as the date of his death. How did a man so little known in his lifetime come to be read in universities, museums and online radio channels around the world? What was in the papers he carried, and what did his friends make of him? And why did a thinker who wrote on art, cities, translation and history leave behind so many unfinished and fragmentary pages?

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• 2. From Berlin to Bern

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  The 15th of July 1892 was the day Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin, then the capital of the German Empire. His family was wealthy and assimilated, part of the city's Ashkenazi Jewish business class. His younger siblings were Georg, born in 1895, and Dora, born in 1901. His father Emil was a banker in Paris who had moved to Germany and worked as an antiques trader and art dealer. Emil's investments in Berlin included ice skating rinks. His mother was Pauline Schönflies. The extended family was unusually distinguished. His uncle William Stern was a prominent child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient. His cousin Günther Anders became a philosopher and anti-nuclear activist.

  In 1901, at the age of eight, Walter was enrolled at the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg. His health was fragile, so in 1905 his parents sent him to a rural boarding school at Haubinda, in the Thuringian countryside, for two years. He then went back to Berlin and finished at the Kaiser Friedrich School.

  University began in 1912 at Freiburg, but he soon moved to the University of Berlin to study philosophy. There he met Zionism for the first time, which had played no part in his liberal upbringing. He rejected nationalist Zionism and worked out what he called a cultural Zionism instead. In a line he wrote then, Judaism was "in no sense an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and representative of the spiritual."

  His public voice came through the German Youth Movement of Gustav Wyneken. Benjamin was elected president of the Free Students Association and wrote for Wyneken's magazine Der Anfang, which was banned from every school in Bavaria. When students voted him out of the presidency, he went back to Freiburg and later travelled to France and Italy.

  In August 1914, the army turned down his offer to volunteer for the First World War. He later feigned illness to dodge conscription and took refuge in Switzerland on doubtful medical grounds. That choice probably hurt his hunt for academic work after the war.

  Munich came next, in 1915. There he met the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem, who became his lifelong friend. Long talks with Scholem about Judaism and mysticism produced a 1916 manuscript on language, which Benjamin said was related to the first chapter of Genesis. In 1917 he moved to the University of Bern, where he met the thinker Ernst Bloch and also Dora Sophie Pollak, whom he married. Their son Stefan Rafael was born in 1918. In 1919 Benjamin earned his doctorate summa cum laude with a dissertation on the concept of art criticism in German Romanticism.

  The young doctor now needed a university post, and the German system had one more exam to set him.

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• 3. One Cannot Habilitate Intellect

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  A brief Latin-sounding word, habilitation, decided the course of Benjamin's life. It was the second thesis that German universities demanded before anyone could teach. In 1923 he had published his translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens. Money was getting tight, and hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic made it harder for his father to support his family. In 1924 Benjamin and Bloch lived on the Italian island of Capri, and there Benjamin wrote The Origin of German Tragic Drama as his habilitation thesis.

  Another text from 1924 may have damaged his prospects before the thesis ever reached a committee. Hugo von Hofmannsthal published Benjamin's essay on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities in the magazine Neue Deutsche Beiträge. Hannah Arendt later argued that it ruined his only real chance at a university career. The essay attacked a book on Goethe by Friedrich Gundolf, the most prominent academic of the George circle. That circle was a group of conservative, medievalist poets with a mystical bent. In private letters, Benjamin said their taste for archaic styles foreshadowed the aesthetics of fascism.

  The thesis itself was a study of German baroque drama and the political climate of the Counter-Reformation, the years from 1545 to 1648. Benjamin wanted to rescue the idea of allegory. The examiners at the University of Frankfurt found the work too unorthodox and too abstruse. Professor Schultz, who had apparently suggested the baroque subject in the first place, judged it unsuitable for the German department. He passed it to the department of aesthetics, whose readers also dismissed it. Hans Cornelius and the young Max Horkheimer sat on the panel too. In 1925 Benjamin withdrew the thesis rather than face formal rejection. The line that sums up the affair says that one cannot habilitate intellect.

  The committee's later fates are almost comic. Cornelius had been the university mentor of Theodor Adorno. Once Adorno began teaching in Frankfurt, he devoted seminars in 1931 and 1932 to the rejected book. He was still teaching it in the winter semester when Adolf Hitler took power, although the course no longer appeared in the catalogue. Cornelius is remembered mostly for refusing Benjamin. Schultz is almost forgotten. Horkheimer later became Benjamin's patron at the Institute for Social Research.

  The failure cost Benjamin his father's support, so he made a living as a critic and occasional translator. With Franz Hessel he translated the first volumes of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. In 1926 he began writing for the Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Literarische Welt, and that income paid for some months in Paris. His father died that year. In December he travelled to Moscow and found Asja Lācis, a Latvian Bolshevik and actress whom he loved, ill in a sanatorium. While there, he was asked to write an article on Goethe for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The People's Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, rejected the article as "non-encyclopedic".

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• 4. Friends and Rivals

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  A bookish list of acquaintances reads almost like a tour of interwar European thought. Benjamin once sat in a class on the Maya civilization taught by Rilke. He stood in the audience when Kurt Gödel first presented the incompleteness theorem. In the summer of 1913 he attended the same Freiburg seminar as the future philosopher Martin Heidegger. His circle spanned theology, theatre, radio, the visual arts and politics, and he was often present at the edges of the decade's great intellectual events.

  Heidegger turned into something close to an enemy. In 1920 Benjamin conceived a postdoctoral plan to ground his theory of language in the old writings of Duns Scotus. Scholem then told him that Heidegger had already published on the same figure. According to the account here, Benjamin felt a lifelong antagonism toward Heidegger from that moment. Another philosopher, Carl Schmitt, was a rival. Arendt, who had studied with Heidegger, was linked to Benjamin by her first marriage to his cousin Günther Anders. Benjamin's friendship with her flowered in Paris after she and Anders separated.

  Scholem was the constant. He emigrated to Palestine at the end of 1923 and could not persuade Benjamin to follow. The two met for the last time in Berlin in 1927. Their letters ran for decades, and Scholem became the sole executor of Benjamin's literary estate. Martin Buber took a different role. Benjamin refused to write for Buber's journal because it was too esoteric, yet Buber paid for his trip to Moscow. Buber also commissioned an article for his publication Die Kreatur, and Benjamin delivered it several years late.

  Bloch described the friendship between them as "almost too close." A scrap that Benjamin cut from a book review of Bloch's Spirit of Utopia was later published as the Theologico-Political Fragment. It is now better remembered than the book it cited.

  Bertolt Brecht was both friend and house-guest host. Benjamin read his early scripts, promoted him, and visited him often, in Denmark among other places. It was Lācis, then Brecht's assistant, who in 1929 presented the intellectuals of Berlin to one another.

  Three voices pulled at his work: Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory, and Scholem's Jewish mysticism. They never reconciled, and the critic Paul de Man argued that Benjamin's thought moves between all three. Scholem himself wrote that Benjamin was a philosopher. Arendt and Adorno, both younger, said he was not. Scholem noted that Benjamin's work gives off "a peculiar aura of authority" that tends to provoke argument.

  Money also came from this circle. The Frankfurt School supported him even from New York, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem occasionally paid him as well. Salman Schocken, a publisher in Buber's orbit, helped too.

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• 5. Streets and Arcades

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  Sixty short prose pieces make up One-Way Street, a book that Benjamin began after meeting Asja Lācis on a beach at Capri in 1924. He finished the cycle in 1926 and published it in 1928, the same year as his failed thesis. The book refuses a straight story line. It mixes aphorisms, jokes, dream records, cityscapes, passages from writing manuals, political analysis and observations on children. Greil Marcus compared its collage form to a graphic novel by Max Ernst and to an early sound-collage film. Michael Jennings points out that many pieces first ran in the feuilleton, the strip along the bottom of a newspaper page. The cramped space of that strip shaped the prose.

  In 1927 he began the project that would absorb the rest of his life, the Passagenwerk, or Arcades Project. Its subject was nineteenth-century Paris, especially the covered passages that let strollers keep up the habit of flânerie, or idle people-watching, when rain made the boulevards impractical. The book was never finished. What exists is a huge pile of notes he filed between 1927 and 1940, running to more than a thousand pages, and it was first published in 1982. Several essays that appeared in his lifetime were pieces of it, including his work on Baudelaire and the one titled Paris, Capital of the 19th Century. In 1937 he gave the manuscript to Georges Bataille for safekeeping, and in the same year he joined the College of Sociology, which he later faulted for its "pre-fascist aestheticism."

  The fragmentary shape was deliberate. Susan Sontag described a style in which each sentence seemed to need to say everything, with no obvious path of reasoning from one to the next. She called it freeze-frame baroque, and noted that his essays seem to end just before they destroy themselves. Scholem said the prose invites quotation as if it were scripture, and he warned that a passage that reads clearly today may turn opaque later, and the reverse.

  Benjamin explained the method in his essay on translation, The Task of the Translator. A translation, he argued, inevitably distorts its original. Yet the distortion is productive, because it lights up features of the source that were hidden and darkens others. Placed beside other works in a constellation, texts reveal affinities that Benjamin considered a form of philosophical truth. He applied the same idea to history, using scattered quotations to show pieces of the past that grand narratives flatten.

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• 6. Aura and the Angel

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  The French magazine page of 1936 carried the first public version of Benjamin's most famous essay. He had written The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in German in 1935, and Max Horkheimer published it in French in the journal of the Institute for Social Research. Its target was the idea of authenticity. A mechanical copy of an artwork, he said, can travel to places the original never could. The presence of the original is the "prerequisite to the concept of authenticity." What the copy cannot carry is what he called aura, the original's unrepeatable presence in time and space. He suggested that aura is decaying, because people find it ever harder to grasp the time and place in which a work was made. The essay also introduces the optical unconscious, which describes how people absorb visual information through habit rather than rapt attention.

  In January 1940 he went back to Paris and drafted a text now known as the Theses on the Philosophy of History. Adorno said it was completed in the spring. Margaret Cohen describes how Benjamin borrowed from the Kabbalah. In the Jewish mystical tradition, divine light was once stored in vessels that shattered, scattering fragments across the world. The task of tikkun is to gather the pieces. Benjamin combined that idea with the Surrealist view that liberation comes from releasing repressed collective memory. His result is a historian who seizes forgotten moments as they flash up in times of danger.

  The ninth thesis is the most famous. It describes the painting Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, an angel whose eyes stare and whose wings are spread. His face is turned toward the past, where he sees a single catastrophe piling wreckage at his feet. In Benjamin's words, "a storm is blowing from Paradise" and it drives the angel backward into the future. "This storm is what we call progress."

  The text ends on the Messiah. Some forms of Judaism forbid calculating the year of his arrival, but Benjamin says this did not make Jews indifferent to the future. In his phrase, every second was "the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."

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• 7. Years of Exile

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  Ibiza was Benjamin's first refuge, in 1932, as Germany lurched toward Hitler's chancellorship. He stayed there some months before moving to Nice, where he considered suicide. The Reichstag fire on the 27th of February 1933 convinced him that the Nazis had effectively taken full power, and the persecution of Jews followed. In September of that year he left Germany for good. He found shelter first at Brecht's house in Svendborg, Denmark, and then at Sanremo in Italy, where his former wife Dora lived. After that he settled in Paris.

  Money ran short in Paris. Horkheimer arranged funds from the Institute for Social Research, and Benjamin lived on that support. Among the refugee artists and thinkers there, he befriended Arendt, the novelist Hermann Hesse and the composer Kurt Weill. In 1938 he made his last visit to Brecht in Denmark. The Nazi regime had by then stripped German Jews of citizenship. As a stateless man, he was arrested by the French government and held for three months in a prison camp near Nevers.

  The German army was forcing the French back in June 1940. On the 13th of June, Benjamin and his sister fled Paris for Lourdes. The Germans entered the capital the next day with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August he obtained a United States travel visa that Horkheimer had negotiated for him. To dodge the Gestapo he planned to sail from neutral Portugal. His route there ran through Spain, then ostensibly neutral under Franco.

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• 8. What Survived

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  A common grave in Portbou's municipal cemetery received Benjamin's body. He was unknown to anyone in the town, and he lay alongside nameless refugees, homeless people and unidentified dead. His fellow traveller, the writer Arthur Koestler, also tried to end his life with some of the same tablets but survived. Spanish officials, perhaps shaken by the death, allowed the rest of the party to continue the next day. They reached Lisbon on the 30th of September. Benjamin's brother Georg was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. A finished manuscript that Benjamin carried in his suitcase disappeared after his death and has never been found.

  Arendt crossed the same border at Portbou a few months later, carrying the manuscript of the Theses. She gave it to Adorno. The Institute for Social Research, by then in New York, published the text in Benjamin's memory in 1942.

  Recognition arrived slowly. The publisher Suhrkamp began releasing his collected writings in 1955, fifteen years after his death. Global fame followed when Arendt introduced his work to English-language readers in 1968. That same year the thinker and artist Natias Neutert founded the first International Walter Benjamin Society. Neutert wanted a body that treated Benjamin's thought as a place where "all doors, windows and roof hatches are widely open." A second society was founded in 2000 and registered in Karlsruhe, with Bernd Witte as chairman and members from 19 countries. It held conferences in Barcelona, Rome, Zurich, Paris, Düsseldorf, Antwerp and Vienna in the years that followed.

  Benjamin's afterlife keeps widening. In 2017 the Jewish Museum in New York staged an exhibition curated by Jens Hoffman, with 36 contemporary artworks answering the 36 convolutes of the Arcades Project. In 2022 the Russian philosopher Igor Chubarov, who translates Benjamin into Russian, launched a Telegram channel called Radio Benjamin. In 2023 Moritz Bleibtreu played him in the Netflix series Transatlantic.

  Places also keep his name. A plaque marks his Berlin home on Prinzregentenstraße, and another stands at 10 rue Dombasle in Paris, where he lived from 1938 to 1940. A square near the Kurfürstendamm, designed by Hans Kollhoff in 2001, is called Walter-Benjamin-Platz. In Portbou, the artist Dani Karavan made a memorial sculpture, commissioned to mark fifty years since the night at the Hotel de Francia.

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