Walter Benjamin

Author profile

born

July 15, 1892 in Berlin, Germany

died

September 27, 1940

website

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/

genre

Philosophy, Social Sciences

About this author

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Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.

As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was a novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated the Tableaux Parisiens edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal as well as Proust's In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies,...more

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Books by Walter Benjamin

Average rating: 4.28 · 6,081 ratings · 335 reviews · 121 distinct works

	Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt (Editor), Leon Wieseltier (Preface) 4.33 avg rating — 2,244 ratings — published 1968 — 11 editions	My rating:
	The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media by Walter Benjamin, Michael W. Jennings (Editor), Brigid Doherty (Editor) 4.18 avg rating — 1,129 ratings — published 1936 — 17 editions	My rating:
	The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, Rolf Tiedemann (Editor), Kevin McLaughlin (Translator) 4.51 avg rating — 613 ratings — published 1982 — 9 editions	My rating:
	Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings by Walter Benjamin, Edmund F.N. Jephcott (Translator) 4.33 avg rating — 424 ratings — published 1978 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Berlin Childhood Around 1900 by Walter Benjamin, Howard Eiland (Translator) 4.08 avg rating — 172 ratings — published 1938 — 10 editions	My rating:
	The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire by Walter Benjamin, Michael W. Jennings (Editor), Rodney Livingstone (Translator) 4.23 avg rating — 99 ratings — published 2006	My rating:
	Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 by Walter Benjamin, Michael W. Jennings (Editor), Marcus Bullock (Editor) 4.48 avg rating — 103 ratings — published 1996 — 2 editions	My rating:
	One Way Street And Other Writings (The Verso Classics Series) by Walter Benjamin, Edmund F.N. Jephcott (Translator), K. Shorter (Translator) 4.18 avg rating — 135 ratings — published 1928 — 10 editions	My rating:
	The Origin of German Tragic Drama by Walter Benjamin, George Steiner 4.15 avg rating — 103 ratings — published 1928 — 10 editions	My rating:
	Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934 by Walter Benjamin, Gary Smith (Editor), Michael W. Jennings (Editor) 4.57 avg rating — 74 ratings — published 2005	My rating:

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Quotes by Walter Benjamin

“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
― Walter Benjamin

tags: hope , love

86 people liked it

“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

tags: books , writers , writing

28 people liked it

“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm 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.”
― Walter Benjamin

24 people liked it

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Polls

What non-fiction book would you like to read for June?

The Coming of the Fairies by Arthur Conan Doyle

11 votes, 28.9%

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 by Virginia Nicholson

8 votes, 21.1%

The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939 by Robert Graves

5 votes, 13.2%

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

4 votes, 10.5%

The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Juliet Nicolson

4 votes, 10.5%

The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War by Juliet Nicolson

3 votes, 7.9%

Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918 World War I and Its Violent Climax by Joseph E. Persico

2 votes, 5.3%

On Hashish by Walter Benjamin

1 vote, 2.6%

A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography by Evelyn Waugh

0 votes, 0.0%

38 total votes

2 comments

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