Walter Benjamin





Walter Benjamin

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born
July 15, 1892 in Berlin, Germany

died
September 27, 1940

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About this author

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


Average rating: 4.28 · 6,081 ratings · 335 reviews · 121 distinct works
Illuminations: Essays and R...
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4.33 of 5 stars 4.33 avg rating — 2,244 ratings — published 1968 — 11 editions
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The Work of Art in the Age ...
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4.18 of 5 stars 4.18 avg rating — 1,129 ratings — published 1936 — 17 editions
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The Arcades Project
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4.51 of 5 stars 4.51 avg rating — 613 ratings — published 1982 — 9 editions
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Reflections: Essays, Aphori...
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4.33 of 5 stars 4.33 avg rating — 424 ratings — published 1978 — 3 editions
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Berlin Childhood Around 1900
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4.08 of 5 stars 4.08 avg rating — 172 ratings — published 1938 — 10 editions
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The Writer of Modern Life: ...
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4.23 of 5 stars 4.23 avg rating — 99 ratings — published 2006
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Walter Benjamin: Selected W...
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4.48 of 5 stars 4.48 avg rating — 103 ratings — published 1996 — 2 editions
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One Way Street And Other Wr...
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4.18 of 5 stars 4.18 avg rating — 135 ratings — published 1928 — 10 editions
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The Origin of German Tragic...
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4.15 of 5 stars 4.15 avg rating — 103 ratings — published 1928 — 10 editions
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Walter Benjamin: Selected W...
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4.57 of 5 stars 4.57 avg rating — 74 ratings — published 2005
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More books by Walter Benjamin…
“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
Walter Benjamin

“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

“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

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