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98-664: 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 Baudelaire , Goethe , Kafka , Kraus , Leskov , Proust , Walser , Trauerspiel and translation theory . He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu . Of

196-534: A British mandate; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Benjamin (and family) to leave the continent for the Middle East. In 1924 Hugo von Hofmannsthal , in the Neue Deutsche Beiträge magazine, published Benjamin's "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" (" Goethe 's Elective Affinities "), about Goethe's third novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). According to literary critic Burkhardt Lindner,

294-450: A commitment to the furtherance of European culture. He wrote: "My life experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active ... For Judaism is to me in no sense an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and representative of the spiritual." This was a position Benjamin largely held lifelong. It was as a speaker and debater in the milieu of

392-491: A concept that identifies the subject's ability to identify desire in visual objects. This also leads to the ability to perceive information by habit instead of rapt attention. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama , 1928), is a critical study of German baroque drama, as well as the political and cultural climate of Germany during the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648). Benjamin presented

490-577: A cousin, Günther Anders , a German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist who studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger . Through his mother, Walter's great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld . 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

588-411: A cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view." The cult value of religious art is in the fact that "certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella ; certain madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level." In practice, the diminished cult value of

686-501: A day before the Germans entered the capital with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the U.S. that Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo , Benjamin planned to travel to the U.S. from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via Francoist Spain , then ostensibly a neutral country. The historical record indicates that he safely crossed

784-482: A fixed, private space (a temple) and placement in a mobile, public space (a museum) allows exhibiting the work of art to many spectators. Further explaining the transition from cult value to exhibition value, Benjamin said that in "the photographic image, exhibition value, for the first time, shows its superiority to cult value." In emphasising exhibition value, "the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions," which "later may be recognized as incidental" to

882-507: A freelance writer and unsuccessfully attempted to re-enter West Germany's school and youth policy debate. Wyneken died in Göttingen on December 8, 1964. In his 1913 book, Schule und Jugendkultur ( School and Youth Culture ), Wyneken defined the Wickersdorf school as cultivating individual consciousnesses as a refraction of the world's unified, metaphysical spirit, each consciousness bringing

980-403: A jumble of sixty apparently autonomous short prose pieces: aphorisms, jokes, dream protocols, cityscapes, landscapes, and mindscapes; portions of writing manuals, trenchant contemporary political analysis; prescient appreciations of the child's psychology, behavior, and moods; decodings of bourgeois fashion, living arrangements and courtship patterns; and time and again, remarkable penetrations into

1078-503: A professional critic and occasional translator. Working with Franz Hessel he translated the first volumes of Marcel Proust 's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu ( In Search of Lost Time ). The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Literarische Welt (The Literary World); that paid enough for him to reside in Paris for some months. In December 1926,

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1176-431: A religious artefact (an icon no longer venerated) increases the exhibition value of the artefact as art created for the spectators' appreciation, because "it is easier to exhibit a portrait bust, that can be sent here and there [to museums], than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple." The mechanical reproduction of a work of art voids its cult value, because removal from

1274-577: A small part of the text prepared by Benjamin was included in the encyclopedia. During Benjamin's lifetime, the article was not published in its entirety. A Russian translation of the article was published in the Russian edition of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in 1996. In 1927, he began Das Passagen-Werk ( The Arcades Project ), his uncompleted magnum opus , a study of 19th-century Parisian life. The same year, he saw Scholem in Berlin, for

1372-558: A tenured university professor in Germany. At Bloch's suggestion, he read Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923). He also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis , then residing in Moscow; he became her lover and she was a lasting intellectual influence on him. A year later, in 1925, Benjamin withdrew The Origin of German Tragic Drama as his possible qualification for

1470-476: A trend of episodic behavior that was to remain true throughout his life, Benjamin was a maven within an important community during a critically important historical period: the left- intelligentsia of interwar Berlin and Paris . Acquaintance with Walter Benjamin was a connecting thread for a variety of major figures in metaphysics, philosophy, theology, the visual arts, theater, literature, radio, politics and various other domains. Benjamin happened to be present on

1568-433: A work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition", which separates the original work of art from the reproduction. Moreover, Benjamin noted that the ritualization of the mechanical reproduction of art also emancipated "the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual", thereby increasing the social value of exhibiting works of art; a social and cultural practice that has progressed from

1666-410: A work of art than would an artist manually reproducing an artefact created by a master artist. The aura of a work of art derives from authenticity (uniqueness) and locale (physical and cultural); Benjamin explains that "even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be" located. That

1764-481: A work of art, Benjamin establishes that artistic reproduction is not a modern human activity, such as the industrial arts of the foundry and the stamp mill in Ancient Greece (12th–9th c. BC), and the modern arts of woodcut relief-printing and engraving , etching , lithography , and photography , which are industrial techniques of mass production that permit greater accuracy in the mechanical reproduction of

1862-409: Is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed." Therefore, "the film makes the cult value recede into the background, not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that, at the movies, this [critical] position requires no attention." The social value of a work of art changes as a society change their value systems; thus the changes in artistic styles and in

1960-436: 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

2058-510: Is partly a meditation on the form 'free-love' that the Benjamins were experimenting with in their marriage at this time, amongst other things. But this was only tangential to the issue that led to the controversy to which Arendt refers. His mistake (per Arendt) was killing a sacred cow from amongst the academic establishment. As so often in Benjamin's writings, his study of Goethe's Elective Affinities

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2156-605: Is the message ". Gustav Wyneken Gustav Wyneken (1875–1964) was a German pedagogue and founder of the Wickersdorf Free School Community . He was also a leader in the German Youth Movement and briefly contributed to school policy during the German revolutionary period after World War I . He failed to regain support for his school reform ideas after his conviction as a pederast . Gustav Wyneken

2254-737: The Eisner government . Wyneken was involved in two decrees, on school community ( Schulgemeinde ) and religious education, that were assailed for their democratizing and secularizing effects and quickly repealed. In 1919, Haenisch helped restore Wyneken to lead the Wickersdorf school, but he was ousted the next year upon a guilty conviction for homosexual contact with students. Wyneken responded by publishing Eros (1921), which advocated for pederastic relations between teachers and boys said to exist in ancient Greece in defense of his actions and philosophy. Wyneken continued to live nearby and influence Wickersdorf in person and in writing. He continued to work as

2352-589: The Frankfurt School , Benjamin published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens . At this time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács , whose The Theory of the Novel (1920) influenced him. Meanwhile, inflation in the Weimar Republic after the war made it difficult for Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his son's family. At the end of 1923 Scholem emigrated to Palestine, then under

2450-575: The Gustav Wyneken 's German Youth Movement that Benjamin was first encountered by Gershom Scholem and later Martin Buber although he had parted ways with the youth group before they had become properly acquainted. Elected president of the Freie Studentenschaft (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change while working alongside Wyneken at

2548-622: The Institute for Social Research and is best remembered as the co-author of Benjamin's closest disciple Theodor Adorno 's magnum opus, the Dialectic of the Enlightenment (a book which cribs heavily from Benjamin's unpublished, esoteric writings in many of its most important passages). In the case of Benjamin's habilitation, however, Horkheimer presents a united front with Cornelius and Professor Schultz in asking Benjamin to withdraw his application for

2646-565: The University of Berlin to continue studying philosophy. There, Benjamin had his first exposure to Zionism , which had not been part of his liberal upbringing. This gave him occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism. Benjamin distanced himself from political and nationalist Zionism, instead developing in his own thinking what he called a kind of " cultural Zionism "—an attitude that recognized and promoted Judaism and Jewish values . In Benjamin's formulation, his Jewishness meant

2744-484: The University of Munich , where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and 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

2842-546: The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung journal of the Institute for Social Research. It was a critique of the authenticity of mass-produced art; he wrote that a mechanically produced copy of an artwork can be taken somewhere the original could never have gone, arguing that the presence of the original is "prerequisite to the concept of authenticity". In 1937 Benjamin worked on "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire" ("The Paris of

2940-422: The aestheticization of politics for the production of art, became resources for research in the fields of art history and architectural theory , cultural studies , and media theory . The original essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility", was published in three editions: (i) the German edition, " Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit ", in 1935; (ii)

3038-404: The aura of authenticity of the original objet d'art . A paralipomena of Benjamin's "Work of Art..." called a "A Short History of Photography", read together with the main-essay, provide a theoretical basis for Susan Sontag's well-known monograph, On Photography . Ideas initially presented in this article also inform Marshall McLuhan's famous slogan or conception that " the medium

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3136-438: The aura – the unique aesthetic authority of a work of art – is absent from the mechanically produced copy. Regarding the social functions of an artefact , Benjamin said that "Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in

3234-409: The cultural tastes of the public follow "the manner in which human sense-perception is organized [and] the [artistic] medium in which it is accomplished [are] determined not only by Nature, but by historical circumstances, as well." Despite the negative effects (social, economic, cultural) of mass-produced art-products upon the aura of the original work of art, Benjamin said that "the uniqueness of

3332-464: The praxis of politics. Written during the Nazi régime (1933–1945) in Germany, in the essay Benjamin presents a theory of art that is "useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art" in a society of mass culture . The subject and themes of Benjamin's essay: the aura of a work of art; the artistic authenticity of the artefact; the cultural authority of the work of art; and

3430-404: The public sphere and in the private sphere ; and explains the socio-economic conditions of society to extrapolate future developments of capitalism that will result in the economic exploitation of the proletariat , and so will produce the socio-economic conditions that would abolish capitalism . By reviewing the historical and technological developments of the mechanical means for reproducing

3528-430: The "sphere of [artistic] authenticity is outside the technical [sphere]" of mechanised reproduction. Therefore, in being unique, the original work of art is an objet d'art independent of the mechanically accurate reproduction; yet, by changing the cultural context of where the artwork is located, the existence of the mechanical copy (an art-product) diminishes the aesthetic value of the original work of art. In that way,

3626-427: The Age of Mechanical Reproduction " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (1935), by Walter Benjamin , is an essay of cultural criticism which proposes and explains that mechanical reproduction devalues the aura (uniqueness) of a work of art , and that in the age of mechanical reproduction and the absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of art would be inherently based upon

3724-567: The French edition, " L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée ", in 1936; and (iii) the German revised edition in 1939, from which derive the contemporary English translations of the essay titled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Benjamin presents the thematic bases for a theory of art by quoting the essay "The Conquest of Ubiquity" (1928), by Paul Valéry , to establish how works of art created and developed in past eras are different from contemporary works of art; that

3822-623: The French government and incarcerated for three months in a prison camp near Nevers , in central Burgundy . Returning to Paris in January 1940, he drafted "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" ("On the Concept of History", later published as " Theses on the Philosophy of History "). While the Wehrmacht was pushing back the French Army , on 13 June Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes , just

3920-640: The French–Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou , in Catalonia on 25 September 1940. The Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish refugee group Benjamin had joined. They were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France the next day, which would have thwarted Benjamin's plans to travel to

4018-448: The Institute for Social Research, later going permanently into exile. In Paris, he met other refugee German artists and intellectuals; he befriended Hannah Arendt , novelist Hermann Hesse , and composer Kurt Weill . In 1936, a first version of " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (originally written in German in 1935) was published in French ("L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée") by Max Horkheimer in

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4116-673: The Second Empire in Baudelaire"), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the Arcades Project manuscript), and joined the College of Sociology (which he would criticize for its "pre-fascist aestheticism.") In 1938 he paid a last visit to Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi régime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Benjamin was arrested by

4214-511: The United States. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets that night, while staying at the Hotel de Francia ; the official Portbou register records 26 September 1940 as the date of death. Benjamin's colleague Arthur Koestler , also fleeing Europe, attempted suicide by taking some of the morphine tablets, but survived. Benjamin's brother Georg

4312-491: The adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful . In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it

4410-533: The age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich . Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown. Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin , then

4508-472: The angel can no longer close them. The 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. The final paragraph about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up

4606-405: The aura is found in a work of art that contains presence. The aura is precisely what cannot be reproduced in a work of art: its original presence in time and space. He suggests a work of art's aura is in a state of decay because it is becoming more and more difficult to apprehend the time and space in which a piece of art is created. This essay also introduces the concept of the optical unconscious,

4704-490: The capital of the German Empire . Walter's father, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who had relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader; he later married Pauline Schönflies. He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks. Walter's uncle, William Stern , was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ). He also had

4802-407: The critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin's writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplary synthesis is "Theses on the Philosophy of History". At least one scholar, historian of religion Jason Josephson-Storm , has argued that Benjamin's diverse interests may be understood in part by understanding

4900-463: The delivery of this piece by several years. Benjamin was a close colleague of Ernst Bloch while Bloch was writing the Spirit of Utopia and maintained a relationship with him until the late 20's that Bloch later described as "almost too close." An untitled scrap omitted from Benjamin's book review of Bloch's Spirit of Utopia which remained unpublished during Benjamin's lifetime (later anthologized under

4998-491: The essay forms the "third major philosophical-aesthetic treatise of the early work" alongside the PhD dissertation and the habilitation thesis . It has often been linked to the breakup of his marriage. The dedication to Julia Cohn, whom he had courted in vain at the time, suggests this. Likewise, according to Hannah Arendt , it was his essay on Goethe that ruined Benjamin's only chance of a university career. Benjamin's Goethe monograph

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5096-488: The feuilleton played a decisive role in shaping the prose form on which the book is based." Written contemporaneously with Martin Heidegger's Being & Time , Benjamin's work from this period explores much of the same territory: formally in his "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to The Origin of German Tragic Drama , and as sketches, allusions and asides in One Way Street. The Passagenwerk ( Arcades Project , 1927–40)

5194-700: The first chapter of the Genesis ". In that period, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin . In 1917 Benjamin transferred to the University of Bern ; there he met Ernst Bloch , and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner), whom he married. They had a son, Stefan Rafael, in 1918. In 1919 Benjamin earned his PhD summa cum laude with the dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik ( The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism ). For his postdoctoral thesis in 1920, Benjamin hit upon an idea very similar to

5292-500: The habilitation teaching credential at the University of Frankfurt at Frankfurt am Main, fearing its possible rejection. The work was a study in which he sought to "save" the category of allegory . It proved too unorthodox and abstruse for its examiners, who included prominent members of the humanities faculty, such as Hans Cornelius . Max Horkheimer also sat on the panel of examiners who rejected Benjamin's thesis. Horkheimer later serves as both patron and promoter of Benjamin's work at

5390-460: The habilitation to avoid disgrace on the occasion of the examination. That is to say: His committee informed him that he will not be accepted as an academic instructor in the German university system. A diagram of the internecine dynamics of Benjamin's habilitation committee's rejection of his work bear recollection here, as they determine something of the character of his later career and ultimate legacy. Hans Cornelius had been Adorno's mentor in

5488-411: The heading of theology". After Scholem sympathetically informed his friend that his interest in the concept had been pre-empted by Heidegger's earlier publication, Benjamin seemed to have derived a lifelong antagonism toward the rival philosopher whose major insights, over the course of both of their careers, sometimes overlapped and sometimes conflicted with Benjamin's. Incidentally, at that time Heidegger

5586-400: The heart of every day things, what Benjamin would later call a mode of empathy with 'the soul of the commodity'" according to Michael Jennings in his introduction to the work. He continues: "Many of the pieces...first appeared in the feuilleton section," of newspapers and magazines which was "not a separate section but rather an area at the bottom of every page...and the spatial restrictions of

5684-502: The hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological , though he eschewed all recourse to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority. In 1940, at

5782-483: The importance of Karl Korsch 's interpretation of Capital to understanding Benjamin's engagement with Marxism in later works like the Arcades . Karl Korsch's Karl Marx , which was "one of Benjamin's main sources [on]... Marxism," introduced him "to an advanced understanding of Marxism." "Theses on the Philosophy of History" is often cited as Benjamin's last complete work, having been completed, according to Adorno, in

5880-473: The influence of Western Esotericism on Benjamin. Some of Benjamin's key ideas were adapted from occultists and New Age figures including Eric Gutkind and Ludwig Klages , and his interest in esotericism is known to have extended far beyond the Jewish Kabbalah . In addition to Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory, and Scholem's Jewish mysticism, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings have underscored

5978-528: The institutional context of the university, whereas once Adorno started actually teaching as a professor at the University of Frankfurt, he devoted his seminars to Benjamin's rejected work. Adorno's 1931 and 1932 seminars, delivered at Frankfurt University , devoted themselves to a close reading of the Origins of German Tragic Drama . Adorno was still teaching this class on the Origins of German Tragic Drama during

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6076-438: The intellectuals to each other. In that time, Benjamin also briefly embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg . 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

6174-572: The interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, of attempts to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter". Perhaps Walter Benjamin's best-known essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," identifies the perceptual shift that takes place when technological advancements emphasize speed and reproducibility. Benjamin argues that

6272-543: The kabbalah, God's attributes were once held in vessels whose glass was contaminated by the presence of evil and these vessels had consequently shattered, disseminating their contents to the four corners of the earth. Tikkun was the process of collecting the scattered fragments in the hopes of once more piecing them together. Benjamin fused tikkun with the Surrealist notion that liberation would come through releasing repressed collective material, to produce his celebrated account of

6370-406: The last time, and considered emigrating from Germany to Palestine. In 1928, he and Dora separated (they divorced two years later, in 1930); in the same year he published Einbahnstraße ( One-Way Street ), and a revision of his habilitation thesis Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama ). In 1929 Berlin, Lācis, then an assistant to Bertolt Brecht , socially presented

6468-572: The legendary and controversial youth magazine Der Anfang (The beginning), that was banned in all schools in Bavaria. Wyneken's thesis that a new youth must pave the way for revolutionary cultural change became the main theme of all of Benjamin's publications at that time. When not reelected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg to study, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert ; at that time he traveled to France and Italy. Benjamin's attempt to volunteer for service at

6566-454: The major published works that appeared in his lifetime—" The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ", " Paris, The Capital of the 19th Century ", and his late essays and monograph on Baudelaire —are fragments of the book that he developed as standalone pieces for publication. The Arcades Project , in its current form, brings together a massive collection of notes Benjamin filed together from 1927 to 1940. The Work of Art in

6664-410: The original purpose for which the artist created the objet d'art . As a medium of artistic production, the cinema (moving pictures) does not create cult value for the motion picture, itself, because "the audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera . Consequently, the audience takes the position of the camera; [the audience's] approach is that of testing. This

6762-572: The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was rejected by the army. Benjamin later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription, allowing him to continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Charles Baudelaire . His conspicuous refuge in Switzerland on dubious medical grounds was a likely factor in his ongoing challenges in obtaining academic employment after the war. The next year, 1915, Benjamin moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at

6860-664: The outbreak of the first World War; another was one of the Jewish Liaisons who took Nazi diplomats on a tour of Palestine. This happened while the Third Reich was preparing the European Zionists to believe that Europe's Jews would be forcibly emigrated from the Reich, to deflect attention from the looming possibility of the strategy that was ultimately adopted: mass extermination in the death camps . Scholem, Benjamin's oldest friend, and

6958-632: The outskirts of many of the most important events within the intellectual ferment of the interwar-period in Weimar Germany and interpreted those events in his writing. He was in the crowd at the conference where Kurt Gödel first described the incompleteness theorem . He once took a class on the Ancient Mayans from Rilke. He attended the same seminar as Heidegger at Freiburg in the summer of 1913 when both men were still university students: concepts first encountered there influenced their thought for

7056-401: The politics and production of art. That in transforming a work of art into a commodity , the modern means of artistic production and of artistic reproduction have destroyed the aesthetic , cultural, and political authority of art: "For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free," because they are commercial products that lack

7154-463: The private sphere of life (the owner's enjoyment of the aesthetics of the artefacts, usually high art) to the public sphere of life, wherein the public enjoy the same aesthetics in a gallery displaying works of art. In the late-twentieth-century television program Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger proceeded from and developed the themes of Benjamin's essay to explain the contemporary representations of social class and racial caste inherent to

7252-442: The readers of which likewise dismissed Benjamin's work. The university officials recommended that Benjamin withdraw Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as a habilitation thesis to avoid formal rejection and public embarrassment. He heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a book. Einbahnstraße ( One Way Street , 1928) is a series of meditations written primarily during

7350-573: The remainder of their careers. He was an early draft script reader, comrade, favorable critic and promoter as well as a frequent house-guest of the Berlin cabaret theater scene writer and director Bertolt Brecht . Martin Buber took an interest in Benjamin, but Benjamin declined to contribute to Buber's journal because it was too exoteric . Nevertheless, Buber financed Benjamin's trip to Moscow and promoted his career in other ways. Nominally, Buber had commissioned Benjamin to write an article Moscow for his Die Kreatur, though Benjamin blew his deadline for

7448-498: The revolutionary historiographer, who sought to grab hold of elided memories as they sparked to view at moments of present danger. 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: 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

7546-518: The same phase as The Origin of German Tragic Drama , after Benjamin had met Asja Lācis on the beach at Capri in 1924. He finished the cycle in 1926, and put it out the same year that his failed thesis was published. One Way Street is a collage work. Greil Marcus compares certain formal qualities of the book to the graphic novel Hundred Headless Women by Max Ernst , or to Walter Ruttman's The Weekend (an early sound collage film) . The book avoids "all semblance of linear-narrative...[offering]

7644-651: The school. Wyneken joined the Youth Movement and lectured for the Association for Free School Communities  [ de ] . Wyneken became a personal advisor to Konrad Haenisch , a German social democratic politician with the Prussian Ministry of Education , during Germany's post-World War I revolutionary period . Wyneken also advised Johannes Hoffmann , the Bavarian social democratic Minister of Education in

7742-656: 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. As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer , and received funds from

7840-514: The sole executor of his literary estate, would resurrect the canonical books of the Kabbalah from private libraries and ancient document dumps called Genizah . These were created when the books flooded into Mandatory Palestine during the period leading up to, coinciding with, and immediately following the Holocaust . In 1923, when the Institute for Social Research was founded, later to become home to

7938-489: The spring of 1940. The Institute for Social Research, which had relocated to New York, published Theses in Benjamin's memory in 1942. Margaret Cohen writes in the Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin : In the "Concept of History" Benjamin also turned to Jewish mysticism for a model of praxis in dark times, inspired by the kabbalistic precept that the work of the holy man is an activity known as tikkun . According to

8036-403: The subject of Baroque drama in the first place, only to reject the thesis that derived from this recommendation--is virtually altogether forgotten. The episode in the history of the German academy is immortalized in the bon mot , "One cannot habilitate intellect." This failure resulted in his father's refusal to continue to support him financially, so that Benjamin was forced to make ends meet as

8134-508: The thesis proposed by Martin Heidegger in the latter's own postdoctoral project ( Duns Scotus: Theory of Categories and Meaning ). Wolfram Eilenberger writes that Benjamin's plan was "to legitimize [his theory of language] with reference to a largely forgotten tradition [found in the archaic writings of Duns Scotus ], and to strike the sparks of systematization from the apparent disjunct among modern, logical, and analytical linguistic philosophy and medieval speculations on language that fell under

8232-413: The title "Theologico-Political Fragment") is now perhaps better remembered than the larger work it cites as an authority for its mystical reflections. It was Bloch's commission that inspired Benjamin's work on the theory of categories , according to Scholem. This was to be a consequential theme throughout his career. One of Benjamin's high-school best friends (also a German Jew) killed himself using gas at

8330-470: The ultimate horror, withdrawal and rejection with which members of the circle greeted the Nazi regime ) this group's commitment to particular archaic styles anticipated the aesthetics of fascism . Later that year Benjamin and Bloch resided on the Italian island of Capri ; Benjamin wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama ) as a habilitation thesis meant to qualify him as

8428-402: The understanding and treatment of art and of artistic technique must progressively develop in order to understand a work of art in the context of the modern time. Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques,

8526-431: The winter semester that Adolph Hitler came to power, although at that time it was not listed in the course catalog--whereas Adorno's academic mentor Cornelius, who had rejected this thesis, is today remembered primarily because of his rejection of Benjamin's habilitation. Horkheimer becomes a footnote to the career of Benjamin's apprentice. Schultz--the other member of Benjamin's committee who seems to have directed him to

8624-469: The work to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 as the postdoctoral dissertation meant to earn him the habilitation (qualification) to become a university instructor in Germany. Professor Schultz of the University of Frankfurt found The Origin of German Tragic Drama inappropriate for his Germanistik department (Department of German Language and Literature), and passed it to the Department of Aesthetics ,

8722-475: The world to greater consciousness of itself. The purpose of life and the goal of education is to serve the world's one, objective spirit. Wyneken's ideal school life drew from the progressive rural school model and development of a school community that included deliberation by a democratic general assembly of both teachers and students. Emphasizing art's role in expressing the spirit, Wyneken also supported musical education and community theater . In its time,

8820-561: The year his father died, Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Lācis and found her ill in a sanatorium. During his stay in Moscow, he was asked by the editorial board of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to write an article on Goethe for the first edition of the encyclopedia. Benjamin's article was ultimately rejected, with reviewer Anatoly Lunacharsky (then the People's Commissar of Education ) characterizing it as "non-encyclopedic", and only

8918-486: Was Benjamin's final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century, especially about the Passages couverts de Paris —the covered passages that extended the culture of flânerie (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather made flânerie infeasible in the boulevards and streets proper. In this work Benjamin uses his fragmentary style to write about the rise of modern European urban culture . Several of

9016-612: Was born April 19, 1875, in Stade , northern Germany. After passing his teachers' exam, he became a teacher at Hermann Lietz 's progressive school in rural Ilsenburg , central Germany. Wyneken became its director in 1901 and eventually left due to differences with Lietz. In 1906, Wyneken founded the Wickersdorf Free School Community in Thuringia with Odenwaldschule founder Paul Geheeb and others. The Ministry of Saxe-Meiningen dismissed Wyneken from his teaching post following infighting at

9114-404: Was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. In the preface to the essay, Benjamin presents Marxist analyses of the organisation of a capitalist society and of the place of the arts in a capitalist society, both in

9212-773: Was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. The others in his party were allowed passage the next day (maybe because Benjamin's suicide shocked Spanish officials), and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, passed the manuscript of Theses to Adorno. Another completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. In addition to his lifelong dialogue in letters with Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin maintained an intense correspondence with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht , and

9310-414: Was marked by polemics and the theme of his assault in this work concerned Friedrich Gundolf 's Goethe book. Gundolf was the most prominent and able academic member of the (Stefan) George-Kreis --a cult of post-symbolist, romantic nationalist poets with a mystically conservative, medievalist bent. Elsewhere, in the anonymity of his private epistolary writings, Benjamin explicitly points out how (regardless of

9408-533: Was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer , even from their New York City residence. At other times he received funding from Hebrew University or from funds made available by Martin Buber and his publishing associates including Salman Schocken . The dynamism or conflict between these competing influences—Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory , Scholem's Jewish mysticism—were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover,

9506-455: 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. In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg , but at the summer semester's end, he returned to Berlin and matriculated at

9604-613: Was soon to embark on a love affair with Hannah Arendt , later related to Benjamin through marriage to his cousin Günther Anders . Later, unable to support himself and family, Benjamin returned to Berlin and resided with his parents. In 1921 he published the essay "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Toward the Critique of Violence"). At this time Benjamin first became socially acquainted with Leo Strauss , and he remained an admirer of Strauss and his work throughout his life. Starting in adolescence, in

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