German-Jewish critic, essayist, and philosopher whose fragmentary, aphoristic body of work — produced against deepening catastrophe and cut off by his suicide at the Spanish border in 1940 — has become, in the half-century since his rediscovery, one of the indispensable resources of twentieth-century thought. He wrote about eighteenth-century baroque drama, Parisian shopping arcades, translation, photography, storytelling, hashish, his own Berlin childhood, and the philosophy of history; the essays feel like pieces of a single book that he never lived to write, and his major project — The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk), a thirteen-year accumulation of quotations and commentary on nineteenth-century Paris — was left unfinished, published only in 1982.
Born into a prosperous assimilated Berlin family, Benjamin failed to secure a university post (his habilitation thesis, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), was rejected as unintelligible) and spent the rest of his life as a freelance critic — book reviews, radio talks, translations (Proust, Baudelaire) — hovering between three magnetic fields he never quite resolved: the Jewish mystical tradition mediated to him by his closest friend Gershom Scholem; the materialist Marxism urged on him by Bertolt Brecht and his cousin-by-adoption Theodor Adorno; and the surrealist and modernist aesthetics of interwar Paris, where he lived in exile from 1933. His signature concept of the dialectical image — the sudden, flashing coincidence of an image from the past with a political moment in the present — was his attempt to hold all three together.
Three essays have proved especially durable. "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility" (1935) argues that mechanical reproduction (photography, film) destroys the aura of the unique artwork — its here-and-now authenticity — and in doing so opens the possibility of a politicized mass art against fascism's aestheticization of politics. "The Storyteller" (1936) mourns the decline of face-to-face transmitted experience in the novel-and-newspaper age. And his final text, "On the Concept of History" (1940) — known as the Theses on the Philosophy of History — contains the famous ninth thesis: Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, the angel of history blown backward into the future by a storm called progress, its face turned toward a pile of wreckage. Fleeing occupied France with a visa for the United States, Benjamin reached the border town of Portbou in Catalonia on 26 September 1940; told (wrongly, as it turned out) that he would be returned to France and thus to the Gestapo, he killed himself with morphine tablets that night.
His influence is now almost unplaceable. Theodor Adorno and the The Frankfurt School edited and canonised him (and, many readers think, slightly tamed him in the process); Arendt carried him into the American academy; cultural studies took the mass-art essay as a founding text; literary criticism took the Baudelaire essays as models; theology, especially Jewish and liberationist, still works the messianic threads. He is unlike anyone else writing in the twentieth century, and the fragmentary form of his work has only made it more hospitable to later readers.