It was as a speaker and debater in the milieu of the Gustav Wyneken's German Youth Movement that Benjamin was first encountered by Gershom Scholem and later Martin Buber although he'd parted ways with the youth group before they'd become properly acquainted. 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. He wrote: "My life experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active. In Benjamin's formulation, his Jewishness meant a commitment to the furtherance of European culture. 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. This gave him occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism. There, Benjamin had his first exposure to Zionism, which had not been part of his liberal upbringing. In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg, but at summer semester's end he returned to Berlin and matriculated at the University of Berlin to continue studying philosophy. In his youth, Walter 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 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled to the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. Through his mother, Walter's great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld. He also had a cousin, Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund Stern 1902–1992), a German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist who studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Walter's uncle, William Stern (born Wilhelm Louis Stern 1871–1938), was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ). He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks. Walter's father, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who had relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader in Berlin he later married Pauline Schönflies. 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 the Berlin of the German Empire (1871–1918). Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown. In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the invading Wehrmacht. 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. His major work as a literary critic included essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, and translation theory. He was also related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders.Īmong 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). He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( / ˈ b ɛ n j ə m ɪ n/ German: ( listen) 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist.Īn eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and Neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism.
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