Benjamin, Walter

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was born in Berlin in 1892, the son of a Jewish art dealer. After schooling at a humanistic gymnasium, he studied philosophy and literature at Freiburg and started a friendship with the poet C. F. Heinle. Heinle and his wife committed suicide in 1914, an event that devastated Benjamin, and the memory of the young poet stayed with Benjamin for the rest of his life. Benjamin himself would, even before the fatal day in Port Bou in 1940 when he took a lethal dose of morphine, contemplate suicide in Paris in 1931 in light of the worsening political situation in Germany.

In 1915, Benjamin met Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), whose friendship was decisive, as was his friendship with Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), whom Benjamin met for the first time in 1923. And in 1929, through the aegis of his Russian lover, Asja Lacis, Benjamin met Bertold Brecht (1898–1956) for the first time in the latter's Berlin apartment. Indeed, at one level, Benjamin's life was a series of friendships and love affairs initiated and ended. Apart from Brecht, Benjamin met many of the literary figures of the interwar period, including Rilke, Gide, Hofmannsthal, Desnos, Aragon, and Kraus, as well as the philosophers Klages, Wolfskehl, and Ernst Bloch. In addition, Benjamin published, especially between 1927 and 1940, literally dozens of reviews and essays, including pieces on figures such as Baudelaire, Hölderlin, Proust, Green, Valéry, Stephan George, and Kafka.

Benjamin was also very peripatetic. His preferred ports of call, where he could often live cheaply and still write, were Capri, Paris, Moscow, and Ibiza, Spain. Each trip provided Benjamin with fuel for articles, with his posthumously published Moscow Diary of 1926–1927 being one of his most distinguished efforts in ethnographic description and personal reflection.

Walter Benjamin's life as an independent scholar unable to secure a permanent academic position is also emblematic [Page 52]of the thinker. For he stands apart from almost every thinker in the twentieth century in his individual approach to scholarship and writing and in his singular distillation of the nature of modernity.

Characteristic of his singularity is the fact that Benjamin published only two books in his lifetime, both in 1928: a book of aphorisms, One-Way Street, and a monograph study, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, initially submitted, then rejected, in 1925 as an Habilitationsschrift that would qualify him for a university post. The rest of his writings, including the vast, unfinished Arcades Project, are in the form of essays, articles (academic and journalistic), translations, and fragments, many published posthumously. For Benjamin, the fragment took precedence over the whole, the pastiche and collage over unity, difference over identity. Famously, Benjamin is quoted as saying that he dreamed of producing a book that was nothing but a series of quotations.

In his interest in art, translation, storytelling, memory, time, and tradition, the persona of Benjamin also emerges along with profound insights. These insights are indebted to the rise of modernity itself and the loss of tradition that comes in its wake, a loss that effectively means the loss of the origin—what Benjamin calls, in the field of art, “aura.” We could also see this as the loss of context in which the original was produced in a community, whether this original is a work of art or a story. Also evoked here is the ritual aspect of art, to the extent that art as ritual constitutes community. “In the beginning….” so the story goes (and the story itself was the beginning). The story bound people together; it made community and thus the context equivalent to an original understanding.

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