Benjamin, Walter

Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940). German writer, regarded as one of the leading cultural critics of the 20th century. He was born in Berlin into an intellectual Jewish family and studied successively at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin, Munich, and Berne, where he obtained a PhD in 1919. For most of his career he made a precarious living as a journalist in Berlin. In 1933 he left Germany because of the rise of Nazism and settled in Paris. After the German invasion of France he fled to Spain and committed suicide at the border in a moment of despair when he was denied entry for trivial bureaucratic reasons. Benjamin's writings are ‘a curious mixture of esoteric, sometimes mystical Jewish thought, artistic modernism and unorthodox Marxism’ ( Terry Eagleton in The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thinkers, 1983). In the context of the visual arts, his most important essay is ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction), originally published in 1936 in Zeitschrift fur Socialforschung, which was operating in exile in New York. In this he ‘argues that the “aura” of the original unique work of art is lost to reproducibility; but that this, far from being something to mourn, opens up progressive possibilities’ ( Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900–1990, 1992). He believed that technical change could encourage a progressive popular art: ‘Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art.’