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 the advance of the Third Reich. Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that, "Benjamin was a philosopher," while his younger colleagues Arendt and Adorno contend just as emphatically that he was "not a philosopher." As 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. 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, Trauerspiel and translation theory. 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). Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. An 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. Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( / ˈ b ɛ n j ə m ɪ n/ German: ⓘ 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940 ) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.Auratic perception, aestheticization of politics, dialectical image, the flâneur Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. Leon Wieseltier’s preface explores Benjamin’s continued relevance for our times. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin’s life in a dark historical era. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode and his theses on the philosophy of history. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity his studies on Baudelaire and Proust and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. Essays and reflections from one of the twentieth century’s most original cultural critics, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt.
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