Walter Benjamin

About the author

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist whose eclectic thought wove together German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western Marxism, and post-Kantianism. Associated with the Frankfurt School, he made lasting contributions to the philosophy of history, aesthetics, and metaphysics, and exercised a profound if oblique influence on the revival of Kabbalah through his lifelong correspondence with Gershom Scholem. His relationships with Hannah Arendt, Theodor W.

Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht shaped his legacy. He died in Portbou in 1940, and remains an emblematic figure of the tragedy of German Jewish intellectuals under Nazism.