Was Walter Benjamin a philosopher? His closest friends could never agree
Gershom Scholem declared flatly that Walter Benjamin was a philosopher. Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno insisted he was not. Benjamin mixed Marxism, Jewish mysticism and German idealism into essays on art, history and translation, won little fame while alive, and became one of the most cited thinkers of the century after his death.
Benjamin was born in Berlin on 15 July 1892 into a wealthy family of assimilated Jews. His father, once a banker in Paris, dealt in antiques and art and invested in, among other things, ice rinks. The family tree was remarkable: an uncle, William Stern, developed the concept of the intelligence quotient, and a cousin, Günther Anders, became a philosopher and Arendt's first husband. A sickly boy, Walter spent two years at a rural boarding school in Thuringia before finishing school in Charlottenburg.
At university in Freiburg and Berlin he met Zionism for the first time and rejected its political form in favour of what he called cultural Zionism, seeing his Jewishness as a commitment to advancing European culture. He was also active in Gustav Wyneken's youth movement, served as president of the Free Students Association and wrote for Der Anfang, a youth magazine banned in Bavarian schools.
His circle was extraordinary. Bertolt Brecht was a friend, Martin Buber helped launch his career, Carl Schmitt was a rival, and he regarded Martin Heidegger as a nemesis. His lifelong correspondence with Scholem fed indirectly into the modern revival of Kabbalah study, and he was associated with the Frankfurt School. His most famous essays are a 1935 study of what mechanical reproduction does to the artwork and a set of 1940 theses on how history should be understood, and he translated parts of Baudelaire and Proust.
Fleeing the advance of the Third Reich in 1940, he died by his own hand at Portbou on the French-Spanish border, aged 48; shaken by his death, Spanish officials let his companions continue to safety. He has become a symbol of the fate of German Jewish intellectuals under Nazism. Recognition came slowly: his collected works began appearing in Germany in 1955, and Arendt's 1968 English edition introduced him to a global readership.
Source: Walter Benjamin
