Book description
The literary-philosophical works of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) rank
among the most quietly influential of the post-war era, though only
since his death has Benjamin achieved the fame and critical currency
outside his native Germany accorded him by a select few during his
lifetime. Now he is widely held to have possessed one of the most
acute and original minds of the Central European culture decimated by
the Nazis.
Illuminations contains his two most celebrated essays, 'The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' and 'Theses on the
Philosophy of History', as well as others on the art of translation,
Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust and an
anatomy of his own obsession, book collecting. The essay is Benjamin's
domain; those collected in this now legendary volume offer the best
possible access to his singular and significant achievement. In a
stimulating introduction, Hannah Arendt reveals how Benjamin's life
and work are a prism to his times, and identifies him as possessing
the rare ability to think poetically.
Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin in July 1832 into a prosperous
Jewish family. As a student, he came under the influence of Messianic
and cabbalistic ideas, and produced a brilliant, esoteric thesis on
German baroque drama, which contrived to fail to win him academic
tenure. Thereafter, he made a precarious living as a literary
journalist, and, under the influence of Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács.
Turned towards Marxism; in the late 1920s, he befriended, and
championed, Bertolt Brecht. Driven from Germany in 1933 by the
political triumph of the Nazis, he went to Paris, where he immersed
himself in Surrealism and the study of Baudelaire. When the Wehrmacht
rolled into Paris too, in 1940, he fled for the Spanish border, only
to die by his own hand in a tragi-comic fashion at the age of forty-eight.
His literary legacy is greater in stature than in size: he published
only two full-scale books in his lifetime, one thesis The Origin of
German tragic Drama, the other The Concept of Art Criticism
in German Romanticism. Three other books since made available
are Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism, Moscow Diary and Understanding Brecht.
Besides these, he was the author of two books of collected
reflections, One-Way Street and A Berlin Childhood Around
1900, and numerous literary and critical essays and commentaries,
the finest among them collected in the present volume.
