Walter Benjamin : a critical life

Abstract

The German Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940) is now generally regarded as one of the most important wit-nesses to European modernity. Despite the relative brevity of his writing career his life was cut short on the Spanish border in flight before the Nazis he left behind a body of work astonishing in its depth and diversity. In the years following what he called his “appren-ticeship in German literature,” during which he produced enduring studies of Romantic criticism, of Goethe, and of the Baroque Trauer-spielor play of mourning, Benjamin established himself in the 1920s as a discerning advocate of the radical culture emerging from the Soviet Union and of the high modernism that dominated the Pa ri sian liter-ary scene.