In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled to the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. 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 from the invading Wehrmacht. 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, and translation theory. He was also related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders.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). He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( / ˈ b ɛ n j ə m ɪ n/ German: ( listen) 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.Īn 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.
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