Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)

Walter Benjamin was born to a Jewish family in Berlin, the eldest of three children. His parents were Pauline (Schönflies) and Emil Benjamin, a banker and businessman. Walter attended a progressive co-educational boarding school in Haubinda, and the universities of Freiburg, Berlin, Munich, and Bern. He married Dora Sophie Pollak, with whom he had a son. In 1919, Benjamin earned his PhD summa cum laude at the University of Bern with a dissertation called Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism). He returned to Berlin and worked as a literary critic and translator. His celebrated 1924 essay on Goethe's novella, The Elective Affinities, put into practice his ideas of art criticism. His book The Origins of German Tragic Drama, published in 1928, quickly received favorable attention from leading critics in Germany and abroad. Benjamin made plans for publishing a left-wing periodical to be entitled Crisis and Critique while eking out a living as a translator and freelance writer. In 1933, he left Nazi Germany, following Bertolt Brecht and many other Jewish friends into an exile he divided between Paris, Ibiza, San Remo, and Brecht's house in Denmark. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Benjamin was temporarily interned in French camps for German citizens. On his release, he returned to Paris and continued his work in the Bibliothèque Nationale before being forced to flee the invading German army in the summer of 1940. He found refuge with the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille led by Varian Fry. He joined a guided party that crossed the Pyrenees on foot and tried to enter Spain, but they were turned back by customs officials. In despair, and thinking he was going to be turned over to the Nazis, he committed suicide in the small Spanish border town of Portbou. The posthumous publication of his prolific writings significantly increased his renown in the later 20th century.