Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

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In 1937 Benjamin worked on "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire" ("The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the Arcades Project manuscript), and joined the College of Sociology (which he would criticize for its "pre-fascist aestheticism.") [61] In 1938 he paid a last visit to Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. [62] Meanwhile, the Nazi régime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Benjamin was arrested by the French government and incarcerated for three months in a prison camp near Nevers, in central Burgundy. [63] [64] Görmenin Diyalektiği: Walter Benjamin ve Pasajlar Projesi, trans. Ferit Burak Aydar, Istanbul: Metis, 2010. [67] (Turkish)

Benjamin had already fled when the Nazis marched into Paris, but his apartment—and all his quotations and books—remained. The mechanical reproduction of a work of art voids its cult value, because removal from a fixed, private space (a temple) and placement in a mobile, public space (a museum) allows exhibiting the work of art to many spectators. [10] Further explaining the transition from cult value to exhibition value, Benjamin said that in "the photographic image, exhibition value, for the first time, shows its superiority to cult value." [9] In emphasising exhibition value, "the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions," which "later may be recognized as incidental" to the original purpose for which the artist created the objet d'art. [9] Wahlverwandtschaften - Aufsätze und Reflexionen über deutschsprachige Literatur, ed. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007, 483 pp. [35] Kafka" (The Kafka writings are composed most famously of "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death", 1934, and "Some Remarks on Kafka", excerpted from a 1938 letter to Gershom Scholem. Both of these are collected in the anthology Illuminations. Benjamin also wrote, "Franz Kafka: Building the Great Wall of China" in 1931, a commentary on Max Brod's biography of Kafka in 1937, and carried on a correspondence about Kafka with Scholem and Adorno.) Sontag, Susan; Benjamin, Walter. "Introduction (by Susan Sontag)". One Way St. & Other Writings. Verso.The use of quotation marks and the way this is phrased suggest that this automaton is not "true" historical materialism, but something that is given that name. By whom, we ask. And the answer must be the chief spokesmen of Marxism in his period, that is to say the ideologues of the Second and Third Internationals. [5] essay by German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin Über den Begriff der Geschichte (2010 edition, Suhrkamp) In the essay, Benjamin's famed ninth thesis struggles to reconcile the Idea of Progress in the present with the apparent chaos of the past: Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland, Harvard University Press, 2019, 308 pp. (English)

Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen" (" On Language as Such and on the Language of Man", 1916) Sigrid Weigel, Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy Stanford: Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2013, 320 pp. [69] (English)Benjamin's attempt to volunteer for service at the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was rejected by the army. [23] Benjamin later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription, [23] [24] allowing him to continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Charles Baudelaire. His conspicuous refuge in Switzerland on dubious medical grounds was a likely factor in his ongoing challenges in obtaining academic employment after the war. [24]

Elizabeth Stewart, Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis, Continuum, 2010. (English) Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit - und weitere Dokumente, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007, 254 pp. [31] Einbahnstraße ( One Way Street, 1928) is a series of meditations written primarily during the same phase as The Origin of German Tragic Drama, after Benjamin had met Asja Lācis on the beach at Capri in 1924. He finished the cycle in 1926, and put it out the same year that his failed thesis was published.

Contents

Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften 1, ed. Siegfried Unseld, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961; 2001, 432 pp. [10] Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928), is a critical study of German baroque drama, as well as the political and cultural climate of Germany during the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648). Benjamin presented the work to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 as the postdoctoral dissertation meant to earn him the habilitation (qualification) to become a university instructor in Germany.

Tobias Robert Klein (ed.), Klang und Musik bei Walter Benjamin, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013, 224 pp. [68] (German) At Bloch's suggestion, he read Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923). He also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis, then residing in Moscow; he became her lover and was a lasting intellectual influence on him. [51] In 1917 Benjamin transferred to the University of Bern; there he met Ernst Bloch, and Dora Sophie Pollak [29] (née Kellner), whom he married. They had a son, Stefan Rafael, in 1918. In 1919 Benjamin earned his PhD summa cum laude with the dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik ( The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism). [30] [31] Erzählen - Schriften zur Theorie der Narration und zur literarischen Prosa, ed. Alexander Honold, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007, 349 pp. [32] The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility", trans. Harry Zohn, in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 1968; 2007, pp 217-251. (English)Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image- Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, Routledge, 1996, 224 pp. (English) Deutsche Menschen - Eine Folge von Briefen, ed. Walter Benjamin, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983, 99 pp. [26] Susan Sontag said that in Benjamin's writing, sentences did not originate ordinarily, do not progress into one another, and delineate no obvious line of reasoning, as if each sentence "had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes", a "freeze-frame baroque" style of writing and cogitation. "His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct". [82] The occasional difficulties of Benjamin's style are essential to his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, his goal in later works was to use intertexts to reveal aspects of the past that cannot, and should not, be understood within greater, monolithic constructs of historical understanding. Dialektik des Sehens - Walter Benjamin und das Passagen-Werk, trans. Joachim Schulte, Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. [65] (German) Agesilaus Santander. Výbor z textů, Prague: Herrmann a synové, 1998, 335 pp. Selection from Gesammelte Schriften (1991). [52]