Walter Benjamin, (born July 15, 1892, Berlin,
Ger.—died Sept. 26, 1940, near Port-Bou, Spain), man of letters and
aesthetician, is now considered to have been the most important German
literary critic in the first half of the 20th century.
Born into a prosperous Jewish family, Benjamin studied philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg im Breisgau,
Munich, and Bern. He settled in Berlin in 1920 and worked thereafter as
a literary critic and translator. His halfhearted pursuit of an
academic career was cut short when the University of Frankfurt rejected
his brilliant but unconventional doctoral thesis, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928; The Origin of German Tragic Drama).
Benjamin eventually settled in Paris after leaving Germany
in 1933 upon the Nazis’ rise to power. He continued to write essays and
reviews for literary journals, but upon the fall of France to the
Germans in 1940 he fled southward with the hope of escaping to the
United States via Spain. Informed by the chief of police at the town of Port-Bou on the Franco-Spanish border that he would be turned over to the Gestapo, Benjamin committed suicide.
The posthumous publication of Benjamin’s prolific
output significantly increased his reputation in the later 20th
century. The essays containing his philosophical reflections on literature are written in a dense and concentrated style that contains a strong poetic strain. He mixes social criticism and linguistic analysis with historical nostalgia while communicating an underlying sense of pathos and pessimism. The metaphysical quality of his early critical thought gave way to a Marxist inclination in the 1930s. Benjamin’s pronounced intellectual independence and originality are evident in the extended essay Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (1924–25; “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”) and in the essays posthumously collected in Illuminationen (1961; Illuminations),
including “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit” (1936; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction”).
This ebook collection contains his complete work and some biographic books about Benjamin in German language and "The Cambridge Compation to Walter Benjamin" in English.
Walter Benjamin - A collection of ebooks
(epub & pdf)
5 Kommentare:
Danke für das umfassende ebook-Material und damit auch die richtige und wichtige Erinnerung an Benjamin – und die verheerenden Umstände seines Entschlusses zur Selbsttötung im März 1941. Gerade in dieser Woche las ich Uwe Wittstocks „Marseille 1940“, das ein noch größeres Bild der fatalen Lage jüdischer, linker, antifaschistischer Emigrant:innen generell und speziell im Petain-Frankreich 1940-42 zeichnet. Darin eben einer von traurigerweise unendlich vielen: Walter Benjamin. Best, TC
This is amazing; what a gift. Thank you.
What a gift; thank you
Many thanks for this publication, Robert
You are all very welcome! Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Chairman! "Marseille 1940" is a book worth reading.,
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