Walter Benjamin - Gesammelte Schriften (7 Bände)

Walter Benjamin, (born July 15, 1892, Berlin, Ger.—died Sept. 27?, 1940, near Port-Bou, Spain), man of letters and aesthetician, 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.

Collected works in german language (pdf):

Band I: Abhandlungen. 3 Teilbände
Band II: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge. 3 Teilbände
Band III: Kritiken und Rezensionen
Band IV: Kleine Prosa. Baudelaire-Übertragungen. 2 Teilbände
Band V: Das Passagen-Werk. 2 Teilbände
Band VI: Fragmente vermischten Inhalts. Autobiographische Schriften
Band VII: Nachträge. 2 Teilbände