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Walter Benjamin

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L. Anderson, `The Dream Before'

Youtube. Weak Messianism: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Walter Benjamin’s writings in German and in English. .

Walter Benjamin’s writings in German and in English

Besides studying Soviet history, reading Walter Benjamin was what got me hooked on all this commie crap. It was probably “On the Concept of History” that first did it. Enigmatic, baffling, simple yet sophisticated — these were my initial impressions of it. The rest is history, or a storm blowing in from the Absolute. Flâneur Walter Benjamin. The Fragmentary, Mystical Thought of Walter Benjamin Presented by Two Experimental Films. Literary theorist and scholar Walter Benjamin was part of a small but incredibly significant cohort of German-Jewish intellectuals who fled the Nazis in the thirties.

The Fragmentary, Mystical Thought of Walter Benjamin Presented by Two Experimental Films

The group included thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and Bertolt Brecht. Of all of the names above, only Benjamin succumbed, committing suicide by morphine overdose in 1940 at a Catalonian hotel, when it became clear that the Spanish, with whom he had sought refuge, were going to turn him back over to Germany. Of all of the thinkers above, most of whom are fairly well-known by U.S. students of the liberal arts, it can (and should) be argued that Benjamin was the most influential, even if he rarely appears on a syllabus, excepting one well-known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” a staple of film and media theory classes.

All of the thinkers listed above adored Benjamin, and all of them figuratively sat at his feet.