Walter Benjamin

Also known as Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin

German cultural critic, philosopher and social critic (1892–1940)

AI overview

Walter Benjamin was a German philosopher and cultural critic who lived from 1892 to 1940 and examined how modern society, technology, and art shape human experience and meaning. His influential ideas about culture, history, and mass media continue to affect how scholars and thinkers understand the modern world today.

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Wikidata facts

Instance of: human
Given name: Walter
Family name: Benjamin
Gender: male
Citizenship: German Reich
Place of birth: Berlin
Place of death: Portbou
Occupation: translator
Educated at: University of Freiburg
Languages spoken: German
Native language: German
Notable work: The arcades project
Field of work: philosophy
Movement: Marxism
Image: Walter Benjamin vers 1928.jpg
Work location: Paris
Significant event: Nazi book burnings

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influenced by: Georg Lukács
Commons category: Walter Benjamin
date of birth: 1892-07-15
date of death: 1940-09-26
topic's main category: Category:Walter Benjamin
manner of death: Suicide
described by source: Pax Leksikon
relative: Arthur Moritz Schoenflies
name in native language: Walter Benjamin
writing language: German
pseudonym: Detlev Holz
P8168: Oomycetes
on focus list of Wikimedia project: Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
IPA transcription: ˌvaltɐ ˈbɛnjamiːn
hashtag: WalterBenjamin

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Encyclopedic overview

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (/ˈbɛnjəmɪn/ BEN-yə-min; German: [ˈvaltɐ ˈbɛnjamiːn] ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western Marxism, and post-Kantianism, he made contributions to the philosophy of history, metaphysics, historical materialism, criticism, and aesthetics, and had an oblique but overwhelmingly influential impact on the resurrection of the Kabbalah by virtue of his life-long epistolary relationship with Gershom Scholem.

In popular culture and left-wing journalism he often appears as an exemplar whose experience is representative of the tragedy of German Jewish intellectuals under Nazi Germany.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Walter Benjamin” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Walter Benjamin

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