Walter Benjamin Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Walter Benjamin

Cultural and aesthetic theorist, literary critic, social semiotician, philosopher of history, media theorist, poet, journalist, architectural critic, autobiographer, and political thinker, Walter Benjamin figures among the most significant twentieth-century European intellectuals. Whether read in the context of philosophical hermeneutics, poststructuralism, Jewish theology, modern literary and cultural studies, or the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, his writings have influenced a wide range of scholarly disciplines, and they continue to be a source of inspiration and provocation for a diverse general readership. Benjamin's striking insights and unexpected perspectives on a variety of cultural phenomena have given his famously difficult writings canonical status, a status that was solidified with the publication of his Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings, 1972-1989), consisting of fourteen books in seven volumes, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Benjamin's texts, which always remain committed to a consideration of the problems of language and representation, enact the phenomenon he described in his 1929 travelogue "San Gimignano," collected in volume four of his Gesammelte Schriften (1972): "Worte zu dem zu finden, was man vor Augen hat--wie schwer kann das sein.

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