Wenn sie dann aber kommen, stoßen sie mit kleinen Hämmern gegen das Wirkliche, bis sie das Bild aus ihm wie aus einer kupfernen Platte getrieben haben" (To find words for what is before one's eyes--how difficult that can be. But when they do come, they pound with little hammers against the real until they drive the image out of it as though from a copper plate).
Ostracized from the German academy because of the innovation of his thought, Benjamin remained largely deprived of recognition during his lifetime, though he did begin to emerge as a public intellectual in the late Weimar Republic. His first wave of posthumous success came in the heady days of the German student movement in the late 1960s. These students saw in him a thinker of the first order who shared their sense of personal marginalization and political urgency. In 1968 students temporarily even renamed the German Department of the University of Frankfurt "Walter Benjamin Institute." Difficult circumstances, including academic isolation, personal and economic hardship, and political persecution, allowed him to publish only a few books during his lifetime.
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