Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist, one of Europe’s most prominent intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892 to a wealthy family; he got a lot of education by attending universities in Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich. Such sources as neo-Kantian philosophy, German Romanticism, and Jewish mysticism influenced his academic career.

When Benjamin was a student in the early 1910s, he befriended other scholars such as Gershom Scholem, whom he knew for the rest of his life and whose impact on his work should be emphasized. He later wrote his doctoral thesis on Romantic criticism at the University of Bern. However, his bid to secure a university position via a Habilitationsschrift in 1925 was unsuccessful, thus putting paid to his academic dreams, leading him to another intellectual track.

Benjamin’s work was interdisciplinary, although he is most famous for his methodologically innovative works in aesthetics, literary theory, and philosophy of history. His most influential essays include “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” published in 1936, which explained how new technologies such as photography and film had transformed art by reducing the value of the ‘original’ in favor of reproduction. Benjamin contended that this shift effectively democratized art and posed new questions about politics and culture in the modern world. His essay is now a classic in cultural and media studies and explains how art value is produced and changed in capitalist contexts.

During the 1930s, Benjamin became closely identified with the Institute for Social Research, later the Frankfurt School, and formed personal relationships with key members such as Theodor W. Adorno and Bertolt Brecht. He became increasingly interested in Marxist theories, applying historical materialism to his analyses of culture and society. During this time, he wrote some of his most significant works. One of them is the posthumously published work The Arcades Project. This unfinished project was to study the city of Paris in the nineteenth century as the cradle of capitalist modernity and “On the Concept of History,” his meditations on history and time.

Benjamin was a Jewish intellectual who had to leave Nazi Germany in 1933 and first went to Paris and then to Spain. Unfortunately, in 1940, Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou, Spain, while trying to emigrate to the United States. Sadly, he died early, but his ideas have become even more critical, especially those regarding history, memory, and modernity. Benjamin’s legacy is that of a philosopher, writer, and political theorist who worked at the intersection of all three disciplines.