Biography of Walter Benjamin

The denial of the order

15 July 1892 26 September 1940 Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was born in Berlin, in the Charlottenburg district, on 15 July 1892. His is a family of Jewish origin: Father Emil was an antiquary and art dealer, and his mother Paula Schönflies, came from an upper class family of merchants. Walter's younger brothers will be Dora, which dies in Zurich in 1946, and Georg, future leader of the German Communist Party, who died in Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942. Of his early years remains the visionary wrote autobiographical degli anni ' 30 "Berlin Childhood around the nineteen hundred". From 1905 to two years he goes to "Landerziehungsheim" in Thuringia, where he experiences the new educational model taught by Gustav Wyneken, the theoretician of the Jugendbewegung, the youth movement of which Walter Benjamin is joining until the outbreak of World War I. Back to Berlin in 1907 where he finishes his secondary studies five years later. In 1912 he began writing for the magazine "Der Anfang", influenced by the ideas of Wyneken. From the University of Berlin he moved to Freiburg: here follows the lessons of Rickert and squeezes a strong association with the poet Fritz Heinle, who died committed suicide two years later. Benjamin is spared from conscription after the war began and breaks with Wyneken, which had enthusiastically joined the conflict. He moved then to Munich, where in 1915 following the courses of the phenomenologist Moritz Geiger; There he meets among others Gerschom Scholem, with whom he established a close friendship which lasted until his death. In 1916 knows Dora Kellner who the following year would become his wife. The couple was born in 1918, when the pair Stefan Benjamin has now moved to Bern. In the city of German Switzerland, Walter Benjamin is known as the author of important essays, and here he obtained a degree in philosophy with Herbertz, defending a thesis on the "concept of art criticism in German romanticism". His thesis is pulled in a thousand copies but unsold, ending to ashes in the fire of a warehouse. Know then Ernst Bloch, with whom he will have to end a controversial relationship between enthusiasm and impatience. Back in Germany, in Berlin in 1920 where he designs the magazine "Angelus Novus"; writes "critique of violence" and translate Baudelaire. In 1923 he knows the young Theodor w. Adorno. Benjamin's marriage is in crisis and in 1924, during a long stay in Capri, he falls in love with another woman, Asja Lacis, a Russian revolutionary who induces him to approach to Marxism. Benjamin published an essay about "elective affinities" for the magazine by Hugo von Young. The University of Frankfurt in 1925 rejects its request for academic teaching, accompanied by written on "origin of German Baroque drama" published three years later, along with the aphorisms of "one way street". In recent years Benjamin manages to remain economically thanks to his work as a critic and reviewer for the "Literarische Welt". It is also a translator of Proust (with Franz Hessel); travelling between Paris and Moscow, starting to mature the project-destined however to remain unfinished--a work on the Paris of the 19th century (the so-called Passagenwerk). In 1929 makes a deep relationship with Brecht, who in the 1930s, after the advent of the Third Reich, hosts several times at his home in Denmark. The 1933 was the year marking the final separation of Benjamin from Germany. Exiled in Paris, still spends long periods between Ibiza, San Remo and Svendborg. Although unable to get published an essay on Franz Kafka, his increasingly precarious economic conditions. Between 1938 and 1939 is still working on texts by Baudelaire, but the outbreak of World War II induces him to write straight off his latest text, theses on the concept of history ". Benjamin is interned in the POW camp by Nevers as German citizen: will be released three months later. Abandons belatedly Paris and tries to get a visa to the United States. In 1940 is locked to the Spanish border, to Portbou, by police and during the night of 26 and 27 September commits suicide with an overdose of morphine. His fellow travelers will be allowed to cross the border the following day. Benjamin pockets are emptied and his body fell into a ditch. After five years, getting thrown into a mass grave. When the philosopher Hannah Arendt goes to look for the remains of his friend, find locations only embarrassed by the Spaniards. Today the town of Portbou he dedicated to Walter Benjamin a remarkable monument, with a series of steps excavated in the Sea (by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan), with an epigraph comes from "Das Passagen-Werk" (steps) by Benjamin: "it's harder to honor the memory of nameless not of great personalities. The historical building is devoted to memory at the nameless".
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.