Walter Benjamin: A Biography

by Malcolm Green (Editor), Momme Brodersen (Author), Martina Dervis (Editor), IngridaLigers (Editor)

• New

  Illustrated
  1997

  $41.76

  Revised and updated for the English edition, this comprehensive biography provides an account of Walter Benjamin's career, and demonstrates the fallacy of the popular, romanticized notion of his life as the sorrowful progression of a melancholic personality. The only real tragedy, the author argues, was Benjamin's suicide on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is now recognized as one of the most original and influential thinkers of this century. Brodersen stresses that during the Weimar Republic, Benjamin had been an important critic whose essays and reviews were published by the most distinguished papers of the time. His role as literary critic is one of the many hiterto neglected aspects of Benjamin's life which Brodersen recounts with the same attention to detail as in his discussion of Benjamin's emotional and intellectual relationships. Brodersen pays particular attention to Benjamin's childhood and youth, his activities in the radical section of the German Youth Movement, and the formative, irreconcilable influences of idealism, socialism and Zionism. At the same time, he gives a presentation of Benjamin's written work, and the diversity of his ideas.