Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Jewish literary critic and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and the Jewish mysticism of Gershom Scholem.

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• Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. [...] Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
  • Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting (1931)

• I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
  • Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline (1927-1934, English translation 1997)

• Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness
  • Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline (1927-1934)

• Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
  • Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit [ The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction ] (1935)

• There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
  • Theses on the Philosophy of History, VII (1940; first published, in German, 1950, in English, 1955)

• A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
  • Theses on the Philosophy of History, IX (1940; first published, in German, 1950, in English, 1955)

• Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.
  • The Arcades Project (1927-1940), ed. Roy Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University: Harvard UP, 1999)