Walter Benjamin

Benjamin was born in Berlin to a wealthy Jewish antiques dealer, studied philosophy at Freiburg and Berlin, was active in the youth movement, feigned illness to avoid the war, and took his doctorate at Bern on the concept of art criticism in German Romanticism. His habilitation thesis, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, was rejected by Frankfurt in 1925, ending any academic career; he lived thereafter, always poor, on journalism and radio work and on translating Proust and Baudelaire.

On Capri in 1924 he met the Latvian communist Asja Lacis and turned toward Marxism, while through his friend Scholem he kept up his interest in Jewish theology and mysticism; the tension between the two runs through everything he wrote. One-Way Street rendered the modern city in fragments and aphorisms, and from 1927 he began the never-finished Arcades Project, reconstructing nineteenth-century Paris from quotations and commentary, reading the arcades, department stores, flâneurs, gamblers and collectors as ciphers of the capitalist dream.

In 1933 he went into exile in Paris, writing for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and arguing by letter with Adorno and Brecht. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) argued that photography and film destroy the artwork's 'aura', its unique presence in time and space, a loss that is also a liberation: fascism aestheticises politics, and communism should politicise art. His essays on Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust, the storyteller and the task of the translator became classics of twentieth-century criticism.

When German troops entered Paris in 1940 he fled south and at Lourdes wrote his last text, the Theses on the Philosophy of History: the angel of history is blown backward into the future by the storm called progress while the wreckage before him piles higher; historical materialism must 'brush history against the grain', and every present is a narrow gate through which the Messiah might enter. In September he crossed the Pyrenees with a small group of refugees to the Spanish border town of Portbou, was told they would be sent back, and that night took a fatal dose of morphine. The border reopened the next day. The manuscript in the briefcase he carried has never been found.