Walter Benjamin

Born in Berlin in 1892, Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin wove German idealism, Jewish mysticism, and Marxism into a body of criticism that defied easy classification - even his closest colleagues couldn't agree whether he was a philosopher at all. He wrote major essays on Kafka, Baudelaire, Proust, and translated chunks of both, orbiting the Frankfurt School while maintaining a lifelong correspondence with Gershom Scholem that helped resurrect interest in the Kabbalah. His best-known works - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" - came in 1935 and 1940, but popular recognition never arrived. In September 1940, trying to cross from France into Spain at Portbou, he took his own life rather than be captured by the Third Reich. His companions were allowed through, shaken by his death. Fifteen years later Suhrkamp began publishing his complete works in German; in 1968 Arendt introduced him to the Anglosphere, and posthumous renown finally came.