Walter Benjamin: A Biography - Softcover

"A fitting Bible for the booming Benjamin cult."--Guardian "The definitive biography ... The crisp style and wealth of original letters and journals helpfully illuminate the life and work of this particularly difficult thinker."--Observer "Momme Brodersen's biography supersedes all preceding efforts. It is highly intelligent in its uses of the historical-intellectual background. It draws revealingly on Benjamin's own writings, letters and journals, keeping a certain critical distance from one of the spellbinding literary-philosophic presences of this century. This book merits close attention."--George Steiner "Brodersen has done impressive research and excavates a great deal of fascinating material. His book is indispensable for unravelling Benjamin's life and work."--Marshall Berman "Perhaps the book's finest virtue is that it arouses a desire to know more about Benjamin and above all to read him."--Seattle Weekly

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.