![]() ![]() Benjamin himself left Berlin for Paris in 1933, and took his own life waiting to cross the border to Spain in September 1940. He was influenced by both Marxism and surrealism, and was associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School) until it left Germany for America. ![]() ![]() He was friends with Scholem, Bloch, Adorno, Lukacs, Horkheimer and Brecht. He left behind a colossal manuscript known as the Passagenwerk or Arcades Project, consisting almost entirely of notes on aspects of nineteenth-century society and culture, as expressed and experienced in Paris, and articulated specifically in its bourgeois shopping arcades. He wrote seminal treatments of translation and of the changing nature and status of the artwork once it came to be reproduced and distributed in print form. He thought of himself as a literary critic, publishing essays on Goethe and Hölderlin, on the origins of German tragedy, on Baudelaire and Proust, on Kafka, Walser and Kraus. ![]() As a young man, he was President of the Free Students’ Union in Berlin he was involved in the radical political journal Die Aktion. Walter Benjamin worked freelance, as an independent scholar. ![]()
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