Walter Benjamin

German critic and philosopher — aura, reproducibility and the angel of history

Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt · Germany · d. 15 July 1892 (Berlin) — 26 September 1940 (Portbou, Catalonia)

Wrote the reproducibility essay in 1935 in Parisian exile, and saw it printed in 1936 in Pierre Klossowski's French translation in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, its politics blunted by the editors. Photography and film, he argued, strip the artwork of its aura and its cult value. Fleeing the Gestapo across the Pyrenees, he took his own life with morphine at Portbou on 26 September 1940.

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Record

Life: 15 July 1892 (Berlin) — 26 September 1940 (Portbou, Catalonia)
Country: Germany
Period: 20th century
Affiliation: Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt
Areas: Aesthetics, Philosophy of history, Literary criticism, Media theory
Major works: The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1920)
One-Way Street (1928)
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928)
Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia (1929)
Little History of Photography (1931)
The Author as Producer (1934)
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936)
The Storyteller (1936)
On the Concept of History (1940)
The Arcades Project (1982)
Key concepts: Aura, Technological reproducibility, The flâneur, Dialectical image, Now-time (Jetztzeit), The angel of history, Profane illumination, Cult value and exhibition value
Influenced by: Immanuel Kant, Charles Baudelaire, Gershom Scholem, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust
Sources: Wikipedia, Walter Benjamin
Monoskop, Walter Benjamin
Wikipedia, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Stories

This Day in Philosophy

Heidegger, Benjamin, Eliot and Reichenbach: four clocks on one day

Martin Heidegger was born at Messkirch on 26 September 1889; Walter Benjamin died at Portbou on 26 September 1940, a day after crossing the Pyrenees on foot. T. S. Eliot was born on the date in 1888, Hans Reichenbach in 1891. Four accounts of time: a philosopher who joined the party, a critic who fled it, a poet, a physicist.

Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin

Newsroom26 September 2026

Agenda

What AI art exposes is how little we ever agreed about art

Generative systems have not answered the question of whether a machine can be an artist. They have made it impossible to leave the question vague. A survey of what Danto, Benjamin, Barthes, Collingwood, Dewey, Goodman, Adorno, Heidegger and Boden actually help with, and where the courts have got ahead of the philosophers.