Walter Benjamin is a lone rebel

The name of the German philosopher, Marxist, aesthetics, criticism and interpreter Walter Benjamin is increasingly recollected by current culturologists. Quote it now became fashionable. Just like many of his contemporaries, such as Ortega y Gasset or Bertolt Brecht. All of them were united by a tragic sense of peace, anxiety about the fate of art and pessimism towards humanity. Apparently, all this proved very much in tune with our era, which calls itself "postmodernism." This article is an attempt to shed at least a faint light on what kind of person Walter Benjamin was.

A Brief History of Life

The future philosopher was born in 1892 in a prosperous Jewish family in Berlin. On the maternal side, Walter Benjamin was related to Heinrich Heine. My father was engaged in the sale of antiques. Subsequently, the bankruptcy of the family business prompted the philosopher to go to Moscow. This was in 1926-1927. He worked a lot in the archives, met with Vladimir Mayakovsky. From this trip he left mostly negative memories, which he recorded in his "Moscow diary." In 1933, the Jew and anti-fascist Walter Benjamin was forced to emigrate from Germany. He left for France, where in 1940 he tried to get to the US via Spain.

The tragic end

At the border crossing the Spaniards refused to the writer, since he did not have a visa. According to the law, he was to be sent back to France, where the Nazis already hosted. He was allowed to spend the night in a local hotel, where he committed suicide on the night of 26 to 27 September. His death helped the rest of the group of refugees to cross the border - the Spaniards, under the impression of the tragedy, let all unquestioningly. In this group was Hannah Arendt, who was a big fan of Benjamin's ideas. She transported with her one of the drafts of his article "On the Notion of History" and published it in the United States under the heading "Abstracts on the Philosophy of History."

Philosophical views

Walter Benjamin, like many of his contemporaries, was strongly influenced by Marxism. He combined it in a very peculiar way with Jewish mysticism and psychoanalysis. Being an interpreter, he was the distributor of French culture. Thanks to him, the novels of Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire were published in Germany. Walter Benjamin anticipated the historical approach of the second half of the 20th century. His views on the philosophy of history, he set out in the posthumous work, which moved to the US Arendt. But the most famous work that Walter Benjamin wrote? - "The work of art in the era of technical reproducibility." In it he formulated a theory that has become very popular in our time: about the aura lost by an object of art that has undergone an endless replication.

The fate of the teachings

Only after his death, in the second half of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin's ideas began to gain prominence. A great role in this played his friends and colleagues - Theodore Adorno and Gershom Sholem. Adorno created a whole archive of the philosopher, collecting all his notes, notes, excerpts and drafts in one place. He did not share the work of Benjamin on the significant and passing. This archive and formed the basis of the many years of work of Adorno, dedicated to the legacy of Walter Benjamin. He did a lot to popularize the writings of the writer, but he concentrated exclusively on his philosophical works. For a long time, no one suspected Benjamin's research into the history of photography, for example.

Walter Benjamin: quotes, which became the most famous

The language of Walter Benjamin is very specific. The writer was noted for his ability to see the great in the small, to draw in-depth conclusions from ordinary things. Therefore, the unexpected twists of his speech often cause surprise, but can not help admiring. For example, in the Berlin Chronicles, he displays his future rebellion and a tendency to sabotage from a stubborn unwillingness to go near someone who was typical of him in his childhood.

Poetization of everyday life is the distinguishing feature of Benjamin's style. In the work "Street with a one-way traffic", he links the birth of a detective with the era of the bourgeoisie. All this lush, dark and slightly dusty interior, surrounded by rich merchants, is as best suited for deceased bodies. "On this sofa, Auntie could only be killed," writes the philosopher.

Perhaps Walter Benjamin is becoming more popular, because the current generation, convulsively turning around itself, does not find any support points and is forced to look for them in the past. He is now perceived as an example of ideological resistance to established traditions, a rebellious spirit of unbelief in the obvious and a denial of the worship of science as the only answer to all questions. His works are written in exquisite, correct German and stylistically perfect. They should be read by everyone who is interested in issues related to the historical perspective.