Walter Benjamin

Delve into the profound and influential Marxist aesthetic debates that shaped the course of 20th-century intellectual history with Aesthetics and Politics. This seminal work assembles the pivotal texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art that took place between the 1930s and 1950s in German culture—an era that witnessed an unparalleled tradition of major aesthetic discourse. The book...

Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri; translated by J.A. Underwood Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including One-Way Street, his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany; Unpacking My Library, a delightful meditation on book-collecting;...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Every sort of passion verges on chaos, I know, but what the collecting passion verges on is a chaos of memories. From intimate musings on his book collection to a dream-like trip through the bustling streets of Marseille, each of these essays offers a compelling journey into the mind of one...

The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street, and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, delve into...

Completed in exile in Paris, as the Second World War was dawning, Walter Benjamin looks back at the city of his birth at the beginning of the century. Berlin Childhood around 1900 is both a sensory memoir of childhood as well as a tour of the iconic spaces of the city. These are expeditions into the depths of memory, moving...

The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht, both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices, continued to discuss, argue, and correspond on topics as varied...

‘We must see to it that we put the best of ourselves in our letters; for there is nothing to suggest that we shall see each other again soon.’ So wrote Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno in spring 1940 from the south of France, shortly before he took his own life. The correspondence between Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, published...

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labour their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years—"the theatre," as Benjamin called...

"I fully realise that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust." Walter Benjamin was one of the great cultural critics of the...

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings highlights one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century. Until now, only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of...

One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literature—by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a...

Benjamin's famous Work of Art essay sets out his boldest thoughts on media and on culture in general—in their most realised form—while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay, the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought. This...

Walter Benjamin's essay A Short History of Photography (1931) made bold statements about photographic pioneers such as David Octavius Hill and Nicephore Niepce, and the social and historical context of their work. This first selection of Benjamin's writings on photography includes a new translation of this influential essay as well as a range of Benjamin's other writings, both published and...

"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin's writings in the final years of...

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practising literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays,...