Yves here. One of the costs of being a geek is that the intense pursuit of some areas results in the neglect of others. I wish I had the time to be better versed on all sorts of fronts, particularly history, criticism, and poetry. I have not read Walter Benjamin and Das’ article below has led me to add him to my long list of authors to read someday.
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous technical works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011) and A Banquet of Consequence – Reloaded (2016 and 2021). His latest book is on ecotourism – Wild Quests: Journeys into Ecotourism and the Future for Animals (2024). Published jointly with the New Indian Express online Webscrawl.
Walter Benjamin’s reputation has risen greatly over time. Tangentially related to the Frankfurt School and a contemporary of literary figures such as Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arnendt and Bertolt Brecht, his work has become a significant influence on critical theory.
Peter Gordon’s fine, compact literary biography Walter Benjamin- The Pearl Diver (2026) Yale University Press is the latest attempt to explain Benjamin. It follows other books such as Esther Leslie’s Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000) Pluto and Walter Benjamin (2014) Reaktion. Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians – The Great Decade of Philosophy 1919-1929, 2022, Penguinsought to place him alongside Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein, something which may not have pleased the proud and irascible German.
Benjamin was a mass of contradictions. He was an academic but his habilitation, the highest post-doctoral degree required to teach as a full professor in many European countries, was rejected denying him a university post which likely he would have found restrictive. He was Jew but his embrace of religion was uncertain. Capitalism, for Benjamin was a religion that debases human experience. He flirted with dialectic materialism but was always sceptical about communism. Unable to bring himself to join the Party, he was, by his own description, a “left wing outsider” for whom the prospect of joining was “inconceivable” because politics only allowed the choice of a lesser evil. While trying to fathom ordinary life, he was an elitist shunning “the secret tyranny of vocational training”.
Born German, Benjamin was greatly attached to France, at least Paris. Unfailing polite and courteous but always close to penury, he was unafraid to cadge money from friends and institutions rarely fulfilling his obligations to them. He was an indifferent public speaker. Gordon describes one of his talks in the following terms: “without looking at the audience, he delivered his absolutely letter-perfect speech with great intensity to an upper corner of the ceiling at which he stared the whole time”. Yet, his radio broadcasts were, reportedly, lucid and at times gripping. His personal flaws include gambling, infidelities and erratic moods. He snubbed friends often for obscure reasons.
His limited available output, certainly in translation, combined with his vacillations make him an almost blank screen on which to project particular views. Benjamin provided an interesting insight into himself enjoying La Rochefoucauld’s phrase: “his laziness supported him in glory for many years in the obscurity of an errant and hidden life”.
Benjamin’s oeuvre covered philosophical tracts, short stories, plays, essays, and literary criticism.
His best-known works available in English are Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (a collection of his major writings) and The Storyteller(a collection of short pieces). Probably the best known is the weighty The Arcades Project, on which much of his standing rests. Conceived in 1927 and written over 13 years, it remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1940.
Benjamin referred to The Arcades Project as a monumental ruin and the theatre of all his ideas and struggles.
For him, the nineteenth-century Parisian arcades with their glass-roofed shops represented something profound. He was preoccupied with a very modern concept -commodification of objects and experiences- which he believed was the decisive feature of modernity. The Arcades Project sought to critique this phenomenon.
The book is really notes organised around specific themes – Fashion, Boredom, Dream City, Photography, Catacombs, Advertising, Prostitution, Baudelaire, and Theory of Progress. Benjamin digs below the surface trying to uncover the hidden meanings of the physical world he explores. It is not an easy read. His imagination was formidable, but his dense writing style is often incomprehensible. Yet, the montage of images and jumbled reflections and quotations is hypnotic. Exterior and interiors frequently merge, time becomes fragmented and ephemeral moments are elevated to almost magical significance.
At heart, Benjamin was a man of letters convinced that literary criticism had fallen into disuse and that it was his task to infuse it with new life to elucidate the truth of works. Nowhere is this clearer than in his penetrating essays on Franz Kafka. After reading Benjamin’s great essay on his work, Viennese critic and satirist Karl Kraus was baffled: “[Benjamin] appears to know a good many of things about me that I was previously ignorant of, things that even now I don’t clearly recognise; and I can only express the hope that others will understand it better than I.”
Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Benajmin’s believed in the central role of language as the way the world gains meaning. Ultimately, his reputation relies on the sub-title of Gordon’s book. Hannah Arnendt observed that “nothing was more characteristic of him…than little notebooks which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered,, what daily living and reading netted him in terms of ‘pearls’”. Benjamin’s idea of contentment was to be in a library or café with some book, searching for these little treasures.
Intellectual restless, suspicious of any simple system of thought and peripatetic by necessity, he was the archetypical flaneur wandering through places and texts absorbing everything around him. His greatest work is that of a passionate observer combining the characteristics of critic and poet. In his best pieces, Benjamin displays an unsurpassed skill in description.
There are two essays, both from the posthumously published Theses on the Philosophy of History, which stand out. In The Turk, Benjamin described a dazzling chess playing machine devised by Baron Wolfgang von Kemplen: “an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove”. The device featured a puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sitting before the chessboard. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. Benjamin used the story, which was based on fact, to unveil historical deception. Rather than a miracle of technology and science, the machine was an elaborate hoax animated by a different force. It remains a powerful metaphor for human obsession with god-like technology.
The second was inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. Purchased by Benjamin around 1920 or 1921 for 1,000 marks, the painting portrays a strange figure, human-like but with wings and talons. It seems to hover, its eyes fixed on something that cannot be seen beyond the painting. It would remain with Benjamin for most of his life.
Source: Wikipedia
The image became a fixation. Over time, the figure was transformed into the angel of history. He would write that the image allows us “to understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction”. It is the centrepiece of Benjamin’s thesis IX: “A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” Mystical, melancholic and without hope, there are few more powerful critiques of humanity.
Benjamin’s death is part of the mythology. Fleeing German persecution, he obtained papers for America requiring him to cross from France to Spain enroute to Lisbon for passage to New York. Unfortunately, the Spaniards closed the border on the day he sought to cross. Despondent and fearful of capture by the Nazis, he committed suicide taking a fatal dose of morphine pills. Ironically, the border would be re-opened subsequently.
His tombstone near the town bears a quotation from Theses on the Philosophy of History: “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” In his final journey, Benjamin was carrying a heavy black briefcase. He told his guide that it contained a new manuscript which “must be saved” as “it is more important than I am”. It has never been found.
Walter Benjamin remains an enigma and a somewhat quixotic figure in literary history. In an early piece of fiction, he anticipated his own fate in a poor man who distributes leaflets but suffers humiliation from a public that has no interest in his literature. A great admirer and translator of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, he was attracted to one of the French poet’s lines: “I who sell my thoughts, and would be an author”.
In 1939 as both his life and the world he inhabited were coming to an end, Walter Benjamin told a friend that the extent of his ambition was to “just to sit once more on the terrace of a café and twiddle my thumbs”. Benjamin’s life and work is best captured by one of his haunts – Café des Westens, a popular spot on the Kurfusstendam in Berlin, nicknamed by locals with typical irony as Café Groossenwhan (Café of Grand Illusions).
© Satyajit Das 2026 All Rights Reserved
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Perhaps because I lack cultural sophistication, I wonder where the line is drawn between philosophers and madmen, and between art and scribbles, when reading Benjamin’s assessment of Klee’s painting.
Groossenwhan -> Grossenwahn
Megalomania, more than “Grand Illusion”.
Oh, and Kurfürstendamm.
Thanks. Extremely interesting thinker. Been reading him for decades now.
Minor quibble: more of Benjamin has been translated than this article suggests.
There is a pretty outrageous theory about his death, too:
The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin
https://weeklystandardarchives.com/articles/the-mysterious-death-of-walter-benjamin/
Thanks for this. Read a bit about Benjamin but never read him directly. I do quite like Les Fleurs du Mal though and have a copy at home. I’ll have to check to see if Benjamin did the translation.
My favorite of the bunch is Spleen . The original and several English translations can be found at the link, although not Benjamin’s. Like a lot of literature, it reads better in the original I think, and I particularly like the last stanza, which feels apropos on a gray and dreary day when the world is going to H E double hockey sticks. Hope comes up again, yesterday in Greek, today in French –
— Et de longs corbillards, sans tambours ni musique,
Défilent lentement dans mon âme; l’Espoir,
Vaincu, pleure, et l’Angoisse atroce, despotique,
Sur mon crâne incliné plante son drapeau noir.
Very nice article. As Acacia says above, there are many more ‘corrected’ translations of Benjamin available in the last ten years, from Harvard UP, as alternatives to the 60s era collection Illuminations. (One of my grad school committee members is one of these translators.)
I also want to put out a recommendation for the Arcades Project, Benjamin’s last unfinished work referred to above, sort of an analog of other great unfinished 20th century works like Finnegan’s Wake… It’s a huge brick of a book, but per the article organized by theme, each of which contains short paragraphs of quotes, descriptions, and Benjamin’s own writing, so it’s a surprisingly easy book to read if you like hunt-and-peck reading. (There’s no reason to read it front to back, in other words.) A very weird, challenging, pointillistic work–some of the aphorisms can be bewildering and esoteric, but they’re always insightful.
It would have been unseemly for a dialectician with the sharpness of insight to write “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” to have been anything other than a “mass of contradictions.”
Benjamin’s writing is at once centripetal and centrifugal, leggy sprawl and aphoristic condensation. If his essay “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” were written about him, it might be titled “The Work of Philosophy in an Age of Mechanical Repetition.” Because he wasn’t a system architect like Kant or Hegel—too skeptical, perhaps, or too aware of the incompletability of his thought—readers can dip in here or there, much as with Pascal or Lichtenberg. Benjamin with his briefcase, Pessoa with his trunk, Wittgenstein with his notebooks, they’re like the tesserae of a mosaic, the plan for which, if there was a plan, we puzzle over and turn into tiles of our own, sometimes left behind. It may be for some that the pleasures of curiosity, in the collecting, overtake both the desire to set what’s found in a final form and the anxiety of their irresolution. Another tile. Twiddling thumbs.
another great, moving intro to Walter B – and his complexities – is
Hannah Arendt’s preface to WB’s touchstone collection Illuminations
I read Benjamin in my early 20’s and was impressed, I reread him 40 years later and found things a bit thin.
I suppose the Arcades is worth a dip now and then.
Thank you for introducing me to Walter Benjamin. Your essay about him, and especially The Arcades Project, made me think of Johann Georg Hamann (1730 – 1788), the ‘Magus of the North’ whom Isaiah Berlin called one of “the most passionate, consistent, extreme, and implacable enem[ies] of the Enlightenment and, in particular, of all forms of rationalism” and one of the founders of the Romantic movement. Hamann believed that thought and language are one, that through language all things are made, and that the cardinal sin of the metaphysician is to confuse words with concepts and concepts with real things. God is a poet, not a geometer. Berlin describes his writing style as “appalling: twisted, dark, allusive, filled with digressions, untraceable references, private jokes, puns within puns and invented words, cryptograms, secret names for persons in the past or present, for ideas, for inexpressible contents of visions of the truth … Nevertheless … it is possible by dint of extreme attention (which I do not really recommend) to collect certain grains of sense from the extraordinary contorted metaphors, euphuistic stylisms, allegories and other forms of dark poetical speech with which Hamann’s fragmentary writings – he never finished anything – are written.” Hamann was greatly admired by Kant, Herder, Goethe, and Kierkegaard.
I have read most of Benjamin’s works, the last I read was the Arcades Project. It’s a long read of the doorstop variety, just over a thousand pages. It’s more of a experimental work rather than his usual essays, comprised of odd references, literary quotes, newspaper clippings, song lyrics, speech transcriptions, well-documented rumors, and various commentaries on it all about Nineteenth Century Paris, particularly those which relate to the Arcades. His own thoughts about what the work was supposed to be are riddled throughout, such as:
Another very good book of his not mentioned above is One Way Street:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/149401.One_Way_Street_And_Other_Writings
I also disagree with two of Das’s points: that Benjamin’s embrace of religion was uncertain, and that he merely flirted with ‘dialectical materialism’ (a label itself worthy of dispute). Benjamin is universally acknowledged to be a Marxist. But he was definitely an unorthodox one, and there is debate about how well he understood it. He might have been skeptical towards the Communist party, but he did take a two month trip to Moscow in 1926 in order to learn more about it.
Also, Benjamin’s fascination with Jewish mysticism is widely known, and documented by his mentee and close friend, Gershom Scholem. Many of Benjamin’s commentators, such as Fredric Jameson, have pointed out Benjamin mixed and matched his Marxism and mysticism in significant ways, as he did in his Theses on the Philosophy of History mentioned above. For those interested, here is what I think might be a good translation:
https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html