Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926

The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire

Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Se

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4: 1938-1940

"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 fle

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938

Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie--such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven brilliant pie

Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

Walter Benjamin is one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals, and also one of its most elusive. His writings - mosaics incorporating philosophy, literary criticism, Marxist analysis, and a syncretistic theology - defy simple categorizati

Berlin Childhood around 1900

Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin's lifetime, one of his "large-scale defeats." Now translated into English for the first time in book form, on the

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Walter Benjamin is widely acknowledged as amongst the greatest literary critics of this century, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama is his most sustained and original work. Indeed, Georg Lukacs—one of the most trenchant opponents of Benjamin’s aest

One Way Street And Other Writings

This is a representative selection of Walter Benjamin's intellectual and literary writings. Reminiscences of childhood, reflections on language, psychology, aesthetics and politics are brought together to reveal the range of Benjamin's thought.

Aesthetics and Politics (Radical Thinkers)

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over lit