Blog post

Walter Benjamin's legacy

In this video Esther Leslie and Stuart Jeffries discuss the life and legacy of Walter Benjamin.

Verso Books12 May 2023

To celebrate Verso’s new edition of The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin, Esther Leslie (writer and translator of many books including The Storyteller, and Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, London) and Stuart Jeffries (journalist and author of many books including Grand Hotel Abyss) discuss the life and legacy of Walter Benjamin.

From his relationship with the other members of the Frankfurt School, to his approach to storytelling, do not miss this fascinating and wide-ranging discussion of one of Western Marxism's most important philosophers.

The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness by Walter Benjamin is out now in a new edition.

See all our Walter Benjamin reading here and below.

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The Storyteller

by Walter Benjamin

Illustrated by Paul Klee

Edited by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski

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 Illumi...

Grand Hotel Abyss

by Stuart Jeffries

In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominen...

Radio Benjamin

by Walter Benjamin

Edited by Lecia Rosenthal

Translated by Jonathan Lutes, Diana Reese and Lisa Harries Schumann

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the...

One-Way Street

by Walter Benjamin

Introduction by Susan Sontag

Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter

Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings...

Aesthetics and Politics

by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács

Afterword by Fredric Jameson

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...

Walter Benjamin's Archive

by Walter Benjamin

Edited by Ursula Marx, Michael Schwartz, Gudrun Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla

Translated by Esther Leslie

The work of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is an audacious plotting of history, art, and thought; a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps, and fragments of everyday lif...

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

by Walter Benjamin

Introduction by George Steiner

Translated by John Osborne

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seve...

Understanding Brecht

by Walter Benjamin

Introduction by Stanley Mitchell

Translated by Anna Bostock

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...

Charles Baudelaire

by Walter Benjamin

Translated by Harry Zohn

Walter Benjamin, one of the foremost cultural commentators and theorists of this century, is perhaps best known for his analyses of the work of art in the modern age and the philosophy of history. ...

Walter Benjamin

by Terry Eagleton

From our finest radical literary analyst, a classic study of the great philosopher and cultural theorist.

Walter Benjamin

by Momme Brodersen

Edited by Martina Dervis

Translated by Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is now generally recognized as one of the most original and influential thinkers of this century. In Britain and the United States in particular, he has acquired a statu...

Benjamin and Brecht

by Erdmut Wizisla

Translated by Christine Shuttleworth

Germany in the mid 1920s, a place and time of looming turmoil, brought together Walter Benjamin—acclaimed critic and extraordinary literary theorist—and Bertolt Brecht, one of the twentieth century...

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