“Everything which fell under the scrutiny of Walter Benjamin’s words was transformed, as though it had become radioactive.” - Theodor Adorno

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator and philosopher. 

In this new collection, we find Benjamin's most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor Bertolt Brecht.

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In 1940, he was in Spain, fleeing the Nazis and en route to the United States, when Franco's government cancelled his visa. Expecting repatriation, Benjamin took his own life.

“If the killing of Lorca was Fascism’s first crime against literature, Benjamin’s death was undoubtedly the second.” -  The Listener

Benjamin's work still exerts an influence over philosophical and cultural thinking today. 

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Reflections on Benjamin

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Further Reading

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Further Listening

Esther Leslie and Stuart Jeffries discuss the life and legacy of Walter Benjamin. From his relationship with his peers, the other members of the Frankfurt School, and his cultural heritage, to his use of, and feelings about, technological advancements, to his approach to storytelling, writing and language more broadly, join Esther and Stuart for this fascinating and wide-ranging discussion of one of Western Marxism's most important philosophers.

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Walter Benjamin

by Terry Eagleton

This momentous study of Benjamin’s critical practice marks a sea change in Eagleton’s thought. Its goal is not merely to contemplate Benjamin’s approach to language, history, and art but to chart a...

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...

The Benjamin Files

by Fredric Jameson

The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-p...

Marxist Modernism

by Gillian Rose

Afterword by Martin Jay

Edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott

Marxist Modernism is a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School. It is also a new resource from one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers: ...

Immanent Critiques

by Martin Jay

Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treati...

Infancy and History

by Giorgio Agamben

Translated by Liz Heron

How and why did experience and knowledge become separated? Is it possible to talk of an infancy of experience, a “dumb” experience? For Walter Benjamin, the “poverty of experience” was a characteri...

The Concept of Nature in Marx

by Alfred Schmidt

Translated by Ben Fowkes

In The Concept of Nature in Marx, Alfred Schmidt examines humanity’s relation to the natural world as understood by the great philosopher-economist Karl Marx, who wrote that human beings are ‘par...

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...

Capital

by Kenneth Goldsmith

Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, me...

Cultural Resistance Reader

Contributions by Theodor Adorno, Matthew Arnold, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Hakim Bey, Andrew Boyd, Bertolt Brecht, John Clarke, Stuart Cosgrove, Malcolm Cowley, Ricardo Dominguez, Elaine Goodale Eastman, Friedrich Engels, Barbara Epstein, John Fiske, Thomas Frank, Mahatma Gandhi, Antonio Gramsci, Jason Grote, Stuart Hall, Kathleen Hanna, Dick Hebdige, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Abbie Hoffman, Richard Hoggart, John Jordan, Robin D.G. Kelley, Lawrence Levine, George Lipsitz, Karl Marx, Janice Radway, Jean Railla, Adolph L. Reed Jr., Simon Reynolds, Jerry Rubin, James C. Scott, Raymond Williams and Virginia Woolf

Edited by Stephen Duncombe

From the Diggers seizing St. George Hill in 1649 to Hacktivists staging virtual sit-ins in the 21st century, from the retributive fantasies of Robin Hoods to those of gangsta rappers, culture has l...

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