The most important of Walter Benjamin’s works are:
- Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence, 1921).
- Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe’s Elective Affinities, 1922).
- Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928).
- Einbahnstraße (One Way Street, 1928).
- Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936).
- Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900, 1950).
- Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History / Theses on the Philosophy of History), 1939).
- Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, 1938).
Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer, even from their New York City residence. The competing influences ... Brecht’s Marxism, Adorno’s critical theory, Gerschom Scholem’s Jewish mysticism ... were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover, the critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin’s writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplar synthesis is "On the Concept of History" (
Theses on the Philosophy of History).
The ninth thesis in the essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” presents:
The Origin of German Tragic Drama
The
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928), is the theoretic and empirical analysis of German politics and culture during the Counter-Reformation (1545—1648), via the critical study of the 18th-century theatrical
Trauerspiel (
Bürgerliches Trauerspiel, Bourgeois Tragedy) genre, that Walter Benjamin in 1925 presented to the University of Frankfurt as the (post-doctoral) dissertation meant to earn him the
Habilitation (qualification) to become a university instructor in Germany.
In the changing political climate of German society in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin expected that the
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928) would culturally relate to the German belief in political and historical progress, by demonstrating the intellectual futility of raw historicism, and, like-wise, demonstrating that in the
Trauerspiel the resuscitation of historical object and fact is infeasible. In the event, the abstruse (theoretically complex and referentially obscure) dissertation proved inaccessible to its academic judges when submitted for earning the
Habilitation for Benjamin to be officially granted
venia legendi (permission for lecturing).
Professor Schultz of University of Frankfurt found
The Origin of German Tragic Drama inappropriate for his
Germanistik department (of German Language and Literature), and passed it to the department of æsthetics (philosophy of art), the readers of which department likewise dismissed Benjamin's dissertation. In the event, in 1925, the University (among them Max Horkheimer) recommended to Walter Benjamin that he withdraw
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as a
Habilitation dissertation, and avoid formal rejection and concomitant public embarrassment; he heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published
The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a book.
The Arcades Project
The
Passagenwerk (Arcades Project, 1927—40), was Walter Benjamin’s final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century, especially about the
Passages couverts de Paris the covered passages that extended the culture of
flânerie (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather made
flânerie infeasible in the boulevards and streets proper.
Writing style
Susan Sontag said that in Walter Benjamin’s writing, sentences did not originate ordinarily, do not progress into one another, and delineate no obvious line of reasoning, as if each sentence “had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes”, a “freeze-frame baroque” style of writing and cogitation. “His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct”. The difficulty of Benjamin's writing style is essential to his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, his goal in later works was to use intertexts to reveal aspects of the past that cannot, and should not, be understood within greater, monolithic constructs of historical understanding.
Walter Benjamin’s writings identify him as a modernist for whom the philosophic merges with the literary: logical philosophic reasoning cannot account for all experience, especially not for self-representation via art. He presented his stylistic concerns in
The Task of the Translator, wherein he posits that a literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text. Moreover, in the deformed text, otherwise hidden aspects of the original, source-language text are elucidated, while previously obvious aspects become unreadable. Such translational mortification of the source text is productive; when placed in a specific constellation of works and ideas, newly revealed affinities, between historical objects, appear and are productive of philosophical truth.