Walter Benjamin's Archive

This work is an absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin's personal manuscripts, images, and documents from his own collection. The works of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, arts and dreams. This beautifully designed book gives an insight into Benjamin's habits of collecting and a...

This work is an absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin's personal manuscripts, images, and documents from his own collection. The works of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, arts and dreams. This beautifully designed book gives an insight into Benjamin's habits of collecting and archiving through some of his most personal document. From notebooks in which every conceivable space is covered with handwriting, and a heartfelt traveller's series of postcards, to a sequence of Benjamin's own photographs, and lists that include a collection of his son Stefan's early words and sentences, this wonderful collection testifies to Benjamin's complex and kaleidoscopic passion for the ephemera of human life.

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator and philosopher. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In 1940, he was in Spain, fleeing the Nazis and en route to the United States, when Franco’s government cancel...

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator and philosopher. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. 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, he took his own life.