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Read through the most famous quotes from Walter Benjamin
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like. ↗
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven. ↗
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. ↗
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama 1928). A completed manuscript which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. In 1917 he transferred to the University of Bern; there he met Ernst Bloch and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner) (1890–1964) whom he later married.
His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation alienation). Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism and is associated with the Frankfurt School.
