Walter Benjamin was born July 15, 1892 in Berlin and died September 27, 1940 in Port Bou[?] at the Spanish-French border by comitting suicide on his flight.
Benjamin was known for his essays and as a literature reviewer. As a cultural sociologist he entangled ideas of Jewish mysticism with historical materialism. He also translated texts written by Marcel Proust and Charles-Pierre Baudelaire.
His most important writings were: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin Of The German Tragedy / 1928), Einbahnstraße (One Way Street / 1928), Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility / 1936) and Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900 / 1950, published posthum).
He was brother-in-law to Hilde Benjamin[?].
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