The 19 sixties really shoot him up into begin to the super star sort of elevate an through his ideas f the work of artnteedge, mechanical reproduction and essay. The much more left wing works that seem or obviously left wing works, which are taken up by the student movement in germany. So it's really now, more recently, when his radio writings were translated m into english, that they were recognized as truly significant. In a new edition of the works was carried out in in germanys tat. And then from the eighties onwards, if the harvard translation project of ben, increasingly his his star rises in the english speaking world.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most celebrated thinkers of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, critic, historian, an investigator of culture, a maker of radio programmes and more. Notably, in his Arcades Project, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, examined how the new media of film and photography enabled art to be politicised, and politics to become a form of art. The rise of the Nazis in Germany forced him into exile, and he worked in Paris in dread of what was to come; when his escape from France in 1940 was blocked at the Spanish border, he took his own life.
With
Esther Leslie
Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London
Kevin McLaughlin
Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English, Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University
And
Carolin Duttlinger
Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson