Name: Walter Benjamin
Birth: July 15, 1892,
Berlin, Germany
Death: September 27, 1940,
Port Bou, Spain
School/tradition: Western Marxism, Frankfurt School
Main interests: Literary theory, Aesthetics, Technology, Epistemology, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of history
Influences: Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem
Influenced: Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.
As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas of historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated Charles Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens and Marcel Proust's famous novel, In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.