I am gathering fragments on Walter Bemjamin, as I work on a project. I am aware of Benjamin, as most who ever took philosophy courses in art and technology. But there is actually much more important work and relationships in his short life. Again, these are fragments…
His best friend was Gershom Scholem, who met him when Scholem was 17 and Benjamin was 23. Scholem emigrated to Palestine, when it was under British rule. He tried endlessly to get Benjamin to join him. Benjamin refused.
In 1929, Benjamin befriended Asja Lacis, a Latvian Bolshevik, who became his lover, and also was his intellectual influence for the rest of his life. She introduced him to playwright Bertolt Brecht, as she was his assistant.
Out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkeimer, (the School for Social Research). His famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, was first published in a journal for this school, overseen by Horkeimer.
In 1938 Jews were stripped of their citizenship in Germany, and so Benjamin was a stateless man living in Paris.
While there he met Hanna Aerndt, Herman Hesse, and Kurt Weil. He also met George Bataille, who he trusted with his manuscript of “The Arcade Project”. He was arrested in Paris, and placed in a prison camp in Nevers, near Burgandy.
“Benjamin fused tikkun with the surrealist notion that liberation would come through the releasing of repressed collective materials to produce his celebrated account of the revolutionary historiographer who sought to grab hold of suppressed memories as they sparked to view at moments of present danger.”
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