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Walter Benjamin is one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals, and also one of its most elusive. His writings-mosaics incorporating philosophy, literary criticism, Marxist analysis, and a syncretistic theology-defy simple categorization. And his mobile, often improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. His writing career moved from the brilliant esotericism of his early writings through his emergence as a central voice in Weimar culture and on to the exile years, with its pioneering studies of modern media and the rise of urban commodity capitalism in Paris. That career was played out amid some of the most catastrophic decades of modern European history: the horror of the First World War, the turbulence of the Weimar Republic, and the lengthening shadow of fascism. Now, a major new biography from two of the world's foremost Benjamin scholars reaches beyond the mosaic and the mythical to present this intriguing figure in full.

Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings make available for the first time a rich store of information which augments and corrects the record of an extraordinary life. They offer a comprehensive portrait of Benjamin and his times as well as extensive commentaries on his major works, including "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," the essays on Baudelaire, and the great study of the German Trauerspiel. Sure to become the standard reference biography of this seminal thinker, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life will prove a source of inexhaustible interest for Benjamin scholars and novices alike. Walter Benjamin himself often grappled with the vexed and constantly shifting relations between self and work, life (bios) and writing (graphein). Whatever faint yet abiding hyphen may connect the two, that same line also forever holds them apart. The new biography by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, two Benjamin scholars of the first rank, offers a sober, meticulous, and often moving image of Benjamin's brief life in the shadow of catastrophe. Brilliantly interweaving the conceptual threads of Benjamin's enigmatic work with his no less enigmatic existence, this impeccably informed and eminently readable account of Benjamin's life sets a new standard for his biographers and critics in any language. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life is destined to stand the test of time. -- Gerhard Richter, Brown University Here, for the first time, is a thorough, reliable, non-tendentious, and fully developed account of Benjamin's life and the sources of his work. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life is by far the best biography of Benjamin that has yet appeared. A remarkable scholarly achievement, it will prove of enduring value and will doubtless become the standard reference work for those who become intrigued by the complicated contours of Benjamin's life. -- Peter Fenves, Northwestern University In this ambitious biography, Benjamin scholars (and editors) Eiland and Jennings chart the protean, prolific-albeit short-life of the German-Jewish critic and philosopher with masterly aplomb. As a literary critic, a dodger of both World Wars, flaneur, and eventual victim of Hitler's reign, Benjamin (1892-1940) lived with a funny gait, 'an impenetrable facade' of courtesy, and severe depression; fearing capture and deportation to Germany, he committed suicide in a Spanish hotel. Born to an affluent Berlin family, Benjamin advocated for the radical youth culture movement and education reform in Germany before he pursued a tenured professor of philosophy post in academia, which he never achieved. With intense wanderlust, Benjamin turned to an itinerant existence as he penned thousands of essays, reviews, and books. Shaping avant-garde realism and arguably inventing pop culture, he wrote that he hoped to be 'the foremost critic of German literature.' Leaving Germany for good in 1933, Benjamin spent his last dark decade in exile, where most of his writings contributed to his never completed masterpiece The Arcades Project-'his cultural history of the emergence of urban commodity capitalism in mid-nineteenth-century France.' The authors, in impressive and accessible fashion, reveal Benjamin as an eyewitness to Europe's changing modernity. * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * [Benjamin was] one of the most versatile men of letters the 20th century had known... [This is] an epic, 700-page-plus saga of his peripatetic life and his whirlwind of productivity. -- Eric Banks * Bookforum * I've been waiting for a book like this since first coming across Benjamin's mesmerizing essays as a student. Like others who have fallen under his spell, I've had to make do with bits and pieces of biographical information over the years, not all of them reliable. Jennings and Eiland have spent almost two decades re-editing and retranslating all of Benjamin's works and have also managed to create a map through the maze of his restless, exilic life. -- Eric Bulson * Times Literary Supplement * [Eiland and Jennings] have produced this massive and gripping account of Benjamin's life and troubles, testimonial both to their own efforts in bringing his elusive writings into view, and to the circumstances in which Benjamin arrived at such scope, depth and brilliance... This is Benjamin warts and all, but in place of an impressionistic biographical sketch of a life, marked by false starts and a final mischance, what emerges is an astonishing panorama of a life and of theorizing, of research and of publishing, on the crest of that wave of disaster that was the destruction of European Jewry and of German intellectual life. -- Joanna Hodge * Times Higher Education * Through this fair-minded and meticulously detailed biography we can, perhaps for the first time in the extensive literature on Benjamin, see clearly the way that the arc of his life and work, culminating in the overdose of morphine taken in the Hotel de Francia in Port Bou, is an expression of, and also an epic meditation on, the political and aesthetic conditions that provided the context of his coming into maturity as both a thinker and a man. -- Gregory Day * Sydney Morning Herald * Despite its numerous predecessors, this biography is the first of its kind to succeed in uniting most of the previously published biographical material in one book, including translations of documents which were until now only available in German. With the still-growing interest in Benjamin's thought, one can expect this book to become the standard English-language biography on Benjamin. In A Critical Life, the contours of Benjamin's day-to-day life become graspable for the first time. It is fascinating to read about his whereabouts and travels, the people and places that formed the stages for his life and thought... This biography is also an intellectual biography, which puts the reader herself in a position to navigate the labyrinth-like edifice of Benjamin's thought. For this alone, this biography proves to be a landmark achievement in the history of Benjamin scholarship. -- Sami Khatib * New Inquiry * [Benjamin] produced some of the most memorable and generative critical writing of the last century. There is no end in sight of the need to grapple with that writing and its legacies. This magisterial biography by Eiland and Jennings sets that writing in its place and time with profane illuminations on almost every one of its many pages. Benjamin had scorn for people who produced needlessly 'fat' books, but I think this fairly huge one hits the sweet spot of detail. Most biographical treatments to date tend to be half the length or less and content themselves with the highlights and the fairly well known, however well articulated. If one wants more, this 'critical' biography is the place to look. -- Ian Balfour * Los Angeles Review of Books * Presented here in what looks like a definitive version, Benjamin's life emerges as a tragedy of incompleteness. -- John Gray * Literary Review * Walter Benj

Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life