Culture May 1, 2012

This July will mark the 120th anniversary of the birth of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish intellectual who committed suicide in 1940. Since the publication of his collected writings fifteen years after his death, Benjamin’s enigmatic essays like “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “The Task of the Translator” have become canonical in fields like media studies and comparative literature, and equally influential outside the academy. But unlike the steady rise of his posthumous reputation, Benjamin’s biography was full of false starts and thwarted ambitions. Rejected for jobs at several universities and forced to flee Nazi