Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940)

German Marxist essayist, one of the most important cultural critics of the 20th century. He wrote on literature, film, art, and society. Some of his essays were collected in Einbahnstrasse/One-Way Street 1928 and Illuminationen/Illuminations 1961.

Benjamin's works are a complex and unlikely blend of Marxism and Jewish mysticism. Rejecting more orthodox Marxist aesthetic theory, he was a staunch supporter of modernism, and wrote important essays on the writers Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Charles Baudelaire, and on the relationship between technology, the arts, and society.