Presented here in what looks like a definitive version, Benjamin’s life emerges as a tragedy of incompleteness. (John Gray
Literary Review 2013-12-01)
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, flâneur, and eventual victim of Hitler’s reign, Benjamin (1892–1940) lived with a funny gait, ‘an impenetrable façade’ 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) 2013-11-11)
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)
[
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 2014-01-23)
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 2014-02-08)