In Mosaic Magazine, Walter Laqueur reviews the recently published Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Laqueur tries to explain how a German writer (literary critic, essayist, philosopher) virtually unknown in his own day (1892-1940) has become one of the touchstones of post-modernist thought. In the precincts of “cultural studies and its various academic subdisciplines,” writes Laqueur, Benjamin’s gnomic style may well count as a plus, an outward sign of inward profundity that, simultaneously, invites the most fanciful flights of interpretive ingenuity. Likewise contributing powerfully to his allure is the sorry story of his life.”

Benjamin left Berlin in 1932 and eventually wound up in Paris, where he had a very difficult time scraping together a living, though it was here that he would embark upon what would become what many consider his masterpiece, The Arcades Project. The work, left unfinished at his death, was inspired in part by Benjamin’s obsession with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. “The arcades in question,” writes Laqueur, “were the glass-enclosed passages in central Paris when that city was, in Benjamin’s terms, the capital of the 19th century. A central emblematic figure for Benjamin was that of the flâneur, the stroller or urban explorer who habituated these environs. Having gathered a mountain of materials, Baudelaire’s poetic masterwork Les Fleurs du Mal being prominent among them, Benjamin wanted to show how urbanization had revolutionized not only culture, as evidenced in art and architecture, urban planning, and new ideas of beauty, but life in general.”