WALTER BENJAMIN

Perceptive biography of the German Jewish writer, focused on his ideas.

Intellectual historian Gordon begins with a grim, gripping account of Benjamin’s flight in 1940 from Nazi-occupied France, culminating in his suicide at the border after he was denied entry into Spain. It’s an odd way to begin for a biographer who then declares, “No life is defined by its death,” but it appears Gordon wanted to get this famously tragic story out of the way so readers could concentrate on Benjamin’s achievements as a literary and cultural critic. These are cogently laid out in a short book that devotes more or less equal attention to Benjamin’s complicated relationships with Judaism, Marxism, and modernism. Despite his lifelong friendship with Gershom Scholem, who kept urging Benjamin to join him after emigrating to Jerusalem, Benjamin considered himself influenced by Jewish thought but uninterested in its practice as a religion. He had a similarly conflicted attitude toward Marxism: He was appalled by communism as a political system but influenced by his close ties with Theodor Adorno and the Institute for Social Research to use Marxism as an analytical tool. Benjamin’s most famous works, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and The Arcades Project, unfinished at his death, show the same ambivalence toward modernism, in Gordon’s analysis. On the one hand, he celebrated new media such as film and montage for making art more accessible to the masses, and glorying in the flâneur’s aimless street wanderings as an opportunity to exercise “urban poetics.” On the other hand, in the essay “On the Concept of History,” he suggested that the idea of progress was a myth, and history was in fact “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” Gordon lays out these ideas more lucidly than Benjamin’s dense prose sometimes did.

A solid introduction to a 20th-century thinker whose influence has only increased over time.