An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism , Romanticism , Western Marxism , Jewish mysticism , and neo-Kantianism , Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory , literary criticism , and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", [ 10 ] while his younger colleagues Arendt [ 11 ] and Adorno [ 12 ] contend that he was "not a philosopher".
In , at the age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French—Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg — and Dora — , were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin , then the capital of the German Empire.
Walter's uncle, William Stern , was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient IQ. Through his mother, Walter's great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld. In , ten-year-old Walter was enrolled at the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg ; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. In his youth, Walter was of fragile health and so in the family sent him to Hermann-Lietz-Schule Haubinda , a boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in , having returned to Berlin, he resumed his schooling at the Kaiser Friedrich School.
In , at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg , but at the summer semester's end, he returned to Berlin and matriculated at the University of Berlin to continue studying philosophy. There, Benjamin had his first exposure to Zionism , which had not been part of his liberal upbringing.
This gave him occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism. Benjamin distanced himself from political and nationalist Zionism, instead developing in his own thinking what he called a kind of " cultural Zionism "—an attitude that recognized and promoted Judaism and Jewish values. In Benjamin's formulation, his Jewishness meant a commitment to the furtherance of European culture. He wrote: "My life experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active For Judaism is to me in no sense an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and representative of the spiritual.
