Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Walter Benjamin wrote "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" ("The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility," often rendered in English as "Mechanical Reproduction") in 1935, publishing a French translation in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (the journal of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, then in exile in Paris) in 1936; Benjamin himself continued to revise the essay through several German versions, the differences among which have occupied subsequent editorial scholarship. Writing from exile as a German Jewish critic and Marxist-influenced theorist under the shadow of Nazism, Benjamin frames the essay explicitly as an attempt to develop concepts for a theory of art "useless for the purposes of fascism" while positively serving "the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art," situating a seemingly technical essay on media within an urgent contemporary political stake.