Benjamin on Art, Aura, and Historical Materialism

Walter Benjamin, a close associate of the Institute for Social Research though never formally on its permanent faculty, remains among the most idiosyncratic and posthumously influential figures loosely grouped with the Frankfurt School, combining Marxist categories with Jewish messianism, drawn partly from his friendship with the scholar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem, and with the aesthetic and philosophical resources of German Romanticism and Baroque allegory studied in his 1925 habilitation thesis, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), which was rejected by the University of Frankfurt faculty and effectively closed off an academic career to him. His most widely read essay, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" ("The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility"), was written in 1935 and first published, in French translation, in the institute's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1936, arguing that mechanical reproduction technologies — above all photography and film — fundamentally transform the ontological and social status of the artwork.