Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the prolific German-Jewish author of numerous essays on literary and cultural analysis for magazines and newspapers in the 1930s. In the course the 1960s he became celebrated as one of the legendary Marxist cultural critics and theorists of the twentieth century, in spite of his renowned and notorious

, an astounding critical portrait of the Parisian bourgeoisie in the second part of the nineteenth century. The

was never completed as the

he intended it to be. In its final state, the

consists of materials Benjamin had accumulated between 1927 and 1940, the year of his suicide at the French-Spanish border after he fled the German occupation of Paris. Roughly 15,000 seemingly trivial items of…

1857 words

Citation: Pausch, Holger. "Passagen-Werk". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 March 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5738, accessed 21 November 2024.]