Location: Walter Benjamin Memorial and Gravesite, Portbou, Spain
Cause of Death: Suicide - overdose of morphine tablets
Photo taken by: Klaus Liffers
Buy books by Walter Benjamin
German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and 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.
Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays The Task of the Translator (1923), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), and Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, and translation theory. In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from invading Nazi forces. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown. The epitaph on his grave written in German, repeated in Catalan, quotes from Section 7 of Theses on the Philosophy of History:
"There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism"
Comments