Walter Benjamin - Philosophical Works and Letters (31 books)

WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940) was a German literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. An eclectic thinker whose writings ― mosaics incorporating German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism ― defy simple categorization, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. His writing career moved from the brilliant esotericism of his early writings through his emergence as a central voice in Weimar culture and on to the exile years, with its pioneering studies of modern media and the rise of urban commodity capitalism in Paris. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of social research, and maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem.

Benjamin's brilliant but unconventional doctoral thesis, THE ORIGIN OF GERMAN TRAGIC DRAMA (1928) was initially rejected by the academic community but was rediscovered in the second half of the 20th century and has come to be considered a highly influential piece of philosophical and literary criticism. He eventually settled in Paris after leaving Germany in 1933 upon the Nazis’ rise to power. He continued to write essays and reviews for literary journals, but upon the fall of France in 1940 he fled south with the hope of escaping to the United States via Spain. Informed by the chief of police at the town of Port-Bou on the Franco-Spanish border that he would be turned over to the Gestapo, Benjamin committed suicide.

Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown. His philosophical reflections on literature are written in a dense and concentrated style that contains a strong poetic strain. Benjamin mixes social criticism and linguistic analysis with historical nostalgia while communicating an underlying sense of pathos and pessimism. His pronounced intellectual independence and originality are evident in the extended essay "Goethe’s Elective Affinities" (1924-25) and in the essays posthumously collected in ILLUMINATIONS (1961) and REFLECTIONS (1978). Among the best known and most influential of these are "The Task of the Translator" (1923), "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), and his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a literary critic included studies of Baudelaire, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, and many other luminaries.

The unfinished ARCADES PROJECT (1982), meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years, was Benjamin's effort to represent and critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. It was, as Benjamin called it, "the theatre of all my struggles and all my ideas."

The four volumes of the SELECTED WRITINGS from Harvard UP cover Benjamin's entire career and are very highly recommended. He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children’s books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology.


This is a fully revised and enlarged version of an earlier torrent. The following books are in ePUB and/or PDF format as indicated:

* Aesthetics and Politics (Verso, 2007). With Adorno et al. — ePUB
* Arcades Project, The (Harvard, 1999). H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin, trans. — PDF^
* Early Writings, 1910-1917 (Harvard, 2011). H. Eiland et al, trans. — PDF
* Gesammelte Schriften, v. 2.0 (Pynch, 2016)
* Illuminations (Harcourt, 1968/2019). H. Arendt, ed. — PDF^ + ePUB
* "Moscow Diary", (1985) 35 October 9-135. — PDF
* On Hashish (Harvard, 2006). H. Eiland et al, trans. — PDF
* On Photography (Reaktion, 2015). E. Leslie, trans. — PDF + ePUB
* One-Way Street (Harvard, 2016). M.W. Jennings, ed. — PDF + ePUB
* One-Way Street & Other Writings (Penguin, 2009). J.A. Underwood, trans. — ePUB
* One-Way Street & Other Writings (NLB, 1979). Jephcott & Shorter, trans. — PDF
* Origin of German Tragic Drama (NLB, 1977). J. Osborne, trans. — PDF
* Origin of the German Trauerspiel (Harvard, 2019). H. Eiland, trans. — PDF + ePUB
* Radio Benjamin (Verso, 2014). L. Rosenthal, ed. — ePUB
* Reflections (Schocken, 2007/Harcourt, 2019). P. Demetz, ed. — PDF^ + ePUB
* Selected Writings (Harvard, 1996-2003). 4 vols. Jennings et al., eds. — PDF^
* Storyteller, The (Verso, 2016). S. Dolbear et al., trans. — ePUB
* Storyteller Essays, The (NYRB, 2019). S. Titan, ed. — ePUB
* Understanding Brecht (NLB, 1973). A. Bostock, trans. — PDF
* Walter Benjamin's Archive (Verso, 2015). Marx et al, eds. — ePUB
* Work of Art in Age of Technological Reproducibility (Harvard, 2008). Jennings, ed. — PDF^
* Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Penguin, 2008). Underwood, ed. — ePUB
* Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Prism Key, 2012). Zohn, ed. — ePUB
* Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Baudelaire (Harvard, 2006). Jennings, ed. — PDF^

== LETTERS ==

* Complete Correspondence with T. Adorno, 1928-40 (Harvard, 1999) — ePUB + PDF^
* Correspondence, 1910-40 (Chicago, 1994). Scholem & Adorno, eds. — PDF^
* Correspondence with G. Scholem, 1932-40 (Schocken, 1989). Scholem, ed. — PDF^
* Correspondence with G. Adorno, 1930-40 (Polity, 2008). Lonitz & Gödde, eds. — PDF

PDF^ courtesy of Mohamed5438

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