Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934

Translated by Rodney Livingstone and others

Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith

    In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.

    In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.

    Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

  • Cover: Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934
  • A photo of the author

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis.

Michael W. Jennings is Professor of German, Princeton University.

Gary Smith is an editor at work on the Einstein Papers project.

Howard Eiland is Lecturer in Literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.