20th century · 1892–1940
Who influenced Walter Benjamin?
Influences and legacy
Read modernity in arcades, reproducible art, and the angel of history.
Walter Benjamin was influenced by Karl Marx, and went on to influence Theodor W. Adorno. That is 2 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Photo d'identité sans auteur, 1928, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Walter Benjamin?
Walter Benjamin combined German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western Marxism and post-Kantian thought in essays on history, aesthetics and criticism. He was close to the Frankfurt School and to Bertolt Brecht, and his long correspondence with Gershom Scholem fed Scholem's revival of Kabbalah studies. His best-known essays are "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940).
He also wrote on Kafka, Baudelaire, Proust and the theory of translation, and translated parts of Baudelaire and Proust. In 1940, fleeing the Nazis, he took his own life at Portbou on the French-Spanish border; his companions were then allowed into Spain.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Walter Benjamin?
1 direct influence on this map, earliest first.
- Karl Marx 1818–1883
Who did Walter Benjamin influence?
1 thinker on this map draws directly on Walter Benjamin.
- Theodor W. Adorno 1903–1969
The line of teachers behind Walter Benjamin
The longest documented line of influence ending at Walter Benjamin runs 25 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- F. W. J. Schelling
- Georg W. F. Hegel
- Ludwig Feuerbach
- Karl Marx
- Walter Benjamin
Two steps away from Walter Benjamin
Indirect influences
- Through Karl Marx: Democritus, Epicurus, Adam Smith, Georg W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach
The second generation
- Through Theodor W. Adorno: Jürgen Habermas
Contemporaries of Walter Benjamin
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Walter Benjamin, with no direct line between them.
- Antonio Gramsci 1891–1937
- Edith Stein 1891–1942
- Rudolf Carnap 1891–1970
- Roman Ingarden 1893–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Mikhail Bakhtin 1895–1975
- Max Horkheimer 1895–1973
Walter Benjamin by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 1
- Direct followers
- 1
- Thinkers upstream
- 93
- Thinkers downstream
- 2
- Wikipedia languages
- 70 — #26 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Schools and lineages
- Frankfurt School: György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Jürgen Habermas
Questions about Walter Benjamin
- Who influenced Walter Benjamin?
- Karl Marx.
- Who did Walter Benjamin influence?
- Theodor W. Adorno.
- When did Walter Benjamin live?
- 1892–1940. The map files Walter Benjamin under the 20th century.
- How rare is the Walter Benjamin card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Walter Benjamin in 70 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 20th-century philosophers
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
- Max Weber 1864–1920
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016