Walter Benjamin

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2022

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most celebrated thinkers of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, critic, historian, an investigator of culture, a maker of radio programmes and more. Notably, in his Arcades Project, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, examined how the new media of film and photography enabled art to be politicised, and politics to become a form of art. The rise of the Nazis in Germany forced him into exile, and he worked in Paris in dread of what was to come; when his escape from France in 1940 was blocked at the Spanish border, he took his own life.

With

Esther Leslie Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London

Kevin McLaughlin Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English, Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University

And

Carolin Duttlinger Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
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0:11.2	From next month, you can hear in our time 28 days before anyone else for free on BBC
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0:22.4	It's easy.
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0:37.6	every time a new episode is ready.
0:39.8	I told you it was easy.
0:42.0	Now, let's get back to the podcast.
0:45.0	Hello, for one of the most celebrated thinkers of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin is
0:49.7	hard to categorise and that, for many, is one of his strengths.
0:53.8	Born in Berlin in 1892, he was a philosopher, a critic, a historian, an investigator of
1:00.0	culture.
1:01.0	Notably, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and examine how
1:05.6	the new media of film and photography and radio enabled art to be politicised and politics
1:11.3	to become a form of art.
	...

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