Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Walter Benjamin 1892-1940 a German philosopher and historian who analysed modernity by studying the past of Paris in his Arcades Project. He is also famous for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction which studied the impact of film and photography.
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>Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most celebrated thinkers of the twentieth century. 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
Very interesting. Last year I hiked the trail in the Pyrenees he tried to flee with a small group from the nazi invaded France to Spain. A very sad story, but an interesting man.