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Hello, for one of the most celebrated thinkers of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin is hard to categorise and that for many

is one of his strengths. Born in Berlin in 1892 he was a philosopher a a historian, an investigator of culture.

Notably, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and

examine how the new media of film and photography and radio enabled art to be politicized and politics to become a form of art.

And as a Jewish man exiled to France from Knights of Germany,

he worked in dread of what was to come, ending his own life in 1940 when his escape was blocked at the Spanish border.

With me to discuss Walter Benjamin are Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthet at Birkbeck, University of London,

Kevin McLaughlin, Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English Comparative Literature and German

Saliz at Brown University, and Caroline Dutlinger, professor of German literature and culture at the University of Oxford.

Kevin Milachlan, as a child in Berlin, towards the end of the 19th century. What were the prospects for Walter Benjamin?

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