“We will arrive at a moment of sufficient self alienation where we can contemplate our own destruction as in a static spectacle…” -Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher who died too young, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. In 1940, fleeing the Nazis, he reached the Spanish border and was told he could not cross. He took his own life that night (the Spanish border guards basically murdered one of the greatest minds of the 20th century by following protocol).
Which is a tragedy, because Benjamin saw things about the 20th century that nobody else saw.
His most famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), predicted the entire modern media landscape 80 years before it happened. His big idea, when you can reproduce a work of art infinitely, it loses its aura (that mysterious quality of being in the same room as the original). And the same thing happens to politics. When you can broadcast a politician’s speech to millions of people, politics becomes a spectacle. And when politics becomes a spectacle, it becomes vulnerable to fascism (look around, he was not wrong).
He also had a wild theory of history. He said historical progress is not a straight line forward. It is a pile of debris growing toward the sky while the storm of progress blows through it. The angel of history looks at the wreckage and wants to stay and fix it, but the storm keeps pushing him forward. That is the famous Angel of History passage. It will stick in your brain forever (and haunt you).
Starter book: Illuminations (1968, posthumous collection). Contains the art essay and the Angel of History thesis. Two essays great essays from the legendary Benjamin.
