A life displaced

An account of Benjamin's life is in many ways an account of the financial and intellectual obstacles Benjamin faced during the twenty years he became the foremost cultural critic of his generation. It is also an account of someone who traveled widely through Europe, from Capri to Spain to Moscow to the Arctic Circle and, above all, to the one place that kept such a hold on his critical imagination, Paris; it is an account of the person who came to know and correspond with most of the leading intellectuals and writers of his time – Rainer Maria Rilke, André Gide, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Georges Bataille, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Florens Christian Rang, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Paul Valéry, Hermann Hesse, André Malraux, the photographer Germaine Krull, among many others; of the person who translated Proust and Baudelaire; of the person who used a series of pseudonyms for publishing out of personal choice and political necessity – Ardor, C. Conrad, K. A. Stempflinger, Detlev Holz, Hans Fellner, J. E. Mabinn (an anagram of Benjamin), and O. E. Tal (an anagram of lateo: I am concealed); of the person who wrote for newspapers and journals, performed radio broadcasts; of the person whose writing spanned the autobiographical, the critical, the academic thesis, poetry, the short story, and radio plays for children; and finally of the person who collected toys and children's books in addition to his own extensive literary and philosophical library.