ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin to an assimilated German-Jewish family. In 1933, with the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Benjamin moved to Paris where he engaged with Hannah ARENDT and Georges BATAILLE along with many other intellectuals. The importance Benjamin gives the Parisian arcades, which by the 1930s were nearly all destroyed, derives in large part from his fascination with the Surrealists. Benjamin explores the origins of the work of art in relation to what he believes to be a radically new era in art history brought on by new methods of mass reproduction. Benjamin’s essay provokes new questions at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a time in which new media technologies proliferate with ever-increasing speed. In the theory of allegory, Benjamin presents one of the most modern artistic means of dealing with a preceding tradition—that of citation, tearing a precedent out of context—as, in fact, a gesture that arose with German Baroque drama.
