ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin was born into a rich, Jewish (but nonobservant) family. His formative years were solitary, isolated, full of nannies and French governesses, with few friends and little exposure to the outside world. After unhappy days at Berlin's Kaiser Friedrich Schule, Benjamin's parents sent him away to Haubinda, a country boarding school , thinking rural life might improve his health , make him more independent. It was a progressive institution and Benjamin found an early influence there: Gustav Wyneken, a school reformer with a markedly different approach to pedagogy. Wyneken expressed solidarity with youth, believing education should be conducted in an open dialogue where ideas freely exchange between teacher and pupil. It was a refreshing antidote to the traditional bourgeois model of distance and authority. Benjamin seemed to flourish and, despite his shyness and awkwardness (which he'd never outgrow), began
thinking independently. At the age of twenty he enrolled at the University of Freiburg, intending to study
philosophy. Freiburg's provincialism didn't offer an emerging cosmopolitan Berliner too much cultural stimulation. Neither, apparently, did his philosophy classes. Both town and studies felt narrow and stuffy.Walter attended Heinrich Rickert's lectures on logic, ethics and aesthetics, as did a certain Martin Heidegger. If they inspired the latter, for the former "if that's philosophy . . :' Benjamin was not impressed. "It is a fact;' he told childhood friend Herbert Blumenthal in a letter dated May 14, 1912, "that in Freiburg I am able to think independently about scholarly matters only about one-tenth as often as in Berlin.'" He breathed a sight of relief when his
50 first summer semester ended. Returning to Berlin in 1912, back at home, he enrolled at the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University for the winter session. His main
interests by then were philosophy, German literature, and art history. The year 1913 was significant for a couple of reasons. For one thing, Benjamin attended the packed lectures given by a scholar who made a lasting impression on him, not least in his thinking about the modern metropolitan experience: Georg Simmel, the great fin de siecle philosopher and sociologist whose students also included Ernst Bloch, Gershom Scholem (two friends to be), and Georg Lukacs. (Simmel, a Jew, later left Berlin for Strasbourg to gain the professorship he was always denied in Berlin.') For another, in May of that year Benjamin visited for the first time, as "a stroke of good fortune;' Paris, his vie en rose, a city he'd conjure up soon enough, more in thought than in fact.
