Walter Benjamin WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Among his best-known works are 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', 'Theses n the Philosophy of History' and essays on Kafka, Proust, Baudelaire and the storyteller. His masterwork, the Arcades Project, which intended to present a cultural theory of modernity through a study of nineteenth-century Paris, remained unfin­ished at his death. Read More Read Less