Archive of Walter Benjamin

In this career-spanning interview with George Souvlis, Esther Leslie discusses Walter Benjamin, animated film, the history of color, the Historical Materialism project, and the commemoration of the revolutionary past. 

In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century.  Here we present our Frankfurt School reading.

What was so marvellous to Benjamin about this goofy, eternally hovering angel with hair that looks like paper scrolls, aerodynamically hopeless wings and googly if rather melancholy eyes? “This,” he wrote in one of his greatest essays, “is how one pictures the angel of history.”