Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (1892 – 1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist, literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. Benjamin's final, unfinished work, known as the Arcades Project, was to be an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the roofed indoor "arcades" which created a new kind of Paris street life and extended the culture of flânerie (definition: strolling about and observing the passing people and scenes).