Summary
Walter Benjamin: Experience and Poverty
Benjamin is undoubtedly one of the most important thinkers of our time. His three famous texts, collected in this book (besides the title, 1933, also "The Storyteller", 1936 and "The Task of the Translator", 1923), with the added entries "Experience" (1913) and "Handkerchief" (1932), are imbued with reflections on how to inherit the past. Starting with the end of the First World War, experience lost its value: what was directly experienced almost no longer finds expression in words and is hardly passed on from generation to generation. Here, the author offers us his far-reaching reflection on the beauty of what is disappearing, on the meaning of history and our ambiguous relationship to the past.
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