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President of the Moon Committee: Walter Benjamin’s Radio Years

President of the Moon Committee: Walter Benjamin’s Radio Years

Peter E. Gordon in The Nation on August 8, 2023

Today Benjamin is widely esteemed as one of the foremost cultural critics and theorists of the 20th century. But his career was uneven and marked by failure. In 1925, after the faculty of philosophy in Frankfurt rejected his enigmatic study of German Baroque drama and dashed his hopes for an academic career, he found himself adrift, with little assurance of a regular income. But this failure also brought freedom.

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