The episode in Walter Benjamin's life best known to his readers is, no doubt, its untimely ending. On the run from German forces and the Vichy police in September 1940, Benjamin attempted to escape France by crossing the Pyrenees into Spain with a small group of fellow refugees. When they arrived at the town of Port Bou, the travelers discovered that the border had been closed to those without proper exit visas. With rendition into French custody seemingly imminent, Benjamin succumbed to despair and took a lethal dose of morphine in his hotel room. Had he held out only a little longer, he might have made it to safety in the United States: the Spanish authorities decided to reopen the border the following day.

The pathos of Benjamin's death makes his life seem tragically unfulfilled. But as Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings's elegant and comprehensive Critical Life shows, Benjamin managed to accomplish an extraordinary amount in his forty-eight years. After spending a formative (if not particularly productive) decade studying classical German literature and philosophy, Benjamin finally found his métier as a literary journalist in the mid-1920s. He single-mindedly pursued his ambition of becoming “the foremost critic of German literature” (337), and came tantalizingly close to achieving his goal before the rise of the Nazis drove him into exile. He was a prolific author of high-brow literary criticism, feuilleton pieces, and personal essays, as well as a progenitor of what we would recognize today as media and cultural studies. In his quest for patrons, intellectual informants, and confrères, he seems to have met nearly everyone who was anyone in interwar cultural life—in locales as diverse as Berlin, Moscow, Ibiza, Capri, and Paris. Eiland and Jennings take on the daunting task of reconstructing Benjamin's complicated personal relationships and interpreting his intellectual itinerary, and then contextualizing both within the political and cultural ferment of interwar European history. The result is a major achievement, an authoritative biography that renders Benjamin's eclectic mind and turbulent times in all their fascinating complexity.

Drawing primarily on published correspondence, memoirs, and Benjamin's own literary and autobiographical writings as source material, Eiland and Jennings proceed chronologically through Benjamin's life, integrating close readings of his books and essays into a seamless narrative of his personal development. Their account of the relationships that shaped his thinking and writing is especially compelling. Thanks to Hugo Ball, Benjamin was introduced during World War I to the avant-gardists sojourning in Switzerland, who subsequently helped him forge connections to radical artists in postwar Berlin. Siegfried Kracauer opened his eyes to “everyday modernity” (205) through his micrological studies of popular culture. László Moholy-Nagy and Asja Lacis offered Benjamin access to the world of Soviet art, while Bertolt Brecht entranced him with left-wing politics and aesthetics. During the 1930s, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno provided a much-needed publishing venue and financial lifeline through the Institute of Social Research. If Benjamin's presence in these intellectual circles remained somewhat spectral, Eiland and Jennings suggest, it was in part because he wanted it that way. Instead of forming a network of his own, Benjamin preferred a solipsistic form of sociability, operating according to the maxim that “solitude is to be cultivated as the precondition for true community, which is necessarily a community of individual intellects and individual consciences” (41).

As with friends, so, too, with ideas: Benjamin wanted the freedom to chart his own course: “His stance, which is consistent in regard to every established doctrine and belief system, was to approach just close enough to allow the use of certain elements of the system—and no further. This was more than a tendency to bricolage. Like his extreme courtesy and his effort to seal his friends off from one another, it was a strategy designed to maintain his intellectual independence” (322). With the aim of doing justice to what Benjamin called the “contradictory and mobile whole that my own convictions represent in their multiplicity” (448), Eiland and Jennings refrain from reducing his oeuvre to a single theory or intellectual trajectory. They depict his engagement with Jewish and Christian thought, German idealism, and Marxism as independent streams that comingled around persisting themes, some of which originated in his earliest student writings: a preoccupation with the philosophical nature of language; a fascination with “dialectical images” that connected the present with the past; and a curiosity about the new kinds of sensory experience that modern life makes possible.

While Eiland and Jennings present a generally admiring portrait of Benjamin's intellectual accomplishments, they are unflinching in their portrayal of his disagreeable personal conduct. After marrying young and fathering a son, Benjamin demanded that his parents unconditionally support him while he pursued his literary interests. Despite his fascination with the mysteries of childhood and his extensive collection of rare children's books, he found little time to devote to his own family. (It is indicative of Benjamin's priorities that his son's first word was “quiet!” [244].) Benjamin faced a desperate situation after 1933 as an émigré journalist in France, where he struggled to find publishers and was constantly plagued by financial problems. Though Eiland and Jennings are scrupulous about maintaining a nonmoralizing stance, the reader's sympathy for Benjamin's plight is nonetheless diminished after learning about his shabby treatment of his wife Dora—who continued to provide financial and emotional support long after he had abandoned her—and about his propensity to squander his funds in casinos. Benjamin may have been “loyal and generous to those who knew him longest” (5), but he was also capable of a striking “lack of empathy with others” (84).

Readers who want to understand why Benjamin's reputation expanded so dramatically in the decades after his death, and how his ideas were often distorted in the process, will likely find the book's three-page epilogue too brief. Though the authors refer to the impact of Adorno's 1955 edition of Benjamin's writings and of the rise of the student movement on Benjamin's legacy, it would have been interesting to know more about the ways in which Benjamin's ideas were mobilized by his posthumous champions. Eiland and Jennings close their biography by observing that “coming generations of readers will undoubtedly find their own Benjamins in the encounter with that ‘mobile and contradictory whole’ that is his lifework” (679). A Critical Life will provide an indispensable guide for such endeavors.