In Our Time

Original version

BBC Radio 4 LW

Discussion & Talk

Podcasts

Factual: History

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

BBC Radio 4 FM

In Our Time: Walter Benjamin

10/02/2022

Walter Benjamin

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Walter Benjamin

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most influential thinkers of the last century.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable philosopher and critic whose ideas, developed in the 1930s, became highly influential after his death while escaping the Holocaust.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most celebrated thinkers of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, critic, historian, an investigator of culture, a maker of radio programmes and more.  Notably, in his Arcades Project, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, examined how the new media of film and photography enabled art to be politicised, and politics to become a form of art. The rise of the Nazis in Germany forced him into exile, and he worked in Paris in dread of what was to come; when his escape from France in 1940 was blocked at the Spanish border, he took his own life. 

With 

Esther Leslie
Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London

Kevin McLaughlin
Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English, Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University

And

Carolin Duttlinger
Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

In Our Time

Walter Benjamin

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 4 LW

About BBC Radio 4