Walter Benjamin (Berlin, 1892 – Portbou, 1940) is one of the most important and influential German thinkers of the last century. Born into a well-established Jewish family, he soon became associated with Marxist thought, becoming one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School, along with Adorno and Horkheimer. A brilliant and independent thinker during the Weimar Republic, he was forced into exile, first to Paris, and then, after the Nazi occupation of France, to the United States. His journey was tragically cut short: faced with the imminent possibility of falling into the hands of the German authorities, Benjamin took his own life on September 26, 1940.

For his extensive and brilliant contributions to the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, literary theory and criticism, or the theory of art and history, the philosopher's penetrating work stands at the pinnacle of the history of Western culture, like a powerful corrosive that, applied to the negative of reality, reveals the most hidden details of its revealed counter-figure.