German philosopher and writer Walter Benjamin was BOTD in 1892. Born in Berlin to a wealthy Jewish banking family, he was a sickly child though a gifted student, and was sent to boarding school in Thuringia to improve his health. He studied philosophy at the University of Freiburg and the University of Berlin. During World War One, he exaggerated his illness to avoid military conscription, moving to Switzerland, where he translated the first volume of Marcel Proust‘s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu into German. He later moved to Munich, where he met and befriended the writer Rainer Maria Rilke. After the war, he completed his doctorate at the University of Bern, starting a lifelong rivalry with philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose ideas frequently overlapped and conflicted with his own. He returned to Berlin in 1921, struggling to find academic work due to his dubious war record, and worked as a journalist and critic. He became associated with the Frankfurt School, developing a close friendship with his protégé Theodor Adorno, and also befriending dramatist Bertolt Brecht. After the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, he fled to Paris, where he wrote essays and reviews for literary journals, befriending writers Hannah Arendt, Hermann Hesse and Georges Bataille. The Nazi occupation of France in 1940 prompted him to flee to Spain, with the hope of escaping to the United States. Detained at the Spanish border and faced with imprisonment by the Gestapo, he committed suicide, aged 48. Largely unknown in his lifetime, his posthumous reputation soared after Arendt’s English-language translations of his work in the late 1940s. He is best known for his 1935 essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Written in response to the Nazi Party’s propaganda regime and drawing from Marxist theory, he predicted the mass production of art in the 20th century and the attendant devaluing of hand-made art works. His views on Zionism, which he supported as a spiritual practice but not as a political or nationalist movement, have also been widely debated. His final unfinished work Passagenwerk (Arcades Project) popularised the concept of the flâneur (or urban wanderer). A lifelong bachelor, Benjamin had a long-term relationship with Latvian actress Asja Lâcis, and a complex, homoerotically-charged friendship with his friend and colleague Gershom Scholem. Now considered one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers, his work has inspired philosophers including Jacques Derrida, John Berger and Susan Sontag, and influenced the development of film studies and queer theory.