Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technologies on culture, an interest that extended beyond his critical essays. From 1927 to 1933 he wrote and presented around eighty works for the new radio environment.

Radio Benjamin brings together the preserved transcripts of these works. This eclectic collection shows the thematic variety of Benjamin's thinking and the thinker's enthusiasm for popular sensibility. His famous “Illustration for Children” programs and his comedies, readings, book reviews and fiction shows us a Benjamin more creative than critical. These works give rise to ideas developed in his essays, some of which are also represented there where they deal with such disparate topics as salary increases or stories of natural disasters, topics chosen for their interest to the general public and examined with passion and sharpness.

Walter Benjamin channels here, in a delicious and incisive way, his complex thinking towards a large audience, which will take advantage of this new voice of one of the most respected thinkers of the twentieth century.

"Benjamin's radio can hardly be overcome ... There is no comparison with what Benjamin got in these talks."

Stuart Jeffries, Financial Times

«[A] vigorous compendium ... Both in its tone and in its thematic display».

Publishers Weekly

"There has been no critic and reader more original and more serious in our time."

George steiner

«Everything is transformed under the gaze of his words as if he became radioactive».

Theodor Ornament

"Benjamin gave himself fully to the task of revolutionary transformation ... his life and his work are a challenge for all of us."

Terry Eagleton