Walter Benjamin was born in Wilhelmine Berlin in 1892 and committed suicide on the Spanish border in 1940, almost within sight of safety. In the 1960s, when his work as a critic began to appear in English, he was hailed as an original contributor to the assessment of the position of the arts in modern industrial society, and by now he is taken for granted as one of the early giants of Theory, that capitalized catch-all term which is meant to cover all the various ways of studying the arts so as to make the student feel as smart as the artist.