Photo d'identité sans auteur, 1928 · Public domain

Walter Benjamin wrote across philosophy, literary criticism, and media theory without settling into any one of them — his friend Gershom Scholem insisted "Benjamin was a philosopher," while Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, both close to his intellectual circle, argued he wasn't. Loosely associated with the Frankfurt School and shaped by his lifelong correspondence with Scholem on Jewish mysticism, he died in 1940 attempting to flee occupied France for Spain, one more casualty of the catastrophe that scattered the rest of that émigré generation across the world.