title: Xuxa

text: Xuxa is the godmother and poster girl of the campaign "Tri-national to Combat Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents" which aims to encourage people to report cases of exploitation and abuse of minors living on the border between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. Since May 2013, the campaign has integrated the actions of several groups: the Itaipu Dam, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Municipal Tourism Council, Childhood and Youth, Ministry of Labor and Employment, and entities of Paraguay and Argentina who work in the same area.


title: Xuxa

text: In May 2014, then-President Dilma Rousseff signed a law that applied stronger penalties to the crime of sexual exploitation of children and adolescents. On 4 June 2014, Xuxa was present when the Senate of Brazil passed the "" (PLC 58/2014) that prohibits the use of violence in the education of children and adolescents, which had been adopted by the Commission on Human Rights of the Chamber of Deputies. When asked about criticism from some parents about how they will educate their children after the passage of this law, Xuxa said that they can educate, but without violence: "We have to show that people can and should educate without violence". Xuxa said that the project should be called ""Lei Menino Bernardo"" in honor of , an 11-year-old boy killed in April that year.


title: Xuxa

text: At the age of 16, she began to model professionally. Years later, the affair with soccer player Pelé boosted her profile and in 1982 Xuxa already was considered one of the main publicity figures of the country, announcing from underwear to residential buildings. In the same year she obtained a supporting role in the soap opera "Elas por Elas" at Globo TV and over time had more of a role in the telenovela.


title: Xuxa

text: Also in 1982 Xuxa founded her first company, Xuxa Produções, a legal entity that takes care of the brand of Xuxa and holds, exclusively, the rights to commercialize the use of the brand and image of the artist, nationally and internationally, and represents the artist in contracts in any area. However, in 1993 Xuxa Produções was responsible for the coming of the "Dangerous World Tour", from Michael Jackson to Brazil and has performed in other segments without the presence of Xuxa, as the co-production of films by Renato Aragão, Angelica and Father Marcelo Rossi.


title: Xuxa

text: At the age of 20, in 1983, Xuxa was invited to present the "Clube da Criança" in the extinct TV Manchete. During this time, she worked as a model during the week in New York City, and recorded the show on weekends. However, the agency made her choose between career photos and walkways as a model or TV and Xuxa opted for the television show. With the success of audience of the program and the album "Xuxa e Seus Amigos", which sold 500,000 copies, Xuxa was contracted by Globo TV and Som Livre. In the same year Xuxa founded the brand "O Bicho Comeu", responsible for the commercialization of clothes and accessories for children.


title: Xuxa

text: With the initial salary at Globo TV of US$40,000, Xuxa had several increases in its salary, which in 1987 had already reached one million dollars. Also in 1987 she founded "Beijinho Beijinho Produções", responsible for the co-production of television programs and albums. Until 1988, the companies of Xuxa were run by her father, retired soldier Luís Floriano Meneghel, mother, Alda, and brothers Cirano, Bladimir and Solange. That year, Marlene Mattos, director of her program and lawyer Luiz Cláudio Moreira took over the companies. The Xuxa film series premiered for theaters the same year, with the film "Super Xuxa contra Baixo Astral", which was watched by more than 2.8 million viewers. That year the artist's fortune was over R$50 million. In 1989 Xuxa already shared with Hebe Camargo the title of highest-paid host of Latin America, receiving only in the Globe TV US$1.5 million monthly. This year, she bought the "MG Meneghel" farm in Rio Bonito, Rio de Janeiro, which had three million square meters and had 50 mango trees and 200 dairy cattle. Also in 1989, the activities of the Xuxa Meneghel Foundation, which carries out four social development programs (Program for Networks and Political Incidence, Program for Socio-educational Actions, Integrated Assistance Program and the Institutional Partnerships Program) began.


title: Xuxa

text: In 1990 Xuxa had already reached the mark of 12 million records sold, which had generated a turnover of more than $110 million, of which 20% was destined for it. The 1990 movie "Lua de Cristal", was watched by more than 5 million viewers and generated a profit of $5 million for Xuxa Productions. Also in 1990 she founded "Xuxa International Corporation", based in the Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven, responsible for collecting royalties and royalties around the world. Xuxa's royalties varied between 5% and 20% of the final profit from the sale of products licensed under its brand. Xuxa made a final profit of $19 million in 1990, resulting in her 37th appearance on "Forbes" list of "Top 40 Most Enlightened Celebrities" in 1991, the first Latin American to appear on the list. The magazine reported that her fortune had already surpassed that of Madonna and was equated with that of Arnold Schwarzenegger.


title: Xuxa

text: Also in the year 1990, Xuxa bought a site in Vargem Grande, in Rio de Janeiro for two million dollars. The property underwent several renovations so that it could be the official residence of Xuxa, with mini zoo and nursery, heated pool with waterfall, main house (1050 m, two floors and five suites with closet), guest house (280 m), Japanese restaurant (195 m bar, industrial kitchen and laundry), fitness center (196 m), party room (540 m), recording studio (60 m), sauna (com 62 m), house of the employees (283 m), old house of the caretaker (63 m), support cellar (67 m), linen and storage (306 m), garage for eight cars and helipad. With a total of 78,000 square meters, Xuxa traveled with the golf carts and this one was a refuge for the artist, which did not prevent that fans slept in the entrance of the site waiting for Xuxa. The site was called Casa Rosa was a frequent figure in television programs and specialized magazines, consequently gaining space in the popular culture, arriving to be called Brazilian "Neverland". In 2007, with the concern of providing a social life closer to normal to her daughter Sasha, Xuxa put the site up for sale for $8 million. However, the presenter has not yet been able to sell the property, which is still part of its equity. Still in 1990 Xuxa acquired an apartment of five million dollars in New York, that still forms part of the artist's patrimony and took advantage of the opening of the Brazilian market to imported vehicles to found the Shine Car, concessionaire of imported luxury cars based in Rio de Janeiro. With a partnership with Grendene, Xuxa sold 4 million sandals in Brazil, 1 million in the United States, 1 million in Mexico and 500,000 in the rest of Latin America only in 1990.


title: Xuxa

text: In 1991 she began her international career as a television presenter, launching the show "El Show de Xuxa" by Telefe, Argentina. The program was retransmitted to 17 countries in Latin America and the United States. Between 1991 and 1992 Xuxa received $1 million a month for work on the Argentine broadcaster. She launched the Xuxa Meneghel Models Course in Rio de Janeiro, with a duration of seven months and a load of six hours a week, tuition starting from $60. Also in 1991 Xuxa intensified the licensing of products with her brand and even sold 1.5 million sandals in the United States. She bought five luxury apartments in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which earned $200,000 in rent.


title: Xuxa

text: In 1992 Xuxa signed a contract with the Spanish television network Telecinco for 15 episodes of the "Xuxa Park" program, receiving $240,000 per episode. Only TV Globo, Telefe and Telecinco Xuxa received more than $3.4 million monthly. In May 1992, Xuxa's estate was estimated at US$100 million by "People", making it the second-richest artist in Brazil until then, with the same patrimony of Roberto Carlos and behind Silvio Santos. In the same year she founded "Light Beam Corporation" to license her brand exclusively in the United States, selling this year, among other products, 500,000 dolls. Xuxa made 12 advertising campaigns a year, earning $200,000 each. Xuxa made a final profit of $27 million in 1992, resulting in her return to the list of "40 celebrities who grew richer in the last year" by Forbes in 1993, this time in 28th place. Between 1986 and 1992 Xuxa had sold 18 million discs, which had generated a revenue of over $175 million, of which 20% was destined for Xuxa. Xuxa's Xuxa program produced four tours, including Xuxa's Xuxa 89 tour, in which Xuxa's cache was over $300,000, with a production schedule that involved ten trucks, 60 air tickets, two wagons, two 25-ton stages with more than 150 people involved.


title: Xuxa

text: In 1993 she premiered the "Xuxa" program in the United States, in English. The program was broadcast by more than 100 relays in the country, including CBS and Freeform, and was also sold to more than 120 countries. Through the program, Xuxa received $7 million and launched products in more than 100 countries. So that she could rest between the recordings of the show, Xuxa bought a mansion in Calabasas, Califórnia. In September 1999 the residence was bought by the singer and American actress Brandy Norwood, for $1.7 million. In the year of 1993 Xuxa handled $220 million only in licenses. At the end of this year, a problem in the spine made her slow down. In 1994, the death of Ayrton Senna also contributed to Xuxa diminishing her work rate gradually. Also that year, she bought a mansion on Star Island in Miami for $15 million. The mansion had already belonged to Madonna and is owned by Xuxa until the present time. A tourist boat ride, titled "Rich and Famous Tour", includes the Xuxa mansion in the script. In present values, a mansion in the island has the minimum price of $65 million.


title: Xuxa

text: On her 33rd birthday she won a Ferrari F355 from her manager Marlene Matos. In 1996 they realized the tour "Tô de Bem com a Vida", with more than 45 concerts and a cache of $350,000. In that same year the international press announced that Xuxa is concerned about having little private life. In October, she announced that she would soon leave her career to try to be a mother through artificial insemination, which did not happen because Xuxa had to meet contractual deadlines, which did not prevent the artist from again slowing down the work pace. In November its patrimony was estimated at $300 million. Also in 1996 she founded "Lar's Empreendimentos", responsible for real estate investments and the creation of the "O Mundo da Xuxa" park in 2003.


title: Xuxa

text: In 2000 she acquired a million-dollar home in Celebration, Florida, near Walt Disney World. In 2005, an 11-year-old girl, daughter of friends of Xuxa, passed away in the parks of Disney while she was lodged in the house of Xuxa.


title: Xuxa

text: In 2002 they acquired a coverage of four suites for R$13 million in São Conrado, in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In 2008 part of the cover caught fire when Xuxa, Sasha and Luciano Szafir were in the property. Luciano was taken to the hospital with a degree of intoxication by the great smoke that quickly spread. According to the magazine "Veja", also in 2002, Xuxa had $250 million in equity referring only to real estate. The year 2002 was also marked by the professional breakup of Xuxa and Marlene Mattos, who left the command of the holding company of Xuxa, by reducing their salary at Globo TV to $1 million a month, which lasted until their exit of the issuer, and the foundation of the company "Espaço Laser", in which Xuxa owns 51% of participation. It ended the year with 200 licensed products and monthly sales of R$30 million.


title: Xuxa

text: In 2003, she bought the "Gugu Park" at the SP Market mall in São Paulo and transformed it into the Xuxa Mundo O Mundo amusement park. Xuxa bought the park for $15 million. The park made about R$10 million a year.


title: Xuxa

text: In 2007, when she left to live in "Casa Rosa", Xuxa moved to a residence that had been built in the Malibu Condominium in Barra da Tijuca. The 1,700-square-meter, three-storey mansion is valued at R$10 million.


title: Xuxa

text: In 2009, "Lar's Empreendimentos" of Xuxa was ordered to pay an indemnity of R$50,000 for moral and material damages in legal proceedings.


title: Xuxa

text: In November 2010 Xuxa did not agree to the increase in rent of the building which the "Shine Car" company occupied and took the company to court, but lost the action, leaving the property and extinguishing "Shine Car" in January 2011. Also in January 2011 Xuxa won a $150,000 lawsuit against "Folha Universal", which had stated in 2008 that the artist "was Satanist and would have sold her soul to the devil for $100 million."


title: Xuxa

text: In 2012 Xuxa received R$2 million to participate in an advertising campaign of beauty products brand Wella, changing the color of her hair, appearing brunette for the first time in her career. The amount was donated to the Xuxa Meneghel Foundation.


title: Xuxa

text: In 2013 TV Bandeirantes was condemned by the Superior Court of Justice (STJ) to pay an indemnity of 1.1 million reais to the presenter. The STJ ruled that Xuxa appeared naked on the station's show in 2008. The images had been published by Playboy before Xuxa launched herself as a children's show host in the early 1980s. The STJ, therefore, rejected the request of the issuer to rediscuss the amount of compensation established by the Court of Justice of Rio de Janeiro (TJRJ) in 2011. Also in 2013 Xuxa bought an island in Angra dos Reis, for R$12.7 million.


title: Xuxa

text: In 2014 RecordTV was ordered to pay R$100,000 to Xuxa. The broadcaster was sued for broadcasting photos of the hostess in an essay performed for "Playboy" in the 1980s without authorization during the Gugu Liberato in 2012.


title: Xuxa

text: In February 2015, Xuxa refused a proposal of renewal with Globo TV, since its salary would happen to be 1 million dollars monthly, that received from 2002, to R$250,000, without next projects to return to present a program. In the same month, the "O Mundo da Xuxa" came to an end, since the place would have to go through new investments in attractions and layout, to meet the need to expand the shopping center in which it was, which would not be viable that due to the Brazilian economic crisis; the park had a final profit of R$4 million in 2014, against R$10 million in 2008. It was sold to Parque da Mônica for R$40 million. In March Xuxa signed with RecordTV for R$1 million monthly. If the program leaves the grid of the station, Xuxa will receive $250,000 monthly. In that same year the Laser Space earned R$50 million. Xuxa, as a businesswoman, had a final profit of $160 million from her companies.


title: Xuxa

text: In 2016, Espaço Laser earned R$60 million, expanding its operations to 187 units in Brazil. Xuxa, as a businesswoman, made a final profit of R$200 million with her holding company in 2016. In the same year, she launched herself as a YouTuber.


title: Xuxa

text: The company of children's parties—"Casa X"—of the presenter earned R$17 million in 2017, a 50% increase in one year.


title: Xuxa

text: The equity of Xuxa and its companies is valued at US$1 billion, making her one of the richest women in Brazil. Xuxa is a vegan.


title: Xuxa

text: Xuxa has one daughter with actor Luciano Szafir, Sasha, who was born in 1998. Xuxa dated Brazilian football legend Pelé in the 1980s, and later Formula 1 legend, Ayrton Senna.


title: Xuxa

text: She reported in 2012 that reclusive singer Michael Jackson had once courted her, inviting her to dinner at Neverland Ranch and his manager asked whether she would consider bearing his children. She is in a relationship with actor and singer Junno Andrade. In 2013, her Italian nationality was recognized.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The Malleus Maleficarum, usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, is the best known treatise on witchcraft. It was written by the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer (under his Latinized name "Henricus Institor") and first published in the German city of Speyer in 1486. It has been described as the compendium of literature in demonology of the 15th century. The top theologians of the Inquisition at the Faculty of Cologne condemned the book as recommending unethical and illegal procedures, as well as being inconsistent with Catholic doctrines of demonology.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The "Malleus" elevates sorcery to the criminal status of heresy and recommends that secular courts prosecute it as such. The "Malleus" suggests torture to effectively obtain confessions and the death penalty as the only certain remedy against the evils of witchcraft. At the time of its publication, heretics were frequently sentenced to be burned alive at the stake and the "Malleus" encouraged the same treatment of witches. The book had a strong influence on culture for several centuries.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Jacob Sprenger's name was added as an author beginning in 1519, 33 years after the book's first publication and 24 years after Sprenger's death; but the veracity of this late addition has been questioned by many historians for various reasons. Kramer wrote the "Malleus" following his expulsion from Innsbruck by the local bishop, due to charges of illegal behavior against Kramer himself, and because of Kramer's obsession with the sexual habits of one of the accused, Helena Scheuberin, which led the other tribunal members to suspend the trial.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The book was later used by royal courts during the Renaissance, and contributed to the increasingly brutal prosecution of witchcraft during the 16th and 17th centuries.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Witchcraft had long been forbidden by the Church, whose viewpoint on the subject was explained in the "Canon Episcopi" written in about AD 900. It stated that witchcraft and magic were delusions and that those who believed in such things "had been seduced by the Devil in dreams and visions". However, in the same period supernatural intervention was accepted in the form of ordeals that were later also used during witch trials.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: It is an element of doctrine that demons may be cast out by appropriate sacramental exorcisms. In the "Malleus", exorcism is, for example, one of the five ways to overcome the attacks of incubi. Prayer and transubstantiation are traditionally excluded from the category of magical rites.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: In 1484 clergyman Heinrich Kramer made one of the first attempts at prosecuting alleged witches in the Tyrol region. It was not a success: he was expelled from the city of Innsbruck and dismissed by the local bishop as "senile and crazy". According to Diarmaid MacCulloch, writing the book was Kramer's act of self-justification and revenge. Ankarloo and Clark claim that Kramer's purpose in writing the book was to explain his own views on witchcraft, systematically refute arguments claiming that witchcraft did not exist, discredit those who expressed skepticism about its reality, claim that those who practised witchcraft were more often women than men, and to convince magistrates to use Kramer's recommended procedures for finding and convicting witches.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Some scholars have suggested that following the failed efforts in Tyrol, Kramer requested explicit authority from the Pope to prosecute witchcraft. Kramer received a papal bull "Summis desiderantes affectibus" in 1484. It gave full papal approval for the Inquisition to prosecute what was deemed to be witchcraft in general and also gave individual authorizations to Kramer and Dominican Friar Jacob Sprenger specifically. Other scholars have disputed the idea that Sprenger was working with Kramer, arguing that the evidence shows that Sprenger was actually a persistent opponent of Kramer, even going so far as to ban him from Dominican convents within Sprenger's jurisdiction while also banning him from preaching. In the words of Wolfgang Behringer:


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Sprenger had tried to suppress Kramer's activities in every possible way. He forbade the convents of his province to host him, he forbade Kramer to preach, and even tried to interfere directly in the affairs of Kramer's Séléstat convent... The same day Sprenger became successor to Jacob Strubach as provincial superior (October 19, 1487), he obtained permission from his general, Joaquino Turriani, to lash out "adversus m[agistrum] Henricum Institoris inquisitorem" ("English": against Master Heinrich Kramer, inquisitor).


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The preface also includes an alleged unanimous approbation from the University of Cologne's Faculty of Theology. Nevertheless, many historians have argued that it is well established by sources outside the "Malleus" that the university's theology faculty condemned the book for unethical procedures and for contradicting Catholic theology on a number of important points: "just for good measure Institoris forged a document granting their apparently unanimous approbation."


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The book became the handbook for secular courts throughout Renaissance Europe, but was not used by the Inquisition, which "denied any authority to the "Malleus"" in the words of historian Wolfgang Behringer.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: In modern times, the book has often been viewed as a typical inquisitorial manual, a perception that many historians have refuted. According to Jenny Gibbons:


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Before 1400 it was rare for anyone to be prosecuted for witchcraft, but the increasingly common prosecution of heresy and failure to fully defeat these heretics paved the way for later criminal prosecution of witchcraft. By the 15th century belief in witches was widely accepted in European society. Previously, those convicted of witchcraft typically suffered penalties no more harsh than public penances such as a day in the stocks, but their prosecution became more brutal following the publication of the "Malleus Maleficarum", as witchcraft became widely accepted as a real and dangerous phenomenon. The most severe prosecutions took place between the years 1560 and 1630, largely ending in Europe around 1780.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries an intense debate on the nature of witches preoccupied demonologists across Europe and they published many printed sermons, books and tracts. The Catholic Church played an important role in shaping of debate on demonology, but the discourse was not much affected by the Reformation. Martin Luther was also convinced about the reality and evil of witches, and facilitated development of Protestant demonology.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Catholic and Protestant demonologies were similar in their basic beliefs about witches and most writers agreed on the severity of the crime of witchcraft. It was accepted by both Catholic and Protestant legislatures and witch-hunting was undeniably sponsored by both Protestant and Catholic governments. Witches became heretics to Christianity and witchcraft became the greatest of crimes and sins. Within continental and Roman Law witchcraft was the "crimen exceptum", a crime so foul that all normal legal procedures were superseded.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: During the Age of Enlightenment, belief in the powers of witches to harm began to die out in the West. For the post-Enlightenment Christians, the disbelief was based on a belief in rationalism and empiricism.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: In this part it is briefly explained that prevalence of sorcery which is a method of Satan's final assault motivated authors to write the "Malleus Maleficarum":


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: [...] [ Lucifer ] attacks through these heresies at that time in particular, when the evening of the world declines towards its setting and the evil of men swells up, since he knows in great anger, as John bears witness in the Book of Apocalypse [12:12], that he has little time remaining. Hence, he has also caused a certain unusual heretical perversity to grow up in the land of the Lord – a Heresy, I say, of Sorceresses, since it is to be designated by the particular sex over which he is known to have power. [...] In the midst of these evils, we Inquisitors, Jacobus Sprenger together with the very dear associate [Institoris] delegated by the Apostolic See for the extermination of so destructive a heresy [...] we will bring everything to the desired conclusion. [...] naming the treatise the "Hammer for Sorceresses," we are undertaking the task of compiling the work for an associate [presumably, an ecclesiastic] [...]


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Copies of the "Malleus Maleficarum" contain a reproduction of a papal bull known as "Summis desiderantes affectibus" that is addressed to Heinrich Institoris and Jakob Sprenger. According to it, Pope Innocent VIII acknowledges that sorceresses are real and harmful through their involvement in the acts of Satan.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: According to the date on the document, the papal bull had been issued in 1484, two years before the "Malleus Maleficarum" was finished. Therefore, it is not an endorsement of a specific final text of the "Malleus". Instead, its inclusion implicitly legitimizes the handbook by providing general confirmation of the reality of witchcraft and full authority to Sprenger and Institoris in their preachings and proceedings:


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: This part of the "Malleus" is titled "The Approbation of The Following Treatise and The Signatures Thereunto of The Doctors of The Illustrious University of Cologne Follows in The Form of A Public Document" and contains unanimous approval of the "Malleus Maleficarum" by all the Doctors of the Theological Faculty of the University of Cologne signed by them personally. The proceedings are attested by notary public Arnold Kolich of Euskirchen, a sworn cleric of Cologne with inclusion of confirmatory testimony by present witnesses Johannes Vorda of Mecheln a sworn beadle, Nicholas Cuper de Venrath the sworn notary of Curia of Cologne and Christian Wintzen of Euskirchen a cleric of the Diocese of Cologne.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Text of approbation mentions that during proceedings Institoris had a letter from Maximilian, the newly crowned King of the Romans and son of Emperor Frederick III, which is summarized in the approbation: "[... Maximilian I] takes these Inquisitors under his complete protection, ordering and commanding each and every subject of the Roman Empire to render all favor and assistance to these Inquisitors and otherwise to act in the manner that is more fully contained and included in the letter." Apparently, in early December 1486, Kramer actually went to Brussels, the Burgundian capital, hoping to obtain a privilege from the future Emperor (Kramer did not dare to involve Frederick III, whom he had offended previously), but the answer must have been so unfavorable that it could not be inserted into the foreword.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: It begins with a general statement about circumstances: IN THE NAME OF Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Let all those who will read, see or hear the present public document know that in the year since the Birth of Our Lord 1487, in the fifth indiction, on Saturday, the nineteenth day of May, at five in the afternoon or thereabouts, in the third year of the Pontificate of Our Lord, the Most Holy Father in Christ, Lord Innocent VIII, by Divine Providence Pope, in the presence of my notary public and of the witnesses written below who had been specifically summoned and asked for this purpose, the venerable and religious Brother Henricus Institoris, Professor of Holy Theology and member of the Order of Preachers, who was appointed as Inquisitor into Heretical Depravity by the Holy See along with his colleague, the venerable and religious Brother Jacobus Sprenger, also a Professor of Holy Theology and Prior of the Convent of Preachers in Cologne[...]


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Then, signatories complain that "Some curates of souls and preachers of the Word of God feel no shame at claiming and affirming in their sermons to the congregation that sorceresses do not exist" and notice that the intention of the authors of the "Malleus Maleficarum" is not primarily to alleviate this ignorance but rather "toil to exterminate the sorceresses by explaining the appropriate methods of sentencing and punishing them in accordance with the text of the aforementioned Bull and the regulations of the Holy Canons, thereby achieving their extermination"; finally, signatories explain why they are providing their expertise: It is consonant with reason that those things that are done on behalf of the common good should also be confirmed through the common approval of the Doctors, and therefore, lest the aforementioned poorly educated curates and preachers think, in their ignorance of Holy Scripture, that the aforesaid treatise, which was composed in the manner mentioned above, is poorly supported by the determinations and pronouncements of the Doctors, they offered it for examination and comparison against Scripture to the illustrious University of Cologne or rather to certain Professors of Holy Theology, in order that if any things were found to be worthy of censure or incompatible with the Catholic Truth, they should be refuted by the judgment of those Professors, and that those things found to be compatible with the Catholic Truth should be approved. This was in fact done in the ways written below.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: There are two signings, sometimes also referenced as two approbations. The difference is that four signatories of the first part testify that they have examined the treatises and endorse its text while in the second signing signatories do not assert that they have read the treatises but nonetheless express approval by explicitly restating some general propositions of the treatises and endorsing them instead.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: In the first part, the opinion of a "temporary Dean of the Faculty of Holy Theology at Cologne" namely Lambertus de Monte of 's-Heerenberg is expressed and then professors Jacobus Straelen of Noetlinck, Andreas Schermer of Ochsenfurt and Master Thoma de Scotia testify that they agree with his opinion. The following is an excerpt from the opinion: [I proclaim] that this three part treatise, which has been examined by me and carefully compared against Scripture with regard to its first two parts, contains nothing, in my humble judgment at least, that is contrary to the pronouncements of the non-erroneous philosophers, or against the Truth of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Faith, or against the determinations of the Doctors approved or admitted by the Holy Church, and that the third part should certainly be upheld and approved in regard to the punishments of those heretics whom it treats, in that it does not contradict Holy Canons, and also because of the personal experiences described in this treatise, which are believed to be true because of the reputation of such great men, particularly since they are inquisitors. It should be ensured that this treatise will become known to learned and zealous men, who will then, on the basis of it, provide various healthy and appropriate advice for the extermination of sorceresses [...]


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text:
The second part is signed by those from the first signing and in addition by professors Ulrich Kridweiss of Esslingen, Konrad Vorn of Kampen, Cornelius Pays of Breda and Dietrich of Balveren (Bummel). Signatories attest that: 1) The Masters of Holy Theology written below commend the Inquisitors into Heretical Depravity appointed by the authority of the Apostolic See in conformity with the Canons, and urge that they think it right to carry out their office zealously.
2) The proposition that acts of sorcery can happen with God's permission through sorcerers or sorceresses when the Devil works with them is not contrary to the Catholic Faith, but consonant with the statements of Holy Scripture. Indeed, according to the pronouncements of the Holy Doctors it is necessary to admit that such acts can sometimes happen.
3) It is therefore erroneous to preach that acts of sorcery cannot happen, because in this way preachers impede, to the extent that they can, the pious work of the inquisitors, to the prejudice of the salvation of souls. Nonetheless, secrets that are heard at any time by inquisitors should not be revealed to everyone.
4) All princes and Catholics should be urged to think it right to assist such pious vows on the part of the Inquisitors in defense of the Holy Catholic Faith.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The "Malleus Maleficarum" asserts that three elements are necessary for witchcraft: the evil intentions of the witch, the help of the Devil, and the permission of God. The treatise is divided into three sections. The first section is aimed at clergy and tries to refute critics who deny the reality of witchcraft, thereby hindering its prosecution.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The second section describes the actual forms of witchcraft and its remedies. The third section is to assist judges confronting and combating witchcraft, and to aid the inquisitors by removing the burden from them. Each of the three sections has the prevailing themes of what is witchcraft and who is a witch.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Section I examines the concept of witchcraft theoretically, from the point of view of natural philosophy and theology. Specifically it addresses the question of whether witchcraft is a real phenomenon or imaginary, perhaps "deluding phantasms of the devil, or simply the fantasies of overwrought human minds". The conclusion drawn is that witchcraft must be real because the Devil is real. Witches entered into a pact with Satan to allow them the power to perform harmful magical acts, thus establishing an essential link between witches and the Devil.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Matters of practice and actual cases are discussed, and the powers of witches and their recruitment strategies. It states that it is mostly witches, as opposed to the Devil, who do the recruiting, by making something go wrong in the life of a respectable matron that makes her consult the knowledge of a witch, or by introducing young maidens to tempting young devils. It details how witches cast spells, and remedies that can be taken to prevent witchcraft, or help those who have been affected by it.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Section III is the legal part of the "Malleus Maleficarum" that describes how to prosecute a witch. The arguments are clearly laid for the lay magistrates prosecuting witches. The section offers a step-by-step guide to the conduct of a witch trial, from the method of initiating the process and assembling accusations, to the interrogation (including torture) of witnesses, and the formal charging of the accused. Women who did not cry during their trial were automatically believed to be witches.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Jakob Sprenger was an appointed inquisitor for the Rhineland, theology professor and a dean at the University of Cologne in Germany. Heinrich Kraemer (Institoris) was an appointed inquisitor of south Germany, a professor of theology at the University of Salzburg, the leading demonologist and witch-hunter in late medieval Germany. Pope Innocent VIII in the papal bull "Summis desiderantes affectibus" refers to them both as "beloved sons" and "professors of theology"; also authorizes them to extirpate witchcraft.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: This text codified the folklore and beliefs of the Alpine peasants as ‘witchcraft’ and was conceptually dedicated to the implementation of Exodus 22:18: "You shall not permit a sorceress to live.”Kramer and Sprenger were the first to raise harmful sorcery to the criminal status of heresy. [...] If harmful sorcery is a crime on the order of heresy, Kramer and Sprenger argue, then the secular judges who prosecute it must do so with the same vigor as would the "Inquisition" in prosecuting a heretic. The "Malleus" urges them to adopt torture, leading questions, the admission of denunciation as valid evidence, and other Inquisitorial practices to achieve swift results. Moreover, the authors insist that the death penalty for convicted witches is the only sure remedy against witchcraft. They maintain that the lesser penalty of banishment prescribed by "Canon Episcopi" for those convicted of harmful sorcery does not apply to the new breed of witches, whose unprecedented evil justifies capital punishment.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The treatise often makes references to the Bible and Aristotelian thought, and it is heavily influenced by the philosophical tenets of Neoplatonism. The first section of the book's main text is written using the scholastic methodology of Thomas Aquinas characterized by a mode of "disputed questions" most notably used in his "Summa Theologica". It was a standard mode of argumentation in scholastic discourse with a long tradition. Most of the citations in the "Malleus" come from multiple works of Aquinas, a highly influential author in theology. Aquinas is a main source for Section I but is cited in all sections; "Formicarius" by Johannes Nider is the important source for Section II, and "Directorium Inquisitorum" by Spanish inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric is a crucial source for Section III.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The ancient subjects of astronomy, philosophy, and medicine were being reintroduced to the West at this time, as well as a plethora of ancient texts being rediscovered and studied. The "Malleus" also mentions astrology and astronomy, which had recently been reintroduced to the West through the ancient works of Pythagoras. The "Malleus" is also heavily influenced by the subjects of divination, astrology, and healing rituals the Church inherited from antiquity.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Importantly, Kramer and Sprenger were convinced that God would never permit an innocent person to be convicted of witchcraft.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The "Malleus" recommended not only torture but also deception in order to obtain confessions: "And when the implements of torture have been prepared, the judge, both in person and through other good men zealous in the faith, tries to persuade the prisoner to confess the truth freely; but, if he will not confess, he bid attendants make the prisoner fast to the strappado or some other implement of torture. The attendants obey forthwith, yet with feigned agitation. Then, at the prayer of some of those present, the prisoner is loosed again and is taken aside and once more persuaded to confess, being led to believe that he will in that case not be put to death."


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: All confessions acquired with the use of torture had to be confirmed: "And note that, if he confesses under the torture, he must afterward be conducted to another place, that he may confirm it and certify that it was not due alone to the force of the torture."


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: However if there was no confirmation, torture could not be repeated, but it was allowed to continue at a specified day: "But, if the prisoner will not confess the truth satisfactorily, other sorts of tortures must be placed before him, with the statement that unless he will confess the truth, he must endure these also. But, if not even thus he can be brought into terror and to the truth, then the next day or the next but one is to be set for a continuation of the tortures – not a repetition, for it must not be repeated unless new evidences produced. The judge must then address to the prisoners the following sentence: We, the judge, etc., do assign to you, such and such a day for the continuation of the tortures, that from your own mouth the truth may be heard, and that the whole may be recorded by the notary."


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The treatise describes how women and men become inclined to practice witchcraft. The text argues that women are more susceptible to demonic temptations through the manifold weaknesses of their sex. It was believed that they were weaker in faith and more carnal than men. Michael Bailey claims that most of the women accused as witches had strong personalities and were known to defy convention by overstepping the lines of proper female decorum. After the publication of the "Malleus", it seems as though about three quarters of those individuals prosecuted as witches were women.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Witches were usually female. The reasons for this is the suggestion that women are "prone to believing and because the demon basically seeks to corrupt the faith, he assails them in particular." They also have a "temperament towards flux" and "loose tongues". They "are defective in all the powers of both soul and body" and are stated to be more lustful than men.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The major reason is that at the foundation of sorcery is denial of faith and "woman, therefore, is evil as a result of nature because she doubts more quickly in the faith." Men could be witches, but were considered rarer, and the reasons were also different. The most common form of male witch mentioned in the book is the sorcerer-archer. The book is rather unclear, but the impetus behind male witches seems to come more from desire for power than from disbelief or lust, as it claims is the case for female witches.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Indeed, the very title of the "Malleus Maleficarum" is feminine, alluding to the idea that it was women who were the villains. Otherwise, it would be the "Malleus Maleficorum" (the masculine form of the Latin noun "maleficus" or "malefica," 'witch'). In Latin, the feminine "maleficarum" would only be used for women, while the masculine "maleficorum" could be used for men alone or for both sexes if together. The "Malleus Maleficarum" accuses witches of infanticide, cannibalism and casting evil spells to harm their enemies as well as having the power to steal a man's penis. It goes on to give accounts of witches committing these crimes.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Arguments favoring discrimination against women are explicit in the handbook. Those arguments are not novel but constitute a selection from the long tradition of Western misogynist writings. However, according to Brauner, they are combined to produce new meanings and result in a comprehensive theory. It mixes elements borrowed from "Formicarius" (1435), "Preceptorium divinae legis" (1475) and "Lectiones super ecclesiastes" (1380).Kramer and Sprenger develop a powerful sex-specific theory of witchcraft based on a hierarchical and dualistic view of the world. Everything exists in pairs of opposites: God and Satan, Mary and Eve, and men (or virgins) and women. Each positive principle in a pair is delineated by its negative pole. Perfection is defined not as the integration or preservation of opposites, but rather as the extermination of the negative element in a polar pair. Because women are the negative counterpart to men, they corrupt male perfection through witchcraft and must be destroyed.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Although authors give many examples of male witchery in the second part of the handbook, those witchcraft trials that are independently confirmed and that were led by Kramer himself are related to persecution of women almost exclusively. They took place in Ravensburg near Constance (1484) and Innsbruck (since 1485). According to Brauner, trial records confirm that Kramer believed that women are by nature corrupt and evil. His position was in harmony with the scholastic theory at the time.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: In contrast, Sprenger never conducted a witch trial though he was consulted in a few cases. Kramer and Sprenger use a metaphor of a world turned upside down by women of which concubines are the most wicked, followed by midwives and then by wives who dominate their husbands. Authors warn of imminent arrival of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible and that men risk bewitchment that leads to impotence and sensation of castration. Brauner explains authors' prescription on how a woman can avoid becoming a witch: According to the "Malleus", the only way a woman can avoid succumbing to her passions – and becoming a witch – is to embrace a life of devout chastity in a religious retreat. But the monastic life is reserved to the spiritually gifted few. Therefore, most women are doomed to become witches, who cannot be redeemed; and the only recourse open to the authorities is to ferret out and exterminate all witches.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Strixology in the "Malleus Maleficarum" is characterized by a very specific conception of what a witch is, one that differs dramatically from earlier times. The word used, malefica, carries an explicit condemnation absent in other words referring to women with supernatural powers. The conception of witches and of magic by extension is one of evil. It differs from earlier conceptions of witchcraft that were much more generalized.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: This is the point in history where "witchcraft constituted an independent antireligion". The witch lost her powerful position vis-a-vis the deities; the ability to force the deities comply with her wishes was replaced by a total subordination to the devil. In short, "[t]he witch became Satan's puppet." This conception of witches was "part of a conception of magic that is termed by scholars as 'Satanism' or 'diabolism'". In this conception, a witch was a member of "a malevolent society presided over by Satan himself and dedicated to the infliction of malevolent acts of sorcery ("maleficia") on others."


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: According to Mackay, this concept of sorcery is characterized by the conviction that those guilty engage in six activities:


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: In the "Malleus" demons are the ones who tempt humans to sorcery and are the main figures in the witches' vows. They interact with witches, usually sexually. The book claims that it is normal for all witches "to perform filthy carnal acts with demons." This is a major part of human-demon interaction and demons do it "not for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of corrupting."


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: It is worth noting that not all demons do such things. The book claims that "the nobility of their nature causes certain demons to balk at committing certain actions and filthy deeds." Though the work never gives a list of names or types of demons, like some demonological texts or spellbooks of the era, such as the "Liber Juratus", it does indicate different types of demons. For example, it devotes large sections to incubi and succubi and questions regarding their roles in pregnancies, the submission of witches to incubi, and protections against them.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: In the 19th century, Joseph Hansen, a historian who was appalled by the witch-craze and those who carried it out, first proposed that coauthorship by Sprenger was a falsehood presented by Institoris (Kramer) and that approbation is "partially" a forgery.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Christopher Mackay, author of the modern academic translation of the "Malleus" into English offers rebuttals to arguments of proponents of this theory and in an interview gives an accessible summary:


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The argument was made in the nineteenth century by a scholar hostile to what the Malleus stood for that the approbation was a forgery by Institoris and that Sprenger had nothing to do with the composition. The evidence for this is in my view very tenuous (and the main argument is clearly invalid). Nonetheless, once the argument was put forward, it took on a life of its own, and people continue to advance arguments in favor of the idea that Sprenger's involvement was a falsification perpetrated by Institoris, despite the fact that this argument was vitiated from the start.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: In addition, Mackay points out that allegations raised in support of this theory that supposedly two of the signatories had not in fact signed the approbation are unsubstantiated.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: A similar response is offered by the author of the first translation of the "Malleus" into English Montague Summers. In his introduction, he ignores completely the theory that joint authorship or approbation could be a mystification. Nonetheless, he mentions briefly that it was questioned whether Kramer or Sprenger contributed more to the work. He comments that "in the case of such a close collaboration any such inquiry seems singularly superfluous and nugatory".


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Broedel, a historian who writes that it is likely that Sprenger's contribution was minimal, nonetheless says that "Sprenger certainly wrote the "Apologia auctoris" which prefaces the "Malleus" and agreed to be a coauthor.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: "Encyclopædia Britannica" and "The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft and Wicca" ignore completely Hansen's theory and list Sprenger and Kramer as co-authors.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Wolfgang Behringer argues that Sprenger's name was only added as an author beginning in 1519, thirty-three years after the book was first published and decades after Sprenger's own death. One of Sprenger's friends who was still alive denounced the addition of Sprenger's name as a forgery, stating that Sprenger had nothing to do with the book.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Many historians have also pointed out that Sprenger's actual views in his confirmed writings are often the opposite of the views in the "Malleus", and Sprenger was unlikely to have been a colleague of Kramer since Sprenger in fact banned Kramer from preaching and entering Dominican convents within his jurisdiction, and spoke out against him on many occasions.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The alleged approval from the theologians at Cologne, which Kramer included in the "Malleus" with a list of names of theologians who he claimed approved the book, has also been questioned by many historians, since in 1490 the clergy at Cologne condemned the book and at least two of the clergy listed by Kramer, Thomas de Scotia and Johann von Wörde, publicly denied having approved the "Malleus".


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Jacob Sprenger's name was added as an author beginning in 1519, 33 years after the book's first publication and 24 years after Sprenger's death.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Jenny Gibbons, a Neo-Pagan and a historian, writes: "Actually the Inquisition immediately rejected the legal procedures Kramer recommended and censured the inquisitor himself just a few years after the "Malleus" was published. Secular courts, not inquisitorial ones, resorted to the "Malleus"".


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The preface also includes an allegedly unanimous approbation from the University of Cologne's Faculty of Theology. Nevertheless, many historians have argued that it is well established by sources outside the "Malleus" that the university's theology faculty condemned the book for unethical procedures and for contradicting Catholic theology on a number of important points : "just for good measure Institoris forged a document granting their apparently unanimous approbation."


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: In 1484 Heinrich Kramer had made one of the first attempts at prosecuting alleged witches in the Tyrol region. It was not a success and he was asked to leave the city of Innsbruck. According to Diarmaid MacCulloch, writing the book was Kramer's act of self-justification and revenge. Ankarloo and Clark claim that Kramer's purpose in writing the book was to explain his own views on witchcraft, systematically refute arguments claiming that witchcraft does not exist, discredit those who expressed skepticism about its reality, claim that those who practiced witchcraft were more often women than men, and to convince magistrates to use Kramer's recommended procedures for finding and convicting witches.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Kramer wrote the "Malleus" following his expulsion from Innsbruck by the local bishop, due to charges of illegal behavior against Kramer himself, and because of Kramer's obsession with the sexual habits of one of the accused, Helena Scheuberin, which led the other tribunal members to suspend the trial.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Kramer received a papal bull, "Summis desiderantes affectibus", in 1484. It directed Bishop of Strasburg (then Albert of Palatinate-Mosbach) to accept the authority of Heinrich Kramer as an Inquisitor, although the motivation of the papal bull was likely political. The "Malleus Maleficarum" was finished in 1486 and the papal bull was included as part of its preface, implying papal approval for the work.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Kramer was intensely writing and preaching until his death in Bohemia in 1505. He was asked by Nuremberg council to provide expert consultation on the procedure of witch trial in 1491. His prestige was not fading. In 1495 he was summoned by the Master General of the Order, Joaquin de Torres, O.P. to Venice and gave very popular public lectures and disputations. They were worthy of presence and patronage of Patriarch of Venice.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: He also wrote treatises "Several Discourses and Various Sermons upon the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist" (Nuremberg, 1496); "A Tract Confuting the Errors of Master Antonio degli Roselli" (Venice, 1499); followed by "The Shield of Defence of the Holy Roman Church Against the Picards and Waldenses" which were quoted by many authors. He was appointed as papal nuncio and his assignment as inquisitor was changed to Bohemia and Moravia by Pope Alexander VI in 1500.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Sprenger continued his work as Inquisitor Extraordinary for the Provinces of Mainz, Trèves and Cologne. Later, he was elected Provincial Superior of the whole German Province (in 1488). He had enormous responsibilities. He received a letter from the pope praising his enthusiasm and energy in 1495.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Summers observes that 17th-century "Dominican chroniclers, such as Quétif and Échard, number Kramer and Sprenger among the glories and heroes of their Order".


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Sex-specific theory developed in the "Malleus Maleficarum" laid the foundations for widespread consensus in early modern Germany on the evil nature of witches as women. Later works on witchcraft have not agreed entirely with the "Malleus" but none of them challenged the view that women were more inclined to be witches than men. It was accepted so that very few authors saw the need to explain why witches are women. Those who did, attributed female witchery to the weakness of body and mind (the old medieval explanation) and a few to female sexuality.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Some authors argue that the book's publication was not as influential as earlier authors believed. According to MacCulloch, the "Malleus Maleficarum" was one of several key factors contributing to the witch craze, along with popular superstition, and tensions created by the Reformation. However, according to "Encyclopædia Britannica":


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: Between 1487 and 1520, twenty editions of the "Malleus Maleficarum" were published, and another sixteen between 1574 and 1669. The "Malleus Maleficarum" was able to spread throughout Europe rapidly in the late 15th and at the beginning of the 16th century due to the innovation of the printing press in the middle of the 15th century by Johannes Gutenberg. The invention of printing some thirty years before the first publication of the "Malleus Maleficarum" instigated the fervor of witch hunting, and, in the words of Russell, "the swift propagation of the witch hysteria by the press was the first evidence that Gutenberg had not liberated man from original sin."


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The late 15th century was also a period of religious turmoil. The "Malleus Maleficarum" and the witch craze that ensued took advantage of the increasing intolerance of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe, where the Protestant and Catholic camps respectively, pitted against one another, each zealously strove to maintain what they each deemed to be the purity of faith.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The Catholic Counter-Reformation would eventually even out this religious turmoil, but until then both the Catholics and Protestants constantly battled for what they believed was right.


title: Malleus Maleficarum

text: The Latin book was firstly translated by J. W. R. Schmidt into German in 1906; an expanded edition of three volumes was published in 1923. Montague Summers was responsible for the first English translation in 1929.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was also related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, and translation theory. He also made major translations into German of the "Tableaux Parisiens" section of Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du mal" and parts of Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu".


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin committed suicide at Portbou on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the invading Wehrmacht.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in the Berlin of the German Empire (1871–1918). Walter's father, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who had relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader in Berlin; he later married Pauline Schönflies. He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Walter's uncle, William Stern (born Wilhelm Louis Stern; 1871-1938), was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ). He also had a cousin, Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund Stern; 1902-1992), a German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist who studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Through his mother, Walter's great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled to the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. In his youth, Walter was of fragile health and so in 1905 the family sent him to Hermann-Lietz-Schule Haubinda, a boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in 1907, having returned to Berlin, he resumed his schooling at the Kaiser Friedrich School.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg, but at summer semester's end he returned to Berlin and matriculated at the University of Berlin to continue studying philosophy. There, Benjamin had his first exposure to Zionism, which had not been part of his liberal upbringing. This gave him occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism. Benjamin distanced himself from political and nationalist Zionism, instead developing in his own thinking what he called a kind of "cultural Zionism"an attitude that recognized and promoted Judaism and Jewish values. In Benjamin's formulation, his Jewishness meant a commitment to the furtherance of European culture. He wrote: "My life experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active ... For Judaism is to me in no sense an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and representative of the spiritual." This was a position Benjamin largely held lifelong.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: It was as a speaker and debater in the milieu of the s German Youth Movement that Benjamin was first encountered by Gershom Scholem and later Martin Buber although he'd parted ways with the youth group before they'd become properly acquainted. Elected president of the "Freie Studentenschaft" (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change. When not reelected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg to study, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert; at that time he traveled to France and Italy.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Benjamin's attempt to volunteer for service at the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was rejected by the army. Benjamin later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription, allowing him to continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Charles Baudelaire. His conspicuous refuge in Switzerland on dubious medical grounds was a likely factor in his ongoing challenges in obtaining academic employment after the war.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: The next year, 1915, Benjamin moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at the University of Munich, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem; the latter became a friend. In that year, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In 1917 Benjamin transferred to the University of Bern; there he met Ernst Bloch, and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner), whom he married. They had a son, Stefan Rafael, in 1918. In 1919 Benjamin earned his PhD "summa cum laude" with the dissertation "Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik" ("The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism").


title: Walter Benjamin

text: For his post-doctoral thesis in 1920, Benjamin hit upon an idea very similar to the thesis proposed by Heidegger in the latter's own postdoctoral project ("Dun Scotus: Theory of Categories and Meaning"). Wolfram Eilenberger writes that Benjamin's plan was, "to legitimize [his theory of language] with reference to a largely forgotten tradition [found in the archaic writings of Duns Scotus], and to strike the sparks of systematization from the apparent disjunct among modern, logical, and analytical linguistic philosophy and medieval speculations on language that fell under the heading of theology". After Gershom Scholem sympathetically informed his friend that his interest in the concept had been pre-empted by Heidegger's earlier publication, Benjamin seems to have derived a lifelong antagonism toward the rival philosopher whose major insights, over the course of both of their careers, sometimes overlapped and sometimes conflicted with Benjamin's. Incidentally, at that time Heidegger was soon to embark on a love affair with Hannah Arendt, later related to Benjamin through marriage to his cousin.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Later, unable to support himself and family, Benjamin returned to Berlin and resided with his parents. In 1921 he published the essay ""Zur Kritik der Gewalt" (Toward the Critique of Violence)". At this time Benjamin first became socially acquainted with Leo Strauss, and he remained an admirer of Strauss and his work throughout his life.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Starting in adolescence, in a trend of episodic behavior that was to remain true throughout his life, Benjamin was a maven within an important community during a critically important historical period: the left-intelligentsia of interwar Berlin and Paris. Acquaintance with the eccentric critic was a connecting thread for a variety of major figures in metaphysics, philosophy, theology, the visual arts, theater, literature, radio, politics and various other domains. Benjamin was less of an organizer, impresario, or celebrity author and more of an occult, Zelig-like figure who just happened to be present on the outskirts of an improbably numerous inventory of the most important events within the intellectual ferment of the interwar-period in Weimar Germany and to interpret those events in a peculiar and sometimes unsettlingly premonitory style.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: He was in the crowd at the conference where Kurt Gödel first described the incompleteness theorem. He was an early draft script reader, comrade and frequent house-guest of Bertolt Brecht's (the most innovative writer and director of the Berlin theater scene, memorably mythologized in the musical Cabaret). Martin Buber took an interest in Benjamin, but the younger author declined to contribute to Buber’s journal because it was too exoteric. He hung out with Ernst Bloch while the older author was writing the "Spirit of Utopia". Now a lesser known work, Bloch's "Utopia" is included as the representative Bolshevik Jewish work in a group of six prophetic, apocalyptic interwar German books that, George Steiner writes, "were more than books in their dimensions and extremity", characterizing the end-times ambience of thought in Germany during the Weimar period and setting the metaphysical tone of the era whose climax came with the Second World War from the perspective of German intelligentsia contemporary to that moment (other entries in this list include "Being & Time" by Martin Heidegger, "The Decline of the West" by Oswald Spengler, "The Epistle to the Romans" by Karl Barth, "The Star of Redemption" by Franz Rosenzweig and "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler). It was Bloch's commission that inspired Benjamin's work on the theory of categories, according to Scholem. This was to be a consequential theme throughout his career.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: One of Benjamin's high-school best friends (also a German Jew) committed suicide by gas at the outbreak of the first World War, while another was the one of the Jewish liaisons who took Nazi diplomats on a tour of Palestine during a period of Nazi-Zionist relations when the Third Reich was preparing the European Zionists to believe that Europe's Jews would be forcibly emigrated from the Reich, deflecting communal attention from the looming possibility of the strategy that was actually executed: mass extermination in the death camps. His oldest friend, and sole executor of his literary estate, Gershom Scholem would resurrect the canonical books of the Kabballah from private libraries and ancient document dumps called Genizah when they flooded into Israel as darkness fell in the West during the time leading up to, coinciding with, and following after the Holocaust.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In 1923, when the Institute for Social Research was founded, later to become home to the Frankfurt School, Benjamin published "Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens". At that time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács, whose "The Theory of the Novel" (1920) much influenced him. Meanwhile, the inflation in the Weimar Republic after the war made it difficult for Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his son's family. At the end of 1923 Scholem emigrated to Palestine, a country under the British Mandate of Palestine; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Benjamin (and family) to leave the Continent for the Middle East.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In 1924 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in the "Neue Deutsche Beiträge" magazine, published Benjamin's "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" ("Goethe's Elective Affinities"), about Goethe's third novel, "Die Wahlverwandtschaften" (1809). Later that year Benjamin and Bloch resided on the Italian island of Capri; Benjamin wrote "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels" ("The Origin of German Tragic Drama") as a habilitation dissertation meant to qualify him as a tenured university professor in Germany. At Bloch's suggestion, he read Lukács's "History and Class Consciousness" (1923). He also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis, then residing in Moscow; he became her lover and was a lasting intellectual influence on him.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: A year later, in 1925, Benjamin withdrew "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" as his possible qualification for the habilitation teaching credential at the University of Frankfurt at Frankfurt am Main, fearing its possible rejection; he was not to be an academic instructor. Working with Franz Hessel he translated the first volumes of Marcel Proust's "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu" ("In Search of Lost Time"). The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers "Frankfurter Zeitung" (The Frankfurt Times) and "Die Literarische Welt" (The Literary World); that paid enough for him to reside in Paris for some months. In December 1926, the year his father died, Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Lācis and found her ill in a sanatorium.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: During his stay in Moscow, he was asked by the editorial board of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to write an article on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for the first edition of the encyclopedia. Benjamin's article was ultimately rejected, with reviewer Anatoly Lunacharsky (then the People's Commissar of Education) characterizing it as "non-encyclopedic", and only a small part of the text prepared by Benjamin was included in the encyclopedia. During Benjamin's lifetime, the article was not published in its entirety. A Russian translation of the article was published in the Russian edition of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in 1996.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In 1927, he began "Das Passagen-Werk" ("The Arcades Project"), his uncompleted "magnum opus", a study of 19th-century Parisian life. The same year, he saw Scholem in Berlin, for the last time, and considered emigrating from Germany to Palestine. In 1928, he and Dora separated (they divorced two years later, in 1930); in the same year he published "Einbahnstraße" ("One-Way Street"), and a revision of his habilitation dissertation "Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels" ("The Origin of German Tragic Drama"). In 1929 Berlin, Lācis, then an assistant to Bertolt Brecht, socially presented the intellectuals to each other. In that time, Benjamin also briefly embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler's assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany, Benjamin left Germany for the Spanish island of Ibiza for some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered killing himself. Perceiving the sociopolitical and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) as the "de facto" Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, he moved to Paris, but before doing so he sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertolt Brecht's house, and at Sanremo, where his ex-wife Dora lived.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer, and received funds from the Institute for Social Research, later going permanently into exile. In Paris, he met other refugee German artists and intellectuals; he befriended Hannah Arendt, novelist Hermann Hesse, and composer Kurt Weill. In 1936, a first version of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (originally written in German in 1935) was published in French ("L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée") by Max Horkheimer in the "Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung" journal of the Institute for Social Research. It was a critique of the authenticity of mass-produced art; he wrote that a mechanically produced copy of an artwork can be taken somewhere the original could never have gone, arguing that the presence of the original is "prerequisite to the concept of authenticity". In 1937 Benjamin worked on "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire" ("The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the "Arcades Project" manuscript), and joined the College of Sociology. In 1938 he paid a last visit to Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi régime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Benjamin was arrested by the French government and incarcerated for three months in a prison camp near Nevers, in central Burgundy.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Returning to Paris in January 1940, he wrote "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" ("On the Concept of History", later published as "Theses on the Philosophy of History"). While the Wehrmacht was pushing back the French Army, on 13 June Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes, just a day before the Germans entered the capital with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the US that Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin planned to travel to the US from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via Francoist Spain, then ostensibly a neutral country.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: The historical record indicates that he safely crossed the French–Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou, in Catalonia on 25 September 1940. The Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish refugee group Benjamin had joined. They were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France the next day, which would have thwarted Benjamin's plans to travel to the United States. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets that night, while staying at the "Hotel de Francia"; the official Portbou register records 26 September 1940 as the date of death. Benjamin's colleague Arthur Koestler, also fleeing Europe, attempted suicide by taking some of the morphine tablets, but survived. Benjamin's brother Georg was murdered at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. Despite his suicide, Benjamin was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: The others in his party were allowed passage the next day (maybe because Benjamin's suicide shocked Spanish officials), and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, passed the manuscript of "Theses" to Adorno. Another completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. Some critics speculate that it was his "Arcades Project" in a final form; this is very unlikely as the author's plans for the work had changed in the wake of Adorno's criticisms in 1938, and it seems clear that the work was flowing over its containing limits in his last years.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In addition to his lifelong dialogue in letters with Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin maintained an intense correspondence with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer, even from their New York City residence. At other times he received funding from Hebrew University or from funds made available by Martin Buber and his publishing associates including Salman Schocken.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: The dynamism or conflict between these competing influences—Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory, Scholem's Jewish mysticism—were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover, the critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin's writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplary synthesis is "Theses on the Philosophy of History". At least one scholar, historian of religion Jason Josephson-Storm, has argued that Benjamin's diverse interests may be understood in part by understanding the influence of Western Esotericism on Benjamin. Some of Benjamin's key ideas were adapted from occultists and New Age figures including Eric Gutkind and Ludwig Klages, and his interest in esotericism is known to have extended far beyond the Jewish Kabbalah.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: "Theses on the Philosophy of History" is often cited as Benjamin's last complete work, having been completed, according to Adorno, in the spring of 1940. The Institute for Social Research, which had relocated to New York, published "Theses" in Benjamin's memory in 1942. Margaret Cohen writes in the "Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin":


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In the essay, Benjamin's famed ninth thesis struggles to reconcile the Idea of Progress in the present with the apparent chaos of the past:


title: Walter Benjamin

text: The final paragraph about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a harrowing final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up the interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, of attempts to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter".


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Perhaps Walter Benjamin's best known essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," identifies the perceptual shift that takes place when technological advancements emphasize speed and reproducibility. The aura is found in a work of art that contains presence. The aura is precisely what cannot be reproduced in a work of art: its original presence in time and space. He suggests a work of art's aura is in a state of decay because it is becoming more and more difficult to apprehend the time and space in which a piece of art is created.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: This essay also introduces the concept of the optical unconscious, a concept that identifies the subject's ability to identify desire in visual objects. This also leads to the ability to perceive information by habit instead of rapt attention.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels" ("The Origin of German Tragic Drama", 1928), is a critical study of German baroque drama, as well as the political and cultural climate of Germany during the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648). Benjamin presented the work to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 as the (postdoctoral) dissertation meant to earn him the "Habilitation" (qualification) to become a university instructor in Germany.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Professor Schultz of University of Frankfurt found "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" inappropriate for his "Germanistik" department (Department of German Language and Literature), and passed it to the Department of Aesthetics (philosophy of art), the readers of which likewise dismissed Benjamin's work. The university officials recommended that Benjamin withdraw "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels" as a "Habilitation" dissertation to avoid formal rejection and public embarrassment. He heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" as a book.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: "Einbahnstraße" ("One Way Street", 1928) is a series of meditations written primarily during the same phase as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," after Benjamin had met Asja Lācis on the beach at Capri in 1924. He finished the cycle in 1926, and put it out the same year that his failed thesis was published.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: It is a kind of a collage work. Greil Marcus compares certain formal qualities of the book to the graphic novel "Hundred Headless Women" by Max Ernst and André Breton, or to Walter Ruttman's "The Weekend" (an early sound collage film)"." The book avoids, "all semblance of linear-narrative...[offering] a jumble of sixty apparently autonomous short prose pieces: aphorisms, jokes, dream protocols, cityscapes, landscapes, and mindscapes; portions of writing manuals, trenchant contemporary political analysis; prescient appreciations of the child's psychology, behavior, and moods; decodings of bourgeois fashion, living arrangments and courtship patterns; and time and again, remarkable penetrations into the heart of every day things, what Benjamin would later call a mode of empathy with 'the soul of the commodity'" according to Michael Jennings in his introduction to the work. He continues: "Many of the pieces...first appeared in the feuilleton section," of newspapers and magazines which was "not a separate section but rather an area at the bottom of every page...and the spatial restrictions of the feuilleton played a decisive role in shaping the prose form on which the book is based."


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Written contemporaneously with Martin Heidegger's "Being & Time", Benjamin's work from this period explores much of the same territory: formally in his "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," and as sketches, allusions and asides in "One Way Street."


title: Walter Benjamin

text: The "Passagenwerk" ("Arcades Project", 1927–40) was Benjamin's final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century, especially about the "Passages couverts de Paris"—the covered passages that extended the culture of "flânerie" (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather made "flânerie" infeasible in the boulevards and streets proper. In this work Benjamin uses his fragmentary style to write about the rise of modern European urban culture. Several of the major published works that appeared in his lifetime—"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", "Paris, The Capital of the 19th Century", and his late essays and monograph on Baudelaire—are fragments of the book that he developed as standalone pieces for publication.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: The "Arcades Project", in its current form, brings together a massive collection of notes Benjamin filed together from 1927 to 1940.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Scholem said of Benjamin's prose: “Among the peculiarities of Benjamin’s philosophical prose—the critical and metaphysical prose, in which the Marxist element constitutes something like an inversion of the metaphysical-theological—is its enormous suitability for canonization; I might almost say for quotation as a kind of Holy Writ." Scholem commentary on this phenomena continue at length. Briefly: Benjamin's texts have an occult quality in the sense that passages appearing quite lucid today may seem impenetrable later, and elements that read as indecipherable or incoherent now may read as transparently obvious upon later revisitation.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Susan Sontag said that in Benjamin's writing, sentences did not originate ordinarily, do not progress into one another, and delineate no obvious line of reasoning, as if each sentence "had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes", a "freeze-frame baroque" style of writing and cogitation. "His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct". The occasional difficulties of Benjamin's style are essential to his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, his goal in later works was to use intertexts to reveal aspects of the past that cannot, and should not, be understood within greater, monolithic constructs of historical understanding.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Benjamin's writings identify him as a modernist for whom the philosophic merges with the literary: logical philosophic reasoning cannot account for all experience, especially not for self-representation via art. He presented his stylistic concerns in "The Task of the Translator", wherein he posits that a literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text. Moreover, in the deformed text, otherwise hidden aspects of the original, source-language text are elucidated, while previously obvious aspects become unreadable. Such translational modification of the source text is productive; when placed in a specific constellation of works and ideas, newly revealed affinities, between historical objects, appear and are productive of philosophical truth.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: His work "The Task of the Translator" was later commented by the French translation scholar Antoine Berman ("L'âge de la traduction").


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Since the publication of "Schriften" ("Writings", 1955), 15 years after his death, Benjamin's work—especially the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (French edition, 1936)—has become of seminal importance to academics in the humanities disciplines. In 1968, the first Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft was established by the German thinker, poet and artist Natias Neutert, as a free association of philosophers, writers, artists, media theoreticians and editors. They did not take Benjamin's body of thought as a scholastic "closed architecture [...], but as one in which all doors, windows and roof hatches are widely open", as the founder Neutert put it—more poetically than politically—in his manifesto. The members felt liberated to take Benjamin's ideas as a welcome touchstone for social change.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Like the first Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft, a new one, established in 2000, researches and discusses the imperative that Benjamin formulated in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest the tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it."


title: Walter Benjamin

text: The successor society was registered in Karlsruhe (Germany); Chairman of the Board of Directors was Bernd Witte, an internationally recognized Benjamin scholar and Professor of Modern German Literature in Düsseldorf (Germany). Its members come from 19 countries, both within and beyond Europe and it provides an international forum for discourse. The Society supported research endeavors devoted to the creative and visionary potential of Benjamin's works and their view of 20th century modernism. Special emphasis had been placed upon strengthening academic ties to Latin America and Eastern and Central Europe.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: The society conducts conferences and exhibitions, as well as interdisciplinary and intermedial events, at regular intervals and different European venues:


title: Walter Benjamin

text: In 2017 Walter Benjamin's "Arcades Project" was reinterpreted in an exhibition curated by Jens Hoffman, held at the Jewish Museum in New York City. The exhibition, entitled "The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin", featured 36 contemporary artworks representing the 36 convolutes of Benjamin's Project.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: A commemorative plaque is located by the residence where Benjamin lived in Berlin during the years 1930–1933: (Prinzregentenstraße 66, Berlin-Wilmersdorf). A commemorative plaque is located in Paris (10 rue Dombasle, 15th) where Benjamin lived in 1938–1940.


title: Walter Benjamin

text: Close by Kurfürstendamm, in the district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, a town square created by Hans Kollhoff in 2001 was named "Walter-Benjamin-Platz". There is a memorial sculpture by the artist Dani Karavan at Portbou, where Walter Benjamin ended his life. It was commissioned to mark 50 years since his death.


title: Dark academia

text: Dark academia is a social media aesthetic and subculture concerned with higher education, writing/poetry, the arts, and classic Greek and Gothic architecture. The subculture is associated with ancient art and classic literature.


title: Dark academia

text: The fashion of the 1930s and 1940s features prominently in the dark academia aesthetic, particularly clothing associated with attendance at Oxbridge, Ivy League schools, and prep schools of the period. A number of the articles of clothing most associated with the aesthetic are cardigans, blazers, dress shirts, plaid skirts, Oxford shoes, and clothing made of houndstooth and tweed, its colour palette consisting mainly of black, white, beige, browns, dark green, and occasionally navy blue.


title: Dark academia

text: The subculture draws on idealised aesthetics of higher education and academia, often with books and libraries featuring prominently. Activities such as calligraphy, museum visits, libraries, coffee shops, and all-night studying sessions are common among proponents.


title: Dark academia

text: Seasonal imagery of autumn is also common. Imagery of Gothic architecture and Collegiate Gothic architecture, candlelight, dark wooden furniture, and dense, cluttered rooms often occurs. The subculture has been described as maximalist and nostalgic. Universities that are often featured in dark academia imageboards include Oxbridge, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow and Harvard University.


title: Dark academia

text: The subculture shares similarities with Goth subculture, tending to romanticise the finding of beauty and poetry in dark themes. Tim Brinkhof of Big Think has stated that "moody architecture and philosophical pessimism" are key aspects of the aesthetic. Hannah Southwick of USA Today has described it as a "melancholic aesthetic," citing a fashion stylist who described it as "boarding school meets goth enthusiast."


title: Dark academia

text: Donna Tartt's novel "The Secret History", published in 1992, which tells the story of a murder that takes place within a group of classics students at an elite New England college, has been credited as being the inspiration for the dark academia literary genre. In 2015, the genre began to grow into an aesthetic on social media site Tumblr, with the creation of a book club that centered around classic and gothic novels. The aesthetic then grew into a distinct subculture, seeing a wave of popularisation on Instagram led by Ryan Taylor and Maria Teresa Negro in 2017.


title: Dark academia

text: Dark academia rose in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2020 the 'darkacademia' hashtag had over 90 million views on TikTok, by October 2021 it had over 500 million, and by October 2022 over 3 billion tiktok views. Increased interest in dark academia been credited to the shutdown of schools.


title: Dark academia

text: A number of classic works of literature, such as Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and "Maurice" by E. M. Forster, as well as the works of writers such as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, have been cited as either influential or popular among the subculture, or fitting within the subculture's aesthetics. More recent books, such as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, "If We Were Villains" by M. L. Rio, "Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke, and "Ninth House" by Leigh Bardugo have also been included.


title: Dark academia

text: A number of films and TV series have also been credited as fitting into the aesthetic. The 1989 film "Dead Poets Society" and the 2013 film "Kill Your Darlings" have in particular been credited as among the sources of inspiration for dark academia. Writing for "Screen Rant", Kayleena Pierce-Bohen has listed TV shows such as "Ares", "The Umbrella Academy", "A Series of Unfortunate Events", "The Queen’s Gambit" and "The Magicians" as among works that fit within the aesthetics.


title: Dark academia

text: "BookRiot" writer Zoe Robertson stated that the subculture draws on "seductive depictions of shadowy extravagance" and reminds her "to see the rot in the foundations of an institution I can't stay away from, and build my own school in defiance." One writer compared it to the contemporary cottagecore lifestyle aesthetic, saying that while cottagecore requires a home in the country and leisure time for crafting, dark academia's "simple act of putting on a blazer and reading Dostoevsky is far more doable."


title: Dark academia

text: Some commentators have attributed the rise in popularity of the subculture as a reaction to cuts to university funding and the corporatisation of higher education. Honi Soit writer Ezara Norton stated that it "reveals a deep disillusionment with [education models that devalue knowledge unless it can be used to generate profit], and a longing for a space free to learn unencumbered by a neoliberal agenda." Writing for "Jacobin", Amelia Horgan argued that the trend was in part a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in students leaving campuses to learn in their family homes where many did not have access to adequate study space, providing "a fantasy of the university experience" which they were unable to obtain. However she also noted that the world presented in the aesthetic was very different to that of the contemporary university, highlighting trends in UK academia an example of the impacts of neoliberal policies on education, including long hours and casualisation for teaching staff and students having to work multiple part-time jobs to cover their costs.


title: Dark academia

text: In part in reaction to the growth of the subculture, the related "light academia" subculture has experienced a rise in popularity, often featuring lighter and softer imagery and colours and more overt emphasis on optimism.


title: Dark academia

text: Dark academia has been criticized for a variety of reasons, including the aesthetic's perceived Eurocentrism, lack of diversity and glamorisation of unhealthy lifestyle choices.


title: Dark academia

text: Critics of the aesthetic have argued that the English literary canon from which it draws inspiration is an overwhelmingly white one, with Tim Brinkof claiming that associated content creators "prefer to discuss Oscar Wilde and Emily Dickinson over Toni Morrison or James Baldwin". Sarah Burton, a sociology fellow at City, University of London, has noted that the aesthetic contains little representation of "most women, working class, people of colour, fatness, people with low economic or cultural capital, disability, caring and domestic activities and labour (especially the enjoyment of these), motherhood, queerness, and the mundanity of academic life". In response to the aesthetic's lack of diversity, efforts have been made to incorporate literary works from Black authors such as Langston Hughes into dark academia.


title: Dark academia

text: The sub-culture has also been criticised as elitist and as an "old money aesthetic." Drawing on the threefold typology of educational traditions outlined by Raymond Williams in his book "The Long Revolution", Amelia Horgan has described dark academia as being rooted in the attitudes of "old humanists committed to preserving and sustaining a traditional and hierarchical culture while preserving the legacy of humanistic study." Amy Crawford of the University of Dundee has stated that the sub-culture "tends to romanticise European upper-class education." Kevin N. Dalby of the University of Texas at Austin has stated that "its association with higher learning and Ivy League schools, in particular, creates elitism that does not enable just anyone to be a part of the group." Conversely, other commentators have noted that fashion items associated with the trend are easily and cheaply sourced from thrift stores.


title: Dark academia

text: Others have argued that the aesthetic places too much emphasis on the aesthetic of art and higher education instead of proper study and analysis of these works, leading to misinterpretations of the source material. It has also faced criticism for potentially glamourising unhealthy behaviours, such as sleep deprivation, overworking, and substance misuse.


title: Boat

text: A boat is a watercraft of a large range of types and sizes, but generally smaller than a ship, which is distinguished by its larger size, shape, cargo or passenger capacity, or its ability to carry boats.


title: Boat

text: Small boats are typically found on inland waterways such as rivers and lakes, or in protected coastal areas. However, some boats, such as the whaleboat, were intended for use in an offshore environment. In modern naval terms, a boat is a vessel small enough to be carried aboard a ship.


title: Boat

text: Boats vary in proportion and construction methods with their intended purpose, available materials, or local traditions. Canoes have been used since prehistoric times and remain in use throughout the world for transportation, fishing, and sport. Fishing boats vary widely in style partly to match local conditions. Pleasure craft used in recreational boating include ski boats, pontoon boats, and sailboats. House boats may be used for vacationing or long-term residence. Lighters are used to convey cargo to and from large ships unable to get close to shore. Lifeboats have rescue and safety functions.


title: Boat

text: Boats can be propelled by manpower (e.g. rowboats and paddle boats), wind (e.g. sailboats), and inboard/outboard motors (including gasoline, diesel, and electric).