Beatification: . . . the process of determining the sanctity of a person who has died and declaring him to be among the blessed in heaven; he is then entitled to public worship and usually, but not necessarly, canonized.
—Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) seems a singularly unprepossessing candidate for critical apotheosis. Professionally, the would-be philosopher was a failure. Personally, his life was ruled, if not by duplicity, then by abulia—a nearly pathological lack of decisiveness and resolve. At the dawn of World War II, still unable to master the world outside himself, he ended as its self-selected victim, killing himself at the age of forty-eight out of accumulated self-pity.

Born to a prosperous art dealer and antiquarian living in the Grunewald district of Berlin, Benjamin suffered a pampered childhood, in which he was subjected to such occasional traumas as seeing a poor person on the street, being grouped together higgledy-piggledy with other children at school, and having to take long shopping strolls with his mother. “My habit of seeming slower, more maladroit, more stupid than I am, had its origin in such walks,” he later remarked, “and has the great attendant danger of making me think myself quicker, more dexterous, and shrewder than I am.” As an adult, he would claim that he “came into the world under the sign of Saturn—the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.” In “A Berlin Chronicle,” the forty-year-old