Author: Walter Benjamin

Gretel Adorno, née Karplus, was born in Berlin in 1902. She acquired a Ph D in chemistry, and directed a company that manufactured gloves between 1933 and 1937. She was in contact with numerous intelletuals during the late 1920s including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Bertolt Brecht. She met Theodor W. Adorno in 1923, and they married in London in exile in 1937. In 1938 they moved to the USA together. In 1953 she returned to Germany, and lived in Frankfurt am Main until her death in 1993. Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892, and took his own life in Port Bou (France) in 1940 while fleeing from the Nazis. He was a philosopher, critic, essayist, translator and writer, and can be considered one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.