Walter Bendix Schoenflies Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, the eldest of three children in a prosperous Berlin family from an assimilated Jewish background. At the age of 13, after a prolonged period of sickness, Benjamin was sent to a progressive co-educational boarding school in Haubinda, Thuringia, where he formed an important intellectual kinship with the liberal educational reformer Gustav Wyneken. On his return to Berlin, he began contributing to Der Anfang (‘The Beginning’), a journal dedicated to Wyneken’s principles on the spiritual purity of youth, articles which contain in embryonic form important ideas on experience and history that continue to occupy his mature thought. As a student at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau and Berlin, Benjamin attended lectures by the neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert and the sociologist Georg Simmel, whilst continuing to be actively involved in the growing Youth Movement. In 1914, however, Benjamin denounced his mentor and withdrew from the movement in response to a public lecture in which Wyneken praised the ethical experience that the outbreak of war afforded the young. In 1915 a friendship began between Benjamin and Gerhard (later Gershom) Scholem, a fellow student at Berlin. This relationship would have a lifelong influence upon Benjamin’s relation to Judaism and Kabbalism, notably in his interpretations of Kafka in the early 1930s and in the messianic interpretation of the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus in his later theses ‘On the Concept of History’. Scholem would prove instrumental in establishing and, in part, shaping the legacy of Benjamin’s works after his death (Raz-Krakotzkin 2013). 