Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama 1928). A completed manuscript which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. In 1917 he transferred to the University of Bern; there he met Ernst Bloch and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner) (1890–1964) whom he later married.

His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation alienation). Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism and is associated with the Frankfurt School.