The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.

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.