In 1940, having been denied a safe haven in both Spain and France and without the means to travel to the United States, Benjamin committed suicide by way of an intentional morphine overdose rather than fall into Nazi hands. Benjamin spent most of the next seven years in Paris where he met the author George Batailles, to whom he entrusted The Arcades Project manuscript before his death. During this time, Benjamin, a Jew, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 after the Reichstag fire signaled Nazism had become the dominant political and philosophical ethos within the country. The project quickly expanded in scope, and Benjamin spent the next thirteen years working on it. Coetzee, The Arcades Project “suggests a new way of writing about a civilization using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above.” In 1927, Benjamin began writing The Arcades Project, originally conceiving it as a newspaper article. According to the South African author J.M. The "arcades" of its title refer to Paris's glass-covered pedestrian walkways, full of shops and gas lamps that light the corridors at night. Written between 19-the year of Benjamin's death-the book offers an architectural and cultural history of Paris during the nineteenth century. Published posthumously in 1999, The Arcades Project is an unfinished non-fiction book by German philosopher Walter Benjamin.
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