The German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin was born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Berlin. In 1912 he began attending the University of Freiburg and graduated summa cum laude. However, his habilitation, “The origin of German tragic drama,” was ultimately rejected by the University of Frankfurt in 1925, and thereafter Benjamin was unable to secure steady academic employment. (The Origin of German Tragic Drama was later regarded as a classic of twentieth-century literary criticism.) In 1917 Benjamin married Dora Pollak, and a year later had a son, Stefan. For many years, Benjamin supported himself and his family through his work as a critic for Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Literarische Welt.