Perhaps symbolically, there is really no one "original text" for Benajmin's famous essay. He produced three different versions of the work, the earliest in Paris in the autumn of 1935, the second – which represented the form in which he decided he wanted the essay to be read – in 1936, and a third revision in 1939.

Nothing seems to be known for certain about the ultimate fate of any of these manuscripts. They may simply have been discarded by the printers who set the texts. But perhaps the most likely conclusion is that one or more was probably destroyed by the Gestapo, which seized Benjamin's library and his working papers in Paris in 1940 after he fled in an attempt to reach Spain, ultimately committing suicide on the French side of the Pyrenees.

On his journey into the mountains, Benjamin was carrying a briefcase – contents unknown. This disappeared after his death, and the inventory of personal possessions made by the French police after his death contains no mention of any manuscripts.

Benjamin is known to have passed some of his unfinished MSS. to friends for safekeeping before he left, which is how we come to have the notes he assembled for his magnum opus, the Arcades Project – they were kept safe during the war years by his friend Georges Bataille. But, sadly, there's no indication he did the same for any published MS, and so the originals of "The Work of Art" are almost certainly lost to us.

Sources

J.M. Coetzee, "The man who went shopping for truth", The Guardian, 20 January 2001

Rachele Dini, An Analysis of Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (2018)

Michael W. Jennings et al (eds), Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (2008)

David Wallace, "Walter Benjamin’s Unfinished Magnum Opus, Revisited Through Contemporary Art", The New Yorker, 9 May 2017