Translator's Foreword "Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin" by Peter Szondi Berlin Childhood around 1900: Final Version Loggias * Imperial Panorama * Victory Column * The Telephone * Butterfly Hunt * Tiergarten * Tardy Arrival * Boys' Books * Winter Morning * At the Corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner * Two Enigmas * Market Hall * The Fever * The Otter * Peacock Island and Glienicke * News of a Death * Blumeshof 12 * Winter Evening * Crooked Street * The Sock * The Mummerehlen * Hiding Places * A Ghost * A Christmas Angel * Misfortunes and Crimes * Colors * The Sewing Box * The Moon * Two Brass Bands * The Little Hunchback * The Carousel * Sexual Awakening From the 1932-1934 Version Departure and Return * The Larder * News of a Death * The Mummerehlen * Society * The Reading Box * Monkey Theater * School Library * New Companion of German Youth * The Desk * Cabinets * Beggars and Whores * The Moon Complete Table of Contents, 1932-1934 Version Notes Credits for Illustrations Index Illustrations Walter Benjamin and his brother Georg The Victory Column on Konigsplatz The goldfish pond in the Tiergarten Berlin's Tiergarten in winter Market hall on Magdeburger Platz Interior of a middle-class German home Courtyard on Fischerstrasse in Old Berlin
Conceived in the early Thirties, the Berlin Childhood belongs in the orbit of that primal history of the modern world on which Benjamin was working during the last thirteen years of his life. It forms the subjective counterpart to the masses of materials brought together for the project on the Paris arcades. The historical archetypes he wished to lay out in their social-pragmatic and philosophical provenance in the study of Paris were to be illuminated by lightning flashes of immediate remembrance in the Berlin book, which throughout laments the irretrievability of what, once lost, congeals into an allegory of its own demise. For the images this book unearths and brings strangely near are not idyllic and not contemplative. Over them lies the shadow of the Third Reich. And through them dreamily runs a shudder at the long forgotten. -- Theodor Adorno, 1950 afterward to Berlin Childhood in Uber Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis. Howard Eiland teaches literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Conceived in the early Thirties, the Berlin Childhood belongs in
the orbit of that primal history of the modern world on which
Benjamin was working during the last thirteen years of his life. It
forms the subjective counterpart to the masses of materials brought
together for the project on the Paris arcades. The historical
archetypes he wished to lay out in their social-pragmatic and
philosophical provenance in the study of Paris were to be
illuminated by lightning flashes of immediate remembrance in the
Berlin book, which throughout laments the irretrievability of what,
once lost, congeals into an allegory of its own demise. For the
images this book unearths and brings strangely near are not idyllic
and not contemplative. Over them lies the shadow of the Third
Reich. And through them dreamily runs a shudder at the long
forgotten.
*Theodor Adorno, Afterword to Berlin Childhood around 1900
(1950)*
Berlin Childhood is an extraordinary autobiography in which the
19th-century city comes alive, not through abstract analysis or
even storytelling but through details like ‘anthracite as it falls
from the coal scuttle into a cast-iron stove, the dull pop of the
flame as it ignites the brass mantle.’ Benjamin transports us to
the fragmented immediacy of childhood, the city breathing just
beyond the confines of home.
*Wall Street Journal*
Benjamin’s autobiographical masterpiece,…Berlin Childhood around
1900, is a reminder of the astonishing courage and modesty of a
writer who, in the mid-193os, was fully and painfully aware both of
the coming catastrophe and of what precisely had been lost already
(both personally and collectively)… Berlin Childhood is an
extraordinary work: as if the extravagant wanderings of Joyce and
Proust in the labyrinths of memory and the city had been condensed
and refracted to a kaleidoscopic 160 pages. It is less a memoir
than a hallucinated inventory of the space of childhood, an eerie
projection of the most intimate and exposed places in the author’s
recollection, ‘images in which the experience of the big city is
precipitated in a child of the middle class’… Berlin Childhood
around 1900…imagines the city as a series of resonant nooks and
crannies, suffused with an adult’s longing that is never merely
individual but which reconstructs a whole historical era in the
sound of a carpet being beaten in a courtyard or the ‘giant bloom
of plush’ that was his grandmother’s apartment. Inevitably, minor
childhood traumas prefigure mature miseries, the time and space of
childhood and adulthood interweaving in the most telling ways.
*Irish Times*
Now is the time to read Walter Benjamin, when doors to the future
are slamming shut around us and freedom dribbles out of a modern
life that is squeezed by masses of information delivered at high
speeds and by a rigid morality that circumscribes behavior,
movement and thought… He intended his memoir Berlin Childhood
around 1900 as a goodbye to a city he loved but knew he could never
again inhabit. Begun in Spain and Italy in 1932, it was finished in
1938 but wasn’t published until 1950, 10 years after he died of an
intentional overdose of morphine while fleeing the Gestapo.
Benjamin regarded the book as a series of ‘expeditions into the
depths of memory,’ an act of ‘digging’ for the future.
*Los Angeles Times Book Review*
The Proustian ideal of the redemption of ‘lived experience’ lies at
the heart of Benjamin’s idiosyncratic memoir, Berlin Childhood
around 1900… In Berlin Childhood he offers us a cityscape of the
German capital as seen through the eyes of a precocious and
impressionable youth. He revisits his favorite childhood haunts—the
zoos, swimming pools, grammar schools, parks and railway
terminals—and milks them for utopian potential… In a sense,
Benjamin regarded childhood much as he did modern literature: as an
invaluable repository of utopian longings and dreams in an age of
industrialized degradation. Berlin Childhood represents his own
Proustian effort to recapture lost time, a time that any revolution
worthy of the name would seek to restore.
*The Nation*
Comprised of thirty prose pieces separated by montage-like
headings, Berlin Childhood provides a series of intimate glimpses
into Benjamin’s bourgeois Jewish upbringing. Some of the most
heartbreaking scenes include Christmas Day at his grandmother’s
house, ice skating, visiting an otter at the zoo, catching
butterflies, searching for peacock feathers, and wandering around
the streets. In these glimpses of an irretrievable past,
homesickness is tangible… The new and brilliantly executed
translation by Howard Eiland is of the final 1938 version.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Benjamin’s work continues to fascinate and delight because it has
something for everyone: the literary critic, art historian,
philosopher, urban theorist and architect. Whether he is talking
about children’s toys, Mickey Mouse, Surrealism, photography, or
Kafka, Benjamin has a knack for figuring out what they can tell us
about the wider world that produced them.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Begun in 1932 and extensively reworked between then and 1938,
Benjamin’s recollection of his childhood remained unpublished
during his lifetime. Now available in English for the first time,
this unconventional autobiography is of a piece with, and in some
respects the culmination of, Benjamin’s philosophical work. The
three abiding aspects of his character—the flâneur, the allegorist
and the collector—had already come together in Benjamin as a
child.
*London Review of Books*
Benjamin has an affecting approach to the victories of childhood,
exhibiting pleasure and regret at once… Benjamin was acutely aware
of history—the history of ideas, the history of violence and fear,
the history of commerce and objects. He annotated mentally whatever
he saw, then dwelt on it till it became meaningful, maybe
incandescent. He tried to see everyday life through the eyes of a
mystic.
*National Post*
Benjamin was a consummate polymath who wrote with erudition,
playfulness, and compassion… In Berlin Childhood around 1900,
Benjamin turns his scalpel on his childhood, Berlin, and the
capricious faculty of memory… The reader stands awestruck as
Benjamin flits effortlessly from memory to memory, from his
mother’s sewing box to the otter’s cage at the Berlin Zoological
Garden, seemingly unaware of the catastrophic shadow looming over
him. In Benjamin’s hands, the most pedestrian moments of an
inward-facing, bourgeois childhood become revelations about
discipline and ideology… As with Kafka, Benjamin’s prose shines
most brightly through the language of parable, the cliched, but
somehow unexpected aphorism… His province is the truth we always
knew but could never quite put into words, the eerily reminiscent
description.
*Tikkun*
Readers of Berlin Childhood will delight in Benjamin’s precise
prose, rich in simile and metaphor… A Proust devotee and
translator, Benjamin will appeal to enthusiasts of the French
master. Intensely modern in its treatment of the city, in its
unique approach to autobiography, Berlin Childhood, known only to
Benjamin admirers for too long and available only recently in
English, belongs in the canon of classic 20th-century texts.
*AmeriQuests*
Fifty years after its posthumous publication in German, this tidy
volume of urban vignettes—memories of imperial landmarks and family
vacations, school libraries and the arrival of the household
telephone—has earned its own afterlife. The later writings of
Roland Barthes are obvious descendents, and even Jacques Derrida’s
final fixations on hospitality and his native Algeria bear its
trace, however unconsciously… [Here are] some of the most marvelous
performances of a master stylist… Berlin Childhood around 1900
finally functions like all excavations of lost time: the little boy
may be innocent, the remembered milieu yet to be complicated, but
the effect is unquestionably narcotic.
*Harvard Book Review*
Walter Benjamin’s autobiography of his early childhood is a welcome
addition to the English language body of Benjamin’s work… Berlin
Childhood around 1900 offers a rich portrait of Berlin at the turn
of the twentieth century. Benjamin provides descriptive accounts of
his experiences at famous landmarks, such as the Victory Column and
the Tiergarten. His autobiography also provides an uncanny
perspective of middle-class life in Berlin… While this
autobiography focuses on Benjamin’s early childhood, it also
profoundly speaks to Benjamin’s anxieties about living in exile and
his precarious future… Benjamin’s is a rich autobiography that is
translated well and provided with helpful notes by Eiland.
*H-Net Reviews*
Berlin Childhood is not only an autobiographical text by the
literary critic, historian and philosopher Walter Benjamin.
Describing Berlin around 1900 from the point of view of a child
that is introduced into the customs and way of life of society, it
also explores a whole era in a nutshell, as Benjamin did on the
grand scale in his Arcades Project. And, not least, this book
examines the structure of an individual memory and its relation to
history.
*Metapsychology*
All serious general readers should know something about Benjamin
and his ideas… Harvard University Press is doing its best to make
this a realistic goal.
*Seven Oaks*
Howard Eiland’s translation…is incomparable.
*The Stranger*
[Berlin Childhood around 1900] is a series of miniature portraits
conjuring up people, objects, streets, and interior scenes that
reveal his childhood in a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family in
Berlin’s West End at the turn of the century. In the letter to
Gershom Scholem in 1932, Benjamin notes these childhood memories
are not narratives in the form of a chronicle, but individual
expeditions into the depths of memory. Benjamin is a writer who
deserves our full attention.
*Booklist*
Walter has been our philosophy pin up boy for a while now and this
book is another jewel in his crown. An autobiography as a series of
vignettes that concentrate on memory and how we understand not just
ourselves but the cities and places we live in. Underlines the
works he produced later in life with a profoundly personal
understanding. Brilliant.
*Bookshop catalogue of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London*
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