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In the preface, Benjamin notes the "social irretrievability of the past" and concludes that "the images of a childhood spent in the big city proved capable of forming the rudiments of my perception of history".<ref>''Беньямин, Вальтер.'' Берлинское детство на рубеже веков / пер. Г. В. Снежинской; науч. ред. A. B. Белобратов. — М.; Екатеринбург: Ад Маргинем Пресс; Кабинетный ученый, 2012. — pp. 9-10. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-5-91103-120-6</nowiki>.</ref><ref name=":20" /> The concept of image, which is central to Benjamin's analysis of modernity, is linked to allegory in Berlin Childhood. The concept of image, considered by many scholars to be central to Benjamin and his analysis of modernity, is linked to allegory as a symbol in Berlin Childhood, and also refers to the form of the text as a "thought-image".<ref>''Downing, Eric.'' [[iarchive:afterimagesphoto0000down|After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung]]. — Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. — P. 224. — <nowiki>ISBN 9780814333013</nowiki>.</ref> According to commentator Eli Friedländer, understanding the depths of the past from the perspective of the present presented Benjamin with the difficult task of linking individual memory and collective memory, which required a rethinking of a number of dichotomies: external and internal, subjective and objective, private and collective, image and concept, sensation and meaning.<ref>''Friedlander, Eli.'' Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — P. 104. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9</nowiki>.</ref> Despite some affinity with Proustian involuntary memory, Benjamin explicitly contrasts the private (and individual) lived event with the collective experience. The images go far beyond the consciousness of the narrator,<ref name=":16" /><ref>''Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie.'' Histoire et narration chez Walter Benjamin. — <abbr>P.</abbr>: L`Harmattan, 1994. — P. 122. — <nowiki>ISBN 2-7384-2415-5</nowiki>.</ref><ref name=":22" /> they are the memories of a particular person, but not in the context of the events of his life.<ref name=":21" /> By giving memory a spatial form, Benjamin transforms individual memories into collective experiences of places, moments, and situations.<ref name=":16" /> |
In the preface, Benjamin notes the "social irretrievability of the past" and concludes that "the images of a childhood spent in the big city proved capable of forming the rudiments of my perception of history".<ref>''Беньямин, Вальтер.'' Берлинское детство на рубеже веков / пер. Г. В. Снежинской; науч. ред. A. B. Белобратов. — М.; Екатеринбург: Ад Маргинем Пресс; Кабинетный ученый, 2012. — pp. 9-10. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-5-91103-120-6</nowiki>.</ref><ref name=":20" /> The concept of image, which is central to Benjamin's analysis of modernity, is linked to allegory in Berlin Childhood. The concept of image, considered by many scholars to be central to Benjamin and his analysis of modernity, is linked to allegory as a symbol in Berlin Childhood, and also refers to the form of the text as a "thought-image".<ref>''Downing, Eric.'' [[iarchive:afterimagesphoto0000down|After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung]]. — Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. — P. 224. — <nowiki>ISBN 9780814333013</nowiki>.</ref> According to commentator Eli Friedländer, understanding the depths of the past from the perspective of the present presented Benjamin with the difficult task of linking individual memory and collective memory, which required a rethinking of a number of dichotomies: external and internal, subjective and objective, private and collective, image and concept, sensation and meaning.<ref>''Friedlander, Eli.'' Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — P. 104. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9</nowiki>.</ref> Despite some affinity with Proustian involuntary memory, Benjamin explicitly contrasts the private (and individual) lived event with the collective experience. The images go far beyond the consciousness of the narrator,<ref name=":16" /><ref>''Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie.'' Histoire et narration chez Walter Benjamin. — <abbr>P.</abbr>: L`Harmattan, 1994. — P. 122. — <nowiki>ISBN 2-7384-2415-5</nowiki>.</ref><ref name=":22" /> they are the memories of a particular person, but not in the context of the events of his life.<ref name=":21" /> By giving memory a spatial form, Benjamin transforms individual memories into collective experiences of places, moments, and situations.<ref name=":16" /> |
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[[File:Berliner Kindheit Fassung letzter Hand.jpg|thumb|The 2016 edition of Fassung letzter Hand. The cover is [[Lesser Ury]]'s painting "Berlin Street Scene" (1910)]] |
[[File:Berliner Kindheit Fassung letzter Hand.jpg|thumb|The 2016 edition of Fassung letzter Hand. The cover is [[Lesser Ury]]'s painting "Berlin Street Scene" (1910)]] |
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"Forming the rudiments of perceptual history" means that the images of memory do not correspond to past perceptual experiences: the transition from past to present, from child to adult, takes place within memory. The images bring together many separate unconscious perceptions.<ref name=":17" /> As the Germanist Carol Jacobs has pointed out, language and memory are not identical, but are located in the same field, where images are inevitably mixed with objects of perception. It is therefore impossible to distinguish between the images of Benjamin's text and the images that an archaeologist unearths in the past. We confuse images with objects, which only testifies to the unreliability of our perception; it is always determined by images.<ref>''Jacobs, Carol.'' [[iarchive:inlanguageofwalt0000jaco|In the Language of Walter Benjamin]]. — Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. — pp. 27-28. — <nowiki>ISBN 0-8018-6031-8</nowiki>.</ref> The fact that the past is not so much reconstructed in memory as formed in it does not lead to a distortion of experience — images are formed on a fundamentally different level than conscious memory: they are fleeting and difficult to retain, but they are the gathering point for a multiplicity of meanings. Benjamin constructs an infinite series of miniature images, monads or infinitesimals (in Leibniz's sense), that stretch time in a tense rhythm, flashes, kairos. |
"Forming the rudiments of perceptual history" means that the images of memory do not correspond to past perceptual experiences: the transition from past to present, from child to adult, takes place within memory. The images bring together many separate unconscious perceptions.<ref name=":17" /> As the Germanist Carol Jacobs has pointed out, language and memory are not identical, but are located in the same field, where images are inevitably mixed with objects of perception. It is therefore impossible to distinguish between the images of Benjamin's text and the images that an archaeologist unearths in the past. We confuse images with objects, which only testifies to the unreliability of our perception; it is always determined by images.<ref>''Jacobs, Carol.'' [[iarchive:inlanguageofwalt0000jaco|In the Language of Walter Benjamin]]. — Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. — pp. 27-28. — <nowiki>ISBN 0-8018-6031-8</nowiki>.</ref> The fact that the past is not so much reconstructed in memory as formed in it does not lead to a distortion of experience — images are formed on a fundamentally different level than conscious memory: they are fleeting and difficult to retain, but they are the gathering point for a multiplicity of meanings. Benjamin constructs an infinite series of miniature images, monads or infinitesimals (in Leibniz's sense), that stretch time in a tense rhythm, flashes, kairos. These are all images because their aesthetic completeness is a condition of their meaning, and because they must give way to others. An example is the otter from the zoological pool, which the child notices after a long wait; for a moment the otter floats to the surface, but immediately disappears into the depths.<ref>''Friedlander, Eli.'' Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — pp. 104-106. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9</nowiki>.</ref><ref>''Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie.'' Histoire et narration chez Walter Benjamin. — <abbr>P.</abbr>: L`Harmattan, 1994. — pp. 119, 121—122. — <nowiki>ISBN 2-7384-2415-5</nowiki>.</ref> The text "Cabinets" presents the central metaphor of autobiographical memory. The child opens the larder and reaches through its contents to the far corner, where the stockings lie:<ref name=":23">''Friedlander, Eli.'' Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — P. 110. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9</nowiki>.</ref><ref>''Lemke, Anja.'' Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert // Benjamin-Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung / B. Lindner (Hg.). — Stuttgart; Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2011. — pp. 653—662. — P. 661. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-3-476-02276-9</nowiki>.</ref><ref>''Беньямин, Вальтер.'' Берлинское детство на рубеже веков / пер. Г. В. Снежинской; науч. ред. A. B. Белобратов. — М.; Екатеринбург: Ад Маргинем Пресс; Кабинетный ученый, 2012. — P. 71. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-5-91103-120-6</nowiki>.</ref> <blockquote>Each rolled pair was like a purse, perhaps. I knew no greater pleasure than the pleasure I felt when I slipped my fingers into the very depths of a rolled up pair of stockings...I kept pulling the "stuffing" out more and more until the amazing event happened: the "stuffing" was there in front of me, but the wallet it was in was gone! No matter how many times I repeated this experience, it wasn't enough. It showed me that the form and the content, the cover and the hidden, are one and the same. </blockquote>The stocking is a metaphor for the "truth" of memory, which no longer refers to an external referent or to hermeneutic depths, but is an endless unfolding of memories.<ref>''Haustein, Katja.'' Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes. — P. 85. — Oxford: Legenda, 2012. — <nowiki>ISBN 9781907747915</nowiki>.</ref> Commentators have noted the erotic aspect, the element of desire.<ref>''Lemke, Anja.'' [[iarchive:gedachtnisraumed0000lemk|Gedachtnisraume des Selbst. Walter Benjamins «Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert».]] — Wurzburg.: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2005. — P. 41. — <nowiki>ISBN 3-8260-2691-8</nowiki>.</ref><ref name=":23" /> As Friedländer suggests, desire is neither fulfilled nor repressed, but inevitably dissolves or disintegrates, since disintegration is a structural condition of desire itself. The unfolding of the stocking does not allow us to penetrate the reality of the past, but gives it a stable form, a unified surface of meaning, where the distinction between object and outer shell,<ref>''Friedlander, Eli.'' Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — pp. 109-110. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9</nowiki>.</ref> content and form, interior and exterior, disappears. Contradictions are also overcome in the fragment "The Sewing Box." The child is attracted by the skeins of thread; he is beckoned by the holes of the spindle, taped with paper circles embossed with the name of the company and the number of threads. Although the child succumbs to temptation and pushes through the paper with his finger, destroying the inscriptions, he already knows that the inside is empty.<ref>''Jarosinski, Eric.'' One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” // [[iarchive:isbn_9781571133670/page/130/mode/2up|A companion to the works of Walter Benjamin]] / Rolf J. Goebel (ed.). — <abbr>N. Y.</abbr>: Camden House, 2009. — pp. 130—152. — P. 146.— <nowiki>ISBN 978-1-57113-367-0</nowiki>.</ref><ref>''Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie.'' Histoire et narration chez Walter Benjamin. — <abbr>P.</abbr>: L`Harmattan, 1994. — pp. 134-135. — <nowiki>ISBN 2-7384-2415-5</nowiki>.</ref> As Jarosinski notes in the preface, in the phrase about "images of childhood" Benjamin used the adjective "habhaft" with the meaning of mastery, grasping; the recreation of images refers to a desire that cannot be realized.<ref>''Jarosinski, Eric.'' One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” // [[iarchive:isbn_9781571133670/page/130/mode/2up|A companion to the works of Walter Benjamin]] / Rolf J. Goebel (ed.). — <abbr>N. Y.</abbr>: Camden House, 2009. — pp. 130—152. — P. 143. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-1-57113-367-0</nowiki>.</ref> |
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The past is inaccessible to representation, yet in need of allegorical salvation. Lemke notes that it is not a matter of restoring a lost or original unity, but rather of describing the disappearance of the past in the act of writing.<ref>''Schmitt, Axel'' [https://literaturkritik.de/id/9611 "Penelopearbeit des Eingedenkens"] (нем.). literaturkritik.de (5 September 2006). Дата обращения: 1 July 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20180427044633/http://literaturkritik.de/id/9611 Archive]: 27 April 2018.</ref> Describing the past, in turn, does not mean living it or knowing it "as it really was"; Benjamin is interested in translating the images of the past into the experiential space of the present, only there do the images make sense. The liberation of the past lies in its actualization, but in this liberation the past —the wallet or the books— is destined to disappear irretrievably.<ref>''Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie.'' Histoire et narration chez Walter Benjamin. — <abbr>P.</abbr>: L`Harmattan, 1994. — P. 133. — <nowiki>ISBN 2-7384-2415-5</nowiki>.</ref><ref>''Friedlander, Eli.'' Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — pp. 109-111. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9</nowiki>.</ref> The necessary loss or disappearance of the past allows "the rudiments of the perception of history to be formed".<ref>''Downing, Eric.'' [[iarchive:afterimagesphoto0000down|After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung]]. — Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. — pp. 268-269. — <nowiki>ISBN 9780814333013</nowiki>.</ref> In the fragment "Winter Morning," Benjamin writes of the desire to "get a lot of sleep," of which he dreamed at home, on the way to school, and in class:<ref>''Friedlander, Eli.'' Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — P. 108. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9</nowiki>.</ref><ref>''Беньямин, Вальтер.'' Берлинское детство на рубеже веков / пер. Г. В. Снежинской; науч. ред. A. B. Белобратов. — М.; Екатеринбург: Ад Маргинем Пресс; Кабинетный ученый, 2012. — P. 36. — <nowiki>ISBN 978-5-91103-120-6</nowiki>.</ref><blockquote>I must have done it thousands and thousands of times, because in time it came true. But it was a long time before I realized that it had come true, because my hopes of finding a steady job and a secure piece of bread were always in vain. </blockquote> |
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Revision as of 17:39, 9 May 2024
![]() Walter Benjamin in the uniform of a Prussian hussar; between 1897 and 1902 | |
Author | Walter Benjamin |
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Original title | Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert |
Language | German |
Genre | Autobiography Cultural history |
Publisher | Suhrkamp Verlag |
Publication date | 1932−1938 |
"Berlin Childhood around 1900" is a work by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) written between 1932 and 1938. The text consists of thirty fragments that have features of autobiography, prose poetry, and socio-critical historical study. Benjamin recalls various places, objects, and events in Berlin, creating, in his words, "images that reflect the perception of the big city as a child from a bourgeois family. The book is an artistic record of the historical and social upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century: the First World War, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the destruction of the old bourgeois world with the rise of National Socialism. The presentation of the cultural topography of the city at the turn of the century is combined with a poetic presentation of the theory of memory and reflections on individual and collective history in modernity. The identification of the main motifs is complicated by the fragmentary form and the lack of a coherent narrative. The commentators highlight the following themes: the relationship between autobiography and historical research, the city as a mythical labyrinth, the spatialization of memory and threshold spaces, visual images and photography, the child's mimetic experience and the semiotics of resemblance, the disintegration of the subject, and the problem of identity and self-identification.
"Berlin Childhood" was written under conditions of personal crisis, professional failure, harassment by the authorities, and then forced emigration from Nazi Germany. After the first edition (1932), entitled "Berlin Chronicle," Benjamin continued to work on his memoirs until 1938. During his lifetime, individual texts were printed in periodicals; between 1950 and 2000, several editions of the book appeared, none of which is definitive. "Berlin Childhood" has long had a reputation as a stylistically polished collection of memoirs in the spirit of Marcel Proust, popular with the general reader but less accepted theoretically. Academic interest in the work has intensified with contemporary cultural memory studies and visual culture, of which Benjamin was a pioneer.
History of writing and publishing
In a family of assimilated Jews who belonged to the upper echelons of the Berlin bourgeoisie, Walter Benjamin spent his childhood. In the second half of the 19th century, Berlin, which had become an imperial metropolis, experienced a period of unprecedented industrial, demographic, and infrastructural growth. Accelerated modernization turned the city into a concentration of social and cultural contradictions, with the wealth and luxury of bourgeois and aristocratic districts contrasting with the poverty of working-class neighborhoods. Department stores sprang up in the center of Berlin, mass advertising and industrial goods were sold. The proletarian slums remained real ghettos with their own customs and dialects. The spirit of calculation in the mentality of the citizens was combined with militaristic values, and the monuments of neoclassicism with eclectic new architecture. The image of the capital was completed by the pompous buildings of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Benjamin's family lived in various wealthy neighborhoods in West Berlin: near the Tiergarten, then in Charlottenburg and Grunewald. His childhood was marked by prosperity as well as security and isolation in a bourgeois world where the cult of things reigned.[1][2]
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/Walter_Benjamin_family1896.jpg/220px-Walter_Benjamin_family1896.jpg)
In the fall of 1931, the magazine Die literarische Welt invited Benjamin to write a free series of personal stories about Berlin; the series was to be called Berlin Chronicle. Benjamin signed the contract in October.[3] Although the planned quarterly publication of the short essays could not be realized, they laid the foundation for a literary representation of childhood memories.[4] The small form followed the experiments of One-Way Streets (published in 1928).[5] The author called it a "broken book". It reflected the lived experience of oppression, exile, and homelessness. 1932 was a particularly dark year in Benjamin's life. He experienced divorce from his wife, material hardship and professional failure, and life-threatening discrimination from the rising fascism. Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem called this period a time of "crises and turning points":[6][7][8]
The first drafts of The Berlin Chronicle date from January to February 1932, and the author first mentioned the work in a letter to Scholem dated February 28, in which he wrote about notes on "the history of my relationship with Berlin". Later, in a letter to Scholem in September 1932, Benjamin claimed that the genre he had chosen was more marketable and was determined by his difficult financial situation in the face of losing his job before embarking on a new major project.[9] The bulk of the text was written in Ibiza between April and July 1932. This first draft, a manuscript of 24 fragments, was later sent to Sholem in Jerusalem. In July, Benjamin was in Nice, where he contemplated suicide and even wrote a will. These circumstances are thought to have influenced his work, although, according to Germanist Uwe Steiner, the text does not confirm this.[10] After Nice, Benjamin moved to Poveromo (Italy), where from August to November he revised the Chronicle, based on 52 pages of original material and some fragments published in A One-Way Street. The title "Berlin Childhood around 1900" appeared in a letter to Scholem in September 1932 and then in several letters to Theodor Adorno. In April 1933, he completed a second version (the Giesen version). Scholem estimates that about two-fifths of the text of the Berlin Chronicle was incorporated into Berlin Childhood. Between December 1932 and August 1934, 25 fragments were published in the German newspapers Frankfurter Zeitung (12 fragments in the spring of 1933) and Vossische Zeitung. Benjamin had hoped for full publication in the Frankfurter Zeitung, but his plans were thwarted by the Nazis' rise to power. In February 1933 he admitted in a letter to Scholem that he had been paid a "ridiculous pittance" and suspended publication; a month later Benjamin emigrated to France. After August 1934, he was no longer allowed to publish in Germany; until 1935, the essays were printed anonymously or under the pseudonyms "Detlev Holz" and "C. Conrad. In July-August 1938, 7 final fragments appeared in Thomas Mann's émigré journal Maß und Wert (Zurich).[4][11][12][13][14][3]
Benjamin repeatedly tried to get the fragments published as a single book in Germany and Switzerland, but failed. He continued his work for several years, rearranging the order of the texts, removing old elements and adding new ones, and writing a small but important preface.[15][16] Between the summer of 1932 and the spring of 1938, the author prepared at least 4 different manuscript revisions. He originally planned to keep 30 fragments, then 34 and 36.[11] Among the new fragments are "Loggias",[Notes 1] "The Moon" (both texts written in the summer of 1933 during a second visit to Ibiza),[17] "Imperial Panorama", "Butterfly Hunt", "Winter Morning", and "Winter Evening".[18] By 1938, Benjamin had radically reduced and revised the text, returning to the original plan of 30 fragments; 9 autobiographical fragments were removed entirely. The text became more concise and compact, with an emphasis on imagery. The manuscript contained two additional fragments not listed in the table of contents. According to commentator Howard Island, these circumstances indicate hesitation on the part of the author and perhaps that the 1938 edition was not final.[19]
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Zwei_R%C3%A4tselbilder-Vossische_Zeitung-1933.png/220px-Zwei_R%C3%A4tselbilder-Vossische_Zeitung-1933.png)
The editors of Benjamin's collected works, Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, distinguish 5 main versions of the text:[20] 1) the Felicitas Exemplar manuscript, begun in the fall of 1932; 2) the Stefan Exemplar of late 1932, with a dedication to their son Stefan; 3) the Adorno-Rexroth expanded edition (1932-1934); 4) the Author's Copy[Notes 2] — "Fassung letzter Hand" (1938); 5) the Giesen edition (1932-1933). In 1950, Adorno published Berliner Kindheit, after independently determining the number and order of the fragments. The edition contained 37 texts based on newspaper articles, typewritten manuscripts, and individual handwritten fragments. The book was not a success. In 1955, an edition of 34 fragments, also edited by Adorno, was published. The 59-page manuscript of The Berlin Chronicle was first edited and published by Scholem in 1970. On the basis of the first two publications, an expanded edition (Adorno-Rexroth version, 41 fragments, edited by Tilman Rexroth) of Volume IV of the Collected Works (1972) was compiled, which included Felicitas-Example. These versions were neither authorized by Benjamin. The author's copy of the 1938 edition, "Fassung letzter Hand", was discovered by Giorgio Agamben in 1981 in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and published in 1987. The manuscript of the closely related 1938 version, the Giesen edition, the first complete version of Berlin Childhood in which the order of the fragments was determined by the author, belonged to the lawyer Martin Domke from Bertolt Brecht's circle. It was kept at the University of Giessen, found in 1987, and published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2000. In English, Berlin Childhood appeared in 2002 in Volume 3 of Benjamin's Selected Works (Harvard University Press), with a separate edition in 2006. The 1972 edition has influenced the reception of the text. Modern commentators note the special importance of the "final edition" with a preface and author's table of contents. The version is heavily abridged and lacks texts that for thirty years were considered an integral part of Berliner Kindheit. In 2011, commentator Anja Lemke concluded that, in light of new publications, a historical-critical analysis of the author's editions remains a matter for the future.[21][4][22][17][14]
General characteristics
In the early 21st century, "Berlin Childhood" is one of Benjamin's most popular among the masses; the work is often seen as an autobiography, a sophisticated and elegant collection of childhood memories.[23] Early critics[Notes 3] referred to the book as prose poetry. According to the renowned literary scholar and literary historian Peter Sondhi, Berliner Kindheit belongs to "the most beautiful poetic prose of our time";[24] Scholem wrote that the text is "guided by a poetic-philosophical concept".[25] The free sequence of the fragments favors the choice of certain themes or motifs, making it difficult to recognize the coherence of the text.[26]
Commentators, beginning with Adorno and Scholem, have often seen the text in the context of the author's exile, fascism, and related social upheavals. In the preface to the final edition, Benjamin wrote:[27] "I realized[Notes 4] that I would soon have to say goodbye to the city in which I was born for a long time, perhaps a very long time. The shadow of impending fascism looms over the images of the memoirs, and the texts are imbued with the author's horror at the rise of Nazism.[28][26] Sholem wrote that Berlin Childhood was written under the sign of suicide and the coming of National Socialism. The book intertwines motifs of loss and mourning, sadness and melancholy; the vision of early 20th-century Berlin as a dying and disappearing world coincided with the dark premonitions of Benjamin's generation.[29][7] In the memoirs, one sees "symptoms of the disease" of Weimar culture destroying itself between two historical catastrophes.[30] In the children's pictures one finds premonitions of the coming destruction of the bourgeois world by National Socialism.[31] In the epilogue to the first edition, Adorno wrote:[32][33]
...the historical archetypes that Benjamin wanted to derive in this essay from a socio-pragmatic and philosophical genesis suddenly appear in the "Berlin" book, imbued with the immediacy of memories and the grief for the irretrievable, the lost forever, which for the author became an allegory of the sunset of his own life. For in the pictures, which are even too close, there is neither an idyllic nor a contemplative mood. They are overshadowed by the shadow of Hitler's Reich... The air above the Berlin neighborhoods, which in Benjamin's description seem about to come to life, is saturated with death. The condemned man looks into these places and sees that they too are condemned.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/Berlin_Unter_den_Linden_Victoria_Hotel_um_1900.jpg/220px-Berlin_Unter_den_Linden_Victoria_Hotel_um_1900.jpg)
The book has long been associated with M. Proust's epic "In Search of Lost Time" and defined, in contrast to the French author, as "the search for a lost future" or "memories of the future". The revision of Proust followed from Benjamin's philosophy of history, later deployed in Theses on the Philosophy of History, and included a critique of historicism, a reinterpretation of historical materialism, and the idea of messianism.[34][35] In Benjamin's metaphysics of time, memory actualizes the vanished world, and the materialist dimension of the adult corrects the child's view.[36] Memories reveal the complex connections and ruptures of a particular historical moment and project its implications into the future, linking general and political issues with highly personal reflections. Benjamin called memoirs "the autographs of our century," adding that they "contain the most accurate portrait I can give of myself" (Letter to Scholem, 1933). The Germanist Bernd Witte noted that the thinker placed the historian-materialist's gaze within the unconscious sensations of childhood. The encounter between past and present generates meanings with a slight nostalgia, fills memories with a melancholy of absence and finitude; in its uniqueness and transgression, personal experience is inseparable from cultural history. The recourse to rhetorical figures questions the narratives of development and completion; literary space turns out to be not only a place of construction, but also of fragmentation and dispersion.[37][38]
"Berlin Childhood" contains reflections on the ways memory's work is represented, and later an exposition of memory theory.[26][39] The literary and cultural researcher Nicholas Petes has noted that memory is not so much a reflection of autobiographical experience as a structural and structuring element of the text.[40] Benjamin considered modern memory, or the memory of modernity, rather than the ahistorical concept of memory.[41] The concept of memory is based on the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, irretrievable loss and salvation of the past.[42] The spatial model of memory is particularly emphasized. As defined by the historian Karl Schlögel, Benjamin is a "thinker of spatial imagination", deeply dependent on place; "Berlin Childhood" is "a masterpiece of topographical hermeneutics".[43] According to Lemke, Benjamin creates a series of spatial memory schemes in order to "graphically mark the sphere of my life —Bios— on a map".[44][45] Nevertheless, the Berlin texts are not reducible to a topographical structure of memory.[21]
Many commentators have detected in the text a model of critical historical inquiry. As Adorno has noted, "Berlin Childhood":[46][47]
is one of Benjamin's works on the early modern period, the history of which he worked on for the last fifteen years of his life, and represents the writer's attempt to contrast something personal with the mass of material he had already collected for his essay on Paris arcades project.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/Potsdam_Square%2C_Berlin%2C_Germany-LCCN2002713623.jpg/220px-Potsdam_Square%2C_Berlin%2C_Germany-LCCN2002713623.jpg)
One related issue is the relationship between historical research and literary autobiography. The attention to the history of the nineteenth century, to the "prehistory" (Urgeschichte) of modernity brings Berlin Childhood closer to the essay "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" in historical and in theoretical terms. The book is seen as a methodological experiment for "Passages": the reconstruction of childhood experience and the materialist depiction of the era serve to represent the mythological space of Berlin. Benjamin saw the tasks of the two texts differently. In correspondence, he emphasized that the reflection of the prehistory of modernity in the child's gaze is fundamentally different from the signs imprinted on the "map of history." According to sociologist and cultural researcher Graham Gilloch, the attempt to turn autobiography into history ended in failure because personal memories proved to be an inadequate model for socio-historical analysis (which the author himself recognized).[3][48][49]
In the preface to the later edition, Benjamin wrote[27] that he wanted to "recreate images that reflect the perception of the big city by a child from a bourgeois family. In the texts created in the "moment of remembering," the era of childhood is intertwined with the space of the late nineteenth-century city.[21] The title refers to the connection and unity of time, space and the perceived world.[50] Despite the title, "the cultural topography of a vanished city"[39] tells us little about the architectural, cultural, or social characteristics of Berlin. The city is presented as a world of different interconnected spaces,[51] spatial signs and allegories that belong to certain places (e.g. prostitutes and beggars). The children's images are characterized by a sense of powerlessness; the city looks as an enchanted, almost magical world in the child's perception. Benjamin unfolds a tangled dialectic of myth, archaism, and awakening; the city is a puzzle, a universe of hidden meanings to be deciphered.[52][53] While Lemke links the representation of the spatial structure of the city to the graphic structure of memory,[45] Gilloch draws attention to the experience of the modern metropolis, the connections between the metropolitan environment, individual memory and collective history — between memory and city, time and space. Benjamin's questions are: how does the city alter memory? how does memory shape the urban whole? is it possible to write a critical history of an epoch through individual narrative?[54]
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The Berlin memoirs were also seen as the artistic embodiment of Benjamin's aporetic aesthetic theories ("A Brief History of Photography" and "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility"), his concepts of similarity and mimetic capacity ("The Doctrine of Similarity" and "On Mimetic Capacity"). According to Werner Hamacher's famous summary, Benjamin's memoirs were the driving force as well as the unfolding, extrapolation and realization of the program of his theoretical work, even its radicalization.[55][56][57] The book was linked to the author's long-standing interest in the image of the child, childhood, and the problem of experience. Benjamin's enthusiasm for the revolutionary and emancipatory aspect of the new cultural forms (cinema and photography) was combined with melancholy, a longing for the lost world of "authenticity," for the loss of historical and aesthetic experience.[58] On the one hand, Benjamin sought to problematize the notion of the subject in the Western tradition;[45] on the other hand, he sought a structure of experience that would confront the poverty of experience in modernity. In "Berlin Childhood", such a structure turns out to be the childlike capacity for imitation (mimesis).[59] Memories reformulates (often in the same words), explores, and presents the themes and motifs of the 1910s and 1920s: the child's mimetic relationship to things and nature; the primordial relationship between language and name; the bourgeois apartment as prison; play as demystification and liberation.[60]
According to Petes, Benjamin, like Sigmund Freud, is credited with initiating the modern scientific study of cultural memory. His fragmentary sketches on the cultural significance of memory, emphasizing its relationship to the crisis of tradition, reflect a key moment in the paradigm shift from traditional conceptions of memory as a repository to a constructivist model of memory, the latter initially emerging as a compensatory response - in Berlin Childhood expressed in the metaphor of grafting — to the breakdown of continuity and tradition, to the experience of crisis.[61] Memories address the question of cultural heritage and the status of tradition, including the historical and narrative conditions of its possibility, and problematize concepts of personal identity.[62] The "archaeology of modernity", continued by Benjamin after Charles Baudelaire,[63] the surrealists and the photographers, later became, through the influence of Michel Foucault, an important part of cultural studies and penetrated into literature (the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald, who was influenced by "Berlin Childhood").[64]
Text's structure and coherence
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The author constructed a series of stylistically and thematically unified short fragments — "thought images". This approach was part of Benjamin's movement after "One-Way Street" toward a dialectical method of montage, a combination of isolation and assemblage.[65] "Berlin Childhood" has no definitive structure, but neither is it a random collection of images and memories.[66] Benjamin attached great importance to the placement of the fragments and their number (30), which is confirmed by all the edits as well as letters and notes. At the same time, it is unclear whether he succeeded in realizing his plans for the unity of the collection and the arrangement of the fragments, since the author's very approach rejected a linear scheme; the role of the arrangement of the individual sequences remains debatable. On the basis of the final edition, Witte defined the text as a "formed unity"[67] in which several specific plots are constantly reproduced. According to Witte, the structure of the book is not merely detailed, but follows a deliberate plan that suggests the integrity of the text. The commentator drew attention to the numerological principle in the arrangement of the fragments, distinguishing two large groups of 13 texts each (again divided into groups of 5 and 7 texts, with their own "hinge texts" as central), with the fragment "The Otter" in the middle; the final texts "Two Brass Bands" and "The Little Hunchback" occupied a special place, acting as syntheses of the method and content of the whole.[68]
On the basis of the selection of certain key themes (e.g., memories of the future in the hermeneutic interpretation of Anne Stüsi, or the motifs of the threshold and the labyrinth in the psychoanalytic study of Marianne Muthesius), commentators have tried to see the degree of coherence of the text, which is difficult to determine at first because of the free sequence of fragments. The fragmentary form —a "kaleidoscope of memories"— prevents a definitive interpretation, the isolation of individual leitmotifs and central metaphors in the text, since some variants are always excluded. The rearrangement of images generates their new combinations (constellations).[69][70] According to Schweppenhäuser's observation, rhetorical figures and poetic constructions with multiple meanings constantly interrupt the act of reading, delaying the reader. The sentences are rather divisions or caesuras, they can be at the beginning or at the end; they preclude the possibility of a coherent presentation of the author's intention. As the Germanist Gerhard Richter has pointed out, Benjamin, using a method already employed in One-Way Street, has created an enigmatic self-portrait that breaks with the conventional narrative principles of the confessional genre-linearity, chronology, hypotaxis-in favor of kaleidoscope, fragmentation, parataxis.[71]
"Berlin Chronicle" as a preliminary work
The fragmentary autobiographical notes and sketches, called "Berlin Chronicle", constitute, as Scholem puts it, the "embryonic cell" of The Berlin Childhood. The early work is generally considered to be the first edition and most important preparatory draft of The Berlin Childhood, and is less studied. In contrast to the later edition, the Chronicle does not confine itself to a description of early childhood, but also includes episodes of adolescence and memories of the student years, shows political convictions and the specific circumstances of family and friends. The text has therefore often been used as a source of biographical data or information about the young Benjamin's philosophical development. The manuscript sheds light on his complex relationships with family and relatives, friends and teachers (the story of the "four rings" through which friends and girlfriends were connected); describes his first sexual experience with a prostitute; and reveals Benjamin's deeply personal relationship to various neighborhoods, streets, squares, and places (Tiergarten, Pfaueninsel, and the city's cafes). The text recounts their political activities during their college years, the dissolution of their student group, and the outbreak of the war. A special place is given to the story of an early deceased friend, Fritz Heinle, who committed suicide in 1914 in protest of the First World War. Benjamin originally dedicated The Berlin Chronicle (along with Sasha Stone, Scholem, and Asja Lacis) to his late friend. Heinle's image embodies the lost youthful illusions of cultural revival shattered by the war. All of these episodes are absent from Berlin Childhood. In his revision, Benjamin removed most of the biographical facts, including the names of people who were alive at the time (only four real names remain in the text), information about his father's profession and business connections-anything that might have been damaging to German Jews. As Gilloch summarizes, the chronicle is suffused with motifs of suicide and death. The suffering and catastrophes of the past, present, and future are placed in the spaces of the city.[6][72][73][74][4][75][76][77]
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The chronological and traditional narrative of "Chronicle" contradicted Benjamin's theoretical orientation to replace chronology with topography, to break any link between text and reality.[7] In Lemke's estimation, both editions are dedicated to the "mysterious work of memory", as Benjamin formulated it. The first work clearly separates narrative and reflective fragments, personal memories and programmatic theoretical sections, including assertions about the very possibility of autobiography. "Berlin Childhood" is a more literary, stylistically elegant text without theoretical digressions, and it expresses the concept of memory through the poetics of recollection.[26][78][33] The revision of the text points to a shift in the "autobiographical pact" (in Philippe Lejeune's terms), the illusory question about the veracity of autobiography —asked from Aurelius Augustine to Jean-Jacques Rousseau— is replaced by a Proustian question about the inevitable loss of the past and its salvation, above all of childhood as a privileged mode of perception. The reworking of the text points to a shift in the "autobiographical pact" (in Philippe Lejeune's terms), the illusory question of the veracity of autobiography —asked from Aurelian Augustine to Jean-Jacques Rousseau— is replaced by a Proustian question about the inevitable loss of the past and its salvation, especially childhood as a privileged mode of perception. Witte notes that the suicide attempt had a decisive influence on the transformation of the text. The awareness of his own mortality, the perception of his life as a series of failures, and the realization that bourgeois childhood was only a small part of "historical experience" led Benjamin to abandon the chronicle in favor of symbolically charged images inscribed in collective memory. In a letter to Scholem in September 1932, Benjamin wrote that his texts "do not tell anything in the form of a chronicle, but present various expeditions into the depths of memory".[79][9] One of the programmatic ideas of "Chronicle", realized in the poetics of Berlin Childhood, was the thesis that the present determines the representation of memory images, creates:[21][26][80]
the unique environment where these images are presented and become so transparent that the contours of the future, however vague, emerge like mountain peaks. This environment is the writer's present.
The "Berlin Chronicle" is placed by the literary scholar Eric Downing in the broad context of the literature and cultural theory of the modernist period (Mann and Freud). The scholar notes the influence of photography, archaeology, and psychoanalysis on Benjamin's memoirs. Photography and archaeology, according to Downing, cannot be reduced to either empirical fields or metaphors, but have both aspects and are therefore symbolic and discursive fields within the cultural imaginary.[Notes 5] In the early twentieth century, various practices —the new aesthetic media (photography), the practices and discourses of classicism (archaeology), and psychology (including Freud's psychoanalysis)— influenced each other and revolutionized visual culture, bringing German culture, and especially the genre of the Bildungsroman, into crisis. In his "archaeology of modernity," Benjamin confronted the ideology of fascism, which also turned to new practices to justify racism and nationalism. On the one hand, the Berlin Chronicle fits into the tradition of German educational history as the maturation and development of the young person. On the other hand, the idea of the contingency of the subject takes the work beyond Bildungsgeschichte: not only is the bourgeois order "attacked," but also the dominant ideas about the subject.[81][82]
Intertext
"Berlin Childhood, like Benjamin's other texts, is saturated with quotations, allusions, and references. The most important external source is Proust's epic, although there is no direct reference to it. Together with Franz Hessel,[Notes 6] Benjamin translated three volumes of the Proust cycle in the mid-1920s. Memories contains references to Greek myths (Hercules, Theseus, etc.),[Notes 7][83][84] Dante, Shakespeare, and the German Romantics. The text interweaves motifs from German fairy tales and folklore (the Brothers Grimm, etc.), which define the child's perception and the poetics of the text,[70] and themes from psychoanalysis, particularly the "heimlich-unheimlich" dichotomy.[Notes 8] Benjamin paraphrases Goethe and polemicizes with his legacy as well as with the views of Johann Jakob Bachowen,[85] Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Ludwig Klages.[86] The image of the hunchbacked little man comes from the folklore collection "The Boy's Magic Horn," which Benjamin knew from Georg Scherer's edition;[87][88] possible sources include E. T. A. Hoffmann's fairy tale Little Zahes, called Zinnober, and T. Mann's novel The Buddenbrokes.[89]
"Berlin Childhood" was also influenced by the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose work Benjamin appreciated for its attention to fragments and details, as far as for its depiction of an empty and deserted city, seeing in the photographs of "disappearing Paris" a demonstration of the loss of aura.[90][91] A number of motifs go back to the Surrealists: the image of the labyrinth (Louis Aragon's The Paris Peasant), urban mythology and the profane dimension (André Breton's Nadia), the flaneur, the city as landscape (Hessel's A Walk in Berlin, Léon Daudet's Paris Lived). Benjamin had a strong interest in the Surrealists of the late 1920s, in their radical change of language and image of the world beyond individual perception, in their "profane illumination" (emphasis on dreams and the sense of dizziness and endless falling, especially through religious as well as drug and alcohol experiences). Although he sympathized with the Surrealists' "materialist inspiration" and "revolutionary nihilism," by the time he wrote his memoirs, Benjamin considered them reactionary because they denied the role of memory and overemphasized the moment.[92][93][70][94]
Benjamin and Proust. "Memories of the Future"
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Life and hagiography are distinct and cannot fully coincide in Benjamin's conception of autobiography. These ideas are marked by the influence of Marcel Proust, whose epic "In Search of Lost Time" Benjamin admired, although he admitted to Adorno that his dependence on the French novelist troubled him. A number of motifs in the early editions are clearly derived from Proust: the key role of the mother and grandmother in the absence of information about siblings, the reception of guests (for which the mother comes to the child only to say good night), the authority of the father; the first visit to the theater, playing in the park, the appearance of the telephone and its transformation into a mythical object, the importance of photography and reading, sleeping and waking in a dark room, attention to outside noise. We can speak not only of influence, but also of a "selective affinity" between the two authors. The similarity is also related to the common historical material of the fin de siècle; both wrote about "lost time", linking past and present, the experience of the child and the experience of the adult. Commentators have noted Benjamin's use of the concept of involuntary memory (French: mémoire involontaire), a sudden, spontaneous recollection independent of conscious memory. According to Proust, the images of involuntary memory are not determined by intentional, conscious mental activity, but arise in a moment of illumination. A chain of associations and impressions suddenly and briefly awakens a long-forgotten experience, which is then lost. Like the refined fabric of Proust's childhood memories, Benjamin's childhood images are more random and independent of consciousness. According to the philosopher and Benjamin scholar Jeanne-Marie Gagnében, it is profoundly Proustian to define memory as an infinite unfolding-"the ability to interpolate endlessly what was".[95][96][97][98][99][100][101] In "Berlin Chronicle", Benjamin wrote the following:[102][103]
Autobiography is not always memories, even extended ones. And these, even those of the Berlin years, which are the only ones I am concerned with here, are not always autobiographical. Autobiography is concerned with time, with its course and with what creates the continuous flow of life. Here, on the other hand, it is about space, about moments and discontinuities. If months and years reappear here, it is only in the form they take at the moment of recollection. This strange form —it may be called fleeting or eternal— is not at all the stuff of which life is made.
In spite of the obvious parallels, Benjamin made a clear distinction between his project and that of Proust. The differences between the two authors have been explored at length (Peter Sondhi, Anna Stüsi, Christa Greffrath). As Lemke notes, Benjamin followed his own thesis from the Chronicle: "Proust, who once unfurled a fan of memories" in his "deadly game ... would hardly find more followers than he needed comrades".[104][70][105] Proust's task is not to find the lost time but, paradoxically, to free it from its own incompleteness by placing it outside of time. In escaping time, Proust dreams of its disappearance. Sondhi noted that Proust's true goal is to escape the dangers and threats of the future, to escape death. Proust's quest is realized in the coincidence of past and present through the similarity of experience. Marcel finds happiness in finding his childhood in the taste of cookies in his tea, although he realizes with horror that he is subject to the laws of time.[106][107] While for Proust the world of memory is perfect, in Benjamin's past perfection is always absent.[108] As the philosopher, art historian and Benjamin scholar Jean-Michel Palmier summarizes, in contrast to Proust's moments of happiness and joy, the moments of Berlin's childhood appear as failures and unfulfilled promises.[109]
In Sondhi's and Stüssy's interpretations, Benjamin, unlike Proust, does not try to free himself from temporality, nor does he strive for the ahistorical essence of things; he does not flee from the future or long for the past, but defends historical experience and knowledge (Sondhi). In contrast to Proust's subjective insights, Benjamin's images are embedded in historical knowledge. The French novelist listens attentively to the echoes of the past, while the German author searches in the past for the first signs of the future; his past is open and incomplete. Benjamin awakens the emotional chaos of childhood experience because it contains a promise, a "spark of hope"; he liberates the past in the name of the future. From this perspective, Benjamin's lost time is the future, not the past. The search for lost time becomes a search for a lost future, a "hope in the past" (Sondhi) or a "memory of the future" (Stüssy).[110][111][112][113][114][108][115]
"Archaeology". Images of memory
Commentators often quote a famous fragment from the Berlin Chronicle, where Benjamin allegorically compared immersion in memories with an archaeological dig:[116]
Language has unmistakably indicated that memory is not an instrument for studying the past, but its scaffolding. It is the medium of the lived, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities are buried. Whoever wants to approach his buried past must behave like a treasure hunter. This determines the tone and manner of authentic memory. One should not be afraid to return to the same material, to scatter it as one scatters the earth, to turn it as one turns the soil. For the material is only a deposit, a stratum from which only the most meticulous research can extract the true treasures hidden in the depths: images torn from all previous contexts and standing like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery, in the chambers of our late understanding. To be sure, a successful excavation requires a plan. But just as necessary is the careful probing of the dark earth with the trowel. Therefore, those who keep only an inventory of finds in their records, and not this vague joy of space and place of discovery, deprive themselves of the best.
Memory is not a hermeneutic tool for thinking, a way of exploring the past, but a place or medium for remembering, experiencing, and thinking; a medium or place for gathering information about exploration and the past. In memory, memories of past experience and experience itself are created, embodied, and performed; in memory, the past is transformed. The denial of the instrumental role of memory is consistent with Benjamin's conception of language. Language, like memory, is paradoxically not reducible to a mere means of accessing an external referent;[117][21][118][119] literary and cultural studies scholar Katja Haustein argues that the introduction of language as a medium or vehicle of memory allows Benjamin to avoid the distinction between active and passive memory, a model characteristic of Proust and Freud.[120] The central building block of memory is the principle of spatiality; memory is not just a scene of remembered events, but has a spatial structure. In contrast to Proust's narrative approach, Benjamin spatializes time, people, things, and the content of consciousness. According to Lemke, Benjamin refers to the loci method of ancient mnemonics (ags memoriae) as well as to Freud's topographical model of memory and psychoanalysis. In Benjamin's model, these elements are transformed into a poetics of memory, so that the space of the text corresponds structurally to the space of memory.[121][122][123][39]
Benjamin's archaeology problematizes narratives of linearity, sequence, and progression, including the stated genre of the chronicle. The process of finding is as important as the objects found, and the excavated site is even more significant than the artifacts.[82] Therefore, as in an archaeological excavation, it is equally important not only to inventory the finds, but also to identify the local and precise excavation site in today's soil.[124] The movement of the shovel is both teleological and experimental,[125] the archaeologist aims to find treasure, but luck also plays a role, and the results are torsos, rubble and fragments rather than a coherent and organic narrative.[49] Archaeological work is not about collecting individual things, but about dispersing, atomizing, or scattering the contents of memory.[126] Hamacher noted that dispersal is a condition of collecting.[127][128] Memory contents must be plowed or foamed to produce images, at which point memory deposits must be articulated and destroyed. New layers produce new images of the past and fragments taken out of context, which have value only when their former meaning can no longer be discerned. Each time a historical text is read in a new way, which is why, Richter concludes, there is never an unchanging past to possess.[129]
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The allegory of excavation and the method of scattering is a memory of visiting Aunt Lehmann's apartment and observing the glass rhombus on the table. Inside the rhombus were toy mines, "little men pushing carts, swinging jackhammers as hard as they could, and shining flashlights into tunnels where ore-lifting baskets scurried up and down".[130][131] Germanist Eric Jarosinski noted that the focus was not on the soil being explored, but on the tools of collection and inventory themselves: carts, picks, winches, and flashlights. Subsequently, the mines —and the entire neighborhood— become home to prostitutes and beggars; similarly, Aunt Lehmann, the "viceroy" of the neighborhood, originally seated on her throne in the bay window, is transformed into a caged bird. As Jarosinski suggests, Aunt Lehmann's mines represent a mini-allegory of Benjamin's other allegories. The allegory resists substantiation and instrumentalization, avoids touch and control, confirmation and predictability. The excavation site must remain an allegory, just as there are always images waiting to be discovered.[132]
The deliberate recollection of "images of childhood," Benjamin wrote in the preface, was an effective method of "vaccination that heals the soul" during exile and homesickness. Benjamin added that just as nostalgia should not be stronger than thought, so a vaccine should not be stronger than a healthy body. The method of inoculation has been associated by commentators not only with nostalgia but also with impending social upheaval.[26][133] Autobiographical observations become a defense strategy against possible melancholy, a kind of cathartic practice.[18] As Jarosinski notes, the image of inoculation —the miniaturization, the germ of the whole, what is not a disease but resembles it— proclaims a critical intention based on the allegory that Benjamin finds in Baudelaire. "Berlin Childhood" represents the activation and even radicalization of allegory, for Benjamin has not only placed his life in the realm of the allegorical, but has literally transplanted allegory into himself.[134] The literary and cultural scholar Linda Hoverti Rugg saw a reference to Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," to the idea that neurosis functions as an inoculation or defense against shock.[135]
In the preface, Benjamin notes the "social irretrievability of the past" and concludes that "the images of a childhood spent in the big city proved capable of forming the rudiments of my perception of history".[136][111] The concept of image, which is central to Benjamin's analysis of modernity, is linked to allegory in Berlin Childhood. The concept of image, considered by many scholars to be central to Benjamin and his analysis of modernity, is linked to allegory as a symbol in Berlin Childhood, and also refers to the form of the text as a "thought-image".[137] According to commentator Eli Friedländer, understanding the depths of the past from the perspective of the present presented Benjamin with the difficult task of linking individual memory and collective memory, which required a rethinking of a number of dichotomies: external and internal, subjective and objective, private and collective, image and concept, sensation and meaning.[138] Despite some affinity with Proustian involuntary memory, Benjamin explicitly contrasts the private (and individual) lived event with the collective experience. The images go far beyond the consciousness of the narrator,[49][139][133] they are the memories of a particular person, but not in the context of the events of his life.[117] By giving memory a spatial form, Benjamin transforms individual memories into collective experiences of places, moments, and situations.[49]
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"Forming the rudiments of perceptual history" means that the images of memory do not correspond to past perceptual experiences: the transition from past to present, from child to adult, takes place within memory. The images bring together many separate unconscious perceptions.[50] As the Germanist Carol Jacobs has pointed out, language and memory are not identical, but are located in the same field, where images are inevitably mixed with objects of perception. It is therefore impossible to distinguish between the images of Benjamin's text and the images that an archaeologist unearths in the past. We confuse images with objects, which only testifies to the unreliability of our perception; it is always determined by images.[140] The fact that the past is not so much reconstructed in memory as formed in it does not lead to a distortion of experience — images are formed on a fundamentally different level than conscious memory: they are fleeting and difficult to retain, but they are the gathering point for a multiplicity of meanings. Benjamin constructs an infinite series of miniature images, monads or infinitesimals (in Leibniz's sense), that stretch time in a tense rhythm, flashes, kairos. These are all images because their aesthetic completeness is a condition of their meaning, and because they must give way to others. An example is the otter from the zoological pool, which the child notices after a long wait; for a moment the otter floats to the surface, but immediately disappears into the depths.[141][142] The text "Cabinets" presents the central metaphor of autobiographical memory. The child opens the larder and reaches through its contents to the far corner, where the stockings lie:[143][144][145]
Each rolled pair was like a purse, perhaps. I knew no greater pleasure than the pleasure I felt when I slipped my fingers into the very depths of a rolled up pair of stockings...I kept pulling the "stuffing" out more and more until the amazing event happened: the "stuffing" was there in front of me, but the wallet it was in was gone! No matter how many times I repeated this experience, it wasn't enough. It showed me that the form and the content, the cover and the hidden, are one and the same.
The stocking is a metaphor for the "truth" of memory, which no longer refers to an external referent or to hermeneutic depths, but is an endless unfolding of memories.[146] Commentators have noted the erotic aspect, the element of desire.[147][143] As Friedländer suggests, desire is neither fulfilled nor repressed, but inevitably dissolves or disintegrates, since disintegration is a structural condition of desire itself. The unfolding of the stocking does not allow us to penetrate the reality of the past, but gives it a stable form, a unified surface of meaning, where the distinction between object and outer shell,[148] content and form, interior and exterior, disappears. Contradictions are also overcome in the fragment "The Sewing Box." The child is attracted by the skeins of thread; he is beckoned by the holes of the spindle, taped with paper circles embossed with the name of the company and the number of threads. Although the child succumbs to temptation and pushes through the paper with his finger, destroying the inscriptions, he already knows that the inside is empty.[149][150] As Jarosinski notes in the preface, in the phrase about "images of childhood" Benjamin used the adjective "habhaft" with the meaning of mastery, grasping; the recreation of images refers to a desire that cannot be realized.[151] The past is inaccessible to representation, yet in need of allegorical salvation. Lemke notes that it is not a matter of restoring a lost or original unity, but rather of describing the disappearance of the past in the act of writing.[152] Describing the past, in turn, does not mean living it or knowing it "as it really was"; Benjamin is interested in translating the images of the past into the experiential space of the present, only there do the images make sense. The liberation of the past lies in its actualization, but in this liberation the past —the wallet or the books— is destined to disappear irretrievably.[153][154] The necessary loss or disappearance of the past allows "the rudiments of the perception of history to be formed".[155] In the fragment "Winter Morning," Benjamin writes of the desire to "get a lot of sleep," of which he dreamed at home, on the way to school, and in class:[156][157]
I must have done it thousands and thousands of times, because in time it came true. But it was a long time before I realized that it had come true, because my hopes of finding a steady job and a secure piece of bread were always in vain.
Notes
- ^ The fragment is put in the first place instead of "The Otter".
- ^ The title page was signed by Benjamin as "Handexemplar komplett".
- ^ Peter Sondi, Gershom Scholem, Anna Stüsi.
- ^ Year 1932.
- ^ Cultural imaginaru - a concept in modern cultural studies that combines the definition of culture as an exchange of meanings (Stuart Hall) with the concept of imagined communities (Benedict Anderson).
- ^ Hessel appeared in the text as an unnamed Berlin peasant.
- ^ Hamacher points to Aristophanes.
- ^ Unheimlich is a term introduced by Freud in his work of the same name. It includes connotations of the uncanny, the sinister, the alien. Unheimlich manifests itself in familiar or everyday things (that is why Freud retained the root heim – home); in English it is usually translated as uncanny.
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- ^ a b c Steiner, Uwe. Walter Benjamin: an introduction to his work and thought. — L., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. — P. 139. — ISBN 0-226-77221-7.
- ^ a b c d Lemke, Anja. Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert // Benjamin-Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung / B. Lindner (Hg.). — Stuttgart; Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2011. — S. 653—662. — P. 654. — ISBN 978-3-476-02276-9.
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- ^ Richter, Gerhard. Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography. — Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. — pp. 271-272. — ISBN 0-8143-2880-6.
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- ^ Адорно, Теодор. Послесловие // Берлинское детство на рубеже веков / В. Беньямин; пер. Г. В. Снежинской; науч. ред. A. B. Белобратов. — М.; Екатеринбург: Ад Маргинем Пресс; Кабинетный ученый, 2012. — pp. 138-140. — ISBN 978-5-91103-120-6.
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- ^ a b c Herwig, Henriette. Zeitspuren in erinnerten Kindheitsorten: Walter Benjamins Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert // Benjamin und das Exil / Bernd Witte (Hg.). — Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2006. — S. 44—73. — P. 44. — ISBN 3-8260-3221-7.
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- ^ a b c d Salzani, Carlo. Experience and Play: Walter Benjamin and the Prelapsarian Child // Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity / Andrew Benjamin, Charles Rice (eds.). — Melbourne: re.press, 2009. — pp. 175—200. — P. 194. — ISBN 9780980544091.
- ^ a b Friedlander, Eli. Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — pp. 104-105. — ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9.
- ^ Bothe, Alina. Raum, Stadt und Gedächtnis bei Walter Benjamin - die Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert // Gedächtnisräume: Geschichtsbilder und Erinnerungskulturen in Norddeutschland / Janina Fuge, Rainer Hering, Harald Schmid (Hg.). — Wurzburg: V&R unipress, 2014. — pp. 55—70. — ISBN 9783847102434.
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- ^ Lemke, Anja. Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert // Benjamin-Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung / B. Lindner (Hg.). — Stuttgart; Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2011. — pp. 653—662. — pp. 655—657. — ISBN 978-3-476-02276-9.
- ^ Richter, Gerhard. Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography. — Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. — pp. 32-33. — ISBN 0-8143-2880-6.
- ^ Hamacher, Werner. The Word Wolke—If It Is One // Studies in 20th Century Literature. — 1986. — Vol. 11, № 1. — pp. 133—161. — P. 157.
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- ^ Maurer, Kathrin. Mimesis aus Poesis: Anmerkungen zu Walter Benjamins Berliner Kindheit // Text und Kontext. — 2008. — Vol. 30. — pp. 150—166. — pp. 151-152. — ISSN 0105-7014.
- ^ Salzani, Carlo. Experience and Play: Walter Benjamin and the Prelapsarian Child // Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity / Andrew Benjamin, Charles Rice (eds.). — Melbourne: re.press, 2009. — pp. 175—200. — pp. 192-193. — ISBN 9780980544091.
- ^ Werner, Nadine. Archäologie des Erinnerns. Sigmund Freud in Walter Benjamins »Berliner Kindheit«. — Göttingen.: Wallstein Verlag, 2015. — pp. 12-13. — ISBN 978-3-8353-2840-2.
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- ^ Palmier, Jean-Michel. Walter Benjamin. Un itinéraire théorique. — P.: Les Belles Lettres, 2010. — P. 94. — ISBN 978-2-251-20004-0.
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- ^ Witte, Bernd. Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography. — Detroit.: Wayne State University Press, 1997. — pp. 148-149. — ISBN 9780814320181.
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- ^ a b c d Lemke, Anja. Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert // Benjamin-Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung / B. Lindner (Hg.). — Stuttgart; Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2011. — pp. 653—662. — P. 656. — ISBN 978-3-476-02276-9.
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- ^ Herwig, Henriette. Zeitspuren in erinnerten Kindheitsorten: Walter Benjamins Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert // Benjamin und das Exil / Bernd Witte (Hg.). — Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2006. — pp. 44—73. — P. 45. — ISBN 3-8260-3221-7.
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- ^ a b Jarosinski, Eric. One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” // A companion to the works of Walter Benjamin / Rolf J. Goebel (ed.). — N. Y.: Camden House, 2009. — pp. 130—152. — P. 136. — ISBN 978-1-57113-367-0.
- ^ Hamacher, Werner. The Word Wolke—If It Is One // Studies in 20th Century Literature. — 1986. — Vol. 11, № 1. — pp. 133—161. — P. 151.
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- ^ Downing, Eric. After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung. — Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. — pp. 186-189. — ISBN 9780814333013.
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- ^ Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie. Histoire et narration chez Walter Benjamin. — P.: L`Harmattan, 1994. — pp. 133-134. — ISBN 2-7384-2415-5.
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- ^ Jarosinski, Eric. One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” // A companion to the works of Walter Benjamin / Rolf J. Goebel (ed.). — N. Y.: Camden House, 2009. — pp. 130—152. — P. 133. — ISBN 978-1-57113-367-0.
- ^ Richter, Gerhard. Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography. — Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. — P. 60. — ISBN 0-8143-2880-6.
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- ^ Szondi, Peter. Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin // Critical Inquiry. — 1978. — Vol. 4, № 3 (Spring). — pp. 491—506. — pp. 496-499.
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- ^ a b Klaus, Peter. Stüssi (Anna). Erinnerung an die Zukunft. Walter Benjamins "Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert" // Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire. — 1983. — Vol. 61, № 3. — pp. 659—661.
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- ^ a b Friedlander, Eli. Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — P. 105. — ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9.
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- ^ Palzhoff, Thorsten Heimweh nach der entstellten Welt (нем.). literaturkritik.de (5 September 2006). Дата обращения: 1 July 2022. Archive: 27 April 2018.
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- ^ Hamacher, Werner. The Word Wolke—If It Is One // Studies in 20th Century Literature. — 1986. — Vol. 11, № 1. — pp. 133—161. — P. 161.
- ^ Jarosinski, Eric. One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” // A companion to the works of Walter Benjamin / Rolf J. Goebel (ed.). — N. Y.: Camden House, 2009. — pp. 130—152. — P. 141. — ISBN 978-1-57113-367-0.
- ^ Richter, Gerhard. Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography. — Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. — pp. 44-46. — ISBN 0-8143-2880-6.
- ^ Беньямин, Вальтер. Берлинская хроника // Шок памяти. Автобиографическая поэтика Вальтера Беньямина и Осипа Мандельштама / Е. Павлов; пер. Е. Павлова. — М.: Новое литературное обозрение, 2005. — P. 171. — ISBN 5-86793-393-8.
- ^ Jarosinski, Eric. One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” // A companion to the works of Walter Benjamin / Rolf J. Goebel (ed.). — N. Y.: Camden House, 2009. — pp. 130—152. — pp. 137-138. — ISBN 978-1-57113-367-0.
- ^ Jarosinski, Eric. One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” // A companion to the works of Walter Benjamin / Rolf J. Goebel (ed.). — N. Y.: Camden House, 2009. — pp. 130—152. — pp. 38-39. — ISBN 978-1-57113-367-0.
- ^ a b Haustein, Katja. Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes. — P. 114. — Oxford: Legenda, 2012. — ISBN 9781907747915.
- ^ Jarosinski, Eric. One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” // A companion to the works of Walter Benjamin / Rolf J. Goebel (ed.). — N. Y.: Camden House, 2009. — pp. 130—152. — pp. 143, 148. — ISBN 978-1-57113-367-0.
- ^ Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. — Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. — P. 165. — ISBN 0-226-73146-4.
- ^ Беньямин, Вальтер. Берлинское детство на рубеже веков / пер. Г. В. Снежинской; науч. ред. A. B. Белобратов. — М.; Екатеринбург: Ад Маргинем Пресс; Кабинетный ученый, 2012. — pp. 9-10. — ISBN 978-5-91103-120-6.
- ^ Downing, Eric. After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung. — Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. — P. 224. — ISBN 9780814333013.
- ^ Friedlander, Eli. Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — P. 104. — ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9.
- ^ Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie. Histoire et narration chez Walter Benjamin. — P.: L`Harmattan, 1994. — P. 122. — ISBN 2-7384-2415-5.
- ^ Jacobs, Carol. In the Language of Walter Benjamin. — Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. — pp. 27-28. — ISBN 0-8018-6031-8.
- ^ Friedlander, Eli. Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — pp. 104-106. — ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9.
- ^ Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie. Histoire et narration chez Walter Benjamin. — P.: L`Harmattan, 1994. — pp. 119, 121—122. — ISBN 2-7384-2415-5.
- ^ a b Friedlander, Eli. Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — P. 110. — ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9.
- ^ Lemke, Anja. Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert // Benjamin-Handbuch. Leben — Werk — Wirkung / B. Lindner (Hg.). — Stuttgart; Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2011. — pp. 653—662. — P. 661. — ISBN 978-3-476-02276-9.
- ^ Беньямин, Вальтер. Берлинское детство на рубеже веков / пер. Г. В. Снежинской; науч. ред. A. B. Белобратов. — М.; Екатеринбург: Ад Маргинем Пресс; Кабинетный ученый, 2012. — P. 71. — ISBN 978-5-91103-120-6.
- ^ Haustein, Katja. Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes. — P. 85. — Oxford: Legenda, 2012. — ISBN 9781907747915.
- ^ Lemke, Anja. Gedachtnisraume des Selbst. Walter Benjamins «Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert». — Wurzburg.: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2005. — P. 41. — ISBN 3-8260-2691-8.
- ^ Friedlander, Eli. Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — pp. 109-110. — ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9.
- ^ Jarosinski, Eric. One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” // A companion to the works of Walter Benjamin / Rolf J. Goebel (ed.). — N. Y.: Camden House, 2009. — pp. 130—152. — P. 146.— ISBN 978-1-57113-367-0.
- ^ Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie. Histoire et narration chez Walter Benjamin. — P.: L`Harmattan, 1994. — pp. 134-135. — ISBN 2-7384-2415-5.
- ^ Jarosinski, Eric. One Little Rule: On Benjamin, Autobiography, and Never Using the Word “I” // A companion to the works of Walter Benjamin / Rolf J. Goebel (ed.). — N. Y.: Camden House, 2009. — pp. 130—152. — P. 143. — ISBN 978-1-57113-367-0.
- ^ Schmitt, Axel "Penelopearbeit des Eingedenkens" (нем.). literaturkritik.de (5 September 2006). Дата обращения: 1 July 2022. Archive: 27 April 2018.
- ^ Gagnebin, Jeanne-Marie. Histoire et narration chez Walter Benjamin. — P.: L`Harmattan, 1994. — P. 133. — ISBN 2-7384-2415-5.
- ^ Friedlander, Eli. Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — pp. 109-111. — ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9.
- ^ Downing, Eric. After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung. — Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. — pp. 268-269. — ISBN 9780814333013.
- ^ Friedlander, Eli. Walter Benjamin: a philosophical portrait. — Cambridge, MA; L.: Harvard University Press, 2012. — P. 108. — ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9.
- ^ Беньямин, Вальтер. Берлинское детство на рубеже веков / пер. Г. В. Снежинской; науч. ред. A. B. Белобратов. — М.; Екатеринбург: Ад Маргинем Пресс; Кабинетный ученый, 2012. — P. 36. — ISBN 978-5-91103-120-6.
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