Berlin Childhood around 1900
Text by Walter Benjamin (1932−1938) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Berlin Childhood around 1900 (German: Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert) 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.
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" 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.