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.

Benjamin gives us his
memories of a world wiped out by the 1^st World War, at the dawn of
the most disastrous, self-destructive period in Europe’s history, which would
cut the ideal bonds with this time. Begun in 1932, the German Jew Walter
Benjamin already foresaw his forced exile from Germany. And thus he wrote this
text originally as a "vaccination" to keep his
longing for Germany — the old Germany — in place. In order that the feeling
of longing would not overcome him he tried to master it through "insight into the irretrievability — not the contingent biographical
but the necessary social irretrievability — of the past".

It is a kind of empathy with,
or mimicry of, the expressions of the century, its things and places, that
allow Benjamin to let the general structures of the epoch shine through his
individual experiences:

"Like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the
19th century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to
my ear. What do I hear?
"

What he hears is not the big
political, military or high-cultural expressions of the time. Rather, the
everyday world and society of 1900 as perceived through the eyes of a child,
and thus as formed by the mysterious aura of things and places. The fairy tale
world that for a child is part of everyday experience is transformed into a
mythological layer by the adult, indicating how deep into the past the world
described has been pushed by history.

And as a child would not
tell its life in one continuous flow, these memories are given in little self-contained
pieces. There is no strict system in their sequence; their arrangement rather seems
to follow Benjamin’s notion of a "constellation" which, contrary to a system, allows the single pieces to form a whole while
keeping their individuality. 

The language Benjamin uses
is the language of the grande bourgeoisie he was born into, meandering
sentences full of exquisite vocabulary. Howard Eiland keeps very close to the
German construction in his translation; however, in these meanders Eiland
sometimes looses the correct point of reference, e.g. when, contrary to the
German, he understands the child instead of the wolf Fenris as the imagined world
destroyer.

This translation was
previously published in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Harvard
University Press 2002. Now it is republished by the Belknap Press as a fine
little book on its own, with a commentary that will no doubt be helpful for
people not familiar with Berlin and the German literature Benjamin alludes to. During
his lifetime Benjamin never managed to get this text into the press, compiling four
different manuscript versions until 1938. A first publication was finally arranged
by Adorno in 1950. The current edition, however, is based on the "final version" found in the Bibliothèque National in Paris in 1981, where it was hidden when Benjamin had to flee the Nazis.

As a kind of introduction an essay by the late, highly-distinguished
literary scholar Peter Szondi is added, exploring the obvious connection
between Benjamin and Proust; Proust, the other prominent literary investigator
of memory at that time, was translated by Benjamin. Szondi’s great merit lies
in his clear outline of the differences between the two authors: it is the
timeless essence of things, the disappearance of time as such, that Proust aims
for in his search for the time past, while Benjamin focuses on the historic
experience. And while some tea and Madeleine enable Proust to look from the
present into the past, Benjamin is interested in the view from the past into "his lost future", his current, uncertain present.

Berlin Childhood starts with the loggias in Berlin in which Benjamin
was laid as a baby and which he thus assumes to have fortified his personal memory
when his awareness was still like that of a newborn. These loggias, half
interior half exterior, are close to Benjamin’s heart for "the solace that lies in their uninhabitability for one who himself no
longer has a proper abode". It is these kinds of traces of the future, of his
current homeless life in exile that Benjamin finds in the images that his
memory kept. The book ends with a little hunchback from a fairy tale who breaks
up our normal daily routines by making us clumsy. However, it thus also opens
up the field for history while the routines are handed over to oblivion. Recalling
this little hunchback we should bear in mind a kind of oblivion that is the
foundation for a memory constituting history.

© 2006 Barbara Sattler

Barbara Sattler
is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is mainly working on ancient philosophy and aesthetics.   

Categories: Philosophical