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 King 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.Eiland, Howard; Jennings, Michael. Walter Benjamin: a critical life. — Cambridge, Ma; L.: Belknap Press, 2014. — pp. 12-16. — .
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. Although the planned quarterly publication of the short essays could not be realized, they laid the foundation for a literary representation of childhood memories. The small form followed the experiments of One-Way Streets (published in 1928). 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":
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. 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. 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).
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. 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. Among the new fragments are "Loggias",The fragment is put in the first place instead of "The Otter". "The Moon" (both texts written in the summer of 1933 during a second visit to Ibiza), "Imperial Panorama", "Butterfly Hunt", "Winter Morning", and "Winter Evening". 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.
The editors of Benjamin's collected works, Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, distinguish 5 main versions of the text: the Felicitas Exemplar manuscript, begun in the fall of 1932; the Stefan Exemplar of late 1932, with a dedication to their son Stefan; the Adorno-Rexroth expanded edition (1932-1934); the Author's CopyThe title page was signed by Benjamin as "Handexemplar komplett". — "Fassung letzter Hand" (1938); 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.
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. Early criticsPeter Sondi, Gershom Scholem, Anna Stüsi. 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"; Scholem wrote that the text is "guided by a poetic-philosophical concept". The free sequence of the fragments favors the choice of certain themes or motifs, making it difficult to recognize the coherence of the text.
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: "I realizedYear 1932. 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. 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. In the memoirs, one sees "symptoms of the disease" of Weimar culture destroying itself between two historical catastrophes. In the children's pictures one finds premonitions of the coming destruction of the bourgeois world by National Socialism. In the epilogue to the first edition, Adorno wrote: