An elegant new translation of Benjamin’s moving evocation of the experiences of his urban childhood

Composed in exile in the 1930s and pub­lished as a whole only after his death, the miniatures that make up Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood are crystallized images of child­hood experienced in a city later surrendered to fascism. No ordinary autobiography, the book is a Proustian experiment in memory and a meditative tour of the iconic spaces of a city irretrievably lost to the adult. Instead of details of family and friends, these minia­tures evoke the sensory richness of childhood in images of the squares and courtyards, the parks and monuments of Berlin, the child’s schoolbooks and the gloomy flats of elderly relatives. As Benjamin’s friend Theodor Adorno writes in his afterword, ‘the images the book brings up into a disturbing prox­imity are not idyllic and not contemplative. The shadow of Hitler’s Reich falls across them. Dreamlike, they unite that horror with something that has long existed.’

This new translation includes an introduc­tion by Antonia Hofstätter, highlighting the way this nearly century-old work resonates with contemporary readers and inspires hope by providing access to strata of experience not governed by instrumentality and domination.