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.
