Walter Benjamin. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Introduction by Peter Szondi. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. xvi + 192 pp. $14.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-674-02222-5.
Reviewed by Sara Ann Sewell (Department of History, Virginia Wesleyan College)
Published on H-German (July, 2007)
A Glimpse of a Lost World
Howard Eiland's translation of Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert, Walter Benjamin's autobiography of his early childhood, is a welcome addition to the English-language body of Benjamin's work. The book opens with a foreword by Eiland, which is followed by an English version of Peter Szondi's article "Hoffnung im Vergangenen: Über Walter Benjamin," originally published by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1961. This edition then republishes the 1938 "Final Version" of the autobiography, which is a revision of drafts written from 1932 to 1934 while Benjamin was living in exile. This "Final Version" was discovered only in 1982 and was published in German in 1989. The book also includes thirteen chapters from earlier drafts of the text, which allows readers to study the evolution of Benjamin's writing.
Benjamin's autobiography is unusual in that it is not in narrative form. Instead, Benjamin constructs "Denkbilder" of his life, in which he weaves together brief vignettes invoking the visual world of a middle-class Jewish child growing up in Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century. The first two chapters metaphorically frame the autobiography's approach. In "Loggias" Benjamin is the child "gazing into the courtyards" that cradled Berliners (p. 38), and in "Imperial Panorama" he recounts visits to Berlin's Imperial Panorama, where he peered at snapshots of the world through the viewing screen. Thus, Benjamin establishes himself as the spectator of his childhood and the world of this childhood.
Berlin Childhood around 1900 offers a rich portrait of Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century. Benjamin provides descriptive accounts of his experiences at famous landmarks, such as the Victory Column and the Tiergarten. His autobiography also provides an uncanny perspective of middle-class life in Berlin. Particularly compelling is the chapter entitled "Cabinets," in which he details the contents of his parents' dinning room buffet, which he refers to as "a sacred mountain sheltering a temple," overflowing with all of the necessities of bourgeois existence: silver pitchers, soup tureens, delft vases, and crystal goblets (p. 157). Similarly, he explains in the chapter entitled "Blumeshof 12," his grandmother's address, that bourgeois décor masked all, including death: "In these rooms, death was not provided for. That is why they appeared so cozy by day and became the scene of bad dreams at night" (p. 88).
As the spectator in his own world, Benjamin quickly distances himself from it. In the chapter entitled "The Fever," he recalls his experiences of repeated illness, when he lay in bed for hours on end, patiently viewing his bedroom's contents. This experience, he recounts, gave him a "predilection for seeing everything I care about approach me from a distance, the way the hours approached my sickbed" (p. 72). Benjamin thus positions himself as a detached viewer whose mission is to discover secret worlds. And secrets abound in young Benjamin's world. In "Hiding Places," he details an Easter egg hunt at his home: "Through it all, the house was an arsenal of masks. But once a year in secret places, in the empty eye sockets of the masks, in their rigid mouths, lay presents. Magical experience became science. I disenchanted the gloomy parental dwelling, as its engineer, and went looking for Easter eggs" (p. 100). Not only did adults keep secrets, so too did young Benjamin, as he relays, for example, his awareness that his maid likely collaborated in a burglary of his home.
While Benjamin casts his young self as a detached critical spectator of his own world, particularly the bourgeois features of it, this autobiography continuously evokes a sense of longing for a lost world. In "Imperial Panorama," he laments the declining popularity of the panorama: "The art forms that survived here all died out with the coming of the twentieth century. At its inception, they found their last audience in children" (p. 44). In describing his grandmother's home, Benjamin reflects on the security his childhood provided: "What words can describe the almost immemorial feeling of bourgeois security that emanated from this apartment?" (p. 87-88). And, most poignantly, in "The Little Hunchback," which refers to a verse he read in his Deutsches Kinderbuch, Benjamin grieves the loss of his imaginary hunchback friend: "The little man was often found thus. Only, I never saw him. It was he who always saw me. He saw me in my hiding places and before the cage of the otter, on a winter morning and by the telephone in the pantry, on the Brauhausberg with its butterflies and on my skating rink with the music of the brass band. He has long since abdicated. Yet his voice, which is like the hum of the gas burner, whispers to me over threshold of the century: 'Dear little child, I beg of you,/ Pray for the little hunchback too'" (p. 122).
While this autobiography focuses on Benjamin's early childhood, it also profoundly speaks to Benjamin's anxieties about living in exile and his precarious future. He writes in the introduction to the 1938 version, "I deliberately called to mind those images which, in exile, are most apt to waken homesickness: images of childhood" with the explicit recognition of "the irretrievability...of the past" (p. 37). Indeed, throughout the many autobiographical snapshots he provides, Benjamin leaves the reader with a distinct impression that the world of his childhood has vanished forever. His recognition of the "irretrievability of the past" is a melancholic exploration of a lost world whose distinctive characteristic was security. He reflects: "But, then, the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of performing later historical experience. I hope they will at least suggest how thoroughly the person of here would later dispense with the security allotted his childhood" (p. 38). Yet, it remains unanswered what he laments more--the loss of the perceived security of pre-World War One Germany or his own childhood.
Benjamin's is a rich autobiography that is translated well and provided with helpful notes by Eiland. It is aimed at a knowledgeable audience, which is particularly evident in the inclusion of Szondi's article that examines Benjamin's autobiography in the context of Marcel Proust's A la recherché du temps perdu as well as Eiland's own annotations, which focus on translation details, which would be difficult for non-speakers of German to comprehend fully. An edition more useful to a broader audience, one that would help more novice English-speaking readers such as students, would have omitted Szondi's article and offered a fuller introduction that provided more insight into Benjamin's life and works as well as the context in which he wrote.
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Citation:
Sara Ann Sewell. Review of Benjamin, Walter, Berlin Childhood around 1900.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13435
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