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Berlin Childhood around 1900
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Brief Description
Completed in exile in Paris, as the Second World War was dawning, Walter Benjamin looks back at the city of his birth at the beginning of the century. Berlin Childhood around 1900 is both a sensory memoir of childhood as well as a tour of the...
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Berlin Childhood around 1900
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A new translation of Benjamin's moving and groundbreaking memoir of growing up.
A new translation of Benjamin's moving and groundbreaking memoir of growing up.
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Description
Completed in exile in Paris, as the Second World War was dawning, Walter Benjamin looks back at the city of his birth at the beginning of the century. Berlin Childhood around 1900 is both a sensory memoir of childhood as well as a tour of the iconic spaces of the city. These are expeditions into the depths of memory, moving through vignettes of domestic settings and classrooms, city squares, parks, and streets.
The memories of childhood merge with a city that is about to disappear into darkness. As his friend, Adorno, wrote, the work is "illuminated by lightning flashes of immediate remembrance... the images this book unearths and brings strangely near are not idyllic and not contemplative. Over them lies the shadow of the Third Reich. And through them dreamily runs a shudder at the long forgotten."
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781836740148
Publisher: Verso Books
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 18 November 2025
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Verso Books
Contributors:
- Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen
- Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen
- Afterword by Theodor Adorno
- Introduction by Antonia Hofstaetter
- Introduction by Antonia Hofstatter
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 13.0mm
Width: 129.0mm
Height: 198.0mm
Weight: 213g
Pages: 144
About the Author
Walter Benjamin (1892β1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator and philosopher. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In 1940, he was in Spain, fleeing the Nazis and en route to the United States, when Franco's government cancelled his visa. Expecting repatriation, he took his own life.
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