Berlin childhood around nineteen hundred

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Berlin Childhood at Nineteen Hundred is a collection of autobiographical sketches by Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). It was created in several drafts during the 1930s; the first book edition appeared posthumously in 1950.

Content and style

Benjamin describes short scenes from his childhood, which he spent in middle-class circumstances in West Berlin . The individual texts do not combine to form a coherent narrative, but rather reproduce individual images and memory fragments, such as ice skating on a frozen pond or his mother's sewing box. In doing so, the narrator tries to put himself back in the child's ignorant, amazed demeanor and to reproduce his worldview in artistic linguistic images and comparisons.

Edition history

Between 1933 and 1938 Benjamin rearranged the texts several times, revised them and offered them to various publishers, who refused. Individual texts were published in newspapers, sometimes under a pseudonym. Theodor Adorno published the first book edition in 1950, for which he also wrote an afterword. However, he did not have any of the three versions authorized by Benjamin, so he had to reassemble the work from manuscripts, typescripts and partial prints in newspapers and determine the order of the texts himself. In 1972, Tillman Rexroth published a revised version of Benjamin's Collected Writings, which had been expanded to include texts that had since been found. A compilation going back to Benjamin himself could only be published after a typescript of the last version from 1938 was found in the Paris National Library in 1981 . Benjamin had it hidden there by Georges Bataille in 1940 before he fled the city ; it was considered lost. This 30-text typescript forms the basis for the final version published by Suhrkamp Verlag since 1987 , to which the twelve rejected texts are also attached.

expenditure

  • Walter Benjamin: Berlin childhood around nineteen hundred . Special edition with an afterword by Theodor W. Adorno , Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2010. ISBN 978-3-518-46197-6
  • Walter Benjamin: Berlin Chronicle / Berlin Childhood at Nineteen Hundred . Critical Complete Edition, Volume 11. Two partial volumes, Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-58728-7 .

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