The Berlin Chronicle Notices

the
Berlin chronicle
notices

WA LTER B EN J A M IN

Translated and with commentary by

Carl Skoggard

JANK EDITIONS 2011

Copyright 2011
ISBN: 978 -1-935662- 85 -3
This work is an original translation of
Walter Benjamins Berliner Chronik, together
with original research and commentary
on the text by Carl Skoggard.
Book design by Tom Beckham
Printed and bound by Publication Studio, Portland, Ore.
Map insert printed by Container Corps, Portland, Ore.
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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S
7

T h e N otices Ns 1 - 40 *

C ommenta r y

135

usef u l Sou rces

281

A c k nowle d g ements

291

*Order: 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,

3, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27,
28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40

Wikipedia Nemischer Lwe

The sculptural group Hercules Battling the Nemean Lion

in black sandstone after a design (1797) by Johann Gottfried
Schadow. Together with a companion work showing Hercules
overcoming the Centaur, it once surmounted the Herkulesbrcke in
Berlins Old West, where as a child Walter Benjamin would often
admire it in passing. Today the piece can be seen in the
outdoor Lapidarium in Koellnischer Park, Berlin.

For my dear Stefan

[1]
Here I wish to recall to mind those who led me
into the city. It is precisely that child whose solitary games allow him to develop a great intimacy
with the city who requires and seeks out guides to
its wider reaches, and the first of these guidesfor
a well-born bourgeois child, and I was one would
likely have been childrens maids. With them he
went into the Zoowhich only very much later
comes into view for me among blaring military
bands along with the Lsterallee (as this corso
was named by the Jugendstil)and if not into the
Zoo, then into the Tiergarten. I believe that the
first street which I discovered in this fashion, one
which was no longer anything I might comfortably
inhabit, no sort of native place, and which allowed
me to sense abandonment between shops and also
danger at the crossings, was Schillstrae, and it is
tempting for me to imagine that it has changed
less than have other streets in the West, and that
even today it would be able to accommodate a

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vague scene emerging from the fogthe saving

of Brderchen. The path into the Tiergarten led
over the Herkulesbrcke, whose gently receding
sides are likely therefore to have been the first hillflanks with which the child made acquaintance
under the sway of the beautiful stone lion-flanks
that rose above him. At the end of Bendlerstrae
loomed the labyrinth which did not lack for its
Ariadne: The garden maze surrounding Friedrich
Wilhelm III and Queen Luise, who reared on
their frieze-covered Empire bases from the midst of
flowerbeds as though turned to stone by the magical
characters which a small channel inscribed in the
sand. Rather than to the figures, my eyes would
direct themselves towards the bases because what
went on there, though less intelligible as part of
the scheme, was nearer in space. Even today, the
fact that there is something special about this
Hohenzollernian labyrinth is confirmed for me
by the very banal, undemonstrative aspect of the
forecourt along Tiergartenstrae, where nothing
betrayed your being but several meters removed

FIRST NOTICE

from the strangest spot in the city. In those days,

of course, it must have corresponded only too
well to what was waiting behind it, for here or
not far off must that same Ariadne have made her
stopping place in whose presence I learned for the
first time, and so as to never ever quite forget it,
what the wordwhich I was unlikely to have known
then, for I scarcely three years oldmade instantly
comprehensible when it erupted from me: Love.
Here the Frulein comes into view once more, a
chill shadow who caused the beloved to disappear.
Apparently no one shall ever become the master
of something in which he has not known himself
impotent, and whoever agrees with this will also
be aware that the impotence does not lie at the
beginning, or before there has been any striving for
a thing, but in the midst of that striving. So might
I arrive now at the middle of my life with Berlin,
which stretches over the whole of my later childhood up to the beginning of my university studies:
impotence before the city. Which was rooted in
two things: first, in a very poor sense of direction;

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if thirty years had to pass before the knowledge

of right and left instilled itself in my flesh and blood
or I grasped how a city map is used, nevertheless
I was not clued into this haplessness for a long
time and if anything was capable of increasing my
unwillingness to recognize the haplessness, it was
my mothers determination to rub my nose in it. She
is to blame for the fact that I remain incapable even
today of making myself a cup of coffee, and it is
to her habit of turning the smallest gestures or
show of manners into tests of my aptitude for practical life that I attribute my dreamy resistance as
we walked together through the streets of the City,
streets rarely entered by me. And then again, to this
resistance I must attribute who knows how much
of what funds my present dealings with city streets.
And in particular allows for a gaze which does
not seem to see even one-third of what it takes in.
Also, I remember how nothing was more unbearable to my mother than my embarrassing way of
always keeping a half-step behind her as we walked
through the streets. To appear slower, clumsier,

SECOND NOTICE

more stupid than I wasthis habit I took up

during our shared walks, and there is the great
danger it will make you believe that you are
quicker, more adroit, and cleverer than you are.

[2]
For a long time, for years in fact, I have toyed with
the idea of dividing up the spaces of lifethe
bioscartographically. At first I was thinking of a
Pharus map, but today Id be more inclined to look
to an ordnance map, should any exist of city interiors.
But probably none do, since we misconceive future
theaters of war. I have thought out a system of signs
for myself, and against the gray background of such
maps what a show it would make if the dwellings
of my friends male and female, the assembly rooms
of this or that collective from the speaking halls
of the Jugendbewegung to the gathering places for
communist youth, the hotel and whores rooms I
knew for a night, the decisive Tiergarten benches,

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paths to school, graves I saw filled, the spots where

cafs glittered whose names are now forgotten and
which passed our lips daily, the tennis courts where
today empty apartment buildings [sit], and the giltand-stucco-adorned salons which the terrors of
dancing class nearly turned into gymnasiums
what a show if all of it were to be entered very
distinctly there. Though even if we are lacking this
stimulus, I have the other which a worthy predecessor leaves behind. He is the Frenchman Lon
Daudet, exemplary at least in virtue of the title of
his workParis vcuwhich encompasses precisely what I might under the best of circumstances
provide here. Gelebtes Berlin does not sound so
well but is quite as apt. And it is not only a question
of this title, for Paris in fact figures in the series of
voluntary or involuntary conductors which I began
with childrens maids, being the fourth. If I am to
say in a single word what I owe to Paris for these
musings, so it is: caution. Scarcely would I have
been able to abandon myself to the fluctuating
memories of my earliest urban existence had not the

SECOND NOTICE

only two forms through which it can legitimately

happenmeaning with some guarantee of permanencestood before me, rigorously defined from
Parisand had I not renounced the first as thoroughly as I cherish an enduring hope of one day
achieving the second. The first has been realized
in the work of Marcel Proust, and the renunciation
of all play with related possibilities is unlikely to
find a more convincing shape than that of the translation I have managed to provide for it. Related
possibilitiesdo these actually exist? Surely they
do not tolerate being played with. What Proust
so playfully began would turn into terrifying
seriousness. Whoever has begun to unfold the fan
of memory finds ever new elements, new ribs; no
image satisfies him, because he has realized that it
can be unfolded and that only within the folds is
to be discovered whatever is realthat image, that
taste, that touch for whose sake we have riven every
thing, unfolded every thing. And now memory
proceeds from what is small into the smallest,
from the smallest into the infinitesimal, and ever

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mightier does the thing confronting it in these

microcosms become. Such was the deadly game
into which Proust entered and for which he will
hardly find successors any more than he was in
need of comrades.

[5 ]
The most remarkable of all the street-images from
my early childhoodmore remarkable than the
entry of the bears, which I witnessed at the side
of a childrens maid when I was nine years oldit
could also have been my French governessmore
remarkable than the horsecar which passed by
Schillstrae or had its end-station there, is
this would have been around 1900 a street
absolutely devoid of people and without sign of
life, down which heavy, rumbling masses of
water incessantly streamed. It was a local weather
catastrophe into which I had fallen and quite
apart from which I cannot rid myself of the idea of

sixth NOTICE

extraordinary happenings on the same day; I almost

think we had been sent home from school. In any
case, there stayed with me from this situation an
alarm signal; my strength must have been about
to fail me, and in the midst of the asphalt streets
of the city I sensed myself delivered up to the
powers of nature. I would not have been more
lost between the forest giants in a primaeval wood
than here on Kurfrstenstrae between the watercolumns. How I reached the two bronze lionmouths on our house door with their rings, which
were now life-rings, I no longer know.

[6 ]
Rides to the station in the rattling droshky which
drove in darkness alongside the Landwehrkanal,
and in whose dirty cushionsshortly before an end
should be made of them for a few weeks at least
those evenings spent together in the salon or the
sitting room of the parental apartment reasserted

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themselves oppressively and highhandedly. So it

was not what should come which weighed so
awfully nor, for that matter, taking leave of what
had been, but rather what still went on, what still
persisted; that which still insisted on its rights even
during this first stage of the journey. Most often
the goal of such rides will have been the Anhalter
Bahnhoffrom which you reached Suderode or
Hahnenklee, or Bad Salzschlirf orin the later
yearsFreudenstadt. Though now and again we
would be going to Arendsee or Heiligendamm,
and then you left from the Stettiner Bahnhof. It is,
I think, since then that the dune landscape of the
North Sea emerges for me here in Chausseestrae
as a fata morgana relying solely on the yellow
sandstone hues of the station building and the
mental picture of a illimitable horizon opening
out behind its walls.

seventh NOTICE

[7]
The fourth guide. Not to find your way in a city
that may be uninteresting and banal. It is something for which you need ignorancenothing
else. However, to lose your way in a cityas you
lose your way in a forestthat already requires an
entirely different schooling. Then the shop signs
and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or
taverns must speak to the wayward one like a twig
crackling underneath his feet in the woods, like
the bitterns startling cry heard from afar, like the
sudden stillness of a clearing in whose midst a lily
shoots up. These arts of erring were taught me by
Paris, which fulfilled the dream whose earliest traces
were labyrinths on the blotting sheets of my
exercise books. Nor can it be denied that I fell into
its center, the chamber with the Minotaur, only
this mythological monster had three heads; namely,
those of the inmates of the little bordello in rue
[de] la Harpe, where I entered while drawing on
my last ounce of strength (and luckily not without

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the thread of an Ariadne). If Paris met my most

fearful expectations here, it more than fulfilled
my graphic reveries otherwise. Paris, the manner
through which it disclosed itself to me in the wake
of a hermetic tradition which I am able to trace
back at least to Rilke and whose custodian in those
days was Franz Hesselwas, more than a garden
maze, a maze of underground tunnels. Impossible
that I should ever think of my unending flneries
without the underworld of the Mtro and the
Nord-Sud which extends itself with hundreds of
shafts through the whole of the city.

[4 ]
And then the fifth guide: Franz Hessel. I am not
thinking of his book Spazieren in Berlin, which
appeared only later, but of that after-celebration
of our shared walks in Paris, now heldas in a
harbor whose wharf sometimes still heaves and
sinks, wavelike, under the footsteps of saunter-

fourth notice

ing sailorsin our native city. At the center of

this after-celebration was the green meadow,
a bed which yet looms high even as the couches are
ranging themselves round about, and upon which
we gave a modest and agreeable, eastward-faded
sequel to the great sleepfests with which, several
years earlier, the surrealists had inaugurated their
reactionary career in Paris though without their
realizing it, so that the saying the Lord gives to
his own in sleep became true of them. Upon this
meadow we spread out what still pleased us in the
way of women here at home, but it wasnt much.
From beneath lowered lids, and better oftentimes
than in the drafty stairwells, our gaze met with
the palms, caryatids, stained-glass windows, and
niches out of which a Tiergarten mythology was
evolving as the first chapter in a science of this city.
The mythology thrived and it prospered, for we
had been clever enough to attract lady friends from
the quartiers of the Tiergarten and for the most part
to remain true to the Parisian custom of keeping
to our own quarter. Alas, in Berlin the quarter can

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of course only be an affair of the better situated;

neither Wedding nor Reinickendorf nor Tegel is
as much a quarter as is Mnilmontant, Auteuil, or
Reuilly. All the more delightful, therefore, were
pillaging expeditions on Sunday afternoons when we
discovered a Moabit arcade, the Stettiner Tunnel, or
the unclaimed enclave before the Wallner-Theater.
A photographer, a woman, accompanied us. And
it seems to me, in thinking of Berlin, that the aspect
of the city to which we devoted ourselves in those
days is the only one which is available to the photograph. Indeed, the closer we come to modern urban
existence with its fluidity and functionality, the
more do its photographable surroundings contract
about it; someone has rightly observed that scarcely
anything essential belonging to, say, a modern
factory can be captured on the photographic plate.
One might compare such images to train stations
which, now that the railroad is beginning to grow
obsolete, generally no longer provide the authentic entrance way through which the city unrolls
itself from its outskirts, its outlying districts, as

EIGHTH notice

it does with the motorists access-roads. The train

station provides, as it were, instructions for a
surprise maneuver, but an outmoded one which
only catches what is old, and it is no different
with the photograph, even the snapshot. Optical
access-roads into the citys heart like the ones leading motorists into the new City open themselves up
only to the film.

[8]
Yet this survey would not be worth taking seriously if it failed to account for the only medium
in which such images display themselves and
acquire a transparency in whichhowever cryptically veiledthe lineaments of what is to come
stand out like a range of mountain peaks. The
here-and-now of the one who is writing is this
medium. And, proceeding from his here-and-now,
the writer takes another cross-section from the
series of his experience. He recognizes a new and

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disturbing arrangement in them. First of all [comes]

his early childhood, which shut him up in his
residential quarterthe Old or the New West,
occupied by the class that had made him one of
its own and, with an attitude compounded of selfassurance and resentment, made of it something
like a ghetto granted in fief. However that may
be, he stayed shut up in this quarter of the affluent without knowing of another. The poor for
rich children of his generation, they lived out on
the land. And if at this early time he was able to
conceive of the poor man, it happened under the
image of the schnorrernot that he would have
known of the word and its originwho is really
a rich man, only without money; for being far
removed from the process of production and from
the exploitation which he is not yet able to view
abstractly, the schnorrer assumes the same contemplative attitude towards his privation that the rich
man assumes towards his possessions. Tellingly,
the childs first excursion into the exotic world of
penury was a written one (perhaps only by chance

EIGHTH notice

was it among the first of his writings); to be exact,

the description of a man who distributes leaflets,
and of his humiliation through the behavior of
the public, which does not bother itself even to
accept the proffered leaflets, so that this poor man
so the story endeddisposed secretly of his entire
packet. Surely a quite fruitless resolution of the
situation, in which the flight into sabotage and
anarchism already announces itselfthe f light
which later on makes it especially difficult for the
intellectual to gain an insight into things. It may
be that you rediscover the same sabotage of actual
societal conditions in the childs subsequent
behavior, already described, during those walks
through the City, in the guise of his stubborn
refusal ever to make a common front even with his
own mother. At any rate, there is no doubt that a
feeling of overstepping the threshold of ones own
class for the first time contributed to his nearly unparalleled fascination with accosting a whore on
the public street. Inevitably, however, this overstepping of a social threshold was at the beginning an

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overstepping of a topographical threshold as well,

because by such means an entire network of streets
under the sign of prostitution was revealed. But
was it really an overstepping, is it not far more
a willful-voluptuous hanging back upon the
threshold, a hesitation which has for its most
compelling motive the circumstance that this
threshold leads into nothingness? Still, in large
cities the places where you stand on the threshold
of nothingness are without number, and the whores
are like the Lares of this cult of nothingness
and stand in the doorways of tenements and on
the more gently echoing asphalt of rail station
platforms. So it happened that these strayings
made me especially familiar with train stations,
which, like cities, have their outlying zones:
the Schlesischer, the Stettiner, the Grlitzer,
Bahnhof Friedrichstrae.

NINTH notice

[9]
Just as there are tales for children in which a witch
or perhaps also a fairy rules over an entire forest,
as a child I knew an entire street under a woman
and which she filled completely, even though she
was always enthroned in her oriel one minute away
from the house in which I had been born: Aunt
Lehmann. She was the stadholder of Steglitzer
Strae. Steps leading up to her room rose hard and
steep behind the hallway door; on the stairs it was
dark until the door to the room opened and the
cracking voice would wish guten Tag in brittle
tones and give instructions to place for us on the
table the glass rhombus enclosing a mine in which
little men pushed wheelbarrows, labored with
pickaxes, shone lanterns into tunnels, and traveled
continually up and down in pit cages. Because of
this aunt and her mine, I could never more think
that Steglitzer Strae was named after Steglitz.
A finch in its cage bore more resemblance to this
street where the aunt sheltered in her oriel than

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did the Berlin suburb, which held no meaning

for me. Where it ends in Genthiner, Steglitzer
is among those streets least touched by the transformation of the last thirty years. Here in its rear
apartments and attic stories many whores have
taken up residence as custodians of the past, and
during the inflation years caused the neighborhood to become known as the scene of very low
entertainments. Naturally you could never be sure
on which floors the sitting rooms of the impoverished and the laps of their daughters were being
opened to rich Americans.

[ 10 ]
When I ascended the stairs with the shuffling and
stamping of hundreds of feet in my ear and nothing but boots and thighs before me, frequently I
would be seized withI believe I am remembering
itdisgust at being wedged in this mass, and once
more, just as during those walks with my mother

TEnth notice

through the City, it seemed to me that solitude

is the only state compatible with human dignity.
All very understandable, a mass of schoolboys of
this sort being one of the most formless and
undignified there is and already betraying its
bourgeois nature in the fact that it representsas
does every gathering of that class nowadaysthe
most rudimentary form of organization which its
individual members can bestow on their reciprocal relations. The corridors with their classrooms
which at last lay before one belong to the horrors
that have nested most firmly in methat is to
say, in my dreams, which have taken their revenge
on the monotony, the cold stupor seizing you each
time you stepped over the classroom threshold,
by becoming the scene of the most bizarre occurrences. Often serving as a backdrop is the famous
fear: you must repeat the school-leaving exam a
second time (under less favorable conditions) and
nothing but cockiness or frivolousness had brought
you to this pass. Without a doubt, these spaces
are suitable for appearing in dreams; something

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dreamlike adheres even to the sober memory in

which the stone steps I had to hurry up five times
or even more daily secrete for me a damp odor
of perspiration. The school, outwardly in good
repair, was among the most dismal on account of
its architecture and its situation. The latter suited
the school symbol, a standing plaster statue of
Emperor Friedrich, which, small and scanty, had
been shunted next to a brick wall in a remote corner of the schoolyardthat corner preferred, naturally, by the hordes for their pretend-wars. If I am
not mistaken, a school legend claims it was a donation. Unlike the classrooms, this monument was
never cleaned, and over the years a considerable
layer of dirt and soot has deposited itself there. It
still stands today in its assigned place. But the soot
from passing elevated trains pours down on it day
in and out. My settled dislike for the elevated train
may very well go back to this time, when whoever sat by its windows appeared enviable to me.
To him, the school clock reigning over our heads
had nothing to say, and without his even being aware

TENTH notice

of it, he cut a swath through our invisibly barred

cage of hours. Incidentally, you could see him
only during the breaks, because the lower portions
of the classroom windows were made of milk
glass. Wandering clouds, sailors of the air spoke
to us with the same consummate precision it must
have for the incarcerated. Otherwise not much of
the classrooms themselves has remained in my
mind besides these perfect prisoners emblems,
namely, the panes of milk glass and the infamous
crenellated moldings of carved wood over the
doors. It would not surprise me were someone
to tell me that the cabinets had been similarly crowned, not to speak of the portraits of
the kaisers which hung on the walls. Heraldic
and knightly stupidity made a show wherever
remotely possible. And in the assembly hall, this
had allied itself with the Jugendstil to most
ceremonial effect. A crude, extravagant ornament
with rigid elements of gray-green made its way
along the walls above the wainscoting. Literal references could no more be found in it than historical

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ones; nowhere did it offer your eye the least relief

as your ear was being helplessly delivered up to the
din of foolish speeches. Yet among these assemblies
one is perhaps remarkable for the spell it exercised
over me for years. That was the celebration held
for those about to graduate. Here I findas I do
in several other placeswords, verses, expressions
which are rigidly fixed in my memory, and which
have preserved the impress of the collision between
a considerable collective and myself in the way a
malleable substance does once it has cooled. As
with a certain class of meaningful dreams which
persist as words after our waking, when the rest of
the dream-contents have already evaporated, here,
too, isolated words have remained as the brandings
of catastrophic encounters. Among them is that
word in which the entire atmosphere of the school
has distilled itself for me. Previously I had received
only private instruction; I heard the word when I
was first dispatched one morning to what would be
the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule for a trial lessonin
those days still housed in Passauer Strae. For me

TENTH notice

it clings even today to a fat, lethargic, unappealing

figure of a lad, and that word was: Leithammel.
Nothing more is left of this earliest school experience. Even so, something similar repeated itself
approximately six years later as I was going through
my first day in Haubinda under disconcerting
and menacing circumstances and was asked there
by a tall boy who seemed to me unmannerly and
hostilehe played no small role in our class
whether my Alter had already left. I had no
acquaintance with this familiar item of schoolboy argot. A chasm yawned in front of me, which
I tried to bridge with a terse protest. But here in the
assembly hall it was the verses beginning the hymn
of farewell and sung by the school choir for the
departing graduates: Bruder nun zuletzt / geben
wir dir jetzt / auf die Wanderung das Geleite, and
then there was something with treu zur Seite
in any case, these were the verses which let me
take the measure of my weakness once each year.
For even with the nefarious business of school
placed daily before my eyes, the melody of the hymn

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seemed to me to cloak departure from this hell with

an infinite sorrow. One day, when in the course
of things the hymn was directed at me and my
class, it seems to have passed me by with increased
forebearance, because I know nothing else about
it. More remarkable is another verse which I
heard once while dressing in the anteroom of the
gymnasium after exercises, and which remained
unforgettable for me. And why? Perhaps because
Schulzethe cheeky youth who knew the verse
was very pretty, perhaps because it seemed true to
me, [or] what is most likely, because it conformed
so completely to the atmosphere of rash military
posturing in which it fell. Eile nie und haste nie /
dann haste nie / Neurasthenie.

[ 11]
Above all you must not imagine that people spoke
of a Markt-Halle then. No, you said Mark-Talle,
and just as these two words were eroded through

twelfth notice

habits of speech so that neither retained its original

meaning, in the same way the routine of this visit
eroded all the images provided by it so that none
offer the original concept of buying or selling.

[ 12 ]
If I write a better German than most authors of my
generation, it is largely due to my twenty-years
observance of a single small rule. It says: Never use
the word I other than in letters. The number of
exceptions I have allowed myself to this prescription
might be counted, and that has had a peculiar consequence most intimately connected with the present
notes. For when one day the suggestion reached
me that I should produce a series of commentaries
for a periodical concerning everything which
might seem to me remarkable from day to
day in Berlin, using a loose, subjective formand
when I started in on the workit was suddenly
clear that this subject, which for years had been

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accustomed to keep in the background, would not

be induced to appear before the footlights so easily.
And yet far from submitting a protest, it chose to rely
on cunning, and so successfully that I could regard
a look back at what Berlin had been for me over the
years as the suitable foreword for such commentaries. Thus if this foreword already far exceeds the
space foreseen for the commentaries, it is not merely
the mysterious work of rememberingactually
the power of making endless interpolations into
what has beenbut also the precaution taken by
the subject, which, represented by its I, may
demand not to be sold cheap. Still, there is in Berlin
a district with which this subject is more profoundly connected than he is with any other he
knowingly experienced. Certainly there have been
districts of the city in which he was destined to have
experiences as deep or as harrowing, but in the case
of none of these has the district enmeshed itself so
inextricably with the events of his life. The district to
which I refer is the Tiergarten-quarter. There, in the
rear wing of one of the houses standing right next to

twelfth notice

the overpass for the elevated train, was the Heim.

This was a small apartment which I had rented
together with the university student Ernst Jol. I can
no longer remember how we came to an arrangement, but it is unlikely to have happened altogether
without difficulty, because the student group fr
sozial Arbeit, led by Jol, was, during the semester
in which I headed the Berliner Freie Studentenschaft,
a chief target of my attacks. Jol had signed the
rental contract precisely as leader of this Soziale
Gruppe, whereas my contribution secured the
rights of the Sprechsaal to the Heim. The dividing
up of the rooms between the two groupsit
may have been along spatial or along temporal
lineswas very marked and in any event, only the
Sprechsaal group held any importance for me in
those days. With my co-signer Ernst Jol I was
not on terms, and as yet I had no inkling of the
magical aspect of the city which he and no one else
should reveal to me fifteen years later. So it happens
that his image appears here only in reply to the
question of whether forty is not too early an age to

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be evoking the most important memories of ones

own life. Because the image is already that of a dead
man, and who knows how Jol might have eased my
passage across this threshold with his recollection
even of the most outward or superficial things.
To the other dead man hed had no access, and
among all who once had it, I am the only one left
behind. Never would I have imagined that I would
search for him ever again along thisthe topographicalpath. Recalling now the first attempt
I made in this directionit has been more than ten
yearsthe comparison favors my more recent and
more modest effort. It was in Heidelberg in those
days, and to be sure as I was losing myself in my
work, that I sought in a consideration of the essence
of lyric poetry to conjure up the figure of my friend
Fritz Heinlethe figure around whom all events
in the Heim order themselves and with whom they
disappear. Fritz Heinle was a poet and of all poets
the only one I encountered not in life but through
his poetry. He died at nineteen years of age and you
could not encounter him any other way. And yet

twelfth notice

this first attempt to conjure the space of his life

within the space of lyric poetry came to nothing.
Because of the incomprehension and snobbery of
the audience listening to my lecture in the house
of Marianne Weber, the incommunicable element
in the experienceout of which had grown the
lecture through which I strove to communicate it
came invincibly into all its rights. Since then
my recollection has grown much more faint;
and I am no longer capable of providing a clear
account of the rooms in the Heim. Nevertheless,
attempting for the the sake of the dead man to trace
that external space in which he lived, that room in
which he was registered, seems more warranted
to me today than taking the measure of the
spiritual one in which he wrote his poems. Though
perhaps this may be simply because Heinle, in this
last and most important year of his life, traversed the
space in which I was born. Heinles Berlin was also
the Berlin of the Heim. During this final phase he
dwelt in its immediate vicinity, in a room on the
fourth floor of a house in Klopstockstrae. Once I

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visited him there. It was after a long separation, the

result of a serious falling out. Even now I am able to
recall the smile which made up for the dreadfulness
of all those weeks of our separation, and with which
[he] made what seemed an almost irrelevant mention
of a magic formula, healing the injured party.
Laterwhen the morning had come on which an
express letter awakened me with the words: You will
find us lying in the Heimafter Heinle and his
girlfriend had diedthis district continued for
a while to serve as the focal point for the encounters of the survivors. Today, however, when I call
it back in memory, the physical site where we
chanced to open our Heim becomeswith its oldfashioned blocks of f lats, its numerous trees
which dust covers in summer, the clumsy iron-andstone construction of the elevated train cutting
through it, the few streetcars coming and going
only at long intervals, the sluggish waters of the
Landwehrkanal which sealed it from the proletarian quarter of Moabit, the splendid groups of
trees in the never-visited park of Bellevue, and

twelfth notice

the unspeakably common groups of hunters

flanking its approach at the Groer Sternbecomes
the purest visual expression of the historical stance
adopted by this last true elite of bourgeois Berlin.
They stood as close to the abyss of the Great War
as did their Heim to the steep bank down to the
Landwehrkanal. They were as sharply separated
from proletarian youth as were the houses of this
quarter of rentiers from the houses of Moabit.
And they were the last of their line, just as the inhabitants of those blocks of flats had been the last who
were able to charm the importunate shades of
the disinherited with philanthropic ceremonies.
Stillor precisely because of thisso much is
certain: At no later period has the city of Berlin
itself entered my life so forcefully as during that
epoch when we thought we could leave it unchanged in itself and only improve its schools, only
break our parents of their inhumanity towards
their charges, only make room within it for the
words of Hlderlin or George. It was an extreme
and heroic attempt to alter human beings attitudes

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without attacking their circumstances. We did not

know that it was bound to fail, yet among us there
was scarcely anyone whom such knowledge could
have brought to a change of outlook. And today
just as in those days I understand, though I may
proceed from quite different considerations, that
the language of youth necessarily took center
stage during our meetings. What is more, I know
of no truer expression of our impotence than a
certain struggle which, at the time, seemed to us
the climax of our strength and high spiritseven
if these were rarely as palpable as was the shadow
of destruction which the incomprehension of
those present threw over us on that evening. I am
thinking here of Heinle and myself, when we two
spoke at an Aktion evening. Originally only one
speech had been scheduled, to be given by me. Its
title was Youth. I understood as a matter of course
that the text would become known to our inner
circle before being read publicly. Scarcely had this
happened, however, when Heinle raised objections.
Perhaps he wished to speak himself, or expected me

twelfth notice

to make changes which I did not accepta heated

argument arose and as always on such occasions,
everything and everyone having to do with the
combatants were drawn in. With respect to Heinle,
this meant the youngest of those three sisters
around whom the most important events always
gravitated in those daysas if a Jewish widow living
together with her three daughters should represent
the right sort of fulcrum for a group bent on the
annihilation of the family unit. To be brief, the
girl backed up her friend and his claims. But nor was
I for my part willing to back down. So it happened
that on this Aktion evening two speeches with
identical titles and nearly identical wording were
read before an astonished, though hardly welldisposed, audienceand in truth, the range of
opinion within that Jugendbewegung was no
greater than the space demarcated by the nuances of
these speeches between themselves. Thinking back
today on them, I would compare the two speeches
to the clashing islands of the Argonaut saga, the
Symplegades, between which no ship passes

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unscathed, and in those days, an ocean of love and

hate was throwing up its billows. Back then,
gatherings of bourgeois intellectuals were far
more frequent because they had not yet recognized
their own limits. And yet we are entitled to
say we felt them, even if much time should pass
before we truly came to realize that no one [can]
improve the school and the parental home who
does not pulverize the state which needs those of
inferior quality. We felt such limits when we held
our Sprechsaal sessions during which young
people spoke of the brutalities they had to endure
at home in salons that were ours courtesy of
parents who, deep down, did not think any differently from those we sought to oppose. We felt them
when we older ones held our literary evenings in
tavern rooms which were never safe for a moment
from the waiters serving us, we felt them when
we were obliged to receive our girlfriends in
furnished rooms where we did not dare to lock the
door, we felt them in our dealings with the owners
of assembly rooms and with porters, with relatives

twelfth notice

and with trustees. Then, finally, after the eighth

of August, 1914, came the days when those of us
who had been most intimate with the dead
vowed not to separate from one another until they
had been interred, and now we felt them in
the shame of being able to take refuge only in a
dubious railroad hotel on Stuttgarter Platz. Even
the cemetery gave proof to us of the limits which
the city had imposed on everything we held dear:
It was not possible to procure a single grave in
one and the same burial place for the two who
had died together. And still those were days
which made me ripe for the insight which I met
with later, and which gave me the conviction that
neither would the city of Berlin escape unscarred
from the struggle for a better social order. Today
if I chance to pass through the streets of that
quarter, I do so with the feeling of oppression one
has when entering an attic where he has not been
for years: Well may it still hold valuable things,
but there is no one who knows his way around in
it any longer. And truly, this dead quarter with its

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tall tenements serves today as the attic storeroom

for the bourgeoisie from Berlin-West.

[ 13 ]
This was the era when the Berlin cafs played a role
for us. I still recollect the first one which I definitely
made my own. That was much earlier, immediately
after my graduation exam. The Viktoria caf, where
in those days the first collective bar crawl would
come to an end towards three in the morning,
no longer exists. In its placeat the corner
of Friedrichstrae and Unter den Lindenhas
appeared one of those loud luxury cafes of the
New Berlin, compared with which the earlier establishment, as luxurious as it may also have been
for its time, looms before me with all the enchantment of the age of chandeliers, mirror-fashions,
and plush sofas. This old Caf Viktoria was in those
days our last station, and we would have arrived
there only as a little group. It will by then have been

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more than half emptyin any case, I no longer

recognize, beneath the veils which lie before this
image today, anyone other than several whores
who seemed to have the expanse of the caf to
themselves. We did not remain long and I do not
know if I ever again stepped foot in the Caf
Viktoria, which would have disappeared not long
after. The time when visiting a caf would be a
daily necessity for me had not yet arrived, and it
is scarcely possible that Berlin bred this vice in me
no matter how successfully the vice has adapted
itself to the watering holes of this city, which
pursues its pleasures far too strenuously and selfconsciously to know genuine cafs. Our first caf
was, accordingly, much more a strategic redoubt
than a locale for siestas. And with this it is already
unmistakably indicated: As everybody knows, the
headquarters for bohemians was, up through the
first years of the war, the old Caf des Westens.
Here in this caf we huddled together during the
very first August days and made our choice among
those garrisons which were being beseiged with

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volunteers; it fell upon the calvary in Belle-AllianceStrae, where I, too, arrived on one of the days
followingwithout a single spark of war-fever in
my heart. My place, too, was among the surge of
bodies then swelling in front of the garrison gates,
no matter how reserved my thinking, according
to which it could only be a matter of securing a
place among friends in the unavoidable call-up.
Of course, that was only for two days: On the
eighth the event intervened which caused this city
and this war to sink from my sight for a long time.
I used to see Heinle often in the Caf des Westens.
We had our appointments there mostly late, towards
midnight. I cannot actually say that we had close
connections with the literary bohemians who
convened there at all hours. We made a group unto
ourselves; the world of our movement was a
different world from that of the emancipated
beings surrounding us, and our contacts with them
were fleeting at best. Franz Pfemfert, the editor
of Aktion, was for a time a middleman; our relations
with him were purely Machiavellian. Then, too,

thirteenth notice

Else Lasker-Schler once drew me to her table;

Wieland Herzfelde, in those days a young university
student, could be seen there, [also] Simon Guttmann,
about whom more later, but with them the enumeration has already reached the limits of our narrower
world. Which was, I believe, alien to the caf. The
feverish concentration into which our worries over
so many competing actions threw us, our efforts
to organize the Freie Studentenschaft, to develop
the speaking halls, to elaborate our lectures for
larger gatherings of high school students, and to
assist hard-pressed comrades, our concern for
the ones who were endangered through entanglements with friends or lovers[all] cut us off
from the solidly bourgeois, more status-conscious
bohemians around us. Perhaps Heinle was more
closely acquainted with this person and that from
among them, for example the painter Meidner, who
made a drawing of him, but this connection remained
unfruitful for us. One day in Switzerland I would
read that the Caf des Westens had been closed.
Never was I very much at home there; I did not yet

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then possess that passion for waiting, lacking which

you never learn to fully savor the pleasures
of a caf. And if I see myself waiting in the smoky
space some night or other on the sofa which was
built around one of the central pillars, it was most
likely a feverish waiting for the outcome of a negotiation in the Sprechsaal, or for a broker who would
spring into action when tensions had once again
reached an unbearable pitch. The caf next door,
whose beginnings still fall in the period of which
I speak, became far more congenial to me: the
Prinzess Caf. Should anyone attempt a Physiology
of cafs, the first and most superficial distinction
will be between the professional and the entertainment-oriented establishments. But once we omit
the pushiest, industrially-run entertainment cafs
from consideration, it becomes very evident that
in the history of most cafs, the two functions overlap. An especially handy example is supplied by the
history of the Romanisches Caf precisely from
the moment when the owner of the Caf des
Westens was showing his regular patrons the door.

thirteenth notice

The Romanisches Caf took up the bohemians very

quickly, and they were able to feel themselves
masters of the place in the years following immediately upon the war. The legendary Zeitungskellner
Richard, dead nowa hunchback honored in
these circles because of his evil reputationwas
the emblem of their mastery. As the economy in
Germany climbed once again, the bohemians visibly
shed the atmosphere of menace which had still
surrounded them in the days of the revolutionary
expressionist manifestoes. And the bourgeois
reviewed his relationship with the inmates of Caf
Grenwahn (as the Romanisches Caf soon came
to be called) and discovered that everything was
as it used to be. At this juncture, the physiology
of the Romanisches Caf began to change. The
artists receded into the background, becoming
more and more an item in the inventory, while
the bourgeoisierepresented by stockbrokers,
managers, film and theater agents, and clerks interested in literaturebegan to take command of the
place, and to be sure, as a place of entertainment. For

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the bourgeois in a large city who is trapped day in

and day out within the infinitely complex social
environment of office and family, immersion in a
different milieu is among the most primitive and
indispensable of his amusementsand the more
exotic it is, the better. Hence the artist-bars and the
criminal-bars. From this standpoint, the difference
between the two is but slight. The history of Berlin
drinking establishments is in large degree the history
of clientele strata and among these, of the stratum
which conquered the parquet and then moved
up, gradually clearing it and mounting the stage.
For Heinle and myself, one such stage was the
Prinzess Caf, where we were accustomed to enter
as possessors of box seats. It is almost literally so:
The cafdesigned by Lucian Bernhard, in those
days a very sought-after interior decorator and
poster artistoffered visitors a large number of
cozy bays or loges; historically, it stood halfway
between the chambres spares and the coffee bars.
Which profession the place was most eager to
serve through such an arrangement is clear. And

thirteenth notice

when we appeared, for a time really making it

our regular place, certainly it was because of the
coquettes. Heinle wrote Prinzess-Caf then:
Tren fhren Khle ber durch Gesang. We
had no intention of making acquaintances in this
caf. Quite the oppositebeing enclosed in a world
that isolated us was what lured us here. Any sort of
separation from the literary circles of the city suited
us. To be sure, this one more than any other kind.
And in fact it did have to do with the coquettes.
But that leads into a subterranean layer of this
Jugendbewegung whose entrance could be found
in a studio in Halensee. We shall recall it later. Very
possibly S.G., its occupant, also met us here from
time to time. That has not remained in my memory,
for right here more than elsewhere human beings
generally recede in favor of the caf setting, and
none among them is as mentally present to me as
is a desolate, approximately circular space on the
upper floor hung with violet fabrics and illuminated
with violet, where a great number of seats were
always empty, while on others pairs of lovers took

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up absolutely as little space as possible. I named this

circle the anatomy theater. Later, when the era had
long since come to an end, I would sit for long
evenings there in the vicinity of one or another jazz
band, inconspicuously consulting my sheets and
index cards and composing my Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels. One day, when a new renovation
set in, making out of the Prinzcaf [sic] the Caf
Stenwyk, I gave it up. Now it has sunk so low as to
become a beer restaurant.

[14 ]
Never again has music possessed something
so dehumanized and shameless as that of the two
brass bands which infused the stream of people
pressing along the Lsterallee between the coffee
restaurants of the Zoo. Today I know what gave
the stream its impetus. For the inhabitants of
large cities, no higher school of flirting exists than
this one, which was surrounded by the sand lots

fifteenth notice

of gnus and zebras, bare trees and ledges on

which vultures and condors nested, stinking wolf
dens, and the breeding grounds of pelicans and
herons. The creatures screams and cries mixed with
the racket of kettledrums and snares. Such was the
atmosphere in which for the first time the gaze of
a boy fell upon a passing girl, while he spoke all
the more intently to his friend. And so great was
his effort to betray himself neither in looking nor
in speaking that he saw nothing of her.

[ 15 ]
In those days the Zoologischer Garten still had
an entrance at the Lichtensteinbrcke. Of the
three entrances it was the least animated, and it
also led into the most deserted region of the park.
The alle into which it flowed resembled, with
the milk-white spheres of its candelabra, some
abandoned fountain promenade of Wiesbaden
or Pyrmont and before the economic crisis had

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left these spas so desolate that they seem more

antique than the Roman baths, this dead corner
of the Zoologischer Garten held an image of
what was to come, that is, it was a prophetic
corner. We must regard it as certain that there
are such corners; indeed, just as there are plants
which, the primitives claim, give them the
power to see in the distance, so are there places
to which such power clings: These can be abandoned promenades, or tops of trees, especially city
trees standing against walls, rail station barriers,
and above all, the thresholds which mysteriously erect themselves between precincts of the
city. Fundamentally, the Lichtenstein portal was
also such a threshold, the threshold between the
two westerly parks. It seemed as if life were
suspended in each park in the spot where it came
nearest the other. And this day-to-day desolateness became all the more palpable for one
who recalled the brilliant procession which for
several years could be seen leaving from a portal
of the Adler rooms on ball nights but which is

third notice

no longer the customany more than that portal

remains open.

[3]
How thoroughly different from this (the music
of the Zoo) was another park music which had
already begun sounding for me earlier. It came
from the Rousseau-Insel and inspired the iceskaters on the Neuer See in their arcs and loops.
I was among these skaters long before I had any
notion of the origin of the island-name, let alone of
the difficulties spelling it would pose. Through its
site the rink was beyond compare, and even more
so because of its liveliness throughout the year.
For what did summer make of the other seasons?
Tennis courts. Here, however, under the broad overhanging branches of trees lining its banks a lake
stretched to which were annexed labyrinthine
waterways, and now you glided beneath the small
arched bridges against whose railings or chains

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bearing lion-mouths you had leaned in summer,

to follow the gliding of the boats in the dark water.
In the vicinity of the lake were obscurely winding
paths and, most important, those sweet asylums
for the old and lonely, benches for adults only
along the edge of the heap of sand with its pits and
trenches in which little ones are digging or before
which they stand lost in thought until another
collides with them or there issues from the bench
of authority the voice of the childrens maid, who
reads behind the empty carriage, absorbing her
novel with fierce concentration and who, almost
without looking up, keeps her child in order and
when done trades with the maid on the other end
of the bench who holds her charge between her
knees and knits. Lonely old men find their way
here, honoring the seriousness of life in the midst
of a mass of unreasoning women and screaming
children: the newspaper. If the beloved had finally
left, after we had strolled for a long time along
the garden paths, no place was preferable for dreaming after her to one of the backless benches in such

third notice

spots, and never would I brush away the sand

from where I sat down. All these images have I
preserved. None, however, would give me back
the Neuer See and a few hours of my childhood in
the same way as would hearing once more the
rhythm with which my feet, heavy with skates,
regained the familiar boardwalk after a solitary
sortie over the busy ice and then stumbled past
the Stollwerck automats and the more splendid
one where a hen lays a bonbon-filled egg, and over
the threshold behind which the anthracite oven
was glowing and the bench stood where the burden of iron blades on those feet, which had still
to touch solid earth, could be savored for a while
before you decided to undo the laces. Should you
then slowly bed one leg on the other knee and
loosen the screws of your skates, it seemed as if
youd suddenly exchanged them for wings on each
foot, and you went out with steps nodding to the
frozen earth.

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[ 16 ]
Language has signified unmistakably that memory
is not an instrument for making inquiry into the
past, but is instead its showplace. It is the medium
of whatever has been experienced, as soil is the
medium in which dead cities lie covered up. He who
attempts to near his own covered-up past must
conduct himself as does the man who digs. This
conditions the tone, the attitude, of genuine memories. They should not hesitate to return always and
again to the same body of fact, scattering it about as
you scatter about earth, turning it over as you turn
over earth. For bodies of fact are but strata, layers,
which disclose to the most painstaking investigation alone whatever constitutes the true valuables
hiding within the interior of the earth: The images
which, having once been pried free of all earlier contexts, lie as precious objects in the sober chambers
of our late understanding, as fragments or torsos
do in the gallery of the collector. And to be sure,
undertaking successful excavations calls for a plan.

seventeenth notice

Even so, the cautious touch of the probing spade

in dark soil remains indispensable, and whoever
preserves in his notes only the inventory of finds
and not this dark joy at the very site of his finding,
too, denies himself the best part of it. Vain searching
belongs here as much as does fortunate searching, and that is why memory must not proceed as
though telling a story, even less as though reporting something, but in the strictest sense epically
and rhapsodically, trying ever new places with
its spade thrust and exploring the old ones at ever
deeper levels.

[ 17 ]
Certainly innumerable faades of the city stand
just as they stood in my childhood; yet I do not
encounter my own childhood in their look. Too
often have my looks brushed over them since;
too often have they been the dcor and scene of
my walks and errands. And the few which offer

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exceptions to this ruleforemost among them

the Matthikirche on Matthikirchplatzperhaps
only seem to be such. For during my childhood
years did I really see so frequently the out-of-theway corner in which the church stands, or indeed
even know of it? Im not sure. What the corner says
to me today likely is owing to absolutely nothing
at all beyond the building itself: the church with
the pair of steep gabled roofs over its side aisles,
and the yellow and ochre brick out of which it is
constructed. This is an old-fashioned church and
finds itself in the situation of many old-fashioned
structures, which, though they were absolutely
never small with us, indeed may not even have
known us while we were children, still know much
about our childhoodand for that we love them.
I would, however, find myself present in this time
of life in another sense entirely had I courage to
step through the doorway of a certain house I passed
by a thousand, ten thousand times. A doorway in
the Old West. To be sure, the door and the faade
of the house have nothing to say to my eyes any

seventeenth notice

more. When I should have shut the door behind

me, my soles would likely be the first to report that
they had discovered the number of the worn-down
stairwell steps and their spacing within me, that
they were treading in old traces on this flight of
worn-out stairsand if I do not cross the threshold
of the house any more, it is for fear of encountering this interior of the stairwell landing, which in
its seclusion has preserved that power to recognize
me anew which the faade lost long ago. Indeed,
the landing with its panes of colored glass has
remained the same, even though nothing stayed as it
was where people are living in the interior. Dreary
verses filled up the intervals between our heartbeats
when, exhausted, we would stop on the landing
between floors. They gleamed or brightly shone
from a pane on which a woman with nut-brown
eyebrows and a goblet and hovering like Raphaels
Madonna rose out of a niche, and as the straps of
my schoolbag cut into my shoulders, I would be
obliged to read: Work is the citizens adorning /
Well-being, efforts recompense. Perhaps it was

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raining outside. One of the brightly-tinted panes

stood ajar, and to the regular patter of the raindrops
was my way resumed up the stairs.
Motto: Oh brown-baked Siegessule

With childrens sugar from winter days.

[18 ]
I have never lain on the street in Berlin. The red
of evening have I seen, and the red of dawn, but
between the two I crept under roof. Only those for
whom poverty or vice made it a landscape through
which they wander from sundown to sunup know
about a city something which I do not experience.
I have always found shelter, sometimes though a late
one and unfamiliar to boot, which I did not revisit
and in which I was not alone. When I stopped so late
beneath a gateway, my legs had gotten themselves
tangled in the ribbons of the street and it was not
always the cleanest of hands that set me free.

nineteenth notice

[19 ]
Memories, even when they are extensive, do not
always represent an autobiography. And what I am
writing is most certainly no autobiography, not
even for the Berlin years, which are the only ones
being addressed here. For autobiography is concerned with time, with succession, and with what
constitutes lifes continual flow. Here, on the other
hand, we speak of a space, of moments, and of
what is discontinuous. Although months and years
do come into view, too, it is in the configuration
which they possess at the moment they are thought
of. This strange configurationyou may regard it
as fleeting or as eternalis never the stuff from
which it has been made, the stuff of life. And that
is less apparent from the role which my own life
plays here than from the role played by the persons
who were closest to me in Berlinwhoever and whenever it may have been. The air of the city conjured
up here bestows on them only a brief and shadowy
existence. They steal along its walls like beggars,

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spring up, ghostlike, in its windows only to disappear, taste the air around thresholds like a genius
loci, and even when they fill up entire quarters
with their names, it happens in the way a dead
mans name fills up the memorial stone above
his grave. In fact, noisy, no-nonsense Berlin, the
city of work and the metropolis of affairs, has,
compared with some others, not fewer but rather
more sites and moments through which it bears
witness to the dead, shows itself to be filled with
the dead, and perhaps it is our dim sensing of
these moments, these sites, which, more than anything else, endows the memories of childhood
with whatever makes them so difficult to grasp
and, at the same time, as alluringly painful as halfforgotten dreams. For childhood, which knows
no preconceived opinion, has no such opinion of
life either. The child approaches the realm of the
dead where it reaches into the realm of the living
with just as much precious fellow-feeling as it meets
life itself (and also, surely, with no less reserve). How
far a child is able to reach back into the past is hard

nineteenth notice

to know and depends on many thingsthe era, the

milieu, temperament, and upbringing. My feeling
for the tradition of the city of Berlin which goes
beyond a few facts about the Stralau fishing parade
and Fridericus eighteen hundred and forty-eight
that topographical tradition which represents
ones ties with the dead of this soilis circumscribed, being already limited by the fact that
neither of my parents families number among its
native stock. This establishes the boundaries for
a childs rememberingwhich, more than a
childs experience, is what finds expression hereinafter. Yet wherever these boundaries may run, the
second half of the nineteenth century certainly
falls on this side of them, and to this era the
following images belong. These are images not
of the generalized type, but images which, so
the teaching of Epicurus, are always separating
themselves from things and condition our perception of them.

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[20 ]
To your back lay the antechamber with its dangerous heavy doors that swung in great elastic spirals,
and now youd stepped upon the flagstones, slick
from fish water or rinse water, where your footing
might so easily be lost if you were to slip on carrots
or on lettuce leaves. Behind screened-off partitions
each bearing its own number reigned the lethargic
women: priestesses of commerce-minded Ceres,
market women supplying fruits of field and tree,
all edible fowls, fishes, and mammals, procuresses,
inviolable, wool-knit-clad giants who communicated tremblingly from stand to stand among
themselves with a flash of their big sweater buttons
of mother-of-pearl or a slap on their resounding black aprons or charged money-belts. Werent
things bubbling up, seething and swelling beneath
the hems of their skirts, wasnt this the truly
fertile soil? Didnt a market god himself toss the
wares into their laps: berries, shellfish, mushrooms,
lumps of meat and cabbage, an unseen presence

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for those yielding themselves to him while lazily

and silently eyeing the stream of toiling housewives
who, weighed down with shopping baskets and
purses, struggled to steer the brood before them
through these slippery, disreputable aisles? During
winter, once the gaslights had come on early in the
evening, instantly you would believe yourself to
be sinking down and, gently gliding, to be sensing
for the first time the depths below the sea-surface
which stirred in the glassy waters with an obscure
lethargy.

[21 ]
The more I come back to these memories, the less it
seems merely a matter of chance how slight is the
role played in them by human beings: I am thinking
of an afternoon in Paris to which I owe insights
into my life which came over me like lightning
and with the force of an illumination. For it was
on the very same afternoon that my biographical

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connections with persons, my friendships and

comradeships, my passions and amours, revealed
themselves to me in their most vital and most
hidden interweaving. I say to myself: This would
have to be in Paris, where the walls and quais, the
asphalt, the art collections and street rubbish, the
window grates and squares, the arcades and kiosks
instruct us in a language so singular that we are
enveloped in loneliness and lose ourselves in that
object-world, and our relations with humans
achieve the profundity of a sleep in which the dreamimage awaits them, to reveal to them their true
aspect. I wish to speak of this afternoon because it
made so very clear the nature of the rule exercised
by cities over the imaginationand why the
citywhere people assert the most ruthless claims
over one another, where appointments and telephone conversations, meetings and visits, flirting
and the struggle for existence grant the individual
no moment for contemplationhas its revenge
in memory, and [why] the veil which memory has
created in secret from our lives exhibits less the

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images of persons than those of scenes where

we encountered others or ourselves. On the afternoon of which I wish to speak, I was sitting in
the interior of the Caf des Deux Magots next to
Saint Germain des Prs, where I was expecting
someone, I do not remember whom. Then and
there the thought of drawing a diagram of my
life came over me with irresistible force, and in
the very same moment I knew also just how this
should be done. The question I used to sift
through my past was an utterly simple one, and
the responses as though unaided drew themselves on a sheet of paper I had extracted. One or
two years later when I lost this paper, I was
inconsolable. Never again have I been able to
create a diagram like the one which then came
into being before me, similar to a series of
genealogical trees. Now, however, when I wish
to reconstruct its outlines mentally without
actually reproducing it, I should prefer to speak of
a labyrinth. What dwells in the chamber at its
enigmatic center, the ego or fate, shall not detain

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me here; however, I am all the more concerned

with the many entrances which lead into its
interior. These entrances I am naming ur-acquaintances; each is the graphic symbol of my
acquaintance with someone whom I met not
through other persons but rather by way of
neighborhood circumstances, ties of blood,
school comradeship, mistaken identity, or
travelingthere are only a limited number of
such situations. For every ur-acquaintance, then,
a different entry into the labyrinth. But since most
of these ur-acquaintances, at least those which
remain in our memory, yield other acquaintances,
open up connections to new persons, so these
paths eventually produce branches (you may draw
in the masculine ones to the right and the
feminine to the left). Whether or not connecting
branches ultimately reach from one of these
systems to another, that, too, depends on
interweavings in the course of our life. Though
more important are the surprising insights
which the study of this diagram yields into the

twenty-first notice

variety of individual life-paths: With regard to

ur-aquaintances in the lives of different persons,
what are the roles played by profession and school,
by relatives and travel? And most important of
all: In an individual existence, do something like
hidden laws govern the formation of those many
separate entrances? Which entrances come into
being early in life, and which late? Which persist
until the end of life, and which die off? When
someone has character, Nietzsche says, he will
experience the same thing over and over. Whether
or not that is true overall, still to some extent
there may exist paths which ever and again lead us
to those who possess the very same function for
us: Paths which are always leading us at different
stages in our lives to friends, betrayers, lovers,
pupils, or masters. This is what the outline of my
life showed me as it came into being in front of
me that Paris afternoon. So do the persons who
had been around me come together as a figure
against the background of the city. It was many
years earlier, I believe at the beginning of the war,

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that the world of objects drew itself together in

Berlin as a similarly profound emblem, against
the background of those persons who were then
closest to me. And it drew itself together as four
rings. Which leads me into one of the old Berlin
houses on the Kupfergraben. With their simple,
elegant faades and broad staircases they may
well stem from the Schinkel era. At the time of
which I speak, in one of them was living an
important dealer in antiquities. He maintained
no display window. You had to repair to his
apartment, which took up an entire floor, in order
to admire a selection of prehistoric clasps and
needles, Langobardic earrings, late Roman necklaces, medieval coins, and many other precious
objects kept in several vitrines. How my school
friend A.C. sniffed him out I do not know.
Though I do well rememberbeing then under
the spell of Die sptromanische Kunstindustrie by
Alois Riegl, which I had studied shortly before
the eagerness with which I inspected there the
breast armor plated in gold and the armbands

twenty-first notice

decorated with garnets. If I am not mistaken,

there were three of us: my friend, his intended
of that time or Frau Dorothea J., and myself.
C. had rings shown to himGreek gems, cameos
from the Renaissance, rings from the Imperial
era, most of them worked with carved semi-precious
stones. Each of the four which he ended in
purchasing made an indelible impression upon
me. Except for one I have lost track of, they remain
with the persons for whom they were chosen on
that morning. That oneit was a bright yellow
smoky topazDorothea J. had selected for
herself. The carving was Greek and on a tiny
ground represented Leda as she receives the swan
between her open thighs. It was very charming.
I was able to summon less admiration for the
amethyst which the gift-giver chose for our mutual
friend, Ernst S., on which an Italian of the 15th
or 16th century had inscribed a profileaccording to Lederer that of Pompey. The last two rings,
however, affected me entirely differently. One
was meant for me, though only as a purely interim

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possessor; really it was intended to reach my

betrothed of the time, Grete R., through me and
as my present. This was the most fascinating ring
I have ever seen. Carved from a dark and massy
garnet, it showed a Medusa head and was a work
of Imperial Roman times. The slight setting was
no longer the old one. On your finger, it would
seem merely the most perfect of seal rings. Only
by drawing it off your finger and holding the head
up against the light could you enter into its secret.
The different layers of the garnet being of
differing transparencies, with the thinnest so
transparent that it glowed as though rose-colored,
you could believe you saw the dark snake-bodies
of the head waving over a brow, beneath which
two deep and glowing eyes peered from a countenance that retreated into the night once more
with the purple-black surfaces of its cheeks. Later,
I attempted on several occasions to use this stone
as a seal; however, it turned out to be prone
to fissures and in need of the greatest consideration. Not long after I had made a gift of the ring,

twenty-first notice

I dissolved my connection with its new possessor.

My heart was already accompanying the last of
the four rings, which the gift-giver had reserved
for his sister. And in truth, this girl embodied
the real axis of fate of this circle, though years
would pass before we came to realize it. For
apart from her beautynot dazzling itself, but
weak and insignificantshe had nothing that
seemed to destine her for the central place. And
really she was never the midpoint for human
beings but rather, strictly speaking, the midpoint
for destinies, as if her plantlike passivity and
inertia coordinated these destinieswhich do
indeed appear to be, of all human things, the
most subject to vegetable laws. Many years were
required for what was then in part beginning
its embryonic development, in part still slumbering, to emerge with its web of associations: The
destiny thanks to which she who was bound to
her brother by an intimacy which filled sibling
love to its limits should become the girlfriend
of her brothers two nearest friendsgirlfriend to

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him who had received the ring with the Pompey

head, and to mein order finally to find her
husband in the brother of the woman who
married her brother in a second marriagethat
woman being the same who, back then on the
day of which I speak, had received from me the
ring with the Medusa head. It will have been a
few days later when I sent after the lapis lazuli on
which had been incised a lute surrounded with
laurel branchesthe fourth ringthis sonnet for
its wearer: Well to thy finger did it trust itself [.]

[ 22 ]
The treasure-keeper in the green fir-wood or the
fairy who vouchsafes you a wishthey appear
to everyone at least once in a lifetime. But only
Sundays children know how to recall the wish
they made, and that is why only very few people
recognize its fulfillment in their own lives. I know
a wish of that sort which was fulfilled for me, and

twenty-second notice

will not claim it was cleverer than the wish made

by fairy-tale children. It goes back to my early
childhood and formed in me with the lamp that
was carried over my threshold at six-thirty on dark
winter mornings and which cast the shadow of the
childrens maid on the ceiling. Fire was kindled
in the oven and soon the grate of the oven door
shone against the bare floor in the midst of reddish
reflections. When the warmththe night warmth
of the bed and the morning warmth of the oven
firehad made me sleepy twice over, it was time
to get up. Then I had no other wish except to
be able to sleep my fill. This wish accompanied
me all through my school days. Its inseparable
companion, however, was the anxiety that I would
arrive too late. Today, whenever I pass Savignyplatz,
I am still able to bring to mind the anxiety with
which I would be rounding the corner from
Carmerstrae where I lived and would read my
sentence from the banned space between ten and
twelve on the repulsive clockface. The wish with
which I was inspired on such weekdays, and still

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later when, dead tired, I rose from the sofa on

an afternoon when there was gym, would be
fulfilled for me. Only I did not always perceive this
fulfillment when yet another of my efforts to find
a job, in the bourgeois sense of the word, had come
to nothing.

[23 ]
There is yet another sound which, owing to the
decades in which it has not reached me by way of
the lips or the ears, retains the unfathomableness with which certain words from the language
of adults come before children. It has not yet been
so long since a word came back to me, as did
several indivisible finds similar to this one [that]
have a large share in my decision to write down
these memories. My parents were affluent, and
in the time before I entered school, and perhaps
later on, too, besides taking occasional summer
trips, we used each year to rent summer quarters

twenty-third notice

outside the city. First it was Potsdam and afterwards

Neubabelsberg. And if the Babelsberg times are
still present to me in many an imagethe night
of the great break-in, when my parents locked
themselves in my room, the hours I stood f lyfishing next to my father on the banks of the
Griebnitzsee, my visit to the Pfaueninsel, which
brought me the first great disappointment of
my life because I did not f ind the peacock
feathers in the grass which had certainly been
promised meI may yet have something to
say about these imagesthe summer months
in Potsdam on the other hand have entirely
vanished, unless I am permitted to transfer
asparagus cuttingmy first and only agricultural
passionback to the garden on the Brauhausberg.
And now I have let slip the word in which hundreds of summer days are preserved along with their
fragrance, their shape, color, and variety having
been sacrificedjust as are hundreds of rose petals
in a drop of rose malmaison. It is Brauhausberg.
To draw near what that word holds in itself is nearly

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impossible. Such words, found on the border

between two realms of language, that of children
and of older persons, are comparable to words in
poems by Mallarm, those which the inner antagonism between the poetic and the profane word
leaves, as it were, emaciated and expiring on the air.
So has the word Brauhausberg grown weightless
and no longer has anything more at all to do with
a brewery, is at most a hill with an aura of blue
that in summer raises itself up to house my parents
and me.

[24 ]
The economic basis on which my parents household rested remained shrouded in the deepest
mystery until long after my childhood and youth.
And apparently not solely for me, the eldest son,
but for my mother to nearly the same degree. To be
sure, this way of doing things was the rule in Jewish
families and no doubt in a great many Christian ones

twenty-fourth notice

as well. Actually it is more curious that our

consumption was also somewhat drawn into
the mystery which so thickly cloaked income
and assets. At any rate I remember that the mention
of certain Lieferanten-Quellen, as they were
calledwas always accompanied by solemnity
befitting a consecration. Of course one needs to
distinguish. Suppliers who took care of our daily
household requirements no more belonged to
that mysterious circle than did the old and
respected Berlin f irms of which my mother
made the rounds when she went into town with
me and my siblings. It was just as certain that on
such occasions our childrens suits would be
bought from Arnold Mller, the shoes from
Stiller, and the coffers from Mdler as it was
certain that at the conclusion of all this business,
our chocolate with whipped cream would be
ordered at Hillbrichs. These shopping stations
were prescribed with utmost rigor by tradition.
Matters were entirely different for the connections
with suppliers that went back to my father. For

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despite various inhibitions arising not only from

his decency but from a certain citizenly conformity, too, my father at bottom possessed the
enterprising nature of a great merchant. Unfavorable inf luences were the reason for his far too
early withdrawal from a concern which seems to
have answered to his abilities quite well, and of
which he was part ownerLepkes art auction
house, in those days still located in Kochstrae.
After relinquishing his share in the firm he turned
ever more to the speculative investing of his funds,
and it would not surprise me if he had taken a
livelier interest in the management of our household from that time on. So much is clear: A fair
portion of the suppliers whom he discovered from
then on were indirectly linked to his capital
investments. If my mothers shopping yielded a
traditional and as it were an official picture of
the commercial world of Berlin, my fathers
references and allusions conjured up an unfamiliar
and even perhaps risky one whose prestige for
me was founded both on the authoritative sound

twenty-fourth notice

which such names had around the family table

and on the fact that these firms, unlike the others,
never entered my field of vision. At the foreif
I may put it sowas Lepkes auction house itself.
Not only was my father associated with the firm;
every now and then he would bring home from it
a purchase. I do not believe that he was very fortunate in his purchases on the whole, with the
exception perhaps of his carpets. Just a little before
his death he told me that in those times he had
been able to assess the quality of the weave with
the ball of his foot, provided he was wearing
soles which were not too thick. In childhood,
though, I was most deeply impressed when I
imagined the hammer strokes with which my
father accompanied the auction. Later, after he
had retired from Lepkes, this hammer always lay
on his writing desk. If it was never given me to
hear the sound of his hammer strokes, there was
in exchange another sound which during my
childhood allied itself indissolably with the idea
of the power and greatness of my fatheror

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rather: of a man who has his profession. As little

believable as it sounds, this was the noise made
by the knife with which my mother buttered the
bread my father took with him to work in the
morning, when it was scraped against the crisp
slices one last time so as to remove any excess
butter. This sound heralded my fathers working
day in a manner no less exciting for me than would
be the theater bell in after years which announces
the start of the play. Otherwise, in our house the
actual emblem of the paternal profession was a
Moor who, nearly lifesize, stood on a gondola
reduced to a thirtieth of its original dimensions,
and who in one hand grasped an oar, which could
be removed, and with the other held aloft a golden
bowl. The artwork was fashioned from wood,
with the Moor in black and the gondola and oar
gleaming in many hues beneath the varnish. The
whole thing, however, counted so much on its
companion piece that today I am no longer able
to say whether or not a second Moor which I
imagine accompanying it really was at one time

twenty-fourth notice

on display in our house or is an invention of my

fantasy. That is enough about Lepkes art auction
house. Otherwise, for artworksat least insofar
as it was a matter of bronzesthere was another
supplier; this was the f irm of Gladenbeck.
Whether close business relations guided the
choice here I do not know. But it was decidedly
the case with the procurement of mouthwash,
acquired in huge bottles full of hydrogen
peroxide in the Medizinisches Warenhaus,
and on whose advisory board my father had a
seat. Things were again somewhat less transparent when it came to the firm of Stabernack,
which for many years held an uncontested
monopoly over all electrical, heating, and plumbing
work done in our house. Here perhaps a
construction company was the link, since one of
the directors, Herr Altgelt, served as partner for
countless of my fathers telephone conversations,
and whose name remains in my memory because
his son sat in my class as one of its most inglorious
members. Leaving aside mealtime conversations,

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it was uniquely the telephone which furnished us

with information concerning that hidden world
of business and suppliers. My father did a great deal
of telephoning. A man who seemed always to show
an obliging and docile manner to the outside
world, he may have possessed the bearing and determination in keeping with his wealth, which was
at times great wealth, only when at the telephone.
Not infrequently, when he was speaking with those
whose responsibility it was to put him through to
his party, this energy became an uproar, and
disputes with the telephone girl were the true
symbol of the seriousness of life made visible
through my fathers professional activities. The
telephone made its appearance during my childhood. I knew it when it was nailed up in some
corner or other of the corridor, where with shrill
cries out of the darkness it augmented the terrors
of the Berlin apartment and that endless passage
leading from the twilit dining room to the rear
bedrooms. And it became a veritable infernal
machine when my school comrades called during

twenty-fourth notice

the forbidden time between two and four oclock.

However, not all of my fathers secretive transactions went through the telephone. Like many men
who do not always have such an easy time of it
in their marriage, he had always been inclined to
take over branches of the household economy for
himself. Hence the connections he established in
the province, and above all in the vicinity of
Hamburg, where he often traveled on business.
Our household was regularly supplied from this
region with Holstein country butter and, during
autumn, with teal. For wine, though, another
Berlin f irm made its entrance, whose stock
certificates, too, were in my fathers possession:
this was the Zentrale fr Weinbetrieb, which was
experimenting with new methods for making
calculations in the wine trade. Finally, there were
other names which interwove themselves with
these in my parents consultationsinto which the
traditions of the bourgeois Berlin of those days
flowed from both sides: For notarial attestations
Oberneck was called upon, operations would be

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given Rinne to perform, dance lessons were received

from Quaritsch, Renvers was consulted as the
house physician for as long as we lived in the same
building with him, Joseph Goldschmidt was our
banker. As for what concerns me, however, the
most lasting impression was made one evening
when my father rashly attempted to bring the entertainment of the family into that harmony with his
commercial undertakings which he had managed
with respect to its other needs. In circa 1910, in the
West, in Lutherstrae, when a consortium acquired
the building which now houses the Scala for use as
an Eispalast, my father happened to be among its
members, and with a considerable investment.
Now one eveningI dont know if it was the opening date or laterhe got the idea of taking me
there with him. The Eispalast was not only the first
skating rink which we had in Berlin, but a quite
busy nightclub, too. And so I was far less fascinated by the performances in the arena than by
the apparitions at the bar, which I was able to
observe comfortably from one of the boxes in

twenty-fifth notice

the circle. Among these was a whore in a very

snug-fitting white sailors suit, who, though I was
unable to exchange a word with her, would
determine my erotic fantasies for many years.

[25 ]
In those early years I got to know the city merely
as the scene of shopping errands, in the course
of which it was shown for the first time how our
fathers money cleared a path between the display
tables and the clerks and the mirrors and the looks
of our mother, whose muff lay on the counter.
There we would stand in the embarrassment
of a new suit, out of whose sleeves our hands
peered like smudged price-lists, and only in the
pastry shop did we start to feel better and to
sense our liberation from that heathen worship
which had humiliated our mother before the
idols whose names were Mannheimer, Herzog
and Israel, Gerson, Adam, Esders and Mdler,

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Emma Bette, Bud and Lachmann. A series of

never-to-be-fathomed massifs, no, caverns, full of
goodsthat was the city.

[26 ]
There are persons who believe they are able to
discover the key to their fate in heredity, for others
it is the horoscope, and for still others, their upbringing. I myself believe that I might find a
measure of enlightenment regarding my subsequent life were I able to leaf through my collection of picture postcards once more today. The
great patron of this collection was my grandmother
on the maternal side, a decidedly enterprising
woman from whom I think I have inherited two
things: my delight in gift-giving and my love of
travel. If it remains questionable what role the
Christmas holidaysnot to be dismissed from
the Berlin of my childhood yearshad in the first
of these passions, certainly no adventure book

twenty-sixth notice

of boyhood stimulated my love of travel so much

as did picture postcards, quantities of which my
grandmother thought to send me from her
wide-ranging voyages. And since the yearning
which we feel for a place defines it as much as does
its outer appearance, something shall be said
concerning these postcards. Stillwas what they
awakened in me in those days yearning? Wasnt
their attraction for me too magnetic even to leave
me room to wish to travel to the places they
depicted? I was simply therein Tabarz, Brindisi,
Madonna di Campiglio, Westerlandwhen I
would gaze over and over at the wooded slopes of
Tabarz laden with glowing red berries, the vanishing blur of the yellowish-white piers of Brindisi,
the domes of Madonna di Campiglio, printed
bluish on blue, and the looming bow of the
Westerland as it cut through the wavesand was
unable to part from them. When you visited the
old lady in her oriel, which hung over Blumeshof
and was covered in carpets and graced with a
small balustrade, it was hard to imagine that she

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had undertaken great sea voyages or even excursions on camelback under the direction of Stangels
Reisebro, to whom she would entrust herself
every few years. She was a widow; when I was
little, three of her daughters were already married.
Concerning the fourth I should not have anything
to say, though I might well concerning the room
she occupied at her mothers. But first I ought
perhaps to say something about this apartment
as a whole. Where are the words to capture the
almost immemorial bourgeois security wafting
from these rooms? Paradoxical as it sounds, I am
led to suppose that the notion of their special
security enveloping me is most closely connected with their defects. Certainly the inventory
which f illed these many rooms, as many as
twelve or fourteen, would accommodate itself
today to the shabbiest second-hand shop without any incongruity. And then, too, even if
those ephemeral forms were so much more solid
than the Jugendstil which succeeded them
nevertheless, what was familiar, calming, homey,

twenty-sixth notice

and comforting about them was the lethargy with

which they entrusted themselves to the sauntering
passage of years and days and, when it was a
question of their future, put their faith exclusively
in the durability of materials and never in rational
calculation. Here reigned a class of objects which,
no matter how obligingly they submitted in minor
ways to the whims of fashion, were so sure of themselves and of their permanance that they never
reckoned with any wear, with inheritors, or with
movesand insisted on remaining always very
close to and very distant from their end, which
looked like the end of all things. Penury could
have no place in these rooms, where not even death
had any. There was no room in them for dying
therefore their inhabitants died in the sanatorium,
and still the furniture went with the first change
of hands to the second-hand dealer. In them death
was not foreseenand that is why by day they
were so cozy and by night would become the scene
of our most oppressive dreams. Whence it happens
that hereit was Blumeshof no. 10 or no. 12here

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in this house in which so many of my loveliest childhood hours were passed when I was permitted to
leaf through Herzblttchens Zeitvertreib to the sound
of piano etudes while seated in an armchaira
nightmare greets me upon the threshold. My
waking existence has preserved no image of the
ascending stairs. On the other hand, they still remain
in my memory today as the scene of a menacing
dream I had one night precisely in these good years.
In this dream, the stairwell appeared as the force
field of a ghost who was waiting for me on the steps
and yet did not deny me right of way, and who
first caused me to notice him when only the last
steps still lay before me. On these steps he froze
me. The rooms in this apartment in Blumeshof
were not only numerous, some of them were also
very large. In order to reach my grandmother in
her oriel, I would have to traverse the enormous
dining room and penetrate to the limits of the
sitting room. Nevertheless it was only the holidays,
and most of all the first day of Christmas, which
gave you an idea of how much these rooms could

twenty-sixth notice

hold. If on this day it seemed as though Christmas

had been waited for in the anterooms all through
the year, so were there occasions that called other
parts of the apartment to life: The visit of a married daughter unsealed a trunk room long fallen
into disuse; another rear room opened itself to us
children when the adults sought their midday
rest in rooms toward the front; and piano lessons
given to the last daughter remaining in the house
revived yet another part of it. The most important
of these remote and rarely used rooms was surely
the loggia. The most important, it may be, because
it was the least fitted up and least accommodated
the visits of adults, or it may be because street
noise penetrating the loggia was muff led, or it
may be, finally, because here the rear courtyards
commenced with their children, servants, hurdygurdy players, and porters. Then again, courtyard
voices were more often apprehended from the
loggia than were figures. In any case, the courtyards of so exclusive a residential quarter were
never truly animated; something of the sedateness

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of the rich for whom work was carried out in them

had infiltrated the very tasks, and everything
seemed to be waiting for the hundred years rest
of Sleeping Beauty which settled in here on
Sundays. And that is why Sunday was the actual
loggia-daySunday, which the other rooms
could never quite capture because they were in a
way defective. Sunday seeped through them, and
only the loggia extending into the courtyard along
with the poles on which rugs were beaten and the
other loggias with their bare walls of Pompeian
redonly the loggia captured Sunday, and no
tone from the pealing freight which was slowly
loaded onto it for us during the afternoon by the
churchesthe Zwlf-Apostel- and the Matthiand the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedchtnis-Kirche
slid over its balustrade, but remained stored up
there until evening. As I have already hinted, my
grandmother did not die in Blumeshof, any more
than did my other grandmother, my fathers mother,
who lived across from her in the same street and
was older and more severe. For this reason the street

twenty-seventh notice

became for me an Elysium, an uncertain shadowrealm inhabited by deceased and yet immortal
grandmothers. And because the imagination, once
it has succeeded in throwing its veil over a neighborhood, likes to crimp the edges with unaccountable whimsies, so in the course of the decades has
it allowed an old and reputable shop for colonial
wares in the vicinity of this house, though already
in Magdeburger Strae, to become for one passerby
a memorial to his prematurely deceased grandfather simply because its owner, like the grandfather,
was named Georg. Until today it remains for him
a memorial, and he has never set foot there.

[27 ]
Though isnt this the city, too: the evening strip
of light beneath the bedroom door when beyond
it there was company? Didnt Berlin itself
penetrate the child-night, filled with expectancy,
in the same way the world of Wilhelm Tell or

berlin chronicle

Julius Caesar was to penetrate the night of a theater audience later. I believe that the dream ship
which came for you in those days often heaved
up before our beds upon the waves of noisy
conversation or amid the spray of clattering dinner
plates, and early next morning set us down in
the wake of the rug beating which entered the
window with the moist air on rainy days,
engraving itself more unforgettably for the child
than would the voice of the beloved engrave
itself for the manthat rug beating which was
the speech of the lower orders, of servant girls,
of the genuinely grown up, a language which sometimes gave itself much time, which, muted and
sluggish, was ready for anything beneath the
gray sky, and at times fell once more into an
inexplicable gallop as though there were ghosts
behind the domestics pursuing them. Courtyards,
too, were places in which the city opened itself
up to release the child or else receive him again.
Railway stationstheir openings upon your
departure were a panorama, the frame for a fata

twenty-eighth notice

morgana. No far was farther than where the

tracks converged in fog. With homecoming, however, all was different. For in us there still burned
the dim lamps which had shone only here and
there in the courtyards from windows often lacking
curtains, or in stairwells staring with filth, or out
of basement windows where rags hung. Such were
the courtyards which the city let me glimpse when
I returned from Hahnenklee or Sylt, and which it
then sealed up in itself again and never let anyone
see or enter. But these last five minutes of anxiety
during our return, before everyone gets out of the
train, have transformed themselves into looks from
my eyes, and perhaps there are persons who peer into
them as into courtyard windows set in crumbling
walls and in which a lamp stands in early evening.

[28 ]
Among the postcards in my album were a few
whose writing sides are more firmly lodged in my

berlin chronicle

memory than the picture sides. These were all

furnished with the lovely, ledgible signature:
Helene Pufahl. That was my first teacher. Long
before I was acquainted with a classroom,
through her I was brought into close contact with
children of my class, in the sense of the word
I should come to know only two decades later.
And that it was quite an elevated class I am able
to infer from the two girls names which have
stayed in my memory from among those of the
little circle: Ilse Ullstein and Luise von Landau.
What sort of nobility these Landaus were, I do
not know. However, the name exercised a powerful attraction over me, andas number of
things give me the right to assumeover my
parents likely one no smaller. Although this is
indeed scarcely the reason the name remained
alive in my memory until today. Rather, hers was
the first, among those belonging to persons my
own age, on which I was conscious of hearing fall
the accent of death. It was, so far as I know, not
very long after I had outgrown the small private

twenty-eighth notice

circle. When later I passed along the Ltzowufer,

each time my glances would seek out her house,
and then, towards the end of my school years, as I
was writing my first philosophical essay under the
title Thoughts on the Nobility, there stood the
seductive name of my first schoolmate unspoken
next to Pindar, from whom I had taken my
departure. Fralein Pufahl was succeeded by Herr
Knoche, before whom I was obliged to prove
myself all alone. He was the preparatory teacher
for the school to which my parents thought to
send me later. Quite possibly his instruction
did not wholly agree with me. In any case, from
time to time I would marshal magic rites against
his appearing, and I still recall the feeling of
omnipotence which overcame me one day on the
Herculesbrcke upon hearing the news that Herr
Knoche had announced his absence for the day
following. Back then I knew which circumstance
was responsible for this, but today, alas, I have
forgotten the magic formula. More than through
his appearances in a private capacity, Herr Knoche

berlin chronicle

impressed me during the classroom hours I spent

with him afterwards, once I had been enrolled in
school. These were hours enlivened with many
an intermezzo of chastisement, for Herr Knoche
appreciated what could be done with the cane.
He was also entrusted with singing instruction.
And it was in front of me during singing class that
he pointed out one of those gates which all of us
[know] from childhood, and before whose sealed
portals we are assured that they make free the path
into our subsequentour trueexistence. We were
practicing the Reiterlied from Wallensteins Lager.
Frisch auf, Kameraden, aufs Pferd, aufs Pferd /
in das Feld, in die Freiheit gezogen. / Im Felde da
ist der Mann noch etwas wert, / da wird das Herz
noch gewogen. Herr Knoche wished the class to
tell him what these last words actually meant.
Naturally no one knew what to reply; for it was one
of those artful questions which leave children
bewildered. Herr Knoche, however, found this
helplessness very much to his liking and with
emphasis said: Youll understand that once youre

twenty-ninth notice

grown. Now am I grown; today I stand on the

inner side of the gate which Herr Knoche showed
to us in those days; but its portals are still always
sealed. I have not made my entry through this gate.

[29 ]
Just as the lights of a foggy night surround themselves with gigantic circles, so do the earliest
theater-impressions emerge with great haloes
from the fog of my childhood. At the very
beginning stands a monkey-theater, which may
have played on Unter den Linden and in which
so much comes to me nowI appeared under a
great escort because neither my parents nor my
grandmother were willing to forego witnessing
the impact of a first theatrical performance on me.
To be sure, I no longer recognize the very light
itselfthe actual happenings on the stagein
the midst of so much dazzling fog. A pinkish-gray
cloud of seats, lighting, and faces has buried the

berlin chronicle

pranks of the poor little monkeys on stage beneath

itself. Without doubt I am able to name the sequence
of theater events of the next six or seven years:
But I can say nothing more about them, neither
of the Veilchenfresser which I got to see at the spa
theater in Suderode, nor of the Wilhelm Tell,
which, as was customary, was my initiation to
the Berlin stage, nor of the Fiesko which I saw
performed in the Schauspielhaus with Matkowsky,
nor of the Carmen I saw in the Oper with
Destinn. The last two performances had been
taken under my grandmothers protection, which
answered not only for the brilliant program but
also the handsome box seats. Nevertheless, I
am more drawn to ref lect on the Wilhelm Tell
performance than on these, and to be sure because
of the event which preceeded it and whose
highly hermetic nature remains vivid, whereas no
trace of the performance that night can be found
in my memory. It would have been in the afternoon that a difference of opinion arose between me
and my mother. Something was supposed to be

twenty-ninth notice

undertaken which seemed objectionable to me.

Finally my mother had recourse to the use of
force. She threatened that were I not to do her
bidding, she would leave me home that night;
I submitted. However, the feeling with which I
did soor rather, the feeling as I strove to
assess the strength of the two opposing sides as
soon as the threat had been uttered, and saw in
an instant how overwhelming was the superiority of the oppositionwhence my silent outrage
at so direct and brutal a proceedings, in which
the thing at stake bore no relationship to the end
sought, for the latter was f leeting while the
former, as I know now and sensed then, was the
deep and lasting gratitude I should feel for that
evening which my mother was about to present to
me as a giftthis feeling of misused and violated
trust has outlasted everything else which came
after it on that day. Many years later it was proven
a second time how much more significant and
enduring can be ones joyful anticipation of an
event than anything which comes after. As a boy

berlin chronicle

it was my heartfelt wish to see Kainz. His guest

appearances on the Berlin stage, however, came
during the school year. [And since] the only way
to secure seats on the strength of my pocket money
was to purchase a ticket in advance during the
morning, I was forced to renounce the wish for
many years. My parents did not smile upon its
fulfillment in any case. One dayit may have
been because the first day of advance sales fell
on Sunday, or for some other reasonI was
able to show up as one of the first at the ticket
window. It was already the one for the theater
on Nollendorfplatz. I see myself standing there
at the ticket window, andas though memory
wished to preludize on the main motive to come
waiting there, but not buying the ticket. Indeed,
here memory pauses, to take up its thread once
more only as I am mounting the stairs to my box
seat in the evening, before the start of the performance of Richard II. And now what is it that,
on the auditorium threshold, once again imposes
on the memory a thus far and no further? I do still

twenty-ninth notice

see before me a scene from the drama, but entirely

in isolation, so that I do not know if it actually
comes from that performance or from another, and
I am as little certain whether I saw Kainz or not.
Also whether he canceled, or whether my disappointment in finding him less great than I
had believed has made off with the entire
evening, along with the image of his acting.
Wherever I inquire into my earliest memories
of the theater I meet with uncertainty, and in the
end I can no longer even tell dream from reality. That goes for a dark winter evening on which
my mother and I betook ourselves to a performance
of Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor. I really did
see this opera, to be sure in a sort of popular
theater. It was a noisy and cheerful evening;
all the quieter then was our way there through a
snow-covered and unfamiliar Berlin which spread
itself about me in gaslight. This Berlin stood in
the same relation to the city I knew as did that
most fervently guarded item in my collection of
postcards: the depiction of the Hallisches Tor

berlin chronicle

in bright blue against a dark-blue background.

On it could be seen Belle-Alliance-Platz with
the houses that enclose it; in the sky stood a full
moon. The moon, however, as well as the windows in the faades were freed of the uppermost
layer of the paper stock and protruded out of the
image as white; you were obliged to hold the
postcard up before a lamp or candle so that with
the shining surfaces of windows and moon
parading in the just the same light, you saw everything grow calm. Perhaps the opera towards
which we were making our way was that lightsource before which the city, suddenly so very
altered, shone that evening; though perhaps it
is merely a dream Ive had subsequently of this
pathway, the dream-memory having established
itself and displaced whatever formerly was the
placeholder for reality.

thirtieth notice

[30 ]
Something like Brandenburg brick Gothic must
have hovered before the architect who built the
Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule. Whether or no, it is
constructed out of red brick and prefers motifs
known to us from Stendal or Tangermnde; though
everything turned out thin-chested and highshouldered. The whole structure, rearing there
right beside the elevated train, is of a dismal,
spinsterish primness. Apparently I should ascribe
to this exterior, even more than to my experiences
within its interior, the fact that I retain not one
single cheerful memory of the building. And
then too, since leaving it behind I have never once
entertained the thought of entering there again.
Of my paths to the school I have already spoken.
But when the portal was reached in good time,
or when there was too little idle time leftor
the dread before what was coming weighed too
heavilyfor you to buy some modeling clay in
the stationery store next door, or a protractor or,

berlin chronicle

at the very beginning, labels and ribbons with

which you fastened blotting papers onto notebook coverswhen [here] at last [was] the iron
gate which the attendant was permitted to
open only ten minutes before the beginning of
schoolhow dreary and how oppressive this
waiting must have been before it and beneath the
arch of the elevated train where it crosses
K nesebeckstrae. Though I am no longer
aware of any it except for my being compelled
to remove my cap uninterruptedly and pay
attention whenever another of the teachers
passed byto whom entering was of course
allowed at any time. Today only, so it seems to
me, am I able to explain to myself what was
hateful and humiliating in being compelled to
remove my cap before the teachers. To me it
seemed improper that they would dare to admit
themselves into the realm of my private existence
through this gesture. I would have had no
objection to something less intimate and approaching a military show of respect. But to greet a teacher

thirtieth notice

as you would a relative or a friend seemed as

monstrously improper to me as wanting to hold
school in my house. From this alone one can
see how little school ever succeeded in ingratiating
itself with me. And if I was acquainted with
the more antique forms of school discipline
beatings, demotions, or detentionsolely in
the lower forms, still the horrors and the spell
they laid upon me in these years never lifted.
And that I see not only from the importance
placed [by me] upon promotion as well as the
four report cards that were brought home
during the year, but also from lesser particulars which are nevertheless more telling. Most
of all from the inconceivable dismay, or rather
perplexity, into which I was plunged by interruptions to the instructional planby rural
excursions, games of various kinds, and especially
the grand, annually scheduled competition
among the schools of Greater Berlin to determine
the best team in prisoners base. Needless to say, I
was never a member of our team, which was rarely

berlin chronicle

successful. But I, too, was caught up in the mobilization of the entire school which occured on
such an occasion. These games were usually
held in May or June, and on fields or training
grounds in the vicinity of the Lehrter Bahnhof.
As a rule the day would be blazing hot. With
feelings of unease I would leave the station and
set forth doubtfully in the direction I vaguely
had in mind and finally end up, my sense of
relief at war with repugnance, among one or
another strange group of schoolboys. From here
on the helplessness was unrelenting, no matter
whether it was a question of seeking out my own
school, or of trying to discover someplace to lie
down in the shade without crossing the playing
field, or of reaching a booth where I could buy
fruit for my breakfast, or, to avoid the appearance
of being uninvolved, of cosying up to one of the
gentlemen who were announcing the outcomes
of the day, or finally, of trading remarks with my
comrades while on the way home over how the
games had gone, even though I had not understood

thirtieth notice

the results. Yet what made this event hateful and

offensive more than anything else was not the
mass scale of the activities but the setting. The
wide and remote avenues leading up to it were
flanked with barracks; barracks bordered on the
playing field; the field was a parade ground.
On those days I was never free of the feeling that
should I let my alertness and attention lapse
here for just one moment, were I simply to
find momentary comfort in the shade of a tree or
in front of the stand of a sausage-seller, I would
fall ten years later a hopeless victim to the site:
I would have to become a soldier. The KaiserFriedrich-Schule stands hard by the tract
belonging to the Stadtbahn along Savignyplatz.
From the Savignyplatz station you can look
down into its courtyard. And because once
liberated from school I would take advantage
of that opportunity from time to time, the
schoolyard now stands before me useless and
to no purpose, like one of those Mexican temples
which were excavated far too soon by amateurs,

berlin chronicle

whose frescoes had long since been eroded by

downpours and were unrecognizable when the
serious excavation of cultural artifacts and
papyri could at last beginthe excavation which
would have been able to throw some light on
these images. As a result I am obliged to
content myself with whatever rises to the surface
again only todayisolated, broken-off pieces
of the interior which nevertheless contain in
themselves the whole, whereas the whole which
stands before me outside has shed its singularity
without leaving a trace. Arriving first is nothing
more than what was surely the most idle of all
my perceptions during my years of school: the
battlement-crowned molding over the classrooms. And perhaps this is not so difficult to
explain. For whatever else entered my field of
vision [could] sooner or later somehow be of use
to me, was bound up with a thoughtwith a
handgripthat led it into the sea of oblivion
along with itself. Things were otherwise with
this slender moulding, which the wholesome surf

thirtieth notice

of daily life cast out endless times each day,

leaving it like a shell on the sand of the shore of
my dreaming. And there it lies so that I now
encounter it. I take it into my hands and question
it as Hamlet does the skull. It is, as has already
been mentioned, a moulding representing a series
of battlements. What comes to view between
these is not so much emptiness but always more
wood, only beveled and notched. Surely it was
meant to remind you of a fortress. But what you
might do with such a reminiscence was another
question. In any case, this moulding strengthened
even more the presentiment of a compact mass
which you sensed mornings behind the closed
doors: the class at its lessons. Above the doors
leading to the hall for manual skills and
drawing, it became the emblem of a certain
nave uprightness befitting a guild. It could be
rediscovered on the classroom cabinet, though
to how much greater effect on identically formed
cabinets which stood against the wall of the
teachers room. In the lower forms, on the clothing

berlin chronicle

shelves amid so many jackets and caps, it failed

to register; in the highest classes, however, it
harbored an allusion to the school-leaving
examination that should soon crown the efforts
of their members. In such places, however,
reason and meaning were never more than a
shadow lying over it, and early and late it
remainedtogether with the unspeakable graygreen ornaments embellishing the walls of the
assembly hall and the absurd buds and volutes
of the cast-iron railingsthe asylum for all my
minutes of horror and my nightmares. Nothing
could compare with the mouldingexcept
perhaps for the bell-signal which shrilled the
start and finish of classes and breaks. The tone
and the duration of this signal always remained the
same. And yet how different was the sound of
the signal when it rang for the beginning of the
first class and for the end of the lastto put this
into words would mean lifting the veil which
seven years of school threw ever more thickly over
every one of the days from which the years were

thirtieth notice

made. In winter it was often still light when the

signal began to sound, but there was nothing
familiar or comforting in the light; it offered
no more refuge than that light which the dentist
uses to illuminate our mouth for us, inside
which he must undertake a procedure. Break fell
between two rings of the signal, and after the
second ring would come the tramping of feet, the
noise and idle chatter with which the schoolboy
mass would stream through just two doors and
push its way up three f lights of narrow stairs.
These stairs were always hateful to me: Hateful
when I was forced to mount them in the midst of
the herd, a forest of thighs and feet in front of me
and defenseless against the noxious panting
and sweating of all the bodies shoving up so
close against my ownand no less hateful when
I was late and forced to rush up them all alone,
passing through abandoned corridors in order
to enter the classroom out of breath. If this was
before the teacher had taken the latch of the door
in his hand, you would be more sure to enter

berlin chronicle

unremarked no matter how very close by he

might be standing. But woe betide if the door was
already shutno matter that the neighboring
ones might yet stand wide open, or some time
might yet remain before a banging of doors
being closed overhead and below announced
the start of lessons, or the eye of another teacher
coming down the hall might run over us ever so
harmlesslythere was absolutely no chance of
avoiding a tribunal within if only we mustered
the courage to open that door.

[ 31 ]
Nh nicht liebes Mtterlein Am roten Sarafan
Nutzlos wird die Arbeit sein Drum strenge
dich nicht an. Abend wird es wieder ber
Wald und Feld Sinken Schatten nieder Und es
ruht die Welt. Ich bin der Doktor Eisenbart
Juvivallera Juche Kurier die Leut nach meiner Art
Juvivallera Juche. Wohlauf noch getrunken den

thirty-first notice

funkelnden Wein Adee nun Ihr Lieben Geschieden

mu sein. Wie die Wolken so wandern am
himmlischen Zelt So steht auch die Sinn mir In
die weite weite Welt. This and so much else would
my mother play from Erks Liederschatz, which
rested in the music stand in the form of two thick
volumes bound in green and gold. I would not
join in the singing yet listened with pleasure.
These melodies belonged to the house like the
shuffling sound made when my mother searched
impatiently through the key-basket for the purse
or notebook lying at its very bottom; like the
dull pop with which the wick in the hanging lamp over the big table in the dining room
was ignited from a match at nightfall; like the
creaking of the dumbwaiter bringing food and
dishes up from the kitchen; like the noise with
which my father, returning home midday, would
open the front door and let his cane drop into the
umbrella stand.

berlin chronicle

[32 ]
In one of those streets I would pass in such endless wanderings, the awakening of my sex drive
had surprised me under the strangest of circumstances many years earlier. That was on the Jewish
New Year and my parents had made arrangements
to have me attend some worship service or other.
Most likely it was a service of the Reform branch,
for which my mother had sympathies stemming from family tradition, my father having
always leaned more towards the Orthodox rite.
He was obliged to yield. They had entrusted me
for this synagogue visit to a relative whom I was
supposed to pick up. Now for whatever reason,
it may have been that I had forgotten his address
or that I could not find my way in the neighborhood, the hour grew later and later without my
coming any nearer my goal. Entering the synagogue alone was completely out of the question
because I had no idea of the way. Surely the main
reason for this helplessness, forgetfulness, and

thirty-third notice

awkwardness was aversion towards the coming

event in its familial no less than its liturgical aspect.
Still roaming about in such fashion, I was on the
one hand suddenly overcome by the thought:
much too late, the time is long since past, youll
never make itand, in exactly the same instant,
by the feeling that none of this mattered in the least
and how good that you could let things turn out
as they would. And these two streams of consciousness flowed together unceasingly as an enormous
feeling of pleasure which filled me with a blasphemous indifference towards the worship service
but which so flattered the street on which I found
myself that it seemed already to have acquainted
me with the pandering services it would later
perform for my awakened sex drive.

[33 ]
Our summer residences were first in Potsdam,
then in Babelsberg. In those days you lived outside,

berlin chronicle

namely from the standpoint of the city; from the

standpoint of summer, though, it was inside: You
nested in summer and, like moss which you scrape
in dimness from the walls of a cave for good luck,
I am compelled to free the memories of summer from their sultry twilight. Some recollections
remain especially well preserved in memory because,
even though they were themselves not subject to
shock, they were isolated from all recollections to
follow. They could not wear themselves down
against later memories and so remained detached,
reliant upon themselves. Such a recollection
comes to me first of all as I speak of these summer
days; it is an evening in my seventh or eighth
year. One of our servant girls lingers by the ironwork gate leading into I know not which alle.
The big garden in whose overgrown margins I
have been racing about is already closed to me.
The time for going to bed has come. Perhaps I was
having my fill of my favorite game and, somewhere
along the barbed-wire fence in the bushes, shooting
rubber bullets from my Eureka pistol at the wooden

thirty-third notice

birds who fell backwards from the green painted

foliage upon the impact of a bullet, twine strings
securing them to the rear of the tableau. All day
long, I had been keeping a secret to myself
namely, my dream of the night before. It had been
an uncanny one. A ghost had appeared to me.
Certainly the place where it was busying itself
did not for a fact and strictly speaking exist in our
house, yet it had great similarity with one known
to me, an exciting and inaccessible place, namely,
the corner in my parents bedroom where my
mothers dressing gowns, house dresses, and
shawls hung beneath an arch partitioned from
the rest of the room with a heavy velvet curtain
of faded violet. The dark behind the portire was
unfathomable and this corner the disreputable,
nocturnal pendant to that well-lit and benevolent domain which from time to time disclosed
itself with my mothers linen closet, in which
were stacked sheets, table cloths, napkins, and
bedspreads on shelves lined with white borders
embroidered with a text in blue taken from Die

berlin chronicle

Glocke. A sweet scent of lavender wafted from

small, brightly colored silk sachets hanging from
the pleated lining of the inner sides of its doors.
Here were Hell and Paradise, into which the
ancient, occult magic of warp and woof formerly
at home in the spinning wheel had divided itself.
And the dream had come from below, from the
evil world: a ghost busying itself with a wooden
rack of silken textiles overlapping one another in
their profusion. The ghost stole these silks. But
neither did it lay hold of them nor did it carry
them off; in truth, it did nothing with or to them
that you could see, nothing that was distinct or
distinguishable, and yet I knew: The ghost had
stolen them, just as in sagas people who discover
a spirits banquet know that these dead ones are
enjoying a repast, without ever seeing them eating or drinking. Such was the dream I had been
keeping to myself. In the night which followed,
while half-asleep and at a strange hour, I observed
how my father and mother came softly into my
room. That they locked themselves in with me I

thirty-third notice

no longer saw; and when I arose next morning

there was nothing for breakfast. Our quarters
had been cleaned out. Around noon my grandmother
came from Berlin with the most needful things.
A numerous band of burglars had fallen upon
the house over night. Fortunately the noise which
they made in the house had given us an idea of
how many they were, and that is why my mother
could hold back my father, who, armed with
only his pocketknife, had wanted to confront
them. The dangerous visit had lasted until
nearly morningin vain had my parents stood
by the window at dawn, hoping to direct signals
to the outside; the band was able to withdraw
with their baskets in perfect tranquility. Much
later they were captured and then we learned
that their organizer, a convict and a murderer
who had been punished many times over, was
deaf and dumb. I was proud to be interrogated
over events of the evening beforea complicity being suspected between the servant girl who
had been standing at the gate and the burglars.

berlin chronicle

I was even prouder when they asked me why I had

kept quiet about my dream, which naturally I now
recited as prophecy.

[34 ]
What the first books meant to meto remember that, I would first of all have to have forgotten
everything else I know of books. To be sure, all
my present knowledge depends on the alacrity
with which I would open a book in those days.
However, whereas contents and theme, subject
and substance today confront the book as
something extraneous to it, these were entirely in
the book before; they were no more extraneous to
it, no more independent of it, than would the
number of pages or the paper be today. The world
that revealed itself in the book and the book
itself were not to be separated from each other at
any price; they were completely one. Along with a
book, therefore, its content, its world, were concretely

thirty-fourth notice

present, before one in the wink of an eye. And

this content, this world, transfigured the book
in all of its parts as well. They burned within it
and blazed from it; they nested not only in the
binding or in the illustrations; chapter headings
and initial capitals, paragraphs and columns
were their housing. You did not read through
books, no, you dwelt, you sheltered between
their lines and when you returned to them after
a break, you would startle yourself at the spot
where you had stopped. And the bliss with
which you received the new book, scarcely daring
to cast a f leeting glance within it, was that of
the guest who has been invited to spend several
weeks in a palace and scarcely dares to throw
an admiring glance over the long rows of
splendid rooms through which he must pass in
order to reach his own. He is all the more impatient to be allowed to withdraw. And so with
me: Each year, having just discovered the latest
volume of Neuer deutscher Jugendfreund on the
table of Christmas gifts, I would withdraw behind

berlin chronicle

the parapet of its heraldically-embellished cover

and grope my way into the spy story or hunting
tale in which I thought to spend my first night.
Making this first survey of the story-labyrinth,
nothing was more delightful than sensing the
various air currents, patches of light, odors, and
sounds issuing from its many chambers and passages. Indeed, the longer stories, often interrupted
and re-emerging in the form of continuations,
traversed the whole as subterranean passages.
And what did it matter if the aromas which rose
from these tunnels into the heights, where we
saw the f lash of globes or water-wheels, would
mix themselves with the scent of pfefferkuchen, or
if a Christmas hymn wove its halo about the
head of Stephensonwhich came into sight with
a page turn like an ancestral portrait seen
through a crack in the dooror if the scent of
the pfefferkuchen bound itself up with that of
a Sicilian sulphur works on a full-page illustration which suddenly smote us as though it were a
fresco? On the other hand, should I sit deeply

thirty-sixth notice

absorbed for a time in my book and then return

to the gifts table, no longer did it stand over me
almost imperiously as when Id taken my first
step into the Christmas room; it seemed instead as
if I were descending a small platform leading me
from my spirit-castle back to the table.

[36 ]
With this piece of good fortunethat I can
rememberanother fuses itself: to possess this
good fortune in memory. Today I am no longer
able to separate the two: It is as though a mere
portion of the gift of the moment, on which I
am reporting here: That it received the gift of
never more being altogether lost to meeven
if decades should endure between the seconds
when I think of it.

berlin chronicle

[35 ]
Everyone can testify to the fact that the length of
time during which we are exposed to impressions
is of no consequence for their fate in memory.
There is nothing which keeps us from preserving
more or less distinct recollections of rooms where
we spent twenty-four hours, and from entirely
forgetting others in which we passed months. It
is, therefore, absolutely not always the fault of an
all-too-brief exposure time when no image appears
on memorys plate. More frequent, perhaps, are
the cases in which, for years, the twilight of habit
denies the plate the necessary light until, one day,
this shoots forth from other sources, as if from
magnesium powder when ignited, and fixes the
room on the plate in the image of an instant
photograph. Invariably, however, it is we ourselves
who are at the center of these rare images. And
that is not so puzzling, since such moments of
sudden exposure are at the very same time beingout-of-ourselves moments, and whereas our

thirty-seventh notice

habitual waking and day-time-oriented ego

involves itself in events, either as actor or sufferer, our deeper ego rests in another place and
is struck by shock as is the little heap of magnesium powder by the match flame. Our memory
must thank the sacrifice of our deepest ego to
shock for its most indelible images. So would
the room in which I used to sleep at six years of
age be forgotten by me had not my father
entered it one nightI already lay in bed
with the news of a death. At bottom it was not
this news itself which affected me in such a
manner; the dead man was a distant cousin. But
in the way my father communicated this, there
was [.]

[37 ]
The first great disappointment of my life reached
me one afternoon on the Pfaueninsel. I had been
told while underway that I would find peacock

berlin chronicle

feathers lying in the grass there. No sooner had I

learned of this than a close connection must have
forged itself between the name of this island and
the peacock feathers with the swiftness of a
spark leaping between two electrically-charged
systems. Not that this spark, say, would have
taken the detour which led by way of the image
of the peacock. That image remained out of play
during the whole episode. Hence my reproachful astonishment at searching through the grass
so hopelessly did not direct itself against the
peacocks whom I saw parading up and down,
but rather against the very soil of this island,
which was a peacock island and yet did not bear
any peacock soil. Had I found the desired feathers
in the grass, I would have come across to myself
as being awaited and welcomed here. Now the
island seemed to me to have broken its promise.
The peacocks were certainly not able to console
me for it; they were for everyone to see. I was
supposed to have what had been destined for me
alone, had been hidden from all the others, and

thirty-seventh notice

was only mine to find in the grass. This disappointment would not have been so great had not
mother earth herself inflicted it on me. And my
bliss after slowly and laboriously learning how to
ride a bicycle would not have been so sweet had
not mother earth let me become aware of her
praise for the accomplishment. In those days
during the flowering of the sport of cyclingyou
learned to ride in large indoor halls dedicated to
the purpose. However, these did not possess
the marks of snobbery which would adhere to
the later skating palaces or indoor tennis courts;
they much more resembled skating rinks, gymnasiums, or Dr. Zanders physical therapy clinics,
and were documents of a mentality for which
sports and the outdoors were not so thoroughly
inseparable as they are for us today. It was the era
of sports costumes, which did not aim above
all else to adapt themselves as closely as possible
to the body as do our present-day training outfits
but sought instead to set off the individual sport
as precisely as possible and to insulate it from

berlin chronicle

all the other sports, just as those halls isolated

it from nature and other forms of exercise. As it
was practiced in such halls, the sport still retained
all the eccentricities of its early years. In action
on the asphalt surface and under the supervision of trainers, besides the usual bicycles
for men, women, and children, were mounts
whose front wheels were ten times larger than
the small rear wheels and whose airy perches
appeared to be occupied by acrobats practicing
one or another act here.

[38 ]
The orchards of Glienicke, the broad and imposing promenades of Schlo Babelsberg, the narrow,
concealed paths of our summer garden, the shady
arbor walks which led down to the Griebnitzsee
where the landing stages wereall this I added
to my empire as I knelt for my nuptials with the
swelling earthculminating instantly in fantasy

thirty-ninth notice

the work of countless promenades, games, and

excursions, just as a dynast captures endless territories for himself through a single fortunate match.

[39 ]
I have spoken of the courtyards. Even Christmas
was fundamentally a celebration of the courtyards.
It began in them with the barrel organs, which
stretched out the week before the holiday with
chorales, and it ended in them with the fir-trees
which, robbed of their stands, leaned against
the snow or glistened in the rain. But Christmas
came and before the eyes of the bourgeois child
suddenly divided his city into two enormous
camps. These were not the real, actual camps in
which the exploited and the masters lie facing
each other with no possibility of reconciliation.
No, this was an artificially arranged camp almost
as unreal and contrived as the Nativity scenes
which were set up with figures made of paper or

berlin chronicle

wood, but one just as old and venerable:

Christmas came and made a division of poor
and rich. Christmas came and separated the
children into those who shoved their way with
their parents past the booths on Potsdamer Platz
and those who stood alone inside the booths to
offer dolls and little woolen lambs for sale to
others their own age. Christmas came, and with
it, a wholly unfamiliar world of wares,[.]

[40 ]
The phenomenon of dj vu has very often been
described. But I ask myself whether the term
is really a happy one and whether the metaphor
uniquely suited to it were not much better taken
from the domain of acoustics. We should speak
of incidents which strike us as an echo for which
the cry, the sound which awakened it, seems
to have gone out some time or other in the dimness of vanished life. Corresponding to this, if we

fortieth notice

are not mistaken, is the fact that shock, through

which instants enter our consciousness as
though already experienced, mostly presses to us
in the form of a sound. This is a word, a rapping,
or a rustling which is endowed with the magical
power to banish us all at once to the cool vault of
the past, from whose arches the present seems
to reverberate back as an echo to us. But has the
counterpart of this otherworldly removal ever
been investigatedthe shock with which we
come across a gesture or a word in the way we
suddenly find in our house a forgotten glove or
work-bag? Just as these let us infer that a stranger
was present, so are there words or gestures from
which we infer that invisible stranger, the future,
she who forgot and left them with us. I may have
been five years old. One nightI already lay in
bedmy father appeared, ostensibly to tell me
good-night. Very likely it was half against his
will, so I thought, that he recounted the news of
the death of a relative. The dead man was a
cousin, a grown man, who meant little to me.

berlin chronicle

Still my father made a detailed report, taking

the opportunity to explain, upon my asking, what
a heart attack was, and was most talkative. I did
not absorb much of the explanation. Though it is
probable that I did store away an impression of my
room and my bed on this evening, the way you
scrutinize a place with greater care when you
sense that one day you will have to search there
for something you have forgotten. Many years later
I learned what that was. Here, in this room, my
father had forgotten one piece of the deathnews: That the disease was called syphilis.
Diabolo / The desk where I did my homework
for school / the Neubabelsberg train station /
Neubabelsberg castle

commenta ry

commentary

The Berlin Chronicle, first edited and published

posthumously, is a series of notices of varying length
with which Walter Benjamin filled the better part
of a small parchment notebook, bound in soft chamois leather, in early 1932 (preserved as WBA 0672,
Walter Benjamin Archiv, Berlin). The noticesthere
are forty of thembegin on right-hand pages of
the notebook (with two exceptions) and are densely
written; here Benjamins hand, always minuscule,
becomes even more difficult to decipher than usual.
Some of the notices draw directly on memories from
the authors formative years in his native city and will
strike the reader as so many elements of a projected
autobiography. Others blend this autobiographical
aspect with an investigation into the workings of
memory, the workings, that is, of the writers memory
in relation to various settings in Berlin; one last is
an idiosyncratic meditation on memory as a faculty
of the mind, without personal reference.

We have been handed no finished or rounded
text; Benjamins luxurious pocket notebook appears
to have served only as the reservoir for a stage of
his thinking. Notices succeed one another without
regard for continuity and are unlike as can be. A few

berlin chronicle

have been abandoned in mid-sentence. They show

little sign of any systematic review; solecisms and even
moments of logical confusion are left untouched.
If there is no reason to suppose that Benjamin
commenced work on his Chronicle only with this
notebookand there is some (internal) evidence to the
contraryannotations on the leaf with the final notice
make clear that when he ceased using it, he had other
topics yet to develop. In reading these notices, we
may ask: Does Benjamin already imagine eventual
readers, or does he merely muse to himself? Despite
the often rhetorical pitch of his language, he seems to
hold forth in a personal echo chamber. Solitude has
the upper hand.

Benjamin never thought to issue Berlin Chronicle
in the form we know; instead, he took up work on Berlin
Childhood ca. 1900. The latter, begun just months
after he ceased adding to his Chronicle, recycles
much of the same material. But whereas the Berlin
Chronicle notices roughly mingle striking speculations about memory with shards of autobiography,
Berlin Childhood seems to transcend those categories.
Childhood creates a tricky amalgam of personal
and impersonal. Retreating behind an unidentified,

commentary

first-person voice, affecting intimacy even while he

remains seemingly detached, Benjamin will disclose a series of discrete scenesor as he would call
them, images drawn from an unspecified Berlin
childhood ca. 1900 unspecified though one teasingly
like his own. Aloof and enticing in equal measure,
Berlin Childhood has continued to guarantee Walter
Benjamin some claim to a wider readership.
Berlin Chronicle as well is able to exert fascination, and never more than when Benjamin begins
to meditate upon memory and memories. Indeed,
his fertile Chronicle ruminations give us the indispensable clue to Berlin Childhood. From them,
we gather that Benjamins imagesthose memoryconstellations conjured by the unnamed narrator
of Childhoodwere experienced by Benjamin
himself as moments immune to time, moments
existing outside of time and yet wedded indissolably to particular places. The recognizable embryos
of such imagesthey enclose narration but are not
themselves built up from narration, from temporalitybeing in essence metaphysicalare already
found in the Chronicle. And as he was adding
to his store of notices, Benjamin veered increas-

berlin chronicle

ingly towards the Childhood mode, with the last

of them anticipating his new manner most of all.
The Berlin Chronicle notices are valuable, too,
simply for their passages of autobiography. Benjamin
was a man who shielded himself with forbidding
politeness, who kept secrets large and small. Here
and not in published writings could he acknowledge
in his waycertain of the indelible experiences
of later childhood and adolescence. Autobiographical attention in Benjamins Chronicle centers on his
long years as a gymnasiast at the Kaiser-FriedrichSchule in Charlottenburg, and on the short but
eventful Berlin phase of his university studies. From
the glimpses he provides, we think we know how it
felt to be young Walter at school and university; odd
moments from these years are rendered with the
immediacy of hallucinations. In the main, though,
Benjamin chooses not to view his past with the naked
eye; rather, he peers at it through the prism of selfconscious recall. Emotionally charged events are
mediated by means of observations concerning his
memory: He watches himself remembering. And then
we have his meditation on memory and memories
per se, with no more reference to anyone at all. Later,

commentary

in Berlin Childhood, adolescence will be largely

submergedalong with any conspicuous thinking
about memories and remembering. Childhood
prefers the antecedent time which has often been
remembered as a little paradisealbeit invested with
frights and terrors; the time when a young child loses
himself in enchantment, and dreams waking dreams
more than sleeping ones.

Berlin Chronicle would not be published before
1970, three decades after Benjamins death. A definitive
version followed in 1985 as part of the collected works
issued as Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften (edited
by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser
for Suhrkamp Verlag). The present translation of the
Chronicle adheres to the sequencing of the notices
in the standard Suhrkamp edition, but the number
headings reflect their physical position in Benjamins
notebook. Readers will have discovered that notice 2
is followed by no. 5, whereas no. 4 does not come
until after no. 7 and no. 3 must wait until after no. 15.
The commentar y uses the same ordering and
numbering; those phrases and passages taken directly
from the translation for discussion have been highlighted in bold italics. (Benjamins avoidance of

berlin chronicle

paragraphing, even within longer notices, is respected

in the translation).
Berlin Chronicle: The collective title for these notices,
to which Benjamin assigned no individual titles
or numbering. It is found at the top of page 3R on
its own line, directly over the first notice. Benjamin
had been commissioned by Die literarische Welt to
prepare a Berliner Chronik which would appear in
four quarterly instalments of two to three hundred
lines each, and in which would be recorded his observations of daily life in Berlin. A contract to this effect
was signed with the journal on October 1, 1931, but
its terms were never fulfilled. Indeed, the memoranda Benjamin began amassing for his Chronicle
some months later would send him in quite another
direction. In a letter dated February 28, 1932, he
characterizes them as dealing with a history of my
relationship with the city of Berlin, and in the same
letter he says: At times it seems to me as though
there were something still coming into being behind
my back, in the form of some notes which I have
been making over the past few weeks at opportune
moments, or rather mostly at inopportune ones.

commentary

(Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem; whether he

had already begun using the notebook WBA 0672
cannot be determined.) For my dear Stefan: This
dedication, found on page 2V of the notebook, is
intended for Walter Benjamins only child, Stefan
(1918-72), then nearing his fourteenth birthday. Just
above it and occupying dead center of the page is
another dedication which has been hatched over:
Geschrieben fr vier meiner lieben Freunde / Sascha
Gerhard / Asja Lazis/und Fritz Heinle (Written for
four of my dear friends / Sascha Gerhard / Asja Lazis /
and Fritz Heinle). Sascha Stone was a well-known
graphic artist and photographer; Gerhard (Gershom)
Scholem, the eminent student of the Kabbala and
Jewish mysticism, had been Benjamins closest friend
since 1915 and would take a leading role in preserving
his writings for posterity; Benjamin had met Asja
Lazis (recte: Lacis), an actress and theater director, on
the island of Capri in 1924 and maintained a romantic
interest in her for years (she was the muse who inspired
him to take a deeper interest in Marxism). Given
Benjamins secretiveness, it seems unlikely that these
three would have known as much of his earlier life as is
revealed in these notices. Fritz Heinle, who died in 1914,

berlin chronicle

is himself a major presence in the Chronicle notices

and will be introduced to readers in the proper place.
The change of dedicatees hints at Benjamins
preoccupation with his upcoming fortieth birthday
(on July 15, 1932). As contemporary diary entries show,
he was becoming deeply depressed with his failure to
make headway professionally; moreover, he saw some
German political catastrophe on the horizon. He may
have come to view his Berlin Chronicle writings as
a parting fathers legacy to his son; in July he would
go so far as to make careful preparations for an
act of suicideas if he were marking his decadal
birthday. Berlin Childhood ca. 1900, which no
longer bears any dedication, was begun shortly after
Benjamin drew back from taking his own life.

[1]
Here I wish to recallthose who led me into the
city. Benjamin names the first of these immediately: childrens maids. No second and third guide
is explicitly referred to anywhere in the notebook,
but a fourth and fifth guide will be designated in

commentary

later notices. It is significant that Benjamin says into

the city, for none of his guides are prepared to lead
him out of the city. ...a well-born bourgeois child.
Benjamins family was aff luent, verging on rich.
The extended family lived mostly in Berlin. Perhaps
its wealthiest members were Benjamins maternal
grandparents, who owned a tobacco and cigarette
business a nd lived in st yle (see notice 26 ).
childrens maids. The Benjamin household
would have included a childrens maid, and later a
governess, as well as one or more housemaids and a
cook. the Zoo. Berlins Zoologischer Garten,
which lies at no great distance from the places where
Walter Benjamin lived before the age of 18; during his
childhood, it was becoming the preeminent zoo of
Europe. the Lsterallee. The main promenade within the Zoologischer Garten and a major
social venue; though by the time Benjamin was
writing, its informal name (English: Vice-Allee)
had fallen out of use. the Jugendstil. Benjamin
intends to identify the decades of the 1890s and
1900s with the furniture and decorating style
then in vogue. Jugendstil (Youth-style) will find
mention in subsequent notices. ...the Tiergarten.

berlin chronicle

The Old Berlin-West, where Walter Benjamin

spent his first ten years.

commentary

Berlins major park. As the city was expanding

before and during Benjamins childhood and youth,
wealthier neighborhoods developed first south of
the park, creating its Old West, and later towards
the west (as its New West). Schillstrae. A
street in the Old West, very near the apartment on
24 Nettelbeckstrae where Benjamin lived between
the ages of six and ten. The saving of Brderchen.
Walter Benjamins younger brother Georg (18951942), later a medical doctor and lifelong communist.
Beginning in 1933 he was mostly in prison for his
political activities; he died at Mauthausen. the
Herkulesbrcke. A prominent span over the
Landwehrkanal, at Ltzowplatz in the heart of the
Old West. Its sculptural program centered on two
of the Labors of Hercules, namely, his battles with
the Nemean Lion and the Centaur (these groups
had been fabricated after late-18th-century neoclassical designs). The scheme also featured four
lions couchant as terminal figures, with pairs guarding
the entrance onto the bridge from either direction.
Benjamins Herkulesbrcke was destroyed during
World War II but one sculpture, Hercules Battling
the Nemean Lion, survives (see frontipiece). Today

berlin chronicle

this point is bridged by a utilitarian steel structure.

Bendlerstrae. The street does not lie on the
path into the Tiergarten if you approach the park
via the Herkulesbrcke, but it does offer the most
direct route from where Benjamins family lived
during his early childhood (at 4 Magdeburger Platz
and 154 Kurfrstenstrae; see the map on page
144). the labyrinth...its Ariadne. In Greek
mythology, the Cretan princess Ariadne supplied
the hero Theseus with a ball of thread enabling him
to make his way into and out of the Labyrinth, where
the man-bull Minotaur was housed; Theseus slew the
monster. In Berlin Childhood, the entire Tiergarten
will be experienced by the child who resembles young
Walter Benjamin as a labyrinthine space in which
to wander and lose himself (see also the commentary for notice 7). Ariadne is almost certainly one
of Benjamins unenumerated guides. In Childhood
she becomes identified with a particular young girl
whom the child searches for in vain (see Tiergarten
and Two Riddles). Friedrich Wilhelm III and
Queen Luise. Friedrich Wilhelm, King of Prussia
(1770-1840) and his f irst wife, Luise (1776-1810),
a celebrated beauty. In a corner of the Tiergarten, at

commentary

a romantic distance from each other, are standing

figures of the pair mounted on circular Empire-style
pedestals. In giving his attention to the friezes on
the pedestals and not the figures, young Benjamin
is refusing to conform to what is expected; already
he looks for hidden or unexpected meaning.
Hohenzollernian labyrinth. The Hohenzollerns
had been the hereditary rulers of Brandenburg
since 1415. They furnished the Prussian royal line
and eventually the emperors of the unified modern
German state (between 1871 and 1918). the forecourt along Tiergartenstrae. These statues
are not far from what once was a stationing area
for carriages on Tiergartenstrae, near todays Philharmonie hall. where nothing betrayed. The
first instance of Benjamins frequent and deliberate use of a wayward tense. Here the reader expects
betrays, which would agree with the present tense
that seemed to be governing this sentence; Benjamin,
however, stresses the back-and-forth tussle between his
present perceptions and his memories. so as never to
ever quite forget. The first reference to aural memory, so important in these notices. Benjamins understanding of the word love originated in the moment

berlin chronicle

the word first erupted from him; as an adult he is

recalling (1) that moment, presumably from his early
adolescence, as well as (2) an earlier experience of
the emotion itselfwhich had to wait for its naming.
the Fruleina chill shadow. A childrens
maid interposes herself between Benjamin and his
Ariadne. Apparently no one. The theme of impotence, prefigured through the childrens maid, takes
center stage as Benjamin turns his attention from the
Tiergarten and toward the city at large. my life with
Berlin. Benjamins life with Berlin can be circumscribed temporally, but essentially he conceives of it
in spatial termshere in relation to his own inability
to master urban space. Which was rooted in two
things. The reader will notice that the second of the
two things remains unnamed: We are reminded of
the missing guides to the city. She is to blame.
Presumably the second of those things responsible for
Walter Benjamins impotence before the city is the
baleful influence of his mother, Pauline Schoenflies
Benjamin (1869-1930). we walked together through...
streetsrarely entered by me. Baleful or not, it was
Pauline Benjamin who led her son into streets he
scarcely entered otherwise. Very likely she is another

commentary

of his unenumerated guides, the third of them if

Ariadne is taken to be the second. These putative guides,
one good and the other bad, become associated with
each other through juxtaposition. (Broad contrasts will
provide the structure for a number of pieces in Berlin
Childhood ca. 1900.) the streets of the City.
The main commercial district of Berlin was once
commonly referred to as die City, in imitation
of the City of London. Its axes were Friedrichstrae and Leipziger Strae (insert map C3). it is
to this resistance. Resorting to dialectic, Benjamin
converts his mothers bad inf luence into his own
ability to banish his impotence before the city. The
passage was recycled in Beggars and Whores, an
item Benjamin wrote for Berlin Childhood ca. 1900
but eventually set aside (see also notice 8).

[2]
dividing up the spaces of life...cartographically.
In these notices, Benjamin does not wish to trace the
temporal ebb and flow of his life; rather, he is drawn
to various spatial or topographical arrangements of

berlin chronicle

experience. The idea of mapping or diagramming his

life will return (see especially notice 21). At first I was
thinking of a Pharus map. Pharus maps of the
major German citiescolor-printed street plans with
the principal buildings and monuments and transport networks drawn inwere first issued in 1902 and
soon won wide recognition. The Berlin-based firm
is named after the lighthouse of Alexandria on the
island of Pharos, one of the seven wonders of the
ancient world. an ordnance map. Benjamin must
be thinking of a sober military map with an elaborate array of diagrammatic elements. According to
him, such an urban military map belongs strictly
to the future; however, his use of a map of that sort
would superimpose elements of his vanished past on
the plan of the city. where today empty buildings
[sit]. There will be more allusions made to the desolate conditions in Berlin during the depths of the
Depression, when more than a quarter of the
German labor force was out of work. the speaking
halls of the Jugendbewegung. See the commentary for notices 12 and 13, devoted to Benjamins
political activities as a university student. the
Frenchman Lon Daudet. Daudet (1867-1942) was

commentary

a French political activist and man of letters best

remembered for his volumes of memoirs, among
them Paris vcu [Paris (as) lived; 1929-30]. This book
departs from his earlier memoirs in being organized
topographically rather than chronologically; in it
his memories are summoned as if Daudet were
wandering about in flneur fashion, with every new
destination triggering more memories from one or
another era of his life, from childhood on. Paris vcu
dates from when Daudet was exiled in Brussels,
something not lost on Walter Benjamin, who foresaw his exile from Berlin and Germany as he was
compiling notices for his Berlin Chronicle in the
spring of 1932. exemplary at least in the title of
his work. Daudet helped found the journal Action
franaise and became a leading spokesman for the
French far right during the interwar years. He was a
close associate of Charles Maurras and ultimately
adhered to Ptain and the Vichy regime. Paris
figures in the series ofconductorsbeing the
fourth. Benjamin resumes numbering his guides.
With voluntary or involuntary, he distinguishes
between those of his conductors who willingly
helped him learn the city and those who taught him

berlin chronicle

what he would need to know about the city without

meaning to (e.g., his mother). the work of Marcel
Proust. Benjamin foreswears any comparison between
his own dealings with memory and the achievement
of Marcel Proust, whose la recherche du temps perdu
[In Search of Lost Time], a novel in seven volumes and
running to one-and-a-half million words, appeared
between 1913 and 1927. the translation I have managed. With Franz Hessel (see notices 4 and 7),
Benjamin translated three volumes of Proust and part
of a fourth, but only two of these were published
( lombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, as Im Schatten junger
Mdchen, Die Schmiede, 1927; Le ct de Guermantes,
as Die Herzogin von Guermantes, Piper Verlag, 1930).
The manuscript of their unpublished translation of
Sodome et Gomorrhe seems to have been lost, whereas
work on La prisonnire was abandoned. A worsening economic outlook at the outset of the 1930s is
reason enough for the foundering of this earliest
German translation of Proust. Whoever has begun
to unfold the fan of memory. The first of many
elaborate metaphors Benjamin will develop in these
Berlin Chronicle notices. If such metaphors for memory
and remembering do not appear in Berlin Childhood,

commentary

there we encounter borrowings from Prousts novel

itself. ever mightier does the thingbecome. Proust
uncovers a dangerous paradox with his infinitely divisible memories: The smaller the memory-fragment
becomes, the more capable it will be of expanding
into something infinitely mighty in its meaning and
its capacity for representation. Confronted with endless and ever mightier memories, Prousts memory
itself becomes deadly to him. (He would die with
his monumental novel of memory unf inished.)

[5]
The most remarkablestreet-images. The remarkable street-images which Benjamin passes overthe
entry of the bears, the horsecar at Schillstrae
do not reappear in subsequent Chronicle notices or
in Berlin Childhood ca. 1900. However, the most
important animal anywhere in the latter text is an
otter living in the Zoologischer Garten who is associated intimately with water, and with whom the
unnamed Benjaminian child, mesmerized, will identify himself. And once again, the city of Berlin will

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be inundated under heavy rains (see The Otter).

here on Kurfrstenstrae. Benjamin lived at 154
Kurfrstenstrae between the ages of three and six.

[6]
The notice would be further edited and then incorporated, along with notice 27, in Departure and Return,
an item Benjamin prepared for Berlin Childhood
ca. 1900 and then set aside (see the commentary
for notice 27). the...droshky.... An open fourwheeled, horse-drawn carriage in common use as a
taxi in the Berlin of Benjamins childhood. the
Landwehrkanal. The major canal in Berlin, linking two arms of the River Spree. It extends seven
miles mainly in a southeast-to-northwesterly direction, and transects all the neighborhoods of Berlins
Old West (insert map A3-D4). Benjamin, traveling
eastward along the Landwehrkanal, is likely on his
way to the Anhalter Bahnhof (see below). those evenings spent together. In Departure and Return,
the childs sense of oppression will be attributed
simply to an endless dreary sitting side-by-side

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inside the carriage, with no mention of the usual

evenings at home. the Anhalter Bahnhof. Lying
not far east of Walter Benjamins first neighborhood,
the Anhalter Bahnhof was among Berlins principal
rail stations, with routes into southern Germany
and Austria. It was destroyed during World War II.
Suderode or Hahnenklee. Once it was customary for families of means to escape the summer heat
and the unsanitary conditions of the city and spend
weeks or even several months in a seaside or mountain resort. All of the places named are in present-day
Germany. the Stettiner Bahnhof. The Stettiner
Bahnhof lay at the intersection of Chausseestrae and
Invalidenstrae, several blocks beyond the northern
end of Friedrichstrae (insert map C1). It served
routes to the north, providing access to numerous
North Sea resorts. This station, too, was destroyed
during World War II. the mental picture of an
illimitable horizon. Both physical and psychological movement within the notice are from confinement and oppression to liberation, leading to the final
image of an illimitable horizon opening behind
the Stettiner Bahnhof. In Departure and Return that
image will reappear, but there the child is compelled

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to return, in dread of what he might discover, to the

family apartment in Berlin-West.

[ 7]
The fourth guide. In a previous notice (no. 2), Benjamin
identified Paris as the fourth among his guides,
summarizing what he learned from it with a single
word: Caution. This was in reference to the attitude
to be adopted when writing of his relationship with
Berlin. Now, however, he will say something quite
different: That Paris taught him the arts of erring,
or in other words, the arts of the flneur. Not to find
your way. Cities can be experienced as labyrinths
where the signifiers of civilization (shop signs and
street names, etc.) have been naturalized. the blotting sheets of my exercise books. For Benjamin, the
precursors of the urban labyrinth were accidental
patterns created on blotting sheets which were attached
to the fronts of his school exercise booklets; as a child
he dreamed of wandering inside these patterns and
losing himself in them. (A fascination with accidental
or marginal patterns of various sorts will permeate

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Photo: Alon Belua

The ruined portico of the Anhalter Bahhof. It commemorates

the thousands of Berlin Jews who were deported to concentration
camps from this place during World War II.

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Berlin Childhood.) chamber with the Minotaur

thread of an Ariadne. Benjamin returns to the
Ariadne motif (see notice 1) and now identifies the city
of Paris itself as a labyrinth. Rather than the Minotaur,
however, prostitutes will be discovered in its central
chamber (they must be a goal of Benjamins erring;
see notice 8). Rue de la Harpe lies in the heart of the
ancient Latin Quarter of Paris; topographically this is
a perfect site for the innermost chamber of a Parisian
labyrinth. graphic reveries. Benjamins dream of
abstracting the urban labyrinth as a two-dimensional diagram resurfaces (see also notices 2 and 21).
a hermetic tradition. Benjamin implies that
he learned the secret arts of flneurship from German
speakers living in Paris. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke
lived mainly in Paris between 1902 and 1910; for
Hessel, see notice 4 (below). the underworld of the
Mtro and the Nord-Sud. The first section of the
subterranean rail system of Paris opened in 1900.
Most of its remarkably dense core network would be
complete by the mid-1920s, when Benjamin began
his wanderings of the city. No less than 245 stations
cluster within the 34 square miles of Paris proper.
The Nord-Sud (Socit du chemin de fer lectrique

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souterrain nord-sud de Paris) was an independent

concession which constructed several lines, notably
the one linking Montparnasse and Montmartre
(todays line no. 12). Its services would be absorbed
into the larger Mtro system shortly before Benjamin
paid his literary tribute to underground Paris.
In Berlin Childhood ca. 1900, the motif of the
labyrinth will be detached from Paris and become
associated almost exclusively with Berlins Tiergarten.
There, precisely in Tiergarten, the whole complicated theme-complex of guides, flneuring, city streets,
and labyrinths finally converges. Originally Benjamin
had thought to inaugurate the series of his images for
Berlin Childhood with Tiergarten (it now figures as
no. 6 in the series).

[4]
the fifth guide: Franz Hessel. Hessel (1880-1941)
was a close personal and literary friend who walked the
streets of Paris with Benjamin and collaborated with
him in translating Proust (see notice 2). As a reader
and editor for Rowohlt Verlag, Hessel was able to

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promote Benjamins career as a literary critic. The

two men also reviewed each others books. I am not
thinking of his book Spazieren in Berlin.
Benjamins review of Hessels Spazieren in Berlin
[On Foot in Berlin; 1929] appeared in Die literarische
Welt, the house literary organ of Rowohlt Verlag.
The review is a compendium of ideas about
flneuring and how the flneur experiences the city,
and deals also with the special character of Berlins
Old West. According to Benjamin, the flneur is
utterly unlike the tourist. The latter seeks out what
is extraordinary and sensational; the former (usually he is a native) responds to the past hidden in
ordinary people and things, and through a
dialectical operation, senses something eternal in
the very flux of everyday life around him. A number
of passages from this review would be reused
in Tiergarten in Berlin Childhood. that aftercelebration of ourwalks in Paris. Benjamin
often found himself in Hessels company in Paris
during 1926 and 1927. It was during the late
Weimar years that the two recreated their Paris
flneries in Berlin. in our native city. In fact, Hessel
was born in Stettin (now Polish Szczcin) and came

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to Berlin as a child; like Benjamin, he grew up in its

Old West. From 1906 until the outbreak of World
War I he lived in Paris. ...the green meadow.
Presumably a reference to the Tiergarten, in light
of Benjamins subsequent allusion to a Tiergarten
mythology. the surrealiststheir reactionary
career. In his essay Surrealism: Last Snapshot of
the European Intelligentsia (1929) Benjamin had
traced the trajectory of the surrealist movement from
its spontaneous beginnings and its cultivation of
anarchic, dreamlike freedoms to its later entrenchment in a communist-inspired orthodoxy. the
Lord gives to his own in sleep. An allusion to
Psalm 127, verse 2: It is in vain that you rise up early,
to go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he [the Lord] gives to his beloved in sleep. From
beneath lowered lidsa Tiergarten mythology
was evolving. Tiergarten can refer not only to
the great urban park of that name but also to any
of several residential areas flanking it to the south,
west, and north. Here Benjamin is thinking of the
noble quarter which developed to the south of the
park during the middle of the nineteenth century,
and of its villas in neoclassical style (few of which

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still exist). Perhaps an oblique view of the villas

from beneath lowered lids induces a richer
perception than would staring at them up close,
in drafty stair-wells (see also the commentary for
notice 17).
The idea of a Tiergarten mythology goes back
to Paris and specifically to Louis Aragon, whose book
Le paysan de Paris [The Peasant of Paris; 1926] held
great meaning for Benjamin and provided him with
a germ for his Arcades project. Le paysan de Paris
contains Aragons plea for a modern mythology
to fill the void left by a bare rational notion of existence, and his paean to the metaphysics of places:
Its you who cradle the infants, you who people their
dreams. These shores of the uncharted and the uncanny:
The whole of our mind-matter borders on them. Hessel
and Benjamin elaborated a similar conception to
apply to Berlin and especially to its Old West. Their
Tiergarten mythology relates to bourgeois faades
of the previous century, and especially their dcor.
Such mythologizing ornament seems trivial and
faded, and yet those are the very qualities which
permit the transcendent to show through. What is
more, the minor classical deities weathering away

commentary

on Berlin house fronts can actually look at the

flneur and catch him in their gaze, provided he
lived with them during his childhood. These figures
know him, and with their vacant eyes they will speak
to him of his past.
expeditions on Sunday afternoonsthe
Wallner-Theater. Benjamin and his friends are discovering the neglected or disused corners of Berlin,
where one feels most the metaphysics of place. Moabit
was then and remains today a working-class area;
it stretches beyond the River Spree north and west
of the Tiergarten (insert map A2-B2). The Stettiner
Tunnel, partially filled in now, was a subterranean foot
passage of nearly 200 meters extending beneath the rail
yards of the Stettiner Bahnhof (insert map C1). The
once famous Wallner-Theater (insert map E3) no longer
exists; Benjamin must have come upon some mysterious space nearby which seemed to him to belong to
no one in particular, for he speaks of it as a Freiheit.
In earlier times, this term was applied to enclaves just
beyond the jurisdiction of a town. A photographer,
a woman. She is believed to have been Germaine
Krull (1897-1985), a modernist photographer who
made two photo-portraits of Benjamin (1926, 1938)

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which have become familiar representations. Krulls

photos of Parisian display windows are included
in Benjamins important essay Little History of
Photography (1931). that aspect of the cityavailable to the photograph. Neglected or forgotten
urban spots, and more particularly the details belonging to them, may be photographed without running
the risks of romanticization and falsification which
infect conventional bourgeois photography. (They
are, as it were, unselfconscious places and not used to
being looked at; see notice 17). scarcely anything
captured on the photographic plate. The socioeconomic reality of the modern factory hides behind
its ostentatious display of functionality. In his
photography essay, Benjamin quotes Brecht: A photograph of the Krupp works or of the AEG tells us next
to nothing about these institutions. Actual reality
has slid into functional reality. The reification of
human relationsin the factory, saymeans that
they are no longer explicit. Optical access-roads
into the citys heart. Only film, not still photography, is able to capture what really goes on inside the
heart of the modern city, given its ever-increasing
fluidity and functionality.

commentary

[8]
the only medium in which such images. Benjamin
turns from photography and film to consider another
medium for images, namely, the consciousness of the
one who is writing, i.e., his own state of consciousness as he compiles the notice. the lineaments
of what is to come. The images ranged before
Benjamin for contemplation can foretell the future
because they already contain the future as well as
the past. He does not summon them from the past;
rather they are of the past (and also of the future; they
lie outside time). the writer the series of his
experience. Benjamin does not say: the series of his
experiences. He is not thinking of a sequence of discrete empirical experiences (German: Erlebnisse), but
rather of the knowledge which comes through global
experience (German: Erfahrung) and through the revelation of its underlying patterns. a new arrangement in them. But this series, which Benjamin can
reconsider at will, assumes different arrangements
or dispositions with repeated viewings. His sentence
ends ambiguously; perhaps in them refers back to
images. Note, too, that Benjamin fails to explain

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what is disturbing about the arrangement emerging before him. First comeshis early childhood.
Until he was ten, Benjamin lived in the Schneberg
district of the Old West, at three different addresses.
Many relatives lived nearby. This district stretches
below the Landwehrkanal, to the south and west of
the more exclusive Tiergarten district. The family
would move into a handsome freestanding house in
Charlottenburg, in the New West, around the time
young Walter entered the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule,
in 1902, and remain there until he was 18. Readers
will notice that Benjamin does not keep his promise
of enumeration here, either: Firstcomes is not
followed by then comes or next comes. In fact we
hear nothing more about the arrangement of his
images. like a ghetto. Berlins Old and New
West were home to many wealthy middle-class
Jewish families, who, during the latter part of the
19th century, prospered along with the city. By this
time most legal discrimination against Jews had
been abolished; social segregation persisted, however.
Benjamin himself would find it noteworthy when he
made friends with gentiles during his university years.
they lived out on the land. Benjamin asserts that

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as a child he knew little or nothing of the extensive

proletarian areas of Berlin, lying mainly to the north
and east and growing as rapidly as the more aff luent ones he did know. (NB: Benjamins handwriting
cannot be deciphered with certainty here.) the image
of the schnorrer. Benjamin is thinking of the
schnorrer as a beggar, which is more in the spirit of
the Yiddish word than the German one; the latter,
spelled exactly the same, is used for those who are in
the habit of asking others for cigarettes or small sums
of money, etc. not that he would have known of
the word and its origin. Young Walter Benjamin
would not have heard Yiddish in the family household, since most assimilated German-Jewish families
were embarrassed by Yiddish speakers from Eastern
Europe and by their identifiably Jewish speech and
manners. difficult for the intellectual to gain an
insight. Benjamin is speaking from a Marxist perspective: Sabotage and anarchism are forms of individualistic resistance to capitalism and hence congenial to the bourgeois intellectualwho resists giving
up his self-cultivation in favor of collective struggle.
Benjamin had begun to absorb Marxism during the
1920s, yet he never gave up on his early metaphysical

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1
5

3
4
2

Google Images Charlottenburg

Charlottenburg and environs. The territory shown lies immediately

to the west of the area included on the insert map at A3 and A4.
Walter Benjamin lived at no. 3 Carmerstrae (1) while he was
attending the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule (2), sited immediately
south of Savignyplatz (3) and the tracks of the Stadtbahn (4).
In the upper right is a portion of the Zoologischer Garten
(5). Extending through the heart of Berlins New West is the
Kurfrstendamm (6), a grand boulevard. Benjamin frequented
several cafs near its eastern terminus (Caf des Westens,
Prinzess Caf, Romanisches Caf; see notice 13).

commentary

and theological thinking. He would continue to

entertain two seemingly incompatible perspectives
for the remainder of his life. In a letter to the literary critic Max Rychner (March 7, 1931) Benjamin
describes himself as a scholar to whom the stance of
the materialist seems scientifically and humanely
more productive in everything that moves us than
does that of the idealist, and then adds: I have never
been able tothink in any sense other than, if you
will, a theological one, that is, in accordance with the
Talmudic teaching on the forty-nine levels of meaning in every passage of the Torah. In my experience, the most trite communist platitude possesses
more hierarchies of meaning than does contemporary
bourgeois profundity, which has but one meaning,
that of an apologetic. the same sabotagealready
described. See notice 1. overstepping the threshold of ones own class. The idea of the threshold
pervades Benjamins memories of his life in Berlin.
It is an offshoot of his basic topographical inspiration. Here, at first, he appears to mean something
literal, i.e., the threshold which separates areas dedicated to unlike urban social activities and dominated
by different classes. But sometimes his thresholds are

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invisible, and separate two spaces with different

metaphysical charges. Once again, the idea may have
come to him from Aragon (Without doubt we are
going to witness an upheaval in the fashions for
prostitution and f lneuring, and with this [new]
pathway, [an extension of Boulevard Haussmann]
which is going to allow for greater communication
between the boulevards and the quarter of Saint
Lazare, we may suppose that new and unknown types
of people will stroll about and be shaped by two
zones of attraction, between which their lives will
hesitate, these types who will be the chief bearers of
the mysteries of tomorrow; from Aragons Le paysan
de Paris.). whores are like the Lares of this cult
of nothingness. Prostitutes, too, function as guides
for Benjamin, beckoning him in a dangerous
direction. The Lares were Roman protective guardian
deities, familiar household presences. these strayings. Benjamins adolescent strayings, which seem
to have led him to the deserted stretches of platforms
at Berlins larger rail stations, are more like circling
motions around an attraction he also fears. train
stations...like cities, have their outlying zones.
A compound image, since train stations are themselves

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found in the outlying zones of cities. Here Benjamin

continues to develop his notion of thresholds: They are
places where, in crossing over them, a person or thing
is transformed into someone or something distinctly
different. There are even places through which being
passes into nonbeing.
This notice was condensed and reused for
Beggars and Whores, one of the pieces Benjamin
composed for Berlin Childhood and then set aside.
The literary quality of Beggars and Whores being
unmistakable, it may be that Benjamin removed it
from Berlin Childhood simply to lessen the
presence of adolescence there. The motif of being
and nonbeing returns explicitly, however, with
one of the last pieces to be written for Berlin
Childhood, namely, The Moon.

[9]
The notice reappears, with important alterations, in
Berlin Childhood ca. 1900, under the title Steglitzer,
Corner of Genthiner. Just as there are tales for children. For the first time, Benjamin strikes a fairy-tale

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note. The stylization and the distancing associated with

fairy-tales would provide him with one of the chief
ingredients of his Berlin Childhood manner. I
knew an entire street under a woman.... She casts a
fairy-tale spell over her neighborhood, and the way she
fills an entire street is magical. (Spells cast over places
seem the childs equivalent for Benjamins idea of
metaphysically charged spaces separated by unseen
thresholds.) enthroned in her oriel. An oriel is
a large circular or polygonal recess with a window that
usually projects from an upper story of a building.
Oriel windows in cozy corner sitting rooms were a
normal feature in the Berlin apartments Benjamin
knew. one minute away. Benjamins birthsite, at
4 Magdeburger Platz, is indeed one minutes walk from
the spot where Aunt Lehmanns apartment stood, at
47 Steglitzer Strae. In the Adrebuch fr Berlin und
seine Vororte [Address Book for Berlin and its Suburbs]
for the year 1900, she is listed as: Minna Lehmann,
born Stargardt, merchants widow. the glass rhombus enclosing a mine. The diary young Walter
Benjamin kept in 1902 to record a family vacation in
Switzerland contains a reference to just such a miniature
working mine, enclosed in a glass case, which the boy

commentary

noticed in a restaurant. There is little reason to doubt

that Aunt Lehmanns mine is fiction on Benjamins
part. More generally, Benjamin can be suspected of
deliberately seasoning his memories with fictional
additions (perhaps a great many). When we compare
versions of the same material in these Chronicle
notices and Berlin Childhood, often the differences
between them allow for no other conclusion (see also
notice 33). ...Steglitzer Strae. A finch in its cage.
Benjamin recalls that he confused Stieglitz, the German
word for a kind of finch, with Steglitz, the name of
the Berlin suburb for which the street is actually named.
(Such verbal fantasies on the part of the Benjaminian
child are a staple of Berlin Childhood.) Where it ends
in Genthiner. In Berlin Childhood, the narrator
will assert that his aunts good North German name
vouched for her right to occupy for a generation the
oriel over Steglitzer where it flows into Genthiner.
Minna Lehmann did not live on the corner of
Steglitzer and Genthiner, however, but three house
numbers away. Steglitzer is among those streets
least touched. During World War II the street was
nearly obliterated, and it no longer serves as a through
street. whorescustodians of the past. Prostitutes

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tend to occupy the older or more marginal streets of

a town or city; Benjamin is still thinking of their
affinity with thresholds (see the preceding notice).
The thresholds leading into prostitutes rear and
attic apartments lead one into time past.
It is instructive to compare the whole of
notice 9 with its counterpart in Berlin Childhood
ca. 1900. The latter has become self-consciously
Marxist, with its attention to the history of Aunt
Lehmanns bourgeois family and the insertion
of new, working-class characters: his aunts servants.
These gruff women, the narrator implies, were
preferred by his child self over Aunt Lehmann, her
toy mine, and her chocolates. Gone from Berlin
Childhood are Benjamins amused observations
on whores and postwar bourgeois impoverishment which terminate the present notice. Generally
speaking, Steglitzer, Corner of Genthiner develops
motifs that were merely sketched before. Aunt
Lehmann herself seems to acquire a Proustian aura
so as to bring to mind the housebound Aunt Lonie
in Du cot de chez Swann.

commentary

[10]
With notice 10, we encounter the first of those
memory-complexes which convey a palpable autobiographical atmosphere. Nothing of the notice survives
anywhere in Berlin Childhood. When I ascended
the stairs. What promises to behave like a narrative
commences in medias res, with no mention of where
Benjamin finds himself; it is as though he were being
invaded by the unwelcome memory. His disgust
with the regimentation of school life begins with a
physical recoil from being wedged in this mass of
boys. walks with my mother through the City.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the third reference so
far to young Benjamins walks with his mother
would come in the present context. solitudethe
only state compatible with human dignity. A telling comment: These notices breathe solitude, even
though Benjamin had daily company while he was
living on Ibiza and recording them. in my dreams
bizarre occurrences. Dreams release the bizarre
from its hidden home in ones everyday experience.
Another scene for horrified dreaming will be considered in notice 26, in connection with Benjamins

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grandmothers apartment. something dreamlike adheresto thememory. In his surrealism essay, Benjamin had asked for the cultivation
of profane illumination (we ought to be capable of
discovering the surreal, of liberating our perceptions,
without recourse to stimulants or sexual abandon or
religious enthusiasm). The school, outwardly in
good repair. The building was erected during
the years 1899-1901, and the school was named the
Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule in the latter year; young
Walter enrolled there as a beginning Gymnasium
student in April of 1902. Benjamin spent eight
out of the ten years of his Gymnasium studies at
the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule, from which he would
graduate in 1912. The structure still stands, a looming
presence south of Savignyplatz (see the map of
Charlottenburg on page 168). Today it is known as
the Joan-Mir-Grundschule and offers a bilingual
elementary-level education in Spanish and German.
(See below and notices 22 and 28, and especially
notice 30). Emperor Friedrich. The son of
Emperor Wilhelm I, he ruled for only several months
in 1888. It is believed that Friedrich III would have
set a more liberal course for Germany than the one

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taken by his son and successor, Wilhelm II. the

elevated train. The Stadtbahn was steam-powered
in its early days (hence the soot which rains down on
the statue of Friedrich). Wandering clouds, sailors
of the air. Famous words uttered by the imprisoned heroine in Friedrich Schillers drama Maria
Stuart (act III, scene 1). A crude, extravagant
ornamentJugendstil. Also known as German
Art Nouveau, Jugendstil was the high-fashion trend
in architecture and interior decoration from ca.
1895 to 1910. It called for writhing assymmetry and
for a rich surface ornamentation combining naturalistic and exotic motifs. Benjamin contemplated
writing a complete essay on Jugendstil, which he
came to regard as a highly significant symptom of
bourgeois decadence. isolated wordsbrandings
of catastrophic encounters. Benjamin is bringing
together his belief in the primacy of his aural memories with the deep sense that he is an outsider over and
against a considerable collective. I was first
dispatched one morning. Benjamin was first sent
to a Vorschule, i.e., the preparatory unit of the
secondary school in which his parents were planning
to enroll him; he does not seem to have considered the

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experience much like being in a real school (see notice

28 and also Two Riddles in Berlin Childhood).
The secondary school of their choice, housed at
no. 3 Passauer Strae, had been founded in 1897
as the Stdtische Hhere Lehranstalt fr die
mnnliche Jugend (Municipal Upper School for
Male Youth). Upon moving into the new building
at 25 Knesebeckstrae it would become a stateadministered institution and, renamed for the recently
deceased Emperor, function as both Gymnasium
and Realschule. Leithammel. The German
for ringleader. Benjamin cannot furnish us with
any details to suggest why he would remember the
sound of this word. The memory has become selfsufficient and no longer depends upon the circumstances of an otherwise forgotten experience. Later
notices will disclose the psychological and metaphysical
implications of the isolated memory and its selfsufficiency. my first day in Haubinda. Young
Benajmin spent two years, between 1905 and 1907,
at Haubinda, a progressive boarding school in
Thuringia several hours south of Berlin. There he
came under the influence of the educational reformer
Gustav Wyneken (1875-1964), who was to develop

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the concept of a Jugendkultur (youth culture; see

notices 12 and 13). who seemed to me unmannerly.
Walter Benjamin himself always cultivated extreme
courtesy, even with close friends; Gershom Scholem,
his intimate, spoke of Benjamins mandarin politeness.
my Alter. My old man: Benjamins father,
Emil Benjamin (1856-1926; see notice 24). Bruder
nun zuletzttreu zur Seite. Now at last,
brother, well bear you company in your wanderings
loyally at your side. the atmosphere ofmilitary
posturing. Benjamin could be referring to any of
several international incidents in which Wilhelm
II involved Germany from 1905 onwards as he
promoted German rivalry with France and Great
Britain. Eile nieNeurasthenie. Literally:
Never hurry, never hasten, and youll never catch
neurasthenia. The wittiness of the original does
not survive translation: Hidden in Neurasthenie
is raste nie (never rest)the neatly rhyming
opposite of haste nie (never hasten). Neurasthenia
was a widely diagnosed but elusive condition akin
to nervous exhaustion. Electro-therapy and rest cures
were among the treatments prescribed. Many
suspected that neurasthenia was caused by the

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stresses of modern civilization, and it would be frequently diagnosed in soldiers during World War I.

[11]
This short notice already forms the beginning of
Markt-Halle, in Berlin Childhood; there are only
small differences between the two passages (the remainder of Markt-Halle is thoroughly anticipated in the
Chronicle notice no. 20). a Markt-Halle.
In 1886 the city of Berlin authorized construction of
fourteen indoor food markets; two years later, a freestanding, glass-and-steel-frame structure some 225
feet long and 95 feet wide was erected for this purpose
in Magdeburger Platz, close to Walter Benjamins
birthplace (4 Magdeburger Platz). The market would
be destroyed during World War II and not replaced.
neither retained its original meaning. Habitual
use having eroded the word Markt-Halle, each of
its components acquires one or more new meanings.
Mark, the first of these, can mean marrow, mark
the unit of currency, or the electorate of Brandenburg;
aurally, Talle approximates Tal (valley). Together

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the two can be heard as signifying Brandenburg Vale,

Dollar Vale, or Marrow Vale (this last a strangely
poetical way to refer to a food market).
The first language was nothing like the slipshod speech which has been employed by mankind
ever since Adams Fall, but was of divine origin and
consisted only of names, through which the things corresponding to them were called into existence; very
approximately, such was Benjamins understanding
of the Adamic language, a topic which has received
much speculative attention in both Jewish and
Christian theology. (See Benjamins early essay
On Language as Such and on the Language of
Man; 1916). Perhaps Benjamin places the word meaning in quotation marks here to stress the provisional
character of meanings in our everyday, fallen language. See also notice 17, where he will develop
similar ideas on the difference between our ordinary looking at things, and true looks and looking.

...the routinevisitthe original concept. In
this formulation, Benjamins original images in the
Markt-Halle were of ordinary buying and selling; but
his routine visits there as a child eroded them, so that
today his memories reveal something quite different

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to him (in fact they become nothing less than a revelation; see notice 20).

[12]
While he was at university in Berlin during the years
1913-15 (some two years altogether) Benjamin would
involve himself in student politics and also in the
broader German youth movement known as the
Jugendbewegung. From his elliptical references it
is scarcely possible for readers to grasp the issues of
particular concern to him at the time. And so, very
briefly: As president of the Berlin section of the Freie
Studentenschafta national organization meant to
represent all university students who were not
members of traditional fraternities (dueling societies) Benjamin worked for an idealistic reform
of university life. In this he was following in the footsteps of Gustav Wyneken, his mentor at Haubinda.
For Wyneken, truly valuable teaching and learning
sprang from voluntary social and intellectual intercourse between older and younger (male) seekers of
truth: The existing Schulbetrieb (business of school)

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with its institutional carapace was somehow to be

transformed through the spirit of the young. Benjamin
opposed any more practical approach to school
reform oriented on professional training or social
engagement. (Traditional humanists had been decrying the increased emphasis on technical education in
German universities for several decades.) Never use the
word I other than in letters. Benjamin had already
produced first-person writings, notably travelogues
and city-portraits. The most ambitious of these is
Moscow Diary, a record of his stay in the Soviet capital
from December 1926 through the beginning of
February 1927. Benjamin also wished to make a book
out of his protocols written while he was under the
influence of hashish and other drugs (see below). Like
Berlin Chronicle, both these projects were edited
and first issued only many years after his death. For
when one day the suggestion reached me. See the
earlier commentary for the title (Berliner Chronik)
which Benjamin placed near the beginning of his
notebook. The district to which I refer. The
Tiergarten-quarter in this case refers to the area
bordering on the north-western edge of the park.
Therestood the Heim. Like its English-language

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cognate, Heim has nurturing and socially organic

connotations. The Heim served as a meeting place
for Benjamin and his friends, and for the Berlin
Sprechsaal (or speaking hall; see below). the
university student Ernst Jol. In the years immediately following, Benjamins fellow student Ernst
Jol (1893-1929) emerged as an especially vigorous
opponent of Germanys participation in World War I.
He was expelled in 1916 from university for editing
the antiwar publication Der Aufbruch, after which
he became a medical worker in order to minister to
wounded soldiers. During the 1920s he established a
psychiatrically-oriented social-work practice in Berlin
and published many articles on addiction; a cocaine
addict himself, Jol ended by taking his own life.
the student group fr Sozial Arbeit, led by
Ernst Jol. The Soziales Amt mobilized Berlin
university students to undertake volunteer work in
many different institutional settings; Jol was especially engaged in an effort to reform Berlins housing
and property laws so as to improve living conditions
for workers and the poor. during the semester
I headed the Berliner Freie Studentenschaft.
Benjamin was named leader of the group at the end

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of the winter semester for 1913-14 and was re-elected

for a second semester term. a chief target of my
attacks. Adhering to Wynekens quasi-monastic,
communal pedagogical ideal, Benjamin opposed
conventional political or social-work initiatives on
the part of university students. Benjamins thoughts
on the subject are preserved in his essay The
Life of Students (1914), in which he attacks the
position represented by Jol. my contributionthe
Sprechsaal. The Jugendbewegung entertained
a Wyneken-inspired vision of a self-directed youth
culture that should unfold autonomously, outside
the official confines of student life, and so contribute new values to society. As part of this effort, highschool students were now encouraged to gather to
express their opinions and debate the issues of
importance to themselves in so-called speaking
halls. Sponsored and overseen by adult leaders of
the Jugendbewegung and like-minded university
students, these were in effect safe-houses for adolescents, places free from parental or institutional supervision. They began to appear in Germany immediately before the war. Berlin university students under
the leadership of Benjamin and others set up one

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such Sprechsaal in the Heim in the summer of 1913.

magical aspect of the city. In 1927 Jol and a
colleague asked Benjamin to serve as a subject in medical experiments intended to report on the subjective
experiences induced by smoking hashish in informal, nonclinical surroundings. Benjamin continued
to experiment with hashish and other drugs at least
until 1934, working with Jol and others. His protocols
from these experiments and related material have been
issued in English as On Hashish (introd. by Marcus
Boon, ed. by Howard Eiland, Belknap Press of Harvard
U. Press, 2006). this image is already that of a
dead man. Jol, one year younger than Benjamin,
had been dead for three years. whether forty
is not too early. Here Benjamin strikes a
valetudinarian note, and in thinking of Jols end,
perhaps a suicidal one. To the other dead man. A
first oblique reference to Friedrich Christoph (Fritz)
Heinle, a hard-drinking poet from Aachen whom
Benjamin met in 1913 while both were attending
lectures at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau,
and who migrated with Benjamin to Berlin, where
they shared in the feverish student political activism
of the fateful year before the coming of the war.

commentary

Benjamins memories, it seems, must approach this

central figure cautiously, and by degrees. It was in
Heidelberg in those days. In the year 1921 Walter
Benjamin spent several summer months in Heidelberg
to assess his prospects for obtaining a professorship
there. losing myself in work. Benjamin was
then hard at work on his essay on Goethes novel
Die Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities;
1809]. The essay would be published by Hugo von
Hofmannsthal in the Neue Deutsche Beitrge in
1924-25. Fritz Heinlea poet. Some dozen more
or less mature expressionist poems written by Heinle
(1894-1914) survive. Only one Heinle poem seems to
have been published, all the rest being known from
copies made by his friends. Those in Benjamins
cherished keeping (many more than a dozen) did not
survive; they would have been lost when his library
was scattered in the aftermath of his hasty departure
from Berlin in 1933. Here is a sample Heinle poem:
Exhaustion
The evening came so scared,
Like a weary hand in the hair,

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And there was a voice far away,

So I sank into your slumber,
And listened how a mist fell:
It pulled the black night up,
Rain flew up like a bird,
And rocked all the lights still.
After Heinles death (see below) Benjamin assumed his
friends function as a maker of poems, and over a period
of ten years wrote no fewer than 73 sonnets to mourn
him. Benjamin also made strenuous but unsuccessful efforts to publish Heinles poems. Freely translated,
here is the seventh of Benjamins Heinle sonnets:
How shall I joy in this days gleaming
If you do not enter into woods with me
Where sun flashes in black branches ?
Once your deep gaze could have renewed it
While your finger etched the teaching word
Upon the tablet of my thought, loyal
Keeper of the runesand I lift my gaze, shy gaze,
But at the paths edge sits wakeful

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Death not you, and in the forest am I

More forsaken than bush and tree at night.
A wind fares past the empty hill
The midday blaze erupts about me
Shines from the vault of heaven deeper, bluer
Like the sorrow of an unrevealing eye.
Long thought to be lost, Benjamins sonnets for Heinle
were recovered in 1981 and subsequently published
by Suhrkamp Verlag (1986, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann).
in the house of Marianne Weber. Benjamin
gave his talk on Heinles poetry in the home of the
prominent feminist Marianne Weber, the widow of
the sociologist and political economist Max Weber,
most widely known for his thesis on the relationship
between Protestantism and capitalism. because
Heinletraversed the space in which I was
born. Possibly Benjamin attributes mystic significance to the fact that he and Heinle would share the
same space, that their paths would cross. a long
separationa serious falling out. Benjamin
described the quarrel in a letter to Carla Seligson dated
November 17, 1913; it seems to have turned somehow

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on the two friends fiercely competing conceptions of Spirit (Geist) and how it was to manifest
itself within the Jugendbewegung, in the relations
among its adherents. the injured party. Meaning
Benjamin himself. The above-mentioned letter
fails to explain why he would have felt himself to
be the injured party; however, other incidents from
this time in Benjamins life make clear that with
friends he was inclined to insist on his own intellectual leadership. after Heinle and his girlfriend had died. On August 8, 1914, Fritz Heinle
and Rika Seligson committed suicide in the Heim
by asphyxiating themselves in a gas oven, apparently in dismay over the outbreak of war. Heinle
had dispatched an express letter to Benjamin the
night before. You will find us. The German
employs the formal mode of address: Sie werden uns
im Heim liegen finden. this physical site where
we chanced to open our Heim. Almost nothing
in Benjamins description of the Tiergarten neighborhood (insert map A3) corresponds to what can be
seen there today. The sluggish waters of the
Landwehrkanal never sealed off the neighborhood
from proletarian Moabit; Benjamin is confusing the

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canal with an equally sluggish River Spree. The

old-fashioned blocks of flats, the clumsy original construction of the Stadtbahn, and the streetcar
infrastructure were all destroyed during World War II;
the unspeakably common groups of hunters at
the Groer Stern (the main junction of roads within
the park) were removed by Albert Speer in 1938 as
a preliminary to his planned redesign of Berlin as
Germania. we could leave it unchanged in
itself. That is, young bourgeois intellectuals (like
Benjamin) did not yet realize that the class-structure of society and its material basis would have
to be transformed and not merely the attitudes of
ever so many individual members of society. Once
again, Benjamins retrospective analysis is reflecting
Marxist attitudes he had adopted during the 1920s.
the words of Hlderlin or George. Benjamin
chose to write on the profound (and unclassifiable) German poet Friedrich Hlderlin (1779-1843)
in his first ambitious essay, written in the months
following the death of Heinle and the onset of war;
accents of Hlderlin are heard in his own sonnets.
Benjamin would remember Stefan George (18681933) as the poet who most captivated the idealistic

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young of his generationand who, forseeing the end

of the existing social order, only created a rarified cult
centering on himself. the language of youth.
The language of youth was essentially that of the
German expressionist movement in literature and
the visual arts from the years before and after
World War I. Whether in their personal lives, in
politics, or in their art, young men and women
belonging to the expressionist milieu gloried in
immediate action as the sole worthy response to an
intolerable social order, and they put their faith in
youth as the one force capable of transforming
the world. Suicides among them were frequent (the
deaths of Heinle and Seligson to protest the war
might rate as a supreme expressionist deed). an
Aktion evening. The meeting was convened in the
Heim on November 1, 1913. Aktion evenings featured
speeches by authors who had written for Die Aktion,
the radical-left journal for politics and the arts
founded in 1911 by Franz Pfemfert (1879-1954);
it would continue, though with decreasing influence,
until 1932, always under his direction. Die Aktion was
closely allied with the Jugendbewegung. the three
sisters. The Seligson sisters were Rika (1891-1914),

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Carla (1892-1956), a close friend of Walter Benjamin,

and Traute (1895-1915; she would also choose to
commit suicide with her lover). Doubtless Benjamin
means to refer to Rika Seligson even as he misremembers her as the youngest of the three. two
speeches were read. Benjamins version does
not survive; Heinles version (Jugend) has been
published in Benjamins Gesammelte Schriften, II/3,
pp. 863-65. a single gravethe same burial
place. Heinle and Seligson were unmarried,
and of different religions. no oneknows his
way around in it any longer. The abandoned
attic is Benjamins image for his own sense of remoteness from this part of his life. After the beginning of the war and Heinles suicide, he would
retreat from his political involvements. And in
1915 he formally broke off relations with Gustav
Wyneken after the latter publicly hailed the war as
the opening for a utopian future. Benjamin would
never participate directly in any politics again.

berlin chronicle

[13]
Here Benjamin continues in an explicitly autobiographical vein, framing his memories within a little
sociological consideration of certain Berlin cafs
of the 1910s and 1920s. These venues provided an
alternative social space for the creators of Berlins
unofficial culture, 197 its pathbreaking new literature,
art, and theater. The cafs which Benjamin
mentionsa mere handful out of many hundreds in
the citywere concentrated in two districts,
namely, the central area centering on Friedrichstrae
and Unter den Linden, and the so-called New
West with its grand boulevard, the Kufrstendamm.
None still exist today. Incidentally, Benjamins
seductive narrative is often faulty with regard to chronology and other matters of fact. immediately after
my graduation exam. Benjamin passed his final gymnasial examinations in March 1912, thus becoming
qualified to attend university. The Viktoria cafEcke
Friedrichstrae und Linden. The Viktoria-Caf was
already in existence at the turn of the century, at 46
Unter den Linden. Under several permutations of the
Viktoria name, it survived until at least 1925 (but

commentary

see Benjamins comment below). This caf should

not be confused with another of the same name
(Caf Viktoria) which was long in operation many
blocks to the south at the corner of Friedrichstrae
and Besselstrae. one of those loud luxury
cafes of the new Berlin. By 1927, the site of
Benjamins Viktoria-Caf had been taken over by
Caf Knig, soon to become the venue for celebrated
chess matches between international grand masters as
well as a favorite gathering place for those working in
the film industry. scarcely possible that Berlin bred
this vice. Benjamin would have acquired his caf
habits in Paris during the 1920s. the old Caf des
Westens. See various references below. that was only
for two days. By this reckoning, Benjamin attempted
to enlist on August 6 (1914). Germany had declared
war on Russia on August 1 and invaded Belgium three
days later. On the eighth the event intervened. The
deaths by suicide of Walter Benjamins close friend
Fritz Heinle and Heinles girlfriend, Rika Seligson
(see notice 12). Benjamin withdrew from Berlin the
following autumn, first to Munich and then to
Switzerland; he did not return to live in his native city
until March 1920. He would avoid conscription and the

berlin chronicle

war by feigning a series of disqualifying medical conditions including

pleurisy and sciatica. Franz
Pfemfert. See notice 12. Else Lasker-Schler.
When Benjamin would have met her, in ca. 1914,
Lasker-Schler (1869-1945) was famous and freeliving,
a twice-divorced poet and playwright and a prominent
exponent of literary modernism. In the Caf des
Westens, where she reigned as queen, many were
summoned to her table. Wieland Herzfelde.
A leftist publisher and writer (1896-1988), brother
of the photographer John Heartfield. He moved to
Berlin in 1914 and would help to organize the First
International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920. Simon
Guttmann, about whom more later. In an important letter to his friend Gretel Karplus in June
1934, Benjamin confided that at one time Simon
Guttmann had exercised a strong and harmful influence over him, at least in the eyes of Benjamins then
wife (Dora Kellner Benjamin). Guttmann (1891-1990)
became a pioneering photo-journalist and in 1928
would found the Deutscher Photo Dienst (Dephot).
so many competing actions. Here at last
Benjamin offers us a clearer picture of his and his
comrades political work during the hectic years 1913

commentary

and 1914. the painter Meidner. Ludwig Meidner

(1884-1966) was a leading expressionist painter
and printmaker. Even before the coming of the Great
War, certain of Meidners cityscapes depicted
Berlin as a scene of apocalyptic destruction. One day
in Switzerlandshowing hispatrons the door.
Beginning late in 1917, Benjamin spent two years as a
university student in Bern. But it seems that the fate of
the old Caf des Westens had been sealed several years
before when its owner raised prices and discontinued his
old policy of running a tab for his bohemian clientele
and letting them dawdle for hours without eating or
drinking anything. Some sort of operation was
maintained in the same location (at 18-19 Kurfrstendamm) under the same name and same owner
(Ernst Pauly) for many more years. I did not yet
then possess the passion for waiting. The theme
of waiting will acquire fundamental importance
in Berlin Childhood ca. 1900, where it assumes every
guise from the quotidian and the incidental
to the sheerly metaphysical and implicitly messianic.
However, there will no longer be any role for the
caf as such in Berlin Childhood. the Prinzess
Cafwhose beginnings. This caf was located at

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16 Kufrstendamm and was in existence from at least

1913 until 1925. the history of the Romanisches
Caf. The Romanisches Caf was for many
years housed opposite the Kaiser-Wilhelm-GedchtnisKirche, at 238 Kufrstendamm (at least since 1910).
From the mid-1920s, it was found close by, at 10
Budapester Strae, under the same management.
The legendary Zeitungskellner Richard. The
Zeitungskellner was a waiter who supplied habitus
of a caf with whatever newspapers they wished to
peruse. A sympathetic portrait of Richard der Rote
(Richard the Red; with a line-drawing of him showing a
severely deformed back) stems from Joseph Roth
(Neue Berliner Zeitung, January 8, 1923; reprinted in
Joseph Roth in Berlin, ed. by Michael Bienert).
According to Roth, this Zeitungskellner had gained
his authority while at the old Caf des Westens
during the war years and had then turned into merely
another customer, and a rather pathetic one, at the
Romanisches Caf. Why Benjamin would speak of
his evil reputation is not clear from Roths account;
in any case, the humpbacked little man of the
childrens rhyme becomes a fateful if enigmatic figure
in Berlin Childhood ca. 1900 and elsewhere

commentary

in Benjamins writings (e.g., his Kafka essay of 1934).

As the economy of Germany climbed once
again. Benjamin is referring to the curtailment of
the hyper-inf lation of the German mark,
accomplished with a currency reform late in
1923. Caf Grenwahn. Decades earlier the nickname, which translates as Delusions of Grandeur
Caf, had clung to establishments in Vienna
(Caf Griensteidl) and Munich (Caf Stefanie),

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an acknowledgment of their customers raging ambitions. After the demise of the Caf des Westens,
it would become the property of the Romanisches
Caf in the early postwar years; at the same
time, however, it was also appropriated by the
actress Rosa Valetti for her new and acclaimed
Berlin cabaret. Lucien Bernhard. Bernhard
(1883-1972) was a designer and graphics artist who
helped create the poster style for use mainly in
advertising. He emigrated to the United States in 1923.
Heinle wrote Prinzess Caf then. Nothing more
of the poem survives. Tren fhren Khle
ber durch Gesang. Literally: Doors transport
coolness through song. a subterranean layer
of this Jugendbewegung. Benjamin will not return
to this subterranean layer of the Jugendbewegung,
which he links to Simon Guttmann; here he seems
to allude to promiscuous goings-on at Guttmanns
studio in Halensee, in Berlin-West (Wilmersdorf ).
human beingsrecede. The adumbration of a
theme that will gain in prominence (see notices 19
and 21). my Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels.
The Origins of the German Mourning Play,
Benjamins Habilitationshrift (or second dissertation,

commentary

submitted by the candidate for a professors chair at

German universities), is regarded in retrospect as a
formidable philosophical work, perhaps one of
the most significant 20th-century contributions to
metaphysics. Dense and exceedingly difficult as well
as highly original, it was conceived and written
during the years 1923-25 but was ultimately withdrawn. Benjamin had reason to assume it would not
be acceptedno one on the faculty of the University
of Frankfurt appearing to grasp his ideas or his
working methods. a new renovationCaf
Stenwyk. This caf could not be traced; it is possible
that Benjamins orthography is misleading.

[14]
Slightly revised, the notice would be combined
in Berlin Childhood ca. 1900 with a version
of notice no. 3 as Two Bands. the Lsterallee...
the Zoo. See notice 1. the racket of kettledrums and snares. Bands performed regularly in
purpose-built pavillions in the Zoologischer Garten.

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[15]
Now Benjamin proceeds to develop further his
notion of special, metaphysically-charged zones
where the normal way we experience time and place
is suspended. The first portion of this notice would
be woven into The Otter (Berlin Childhood
ca. 1900). In those daysthe Lichtensteinbrcke.
The earliest entrance to the Zoologischer Garten
was by way of the Lichtensteinbrcke, which led
visitors approaching it from the Tiergarten over the
Landwehrkanal. In 1926 the entrance was renovated
and slightly relocated but not permanently sealed
(as Benjamin implies). Wiesbaden or Pyrmont.
Venerable spa resorts in Hesse (southwestern
Germany) and Lower Saxony (northwestern Germany),
respectively. before the economic crisis. Most
likely Benjamin is thinking of the period of German
hyperinflation which peaked in late 1923. But he
also could have in mind the years of international
financial crisis that began with the Wall Street
crash (October 1929), whose consequences were
oppressing him as he was writing. what was to
come. This dead corner of the Zoologischer

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Garten held an image of (i.e., predicted) the

economic crisis, which would of course increase
the desolation of the corner. thresholds which
mysteriously erect themselves between precincts of
the city. Almost certainly an echo of Aragon and
Le paysan de Paris as quoted in the commentary to
notice 8; the passage does not find any place in
Berlin Childhood. the two westerly parks. The
Zoologischer Garten and the Tiergarten. the brilliant processionleaving from a portal of the
Adler rooms. An immense complex of restaurants and entertainment spaces was erected on the
eastern edge of the Zoologischer Garten just before
the First World War; glittering social events were
regularly held in its ballrooms, and the external
illumination of this structure at night was held to
be remarkable in itself. The principal access to the
so-called Zoofestsle was from Budapester Strae
by way of the Adlerportal, a gateway crowned with
stone eagles. This entrance to the zoo remained in use
until 1955, when the war-damaged ruins of the complex
were removed; today the area is occupied by the Hotel
Intercontinental. Which years of ball nights Benjamin
is remembering remains uncertain.

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[3]
The notice appears near the beginning of the
Chronicle notebook, as the third of its forty items.
The way it seems to begin in the midst of a thought
suggests that Benjamin may have been copying
from a preexisting source (the same would seem true
of several other Chronicle entries; on the other
hand, such a beginning may be Benjamins way of
conveying the immediacy of mental events). The
contents of this notice follow logically after notice
14 or 15, which is why the editors of Benjamins
collected works chose to insert it after notice 15.
In Berlin Childhood ca. 1900, the larger portion
of the notice would be combined with notice 14
as Two Bands. There, a dialectical movement
between (erotic) experience and innocence governs the
text; here, the tension between the two is not so pronounced. the Rousseau-Inselice-skaters on
the Neuer See. An islet in a pond surrounded by a
natural wooded landscape, this Tiergarten feature
honoring the French philosopher is in imitation
of his onetime burial site within the garden park
at Ermenonville, near Paris. Music from the

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Rousseau-Insel would travel many hundreds of yards

to be heard by skaters on the Neuer See, a winding,
many-armed body of water in the western reaches
of the park (insert map 3A). any notion of
the origin of the island-name. Young Walter
is (ironically perhaps) innocent of the name
Rousseau, the great spokesman for natural goodness
and original purity. obscurely winding paths.
The labyrinthine character of the place is in keeping
with the way innocence can bump up against
adulthood, symbolized by the childrens playground
surrounded by adult benches and the nursemaid
with her racy novel. little ones are digging. An
especially jarring shift to the present tense which
emphasizes the power of this memory-image. The
shift can be understood as a minor eruption of
Benjamins now-time (Jetztzeit), his experience of
all time converging on the present moment
(famously formulated in his last major writing,
On the Concept of History, 1940). If the beloved
had finally left.... An unprepared downshifting
back to the past tense; Benjamin is now once more
signalling the pastness of what he remembers.
hearingthe rhythm with which my feet.

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Wikipedia Ludwig Stollwerck

The Merkur, an early Stollwerck vending machine (1889).

commentary

Benjamin is referring to an aural memory; in the

corresponding passage in Two Bands he will
simply say: The lake lives for me still in the rhythm
of my feet, suggesting a muscular or tactile memory lodged in his feet. Stollwerck automats.
Stollwerck was a well-established German chocolate
manufacturer with an international market; it had introduced the candy vending machine in 1887.

[16]
Using the image of the archeologist who excavates precious things from the earth, Benjamin will
ponder the workings of memory as a faculty of
mind, without any reference to himself. memory
is not an instrumentbut its showplace. Benjamin
begins by saying that our memory (Gedchtnis, the
storehouse of the mind) is not instrumental in character, not the means for making inquiry into the past,
but rather the showplace of the past, of experience
past. the toneof genuine memories. They should
not hesitate to return. Suddenly, midway in his
elaboration of archeological imagery, Benjamin

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makes memories (now Errinerungen, i.e., things

that have been made inner in relation to us, internalized things) into actors or agents who, like the
archeologist, should not hesitate to return always
and again to the same body of fact, scattering it about
as you scatter about earth. the true valuables
hiding within the earth. Concealed amid the
facts we may recollect and sift through are images.
These gain in meaning for us when they have been
liberated from their contexts, that is, their specif ic histories embedded in our particular pasts.
Benjamin is suggesting that such images can become
timeless essences when we contemplate them
in the sober chambers of our late understanding.
notas though telling a storyas though reporting
something. Memories are not enclosed, time-bound,
linear narratives which begin and end, traversing
their territories once and for all; rather they are openended, rhapsodic, forever circling their motifs so as
to experience them afresh and more profoundly, too.

commentary

[17]
The notice moves by stages from metaphysical
musings, circling inward towards an encounter with
the authors younger self and ending with the
recapture of one precious moment from his childhood. I do not encounter my own childhood
in their look. The main meaning of the German
Anblick is look or sight, i.e., the way a thing
appears to others, but another meaning is gaze.
(English look is similarly double-sided.) Fundamental
to Benjamin is his experience of looking at and
of being looked at as two aspects of a single higher
reality. We have already met with the idea glancingly
in his (and Hessels) Tiergarten mythology (see
notice 4); the motif will echo through Berlin
Childhood ca. 1900. Too often have my looks
brushed over them since. The flneurBenjamins
ideal urban observerwould not have glanced
indifferently at the old faades, for communing
with them is his main business. Nevertheless,
Benjamin has himself passed innumerable faades
while in pursuit of other businessand he has
overlaid their original reality with so much casual

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empirical experience that they no longer look at

him when he summons them in memory. In an early
essay (Concerning the Program of the Future
Ph i losophy, 1917) Benja min had soug ht to
define epistemological (transcendental) consciousness as genuine experience over and against
mere empirica l consciousness, drawing on an
idea of religion: This experience [Erfahrung ],
then, also includes religion, that is, the true religion, in which neither God nor man is object or
subject of experience. The task of the future
epistemology is to find for knowledge the sphere
of tota l neutra lit y in regard to the concepts
of both subject and object. Something of
Benjamins early philosophical intuitionwith
regard to overcoming the categories of subject
and objectlives on in his images for looking at
objects or things while also being looked at by
them. the Matthikirche on Matthikirchplatz.
The church, in neo-Romanesque style, was designed
by August Stler and completed in 1846; it was to
serve as a parish church for the Tiergarten district
then being developed to the south of the park. The
Matthikirche was destroyed in World War II and later

commentary

reconstructed. Deprived of the original square and

surrounding house-rows, it finds itself today cruelly
exposed in the midst of the so-called Kulturforum.
the churchthe pair of steep gabled roofs.
The triple-aisle design of the interior of the
Matthikirche is ref lected in three gabled roofs
and three terminal apses; this formal purity stands
the church in good stead in its present stripped
surroundings. the doorway of a certain house.
Most l i kely, B enja m i n i s rememberi ng t he
apartment house where he lived between the ages of
six and ten, at 24 Nettelbeckstrae. a thousand,
ten thousand times. Figurative language ultimately
derived from the Bible. Variants occur in both the
Old and the New Testament. Here, for example, is
Psalm 91:7: A thousand shall fall at thy side, and
ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not
come nigh thee. .my solesthe first to report.
The building which Benjamin has passed by so
often over the years no longer has anything to say to
his eyes; however, memories are still lodged in his
feet, because they have not experienced the interior
stairwell since his family left their apartment there.
and if I do not cross the threshold. Benjamin

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explicitly refers to the threshold, beyond which is an

interior that has the power to recognize him and
so return him to his past self. He fears the power
of the threshold. the landing with its panes of
colored glass. The rest of the notice seems to
preser ve a poigna nt individua l memor y that
will reoccur with only small alterations in Berlin
Childhood, in Tiergarten. There the memory
seems even more mysterious because it arrives
unprepared, spliced onto rather different memories
of the park. a womanhovering like Raphaels
Madonna. The reference is to a famous work
by Raphael (The Sistine Madonna) in the
Gemldegalerie in nearby Dresden, which Benjamin
is likely to have visited. Work is the citizens adorning. These dreary verses are taken from Schillers
Die Glocke, long among the most admired
and popular poems in the German language. They
point up the middle-class cultural piety of young
Walters childhood milieu.
Motto:. The motto is inserted between notices
17 and 18. A variant occurs in undated notes that
Benjamin made while participating in an experiment

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Wikepedia, Matthikirche. Photo: Uwe Thobae

The reconstructed Matthikirche, Berlin.

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with hashish or some other hallucinogen: Oh brownbaked Siegessule, with sugar mist in winter
days. Another variant provides the epigraph for Berlin
Childhood: Oh brown-baked Siegessule, with
winter sugar from childhood days. Siegessule.
A handsome column to commemorate Prussian
victories over Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France
(1871). It was first placed in front of the Reichstag, but
was transferred in 1938 to the Groer Stern, where it
still stands (see Siegessule, in Berlin Childhood).

[18]
When I stopped so late. Benjamin would use a
revised version of this final sentence as the final
sentence of Beggars and Whores. There its context
is the Benjaminian adolescents quest for sexual experience and his dealings with prostitutes on city streets.

commentary

[19]
A further consideration of the transcendental nature
of memories (see also notice 16). This strange configuration. The remembered images are no longer
the stuff from which they were made, the stuff of
life; they have been liberated from ordinary experience
and have entered into a higher order of existence
have become patterns in and for themselves alone,
outside of time. That is why they may be regarded
as instantaneous or as eternal, neither of these states
being measurable in time. The air of the citya
brief and shadowy existence. Benjamins memories
of those persons who were closest to him could not
contribute to an autobiography. The images remain
vague and fitful; they seem to depend upon the
air of the city and to issue from their surroundingswalls, windows, thresholds, grave markers. The
latter, all boundary zones, are the true Benjaminian
f igures; they are more memorable than human
beings. sites and moments through which it bears
witness to the dead. The dead have left time
behind them. Berlin shows itself to be filled with
the timelessness of the dead, with numerous sites

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and momentsits thresholdswhere the dead may

be felt by those who are remembering. Benjamin
asserts that noisy, no-nonsense Berlin, an aggressively modern city devoted to temporal pursuits,
is especially accessible to the other dimension of
existence beyond time. the child approaches
the realm of the dead. The consciousness of
the child offers a neutral medium in which the
two planes of existence, one in time and the other
beyond time (the realm of the dead) can touch
each other. the Stralau fishing parade. In 1574
Elector Johann Georg von Brandenburg decreed that
henceforth no fish were to be taken from local waters
using a large net between Thursday before Easter
and St. Bartholomews Day (24 August). A parade
in Stralau celebrates the beginning of open fishing season there. (The town, which lies to the southeast along the River Spree, became a part of Berlin
in 1920.) Fridericus eighteen hundred and fortyeight. Berlin was a site of revolutionary struggle in
the spring of 1848. my parents families. Benjamins
maternal forebears were immigrants from Silesia, where
they had established a profitable cigarette and tobacco
business in 1837; Benjamins father had emigrated to

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Berlin (via Paris) from the Rhineland. a childs

rememberinga childs experience. What the child
remembers does not depend on what he experiences
in his own life; his memories come to him in another
way that has somehow to do with ones ties to the
dead of this soil. the teachings of Epicurus. The
philosopher Epicurus (341-270 bce) taught that all
sensations are caused by very small particles, or atoms,
which are continually being shed by objects and
which stream to us, conveying the physical qualities
of the objects in question. It is perhaps provocative
of Benjamin to appropriate the ideas of an ancient
Greek materialist to suggest the special (metaphysical)
realness of the memories he is discussing.

[20]
This notice picks up precisely where notice no. 11
ended; together, the two will become Markt-Halle in
Berlin Childhood ca. 1900. No. 20 records the
vision promised in the earlier notice, where we were
told that young Benjamins routine visits to the local
indoor food market had eroded the normal images

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which had governed his perception of it previously.

Behind screened-off partitions. Now his language
proliferates as though to accommodate a rush of
new images: The market-women are priestesses of
commerce-minded Ceres, procuresses, and inviolable wool-knit-clad giants communicating among
themselves with the help of arcane signals, that is,
through preverbal means; they fertilize the soil beneath the hems of their skirts so that things are
seething and swelling there; and an unseen marketgod is about to fertilize them in turn. the stream
of toiling housewives. The toiling housewives with
their broods have been touched by the hyperfertility
of the scene. depths below the sea-surface. The
last sentence of the notice, which did not find a place
in Berlin Childhood, possesses a traceable pedigree. Benjamin must have borrowed inspiration for his
gaslit, submarine image of the market interior from
Louis Aragons description, in Le paysan de Paris, of the
arcades of Paris as human aquariums already dead
to their original life, and which deserve to be regarded
as the receivers of a number of modern myths
(from the chapter Le Passage de lOpra; see also
Aragons vision of the display of canes and walking

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sticks in the Passage de lOpra as a sort of underwater ballet). waters. The reading of the MS is
uncertain at this place.

Benjamins vision of a female-centered fertility cult owes something to Johann Jacob Bachofen,
who in Mutterrecht [Mother Right; 1863] was the
first to hypothesize an early matriarchal civilization.
In Bachofens second phase of culture, a lunar matriarchy arises, based on farming and featuring chthonic
mystery cults. Benjamin showed a lively interest in this
work in the early 1920s and would later write a long
essay (in French) on Bachofen. But the market-women
in Benjamins vision of the Markt-Halle are not only
primal; with their rough cheer and telepathic powers
they seem as well to be exponents of an evolving
Marxist class solidarity: Benjamins Markt-Halle is
preparing for a shift in consciousness. The notice
already illustrates a later assertion of Benjamins,
namely, that the collective unconscious of an age
tends to be invaded by visions of a primal past even as
it struggles to awaken to its next historical phase (see his
introductory essay for the Arcades project: Paris,
Capital of the Nineteenth Century, the first version).
A heady Benjaminian synthesis of Hebrew mysticism,

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surrealist dreaming, Marxist class theory, and Freudian

and Jungian ideas about psychic repression and the
collective unconscious, respectively, is underway.

[21]
theslight roleplayed by human beings. An
idea brought forward in notice 19 will now be explored further. insightsthat came over mean
illumination. The drama of sudden illumination or
revelation is unique to the present notice; nothing like
it is found elsewhere in Benjamins Chronicle
notices or in Berlin Childhood. And in fact, nothing
at all from the notice found its way into Berlin
Childhood. this would have to be in Paris. Paris,
not Berlin, provides the matrix for Benjamins insight
into how the experience of place has governed his
relationships with other people. a language so singularthat object-world. The object-world of a great
city speaks its own language to the individual; the
language preempts his social relations, enveloping
him in loneliness the dream-image awaits them
true aspect. Losing or isolating oneself in the city

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induces a state of mind whose profundity invites the

dream-image to reveal the true aspect of our interpersonal relationships to ourselves. Characteristically,
Benjamin senses that the dream-image, or illumination, is lying in wait for him. the cityits revenge
in memory. Our conscious lives are filled with
thoughts about our social interactions and what they will
bring us. But opposing the social plane of consciousness
is the topographical plane, another kind of awareness
which remains unconscious until memories bring it back
to us and we picture (empty) scenes or showplaces
where we have encountered ourselves or other
people. Benjamin seems to attribute an independent
consciousness to the city when he speaks of its
revenge upon us. Indeed, the city sends memories
into our minds which are made from images it has
created in secret. I was expecting someone.
The social surface of his life has Benjamin waiting
for someone in the Caf des Deux Magots, but it is
not important for him to remember who it was;
at the same time, his unconscious is waiting for him
with a revelation, a dream-image, which the city has
fashioned. I wish to reconstruct its outlinesa
labyrinth. The image of the labyrinth with its center

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and entranceways has been associated in other

Chronicle notices with the Tiergarten (see especially
notice 1) or the city of Paris (notice 7). With its particularly dramatic emergence in the present notice, readers
may come to sense how the same image might also
have informed other Chronicle passages dealing
with entrances into the city (see, for example, the conclusion of notice no. 8) all the more concerned
with theentrances. Here, once again, is lurking the
fundamental Benjaminian notion of the threshold.
These entrances I am naming ur-acquaintances.
Benjamins primary acquaintances, regarded topographically, are the thresholds through which he will
meet many more persons. And again, like his guides
into the city, these ur-acquaintances lead the way
into (and never out of) the labyrinth; they bring, as it
were, new persons inside, to him. Either fate or
ego governs the whole process and so occupies the
central chamber of the labyrinth. Benjamin would
have met each of the ur-acquaintances because he felt
himself drawn to him or her; that is, they were not
people he would have fallen in with through mere
circumstance or chance, or through other persons.
A diagram still does exist, with a series of trees indicat-

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ing Benjamins ur-acquaintances and the persons

met through them (see Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften,
VI, 804, where the diagram is reproduced). something
like hidden laws. As to what does underlie our
life-patterns, Benjamin provides no answer, but the
question will be revisited (see below); for the moment
he merely contemplates the intrinsic power of the
paths which are always leading us at different
stages in our lives to friends, betrayers, lovers, pupils,
or masters. Benjamin was impressed with patterns
in his own life: The previously cited letter of June
1934 to Gretel Karplus, for example, considers how many
times he has fallen under the influence of
another man and that mans alien way of viewing the
world, which then led (so Benjamin urges) to a
profitable struggle between himself and the other.
Shortly before he undertook the Berlin Chronicle
notices, Benjamin had become involved with Bertolt
Brecht, much to the concern of certain of his other
friends. When someone has character. Benjamin
is recalling one of the aphorisms (no. 70) from the
fourth section of Nietzsches Jenseits von Gut und Bse
[Beyond Good and Evil]: If a man has character, he
will also have his typical experience, which is always

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recurring. So do the persons. Benjamin never even

names these persons; they are mere foreground for his
background of the city, which is what actually
interests him. the world of objectsdrew itself
togetheragainst the background of those persons.
Now, in a neat reversal, he places objects in the foreground and relegates those persons who were closest
to him at one time (ca. 1914 or 1915) to the background; but simultaneously he turns his attention
from background to foreground, so that objects and
not people continue to command his attention. And it
drew itself together as four rings. Although three
rings would be more suggestive, still Benjamin sounds
a fairy-tale note with the mention of four mysterious
rings drawing themselves together. But in the end he
will be concerned with destiny and fate rather than
the liberation promised by fairy-tales (see notice 22,
commentary). one of the old Berlin housesthe
Kupfergraben. With its two terminations meeting the
River Spree, the Kupfergraben defines one side of
what is today known as Museuminsel (Museum
Island); Benjamin is likely thinking of one of several
former streets along the western side of the canal,
just above Spittelmarkt (insert map D3; this area was

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devastated in World War II). the Schinkel era. Karl

Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), Prussian architect
and city planner (and painter), is celebrated mainly
for his neoclassical buildings in Berlin. my school
friend A.C.. Alfred Cohn (1892-1954), a lifelong
friend to whom Benjamin addressed one final
letter (September 17, 1940) as he sought to make
his way out of Vichy France from Marseilles.
Die sptromanische Kunstindustrie. The Late
Roman Art-industry; Alois Riegls study (1901)
examines the minor arts of a neglected era of Roman
culture, seeking to appreciate them on their own
terms. This novel perspective surely appealed to
Benjamin. our mutual friend, Ernst S.. Ernst
Schoen (1894-1960); as program director for the progressive Frankfurter Rundfunk during the late
1920s and early 1930s, he welcomed Benjamins
contribution in the form of radio broadcasts on a
great variety of topics. (No recordings of Benjamin
speaking survive). according to Lederer. Emil
Lederer (1882-1939), the sociologist and economist
who would publish Benjamins essay Concerning the
Critique of Violence in his Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (1920-21). my betrothed

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Grete R.. Grete Radt (see below). the gift-giver

his sister. Alfred Cohns sister, Jula, who would
become romantically involved with Walter Benjamin
in 1921, after Benjamins marriage had broken down.
this girl...the real axis of fate of this circle.
Benjamin returns to his contemplation of human
destinies. Now, in place of the labyrinth with its many
entrances, he imagines Jula Cohn as the organic matrix
around whom those close to her live out their preordained existences; through a plantlike passivity she
coordinates what will befall them. As with the labyrinth
and the powers of place, so here, too, with his reference
to vegetable laws, Benjamin seeks out the hidden
impersonal forces which direct our actions. Many
yearsits web of associations. The matings and
marriages which took place among Benjamins
friends would have violated many a tribal covenant.
They must be diagrammed (as a kind of pretzel) to be
grasped once and for all: Jula Cohn, the sister of Alfred
Cohn, would become the girlfriend of both Ernst
Schoen and Walter Benjamin. She would then marry
Fritz Radt, the brother of Benjamins former fiancee,
Grete Radt, who in turn would marry Alfred Cohn in a
second marriage. And Benjamin does not even tell us

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that at the time he was becoming involved with Jula

Cohn, his wife Dora was falling in love with Ernst
Schoen. Well to thy finger. Another instance of
sonnet writing by Benjamin (see notice 12, commentary).
The first quatrain
(whose opening line ends
with vertraute) must have concluded with the
word Lautefinally identifying its subject (the
lute surrounded with laurel branches). The sonnet does
not survive. trust itself. The notice breaks off in
mid-sentence.

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[22]
The treasure-keeper in the green fir-wood. This
beginning returns us to the fairy-tale. Benjamin in his
essay The Storyteller (1936) explains fairy-tales as
an undoing, a way of shaking off the nightmare
which myth has placed upon the chest of humanity.
If myths offer us a final, closed, just-so account of
various aspects of the human condition, the fairy-tale
shows us, and children in particular, how to overcome
fate through courage and cunning, with the help of
the supernatural. However, the present notice and
a corresponding text in Berlin Childhood (Winter
Morning) tell of a wish that was granted, only
to cause the wisher to regret its consequences.
(Winter Morning will be more richly furnished
with the stuff of childhood winter mornings, and
more subtle in conveying in Benjamins childish
wish.) only Sundays children. Walter Benjamin
was himself born on a Friday. Fire was kindled in
the oven. Before ca. 1900 few Berlin houses would
have enjoyed central heating (using steam radiators);
bedrooms of the well-to-do had been warmed with
coal-fed tile ovens. I pass Savignyplatzthe repulsive

commentary

clockface. In Winter Morning, the Benjaminian

child encounters the clock only after reaching the
yard of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule; in fact, the
terrifying clock stood in Savignyplatz, on Kantstrae
(its modern replacement occupies the same spot).
my efforts to find a job. As an adult Benjamin
was able to lie abed to his hearts content because
he lacked regular employment. By the age of thirtythree he knew he would never become a university
professor; thereafter he relied on earnings from
freelance journalism and on material assistance from
his grudging parents (later from friends and colleagues).

[23]
There is yet another sound. Once again Benjamin
seems to resume his train of thought rather than
commence one. certain words from the language of adultsbefore children. Butterfly Hunt
(Berlin Childhood) closes with a passage modeled
on this passage. There Benjamin will say: unfathomable in the way that the names children use seem
to adults. The gulf between the two life-stages

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remains with either formulation, and words which

hover over that gulf will be unfathomable to whomever is hearing them from the other side. We are
reminded of Benjamins idea of adjacent places with
different metaphysical charges, separated by unseen
thresholds. a large share in my decision. Truly,
aural memories and in particular his memories of
isolated words haunt Benajmin (see notice 10; see also
notices 36 and 40). PotsdamNeubabelsberg.
These are two localities in the forested and lakefilled region lying to the west of Berlin and long
preferred by city residents in search of relief from
the summer heat. the night of the great break-in.
See Berlin Childhood (A Ghost); my visit to
the Pfaueninsel. See notices 37 and 38, and
Pfaueninsel and Glienicke in Berlin Childhood.
in a drop of rose malmaison. That is, in a drop
of the attar of the Souvenir de Malmaison rose,
developed at the estate of Malmaison in 1843; the
gardens there had been made famous by Josphine
de Beauharnais, the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The idea that a single memory or memory-image
is an essence has already been captured by Benjamin
with an archeological metaphor (see notice 16).

commentary

words in poems by Mallarm. In the poems of

Stphane Mallarm (1843-98), the preeminent French
symbolist, words and phrases are emancipated from the
profane practical operations of language and seem
to live for themselves and their sounds. emaciated
and expiring on the air. These are liminal words;
their stranded situation between the poetic and the
profane leaves them emaciated and expiring on the
air. So has the word Brauhausberg grown weightlessa brewery. The Brauhausberg, a hill to the
south of Potsdam, was laid out in 1701 by the Elector
of Brandenberg as a terraced vineyard, and received
its name from the royal brewery established at its foot
in 1728. For Benjamin, this word drifts now in some
no-mans land of memory, shorn of all references to
the material world: It has grown weightless. hill with
an aura of blue. Memory endows the Brauhausberg
with a protective aura. Benjamin actually says ein
von Blauen umwitterter Berg, words suggesting an
intangible local atmosphere of blues surrounding
the Brauhausberg as remembered. In Butterfly Hunt
he will link an elusive butterfly from his boyhood with
his adult meditations on the word Brauhausberg:
Today, the air in which this butterfly once hovered

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is saturated with a word that has not reached my ears in

decades, nor passed my lips.

[24]
The notice reflects on the often mysterious provisioning of the Benjamin family household with necessaries
and luxuries. the mention of certain LieferantenQuellen. Literally, supplier-sources, an impressively redundant expression which betrays little.
old and respected Berlin firms. The enterprises
named by Benjamin, with the exception of Stiller,
were located on Leipziger Strae, the most important street in the city for retail shopping and the
destination for those unloved expeditions young
Walter made with his mother into the City (see
notice 1); Carl Stiller was to be found on Jerusalemer
Strae, in Charlottenburg (with a second shop on
Potsdamer Strae). It is noteworthy that none of the
grand department stores such as Wertheims (also
on Leipziger Strae) have been included in
Benjamins list of his mothers shopping stations.
Lepkes...still located in Kochstrae. Rudolphe

commentary

Lepkes Kunst-Auctions-Haus, 28-29 Kochstrae,

leading auctioneers in Berlin who would later relocate to 122a-122b Potsdamer Strae. the firm of
Gladenbeck. Several firms belonging to Gladenbecks
and specializing in producing artistic bronzes are
listed in the Adrebuch (1900). the Medizinisches
Warenhaus. The Medicinisches Waarenhaus,
108 Friedrichstrae, offering hospital installations

Wikipedia Lucien Bernhard

An advertisement ca. 1908 in the modern poster style,

designed for the Stiller shoe company by Lucien Bernhard.
The advertisment has been reduced to a trademark
and a product type, with all ornament gone.

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and medical supplies (Adrebuch, 1900). when

it came to the firm of Stabernack. Once again,
according to the contemporary address books
there were several firms headed by Stabernacks and
all having to do with the outfitting of interiors or
exteriors (mainly of commercial properties). one
of the directors, Herr Altgelt. Presumably Herr
Martin Altgelt, architect, with a residence at 14
Tauentzienstrae (Berlin-West). Leaving aside
mealtime conversations. The passage picturing Benjamins father at the telephone was
reworked for Berlin Childhood as part of The
Telephone. None of the rest of this long and
occasionally prosaic notice finds an echo in
Childhood. the Zentrale fr Weinbetrieb.
The Centrale fr Weinbetrieb (23 Dessauer Strae)
is represented in the Adrebuch (1910) with an advertisement stating that its products were to be had
for their cost to the firm, plus ten percent. my
fathers working day. The official hours for
Lepkes auction house were from 8:30 in the morning to 6:30 in the evening. But Emil Benjamin
came home for his lunch and customarily took a
nap between two and four in the afternoon (when,

commentary

as Benjamin informs us, there was always danger

the telephone might ring shrilly from its remote
station in the rear hallway). other names...of
bourgeois Berlin. The names and professional
positions of those who provided their services to
the Benjamin family are traceable in various editions
of the address books for Berlin as follows: Hermann
Oberneck, Dr. jur., lawyer and notary; I. Rinne,
Dr. med., Prof., chief doctor of surgery, ElisabethKrankenhaus, private clinic at Magdeburger Platz
(later on Augsburger Strae); R. Renvers, Prof.,
Dr. med., medical director of the municipal hospital, Moabit; Carl Quaritsch, royal solo dancer,
balletmaster, and dance instructor; Joseph
Goldschmidt, banker. Renversas long as we
lived in the same building. The doctor lived at
24 Nettelbeckstrae when the Benjamin family
were also residents, ca. 1900. an Eispalast.
The Ice Palace opened in 1908, the year Benjamin
turned 16. It was then the largest indoor skating rink
in the world, but it offered other forms of
entertainment, too, even a casino. The building (at
22-24 Martin-Luther-Strae, Wilmersdorf) made for
an imposing addition of Jugendstil architecture to

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Berlin. my erotic fantasies. Benjamin succeeds in

ending this sedate notice with a frisson.

[25]
I got to know the city. Here the central
commercial district of Berlin centering on Leipziger
Strae and Friedrichstrae is no longer referred to
as die City but in ordinary German, as die Stadt.
our fathers money. Benjamin implies that as a
child, he was embarrassed by displays of the power of
his fathers money. It is as though he had been aware
of his mothers shopping and its privileged milieu as
something that should not come the familys way as
a matter of course, or through some natural right.
This notice, a companion to the preceding no. 24
or rather, its correctivereads like a prototypical
image destined for Berlin Childhood, but no sign of
it will appear there (even though the shadow it casts
over bourgeois entitlement will darken more than
one Childhood item). the embarrassment of a
new suit. The Marxist coloring of a latter-day
perspective is seeping into his memory when Benjamin

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This postcard suggests that the Eispalast was a favorite

Berlin attraction ca. 1910.

compares his child self to a commodity, his hands

peering out from the sleeves of a suit like smudged
price-lists. in the pastry shop. Presumably
C. Hillbrich at 24 Leipziger Strae, which advertised
pastries along with confitures and marzipan confections (see notice 24). heathen worship. Capitalism
is a primitive religion and its gods are money and
status goods. the idols whose names. These
names which Walter Benjamin (with his ear for
verbal music) orders ever so precisely can sound like an

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incantation. A series ofmassifs. Benjamin likes

the word massif (a large mountain mass or compact
group of connected mountains forming part of a range).
In Cabinets, written for Berlin Childhood, he
will reuse the image of a hollow massif to describe
the huge dining-room buffet in which the Benjaminian
familys silver hoard was stored (see the first version).

[26]
A considerable portion of the notice was worked
into one of the most extended pieces in Berlin
Childhood. There, in Blumeshof 12, certain
motifs will assume an importance in keeping
with Benjamins increasing focus on capitalism and
bourgeois society. enlightenment concerning my
subsequent life. Benjamin is attributing predictive or prophetic powers to the postcards he cherished
as a child. my collection of picture postcards.
Apparently these were mounted in several albums (see
The Desk, an item intended for Berlin Childhood
but set aside). The collection went missing after
Benjamin left it behind along with most of his

commentary

library in March 1933, upon leaving Berlin and

Germany. my grandmother on the maternal
side. Hedwig Schoenflies, born Hirschfeld (18441908). She lived in a grand apartment in Blumeshof
(see below), not far from the places young
Walter lived in until he was ten. my delight in
gift-giving. That trait will be analyzed in The
Fever (Berlin Childhood), where it is attributed to the unidentified narrator, as is love of travel.
the Christmas holidays. The Benjamins and
many other assimilated Jewish families celebrated
Christmas with all the trappings, making of it an
elaborate family or national holiday. Christmas
receives rather more play in Berlin Childhood
(in addition to Blumeshof 12, see especially A
Christmas Angel; even Easter is mentioned there,
in Hiding Places). But see also Chronicle notices
nos. 34 and 39. I was simply there. Given
Benjamins essentially metaphysical outlook as an
adult, we ought not treat his declaration as mere
charming exaggeration. Blumeshof. An imposing apartment block just south of the Landwehrkanal
and one long block east of Potsdamer Strae, that is,
almost adjacent to Magdeburger Platz, Benjamins

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birthplace. It had been laid out in the early 1860s

around an inner court (Hof ) and named for the
speculative builder who erected it, a Herr Blume.
Blumeshof was destroyed during World War II.
Stangels Reisebro. The Adrebuch (1890)
lists: Carl Stangens Reise-Bureau, first German
firm to offer group tours to every country on earth.
Packaged tourism had begun on a modest scale
with Thomas Cook in 1841. She was a widow.
Hedwig Schoenfliess husband, Georg, had died in
1894, when Walter Benjamin was still an infant.
This notice will end with a brief reference to
Benjamins prematurely deceased grandfather
named Georg.
Even in Berlin Chronicle notices seemingly
devoted to autobiographical disclosure, Benjamin
offers very little information about members of his
family. Now and then we do receive vivid glimpses
of his mother or father, and in the present notice
his maternal grandmother will be characterized
(chiefly through an evocation of her apartment). Yet
apart from Benjamins grandfather named here, no
family member is ever named other than Aunt
Lehmann (in notice 9). Brother Georg remains unmen-

commentary

tioned after notice 1, where Benjamin alludes to him

in passing (the saving of little brother); his sister,
Dora, is never referred to at all. His mothers sisters are
only mentioned here; no cousins are ever mentioned
anywhere (Benjamin had many, and the extended
family was regularly together). Finally, none of
the family servants are treated familiarly.
Benjamin informs us in the foreword to Berlin
Childhood that it had been his intention to
deemphasize the facts of his own biography and
the physiognomies of his family and his comrades
so as to favor the imagesprecipitated by urban
experience in a child of the bourgeois class. As far
as it concerns members of his family, Benjamin
already realizes the intention in Berlin Chronicle.

almost immemorial bourgeois security.
The German unvordenkliche, rendered here as
immemorial, acquired a very specific connotation through the Romantic philosopher Friedrich
W. J. Schelling and his phrase das unvordenkliche
Sein (existence earlier than which thought
cannot penetrate). those ephemeral forms.
In the parallel passage in Blumeshof 12, Benjamin
clearly refers to furniture in an eclectic, histori-

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cist style fashionable during the 1870s and 1880s.

objects whichnever reckoned withwear
inheritorsmoves. This species of furniture was often of mammoth proportions and yet
could be intricately and even delicately wrought. It
would have been susceptible to damage and always a
nuisance to keep waxed and dusted. It was awkward
to shift about and sometimes almost impossible to
move in and out of the house, and generally insured
for dark and choked rooms. Benjamin has left us a
spirited portrait of his familys towering dining room
buffet in the first version of Cabinets (Berlin
Childhood). always very close tothe end of
all things. Benjamin speaks of his grandmothers
furniture as though it were alive. To sustain the illusion of its own permanence and timelessness, it willfully maroons itself in ordinary time so as to escape
being defined by any reference to its own end,
whether close at hand or far off. To her furniture,
that end seemed to loom as the end of all things
(I Peter 4:7: The end of all things is at hand; be
ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.) there
was no room in them for dying. It is as though this
bourgeois furniture were in charge, and to maintain

commentary

the illusion of its timelessness, had dismissed the

inhabitants from their apartments so that they
would perform their definitive, illusion-rupturing act
elsewhere. the scene of our most oppressive dreams.
Repressed class insecurities lie in wait for young
Walter behind the cozy look of his grandmothers
rooms. His dream predicts no downfall of individuals
but the demise of the entire bourgeois order. it was
Blumeshof no. 10 or no. 12. Hedwig Schoenflies
occupied an apartment at 12 Blumeshof; Benjamins
other widowed grandmother, Brunella Benjamin,
lived at no. 8 (see also below). Herzblttchens
Zeitvertreib. A yearbook of childrens stories. Herzblttchens Zeitvertreib [Amusements for
Little Sweetheart] had been started by the prominent educator of conservative, arch-Prussian views
Thekla von Gumpert (1810-97). Its issues were richly
illustrated with color lithographs and woodcuts,
and were subtitled Tales for Little Boys and Girls
Intended to Develop Finer Feelings and Moral
Ideas. The most important of theseroomsthe
loggia. A loggia is a gallery or arcade having one
or both sides open to the air, or, in buildings in
Italianate style, an open-sided, verandah-like exten-

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sion, often set in an upper story and frequently having

columns. The latter kind was a typical feature of the
apartments of well-to-do Berliners ca. 1900. For
Benjamin, the loggia represents a transitional space
between indoors and outdoors and the life led in
each of these, and therefore is another of his many
thresholds. He would elaborate on his relationship
to the loggia in one of the last pieces he wrote for
Berlin Childhood, the one he considered a kind of
self-portrait suitable to introduce his whole series of
images (Loggias; undated letter to Gretel Karplus,
summer of 1933). the pealing freightstored up
until evening. The loggia becomes a zone outside
time where the bell peals from nearby churches
accumulate and are sustained (without their sound
diminishing) during all of Sunday, the day of
rest when nothing should happen to remind us of
ordinary time and its doings. an Elysium. In
Greek mythology, those whom the gods favored
would enjoy a pleasurable existence after death
in Elysium. The ancient writers were divided as to
its whereabouts. an old and reputable shop for colonial wares. Georg Rummler, 28 Magdeburger Strae
(Adrebuch for 1900). Other Colonialwaarenhand-

commentary

lungen are listed in the same year for Magdeburger

Strae, and hundreds more were to be found in
Berlin and its environs. Germany had been in possession of colonies in Africa and the Pacific since 1884;
all would be lost with World War I. its owner,
like the grandfather, was named Georg. Benjamin
the young child is impressed by coincidences in
naming; naming means to confer an existence and a
particular nature on someone or something. Benjamin
thought that names pointed to a first, originary
(Adamic) language purely of names (see also notice
11, commentary).

[27]
In this notice there is no steady sense of autobiographical ownership; in remembering, the narrator
refers now to us, now to the child, now to I and
me. Such vagaries in pronoun usage will also occur
in Berlin Childhood. Though isnt this the city,
too. Another beginning which is not really one;
actually, Benjamins thought is resuming nicely
from where it left off at the end of notice 25.

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the child-night, filled with expectancy. The

(unidentified) children wait for a dream ship
to take them on a dream voyage, just as theater
audiences wait for the curtain to go up. For the
beginning of Departure and Return (Berlin
Childhood), Benjamin would attach a version of
notice no. 6 to a revision of the present passage so
that the childs expectancy centers on a trip he and
his family are to begin the next morning. in the
wake of rug beating. Benjamins praise of the
language of rug beating is praise for the honest
labor of servants as representatives of the working
class. The passage will reappear towards the end
of The Fever (Berlin Childhood), where
these sounds enter his sickroom and bring the
Benjaminian child renewed health after a long
seige of class-coded (bourgeois) childhood illness.
the frame for a fata morgana. A mirage; fata
morgana derives from the Italian for Morgan le
Fay, and reflects a belief in the power of her witchcraft to effect the illusion (see also notice 6 and the
first portion of Departure and Return). in us
there still burned. The remainder of the notice will
be simplified and recycled as the conclusion of

commentary

Departure and Return. It gives expression to

Benjamins feelings of unease over the living conditions of the Berlin proletariat; the way various gazes
interact here, how things and people look at each
other and back at him, are a marvel. Persons who
peer in the eyes of his child self peer into windows
set in crumbling walls and in which a lamp stands
in early evening: That is, the windows with their
lamps have already looked back at and seen into him,
and left themselves there to be seen by others.
Each separate strand of notice 27 possesses its
threshold character. In the first one, children are
waiting for a dream ship and a different reality; in
the second, Benjamins younger self is stationed by a
window so that outdoor morning sounds, sounds
made by servants who have their own language
(rug beating) and their own world, enter his room;
in the third, Benjamin ref lects on the liminal
qualities of courtyards and railway stations; and in
the last, he remembers reentering the city and passing a very poor quarter on his way to the aff luent
Berlin-West. The labyrinthine and fungible qualities
of Benjamins thinking are apparent from the way he
assembled this piece from seemingly unrelated images.

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Later, one of them will find an entirely new context

(in The Fever) whereas the rest will be combined,
though in a different order, for Departure and Return.

[28]
A preliminary version of the Berlin Childhood
item Two Riddles, where the contrast between
two teachers will be more sharply drawn and an underlying lesson in life made memorable. the postcards
in my album. For Benjamins collection of postcards, see notice 26. ...the lovely, ledgible signature:
Helene Pufahl. Pufahl ran a preparatory school
for little boys and girls; in the Berlin Adrebuch
(1900) she is listed as a private instructor living
at 113 Invalidenstrae. It seems that Benjamin was
first enrolled in her school when he was three years
old and remained with her for a number of years.
By law, the lovely, ledgible signatures on her
postcards would have been placed on the front, or
picture side; in those days, the rear side was reserved
for the address and return address. (Benjamin, by
the time he was busy with the Chronicle notices,

commentary

had grown interested in graphology, in connection

with his concept of mimesis). before I was
acquainted with a classroom. As we have seen,
Benjamin began to be given formal classroom
instruction shortly before his tenth birthday. I would
come to knowtwo decades later. A better understanding of class, then, first came to Benjamin in
his early twenties, that is, after he had become a university student and moved beyond the confines of his
boyhood milieu in Berlin-West. His recollection
appears questionable, though, in light of another of
his memories: How as a child he would stare at
stretches of slum housing from his train window
when reentering the city after his summer vacation (see the previous notice; but see also notice 8).
Ilse Ullstein. Beginning in 1877, the Ullstein
family built up a powerful publishing empire
based in Berlin (first with newspapers such as the
Berliner Zeitung and Berliner Morgenpost, then with
books); Ilse Ullstein would have been a third- or
fourth-generation member of the dynasty. Luise
von Landau. She is the same as the Ariadne who
provoked Benjamins earliest sensing of erotic love
(see notice 1). What sort of nobility these Landaus

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were. The head of the family is listed in the

Adrebuch (1902) as Wilhelm von Landau, Freiherr,
Dr. phil., with an apartment at Ltzowufer, no. 5a
(second floor). He seems to have authored a successful travel book (Travels in Asia, Australia,
and America; New York, 1888, published by
George Landau; reprinted 2007) and also to have
written on the Phoenicians. The title-page of his
travel book claims that Baron von Landaus own title
was in connection with Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. the
name remained alive. After Luise van Landau
died, the girls name continued (and still continues)
to live in Benjamins memory: Presumably her name
has become a timeless essence for him and lives on
in the sober chambers of his late understanding
(see notice 16). not long after I had outgrown
the small private circle. In Tiergarten (Berlin
Childhood) the narrator will remark that Luise
van Landau had died while he was still attending the
preschool run by Helene Pufahl; in Two Riddles,
however, he will agree with what is said here.
next to Pindar. The greatest of the nine
canonical lyric poets of ancient Greece, Pindar
(522?-445? bce) praised (inborn) aristocratic virtue

commentary

in his odes, which he dedicated to individual victors in the Panhellenic games. Benjamin would have
read Pindar in the original but also known of the daringly literal translations into German which had
been made by Hlderlin and were first published
in 1910. (Benjamins school essay does not survive.)
Herr Knoche. The Berlin address books for this
period list a Karl Knoche as a preparatory teacher
residing at 150 Wilmersdorfer Strae in Charlottenburg.
The name has something hard-sounding about it
(Knochen in German means bone or bones).
Knoche was supposed to prepare young Walter for the
Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule; but with equal justice one
might argue that the pupil prepared the master for
his subsequent post at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule.
the Reiterlied from Wallensteins Lager. The
Cuirassiers Song, in praise of soldiering, in seven
stanzas of six lines each, is performed by a chorus
at the close of Wallensteins Lager [Wallensteins
Camp], the first drama in Schillers Wallenstein trilogy.
It was a stock patriotic item set by many composers
in the course of the 19th century. (For an online
performance of the Reiterlied to rousing music by
Christian Jakob Zahn (1797), visit www.goear.com).

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Frisch auf, Kameraden. The first lines of

Schillers poem: Look smart, comrades, to horse,
to horse ! / Into field and freedom lets ride. / The
field where a man still has some worth, / And the hearts
still weighed. but its portals are stillsealed.
In Two Riddles, Benjamin will trace a path from
the preschoolers triumphant mastery of the rudiments
to the adults awareness of things he no longer
understands, or never will understand. It is safe to
say that the sentiments expressed by Schiller in his
Cuirassiers Song would have seemed puzzling
if not repugnant to many of Benjamins generation
once they had experienced the Great War. Benjamin
himself avoided everything to do with the war,
yet could write: It was a generation which, still
having gone to school with the horsecar, stood
under the open sky in a landscape in which nothing
had remained unchanged but the clouds, and, at
the center, in a force-field of explosions and torrents
of destruction, the tiny, frail human body (Experience
and Poverty, 1933; and The Storyteller, 1936,
wording slightly altered).

commentary

[29]
Just as the lights of a foggy night. Light as an aspect
of memory flickers intermittently in this notice;
in Winter Evening, the corresponding piece in
Berlin Childhood, Benjamin will focus entirely
on light as a medium of memory. monkeytheater. Plays featuring monkeys as costumed
actors were a characteristic popular entertainment of
the 19th century. Benjamin would write a piece with
that name for Berlin Childhood in order to espouse
Brechtian dramaturgy, or epic theater (the piece
was later set aside). theater events of the next six
or seven years. One imagines that Benjamin is
referring to experiences of middle childhood. His
summary draws upon the most conventional and
representative aspects of the Berlin theater scene
ca. 1900. Der Veilchenfresser [The Violet-eater; 1874],
by Gustav von Moser (1825-1903), drawing-room
comedy in four acts, would have been a somewhat
faded popular favorite when Benjamin attended
a summer spa performance at Suderode, ca. 1900.
Benjamin also names two dramas by Friedrich
Schiller, Die Verschwrung des Fiesko zu Genua [The

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Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa; 1782] and Wilhelm

Tell [William Tell; 1804]. The first he remembers
as having been performed at the Schauspielhaus, a
majestic neoclassical venue designed by Schinkel for
the Preuisches Staatstheater (insert map C3), with
Adalbert Matkowsky (1857-1909) as Fiesco. A
favorite Berlin actor known especially for his
Schiller and Shakespeare, Matkowsky (who was a
huge man) overcame audiences with his distinctive
melodramatic delivery, now thundering his lines,
now filling the hall with a hoarse whisper. Emmy
Destinn (1878-1930) was a Czech spinto soprano
with a ringing top register and marked acting
talent who became a favorite with Berlin audiences
at the very beginning of her career, after her debut at
the Hofoper at the age of 19, in 1898. Carmen was
among her most successful roles (in Georges Bizets
internationally celebrated opra comique of the same
name). because of an event that preceded it.
Benjamin is remembering something which by rights
was more truly dramatic (for him) than the stage
drama he is supposed to have witnessed afterwards
namely, his mothers brutal betrayal of trust.
However, he does not explain why this event, which

commentary

he analyzes with such clarity, came to have a highly

hermetic character for him. (Benjamins situation
with his tyrannical mother does reveal parallels
with Schillers Wilhelm Tell.) how much more
enduringones joyful anticipation. The thing
just now described as enduring was Benjamins
memory of his mothers betrayal, and not of his joyful anticipation of anything per se. my heartfelt
wish to see Kainz. Josef Kainz (1858-1910), one of
the finest actors of the German-speaking stage, most
associated with Vienna and the Burgtheater. Kainzs
performances at the Deutsches Theater in the title
role of Shakespeares Richard II helped win him a
loyal Berlin following. the theater on Nollendorfplatz. The Neues Schauspielhaus, intended as the
architectural centerpiece for Nollendorfplatz (see
the map of the Old West, page 144), opened in 1906
with a staging of Shakespeares The Tempest. The
building was badly damaged during World War II;
only its faade could be salvaged. The replacement
structure, known as the Metropol, provides a venue
for popular, big-draw events. a scene before me,
but entirely in isolation. Here we have another
of Benjamins memory-images deprived of its former

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context and offering him no access to actual past

events; in this case, however, the image itself
does not seem to grip him. Die lustigen Weiber
von Windsor. A perenially popular operetta set to
music by Otto Nikolai and based on Shakespeares
The Merry Wives of Windsor. The operetta was first
heard at the Hofoper in Berlin in 1849. a snowcoveredunfamiliar Berlin.
Benjamin does
not actually say that this unfamiliar part of Berlin
is the same as that depicted on the postcard (see
below), only that it stands in the same relation to
the Berlin he knew as did the postcard scene.
Hallisches TorBelle-Alliance-Platz. Lying
to the east of Benjamins childhood haunts, this
site (insert map C4) would indeed have been
unfamiliar to him. Benjamin reused the passage
in Winter Evening, but there the child and his
mother are said to be on a shopping excursion rather
than making their way to the theater. (Belle-Allianceplatz is known today as Mehringplatz.) Perhaps the
operathat light-source. The light-source in
Benjamins sense is more than physical; according
to his first hypothesis, the theater is the source of
the light which suddenly altered the city altogether

commentary

as with the light of a childs expectation. perhaps

it is merely a dream. On the other hand, it may
have been a subsequent dream which illumines the
path taken by Benjamin and motherand not
light from the theater or from anywhere else in
their surroundings such as they were. The ultimate
source of this light is not to be explained with
reference to ordinary dream psychology.

[30]
Animating the notice is the authors recoil from
German (Prussian) school life and the things it
inflicted upon him. Something like Brandenburg
Gothic. During Benjamins childhood, many
buildings in Berlin were designed in the style
of the brick churches of medieval Brandenburg.
The Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule offers an excellent
example of this neo-Gothic taste, which was being
vigorously promoted by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
beside the elevated train. The Stadtbahn,
flanked by the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule on the south
and Savignyplatz on the north. But when the portal

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was reached in good time. The syntax of this

sentence seems to work against itself, and has been
adjusted by the present translator. In Benjamins
MS the beginning reads: But when the portal
was reached in good time, or when there was
too little idle time leftand the dread before
what was coming did not weigh too heavily
for you to buy some modeling clay, etc.
seemed as monstrously improper to me. The
official and private spheres of life could never
be divided strictly enough to suit Benjamin.
prisoners base. A childrens game in which
two teams try to capture opposing players by
tagging them and bringing them to a home base.
The school games described here, in which there
were teams from all over Berlin and its environs, must have called for elaborate organizing.
in the vicinity of the Lehrter Bahnhof. The
station lay north of the River Spree along the
Spreebogen (a major bend in the Spree; insert
map B2); it was destroyed during World
War II. Today the same land is occupied by Berlins
futuristic Hauptbahnhof (2006). Theavenues
leading up to it. Beyond the Lehrter Bahnhof

commentary

in a northwesterly direction there once stretched

the barracks and parade grounds for several regiments, including those of the Zweites Garde-UlanenRegiment, a distinguished cavalry formation. The
area has been converted into park land. the schoolyardstands before me useless. Benjamin has
looked at the exterior of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule
so often that it can no longer look back in return
and transmit its essential, non-empirical meaning to

gedenkmal berlin

The fortress-like barracks for the Second Uhlans Regiment

in Berlin-Moabit were begun in 1848.

berlin chronicle

him (see notice 17, where a similar thought has been

presented in connection with the Matthikirche).
like one of those Mexican temples. In the summer of 1916, while a student at Ludwig Maximilian
University in Munich, Benjamin attended seminars
on the pre-Columbian culture of Mexico and the
religion of the Mayans and the Aztecs. molding
over the classrooms. A thorough search of the
former Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule for traces of Benjamins

A strip of the elusive battlement molding, former

Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule.

commentary

molding turned up a single remnant, over the

outer doors of the school entrance looking towards
Knesebeckstrae. Whereas the interior of the school
has been almost entirely refurbished, this entrance
remains as it was in Benjamins day. leaving it
like a shell. The battlement molding, left like an
empty shell, is a reservoir harboring all of Benjamins
experiences at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule, and thus
the ultimate pars-pro-toto figment. Another empty
shell, held up to the ear, will sound the whole of
Benjamins intimate memories of the nineteenth
century (see Mummerehlen, in Berlin Childhood).
the absurd buds and volutes of the cast-iron railings. The railings are still to be seen guarding a
few flights of stairs within the school. stairs
always hateful to me. Benjamin outdoes himself
in the following evocation of the atmosphere inside
the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule; we are being offered a
masterpiece of precise observation trained on the
tiniest habits of Prussian authoritarianism.

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[31]
Nh nicht liebes Mtterlein. Snippets of folksong texts as Benjamin is remembering them (not
always accurately): Dont sew on that red sarafan,
dear little mother. Useless will the work be, dont
trouble yourself. Once more tis evening over
wood and field. Shadows fall, the worlds at rest.
Im Doctor Eisenbart, juvivallera juche, and cure
folk my way, juvivallera juche. Well then, lets
down more bubbling wine. Farewell dear friends,
for part we must. Like clouds wandering the face
of heaven, so I yearn for the wide, wide world. All
but one of these items can be found in the multivolume anthology compiled by Ludwig Erk (1807-83).
Erks Liederschatz. The full title: Deutscher
Liederschatz: Eine Auswahl der beliebesten Volks-,
Vaterlands-, Soldaten-, Jger-, Studenten-, und Weihnachts
Lieder fr eine Singstimme und Pianofortebegleitung.
Die Texte und Melodien rividiert und auf deren
Quellen zurckgefhrt [Treasury of German Song:
A Selection of the Most Beloved Folk Songs, Patriotic
Songs, Soldiers Songs, Hunters Songs, Students
Songs, and Christmas Songs Arranged for One Voice

commentary

with Piano Accompaniment. Texts and Melodies

Revised, with an Identification of Their Sources].
Erk was among the earliest scholarly collectors of
German folk and popular song. His anthology, first
issued in 1881, would become a staple in middle-class
households and appear in numerous editions over
the decades. In it, song texts are attributed to known
authors and employ multiple stanzas of polished
verse; tunes are arranged in four-part harmony. I would
not join in. Benjamin seems never to have become
actively interested in the art of music (nor would
his mother have needed to be more than routinely
proficient at the keyboard to perform from Erks
anthology). These melodies belonged to the house.
The piano was omnipresent in bourgeois homes
during the 19th century, and women and girls especially devoted enormous time and effort to perfecting keyboard skills. Benjamin has already remembered the sounds of an etude being practiced
someplace in his grandmothers cavernous Blumeshof
apartment (notice 26). the shuffling sound made
when my mother searchedthe noise with which
my father. Benjamin recalls a catalogue of ordinary domestic sounds from childhood. He remembers

berlin chronicle

these casual everyday noises more readily than the

official sounds of public life and social functions.
A similar catalogue of sounds is introduced in
Mummerehlen (Berlin Childhood), where the
contrast between incidental domestic noises and those
in the public domain will be made explicit.

[32]
The only Chronicle notice to engage explicitly
with Judaism. Although anything but conventionally religious, Walter Benjamin was drawn
to Jewish mysticism and messianism, and sought to
integrate both into his idiosyncratic metaphysics.
Here, however, he appears to be describing a
personal and empirical discovery in psychological
terms. Slightly revised, this text would be considered for inclusion in Berlin Childhood but was
left out of the collection after Benjamins close
friend Gershom Scholem voiced disapproval. such
endless wanderings. Those restless movements
of an adolescent propelled by his sex urges. the
Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah (Hebrew: head

commentary

of the year) is celebrated in late summer or early

autumn, according to the Jewish calendar. Many
Berlin Jews attended services on only the most
important holy days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur. a service of the Reform branch. Reform
Judaism originated in Germany during the first
half of the 19th century in response to the
Enlightenment and the perceived rigidity of
traditional Judaism; Berlin was an early center.
Entering the synagogue by myselfI had no idea
of the way. In the revised version of the text,
Benjamin will offer another reason he could not
have entered the synagogue alone: The admission
cards for the service had been left with his protector (admission being by tickets purchased in advance).
I was overcome by the thought. To young
Benjamin, failure to reach the synagogue, failure
to fulfill a religious obligation, suddenly appears
in an entirely different light, namely, that of an
opportunity: Liberationyielding to his sexdriveis at hand. In the subsequent rewording
for Berlin Childhood, this moment suggests
inner conflict and seems altogether more intense (I
was overcome by a hot wave of anxiety) and then

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something like anger is released: Let it all go to the

devil, what do I care.

[33]
Our summer residences. See also notices 23, 37,
and 38. though they were themselves not subject
to shock. Benjamin will turn to the very significant concept of shock in two late notices (nos. 35 and
40). it is an evening in my seventh or eighth
year. The remainder of the text appears in Berlin
Childhood, slightly modified, as A Ghost.
rubber bullets from my Eureka pistol. Parlor
air pistols, including the Eureka model by Bedford
& Walker, were developed in the United States
in the post-Civil War era; their cartridges, filled
with compressed air, could send rubber bullets,
or slugs, a distance of some forty feet. Id been
keeping a secret.my dream of the night before.
The relationship between dreams and the person
who dreams them is of central important to this
notice. whose texttaken from Die Glocke.
Benjamins second reference to the famous poem by

commentary

Schiller, intended to indicate his parents conventional literary tastes (see also notices 17 and 28). Such
regular allusions to the iconic cultural properties
of the family household make one wonder if
Benjamin were not simply adding them to his
recollections as a kind of titivation (see also
notice 9). Here were Hell and Paradise. The
summer residence of the Benjamin family becomes
a housewifes miniature cosmos. Its distinct realms
the corner of the parental bedroom where his
mothers nightgowns and house dresses hang (a zone
of impurity shrouded by a violet velvet curtain)
and her linen closet (zone of sweet incense and
purity)would have been preceded, says Benjamin,
by an undivided pagan world under the sway
of the ancient, occult magic of warp and woof
(see The Sewing Chest, Berlin Childhood).
The dream had come from below. Dreams
come from somewhere; they do not simply originate with the dreamer. When the dreamer speaks
of my dream, it means that he has taken
possession and claimed it as his own. from the
evil world. The first of the two realms is now
forthrightly characterized as evil; under the

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Christian arrangement, Hell and Paradise (Heaven)

oppose each other with their opposite moral charges.
just as in sagas. The survival of paganism
as an alternative is hinted with this allusion to
the Norse or Icelandic sagas. In the night which
followed. The break-in by a criminal gang seems
like a continuation of the boys dream which had
invaded his sleep the night before. The association
will be made explicit in A Ghost. I was proud to
be interrogated. Complicity between a servant
and the criminals is suspected, but there is complicity between young Benjamin and the criminals,
tooby way of the dream which he first
appropriated and then kept secret. (There may also
be complicity between the pure and the impure
zones of the household, both under his mothers
authority.) whichI now recited as prophecy.
In Berlin Childhood the boy stays mumtaking
the part of the robbers and in effect, betraying
the bourgeois order. In the present notice his
prophecy can be construed as another of
Benjamins Marxist asides on bourgeois morality
and the approaching demise of private property.
(Seen from his metaphysical standpoint, Benjamins

commentary

prophetic dream may have come to him from outside

time, where past, present, and future are always one.)

[34]
everything else I know of books. Benjamin is
referring to his adult knowledge of books, which
rests on an intellectual relationship with their
content. The worldin the book. Nostalgia for
a lost world of child reading and writing will also
animate The Reading Box, an item Benjamin
wrote for Berlin Childhood but set aside. The
childs experience of being at one with his books
corresponds to mankinds prelapsarian existence,
when we were still at one with God and with the
physical world that had been made for us. And
the bliss with which you received a new book.
The rest of the notice, with some editing away of
detail, was once destined for Berlin Childhood,
under the title The New Friend of German Youth.
But as would be the case with The Reading Box
and yet another item concerning books and reading (The Student Library), this item does not figure

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among the thirty pieces Benjamin eventually

designated for inclusion in Childhood. the
latest volume of Neuer Deutscher Jugendfreund.
The New Friend of German Youth was a
deluxe illustrated miscellany of fact and fiction
dedicated to the entertainment and edification
of the young (the young in this case referring
to boys). During Benjamins childhood, its annual
editions ran to between five and six hundred
pages. the story-labyrinth. Yet another way
for Benjamin to return to his favorite image
of the labyrinth: Childhood reading is like
exploring a maze, and promises the child every
sort of sensory experience. In Berlin Childhood
the same idea will enter into Boys Books
(which replaced his other reading pieces). about
the head of Stephenson. George Stephenson
(1781-1848), English engineer and builder of
early steam locomotives, one of the heroes of the
Industrial Age.

commentary

[36]
A tiny, concise ref lection which does not seem to
have been reused. the gift of the moment, on
which I am reporting. These Chronicle notices
are not meant to trace an evolution, or a series of
related events from Benjamins past; they are meant
to recover images which entered into his memory
even as they detached themselves from whatever
contexts they once possessed. See especially notice
19, but also nos. 16 and 23. the gift of never more
beinglost to me. Memor y-images, having
gained their liberation from time by detaching
themselves from their earlier contexts, are always
waitingwaiting for Benjamin to remember them
whenever he will.

[35]
The notice seems to draw on the psychoanalytic
theory of Sigmund Freud. recollections of rooms.
Benjamin is thinking of the memory-images of
apparently empty rooms. (When we committed such

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rooms to memory, we were physically present in them,

of course, but we were not looking at ourselves.) no
image...on memorys plate. Benjamin will rely on a
photographic metaphor to explain the psychological
phenomenon of shock. we ourselvesat the center
of these rare images. Still thinking of the memoryimages of apparently empty rooms, Benjamin implies
that we who were in those rooms have, after suffering a shock, been absorbed into our memory-images
of them. day-time-oriented egodeeper ego.
The daytime ego, absorbed in the flow of our ordinary
lives, becomes desensitized. On the other hand, the
deeper ego, sequestered and left untouched by daily
events, can be prey to shock. Our memory must
thankits most indelible images. Shock transfixes
the defenseless deepest ego in the form of a memory
of its surroundings which comes into being during
a traumatizing moment. This psychological event
corresponds to the fixing of an image on the photographic plate with the aid of a magnesium flash. So
would the roombe forgotten by me. The
beginning of a memory which Benjamin will finish
recording in notice 40. there was. The sentence
has been left incomplete.

commentary

[37]
The material of this notice and the one following would be recycled and further developed in
Berlin Childhood under the title Pfaueninsel
and Glienicke. The setting is the vacation area
in the vicinity of Potsdam, west of Berlin. the
Pfaueninsel. The Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island) lies
in the Havel River, near the Wannsee; after
King Friedrich Wilhelm III acquired it in 1793, a
menagerie was established including peacocks
(who still roam the island). a close connection must have forged itself. Young Benjamins
idea of a Peacock island denies the birds any
significant role; instead he conceives of the soil of
the island as the bearer of peacock feathers. What
is more, he believes that the private association he
has made (between the peacock soil and its
feathers) entitles him to a private and personal
reward not open to anyone else, namely, discovering
desired feathers in the grass. This train of thought
is expressed far more enigmatically in a corresponding passage in Berlin Childhood. my bliss after
learning how to ride a bicycle. A vivid, almost

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breathless, first-person account of learning to ride will

be provided in Pfaueninsel and Glienicke (but not
here). during the flowering of cycling as a sport.
The 1880s gave birth to the modern bicycle, and
the years of Benjamins childhood saw a cycling
craze. the later skating palaces. Benjamin
has already referred to one of these (see notice 24).
skating rinks. Benjamin renders the term in
English as scating-rings (without quotation marks).
Dr. Zanders physical therapy clinics. Gustav
Zander (1835-1920) was a Swedish-born physician
who invented a therapeutic method employing
special exercise machines based on the principle
of graduated resistance; his program of mechanical
exercise was meant to profit persons of all ages
and conditions. Zander worked first in London and
later in New York, where he founded the Zander
Institute at 20 Central Park South.

[38]
A single culminating sentence which seems to presuppose the narrative Benjamin will provide in

commentary

Pfaueninsel and Glienicke (Berlin Childhood)

of how his unidentified alter ego mastered bicycle
riding. my nuptials with the swelling earth.
In Pfaueninsel und Glienicke, the idea of acquiring territories by means of one single symbolic
act will unite the Benjaminian childs hunt for
peacock feathers and his mastering of the bicycle (see
the notice preceding). The orchards of Glienicke.
All the localities named are found in the vacation
zone west of Berlin.

[39]
I have spoken of the courtyards. See notices 26 and
27. Even Christmas. This notice, which adopts
a stridently Marxist tone and breaks off in midsentence, would be much revised before being
incorporated into A Christmas Angel (Berlin
Childhood), where Benjamin intimates the bare
possibility of a divine intervention in earthly
affairs.
no possibility of reconciliation. In
1932, witnessing the depths of the Depression,
Benjamin was persuaded that there could be no

berlin chronicle

Ludwig-Meidner-Archiv, Jdisches Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Ludwig Meidner, Potsdamer Platz, 1913.

An expressionists vision of what would for a time
be the busiest crossroads in all Europe.

commentary

peaceful solution for social and economic injustice

under the bourgeois order. Christmasmade a
division of poor and rich. Ordinary class
divisions are meanly highlighted with the
commercial activity of the Christmas season.
Potsdamer Platz. Once the busiest hub of
Berlin, where every kind of activity and enterprise
met with every other (insert map C3). Following
World War II, the area was divided by the Wall
and would stay a wasteland for many decades. Today
it is undergoing a painstaking, well-subsidized revival.

[40]
The notice combines a meditation on the aural
equivalent of dj vu with the continuation of a
personal reminiscence (see notice 35). has the
counterpartever been investigated. The
point of Benjamins strange thought is that the
item forgotten and left behind in our house has
been waiting for us, ever since. This is the sense in
which the invisible stranger responsible for the
oversight is actually the future. I may have been five

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years old. The rest of the notice would be revised

and appear in Berlin Childhood as News of
a Death. I did not absorb much of the explanation. Young Benjamin is undergoing the experience of shock; his surroundings are taking on a
tremendous significance for him even as his usual
means of apprehension are being disabled. And
thus he stores up an image of his room and bed
as an isolated memory. the disease was called
syphilis. At the time his father was relating the
news of the death, Benjamin had sensed, dimly,
that there was more to the story. The inkling
remained buried in his memory, much as
syphilis remains latent in the human body for
decades. Having finally learned the name of the
disease which killed his elderly cousin, Benjamin
feels as though that piece of information had
always been lying in wait for him. In News of
a Death, the Benjaminian father chooses the
room to be the recipient of his news, rather than
his son: But he was seeking my room and not me.
Those two were in no need of a confidant.

commentary

Diabolo. Of the four annotations entered on

page 59R of Benjamins Chronicle notebook
below the final notice, none seem to correspond
to existing Chronicle notices; and only one
(The desk where I did my homework) presages
something written for Berlin Childhood (see
The Desk).

SOME USEFU L SOURCES

Adorno, Gretel, and Walter Benjamin. Briefwechsel,
1930-1940 [Correspondence, 1930-1940]. Ed. by Christoph
Gdde and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005.
[Address Books for Berlin and Environs, 1789-1943].
See www.zlb.de.
Adorno, Walter. ber Walter Benjamin [Concerning
Walter Benjamin]. Rolf Tiedemann, ed. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970.
Aragon, Louis. Le paysan de Paris [The Peasant of Paris].
ditions Gallimard: Paris, 1926; repr. 1953.
Baedeker, Karl, ed. Berlin and Its Environs: Handbook
for Travellers. Karl Baedeker: Leipzig, 1923 [6th edition].
Includes an index of Berlin streets and other topographical features, keyed to detailed maps.
Bauermeister, Ursula Walburga. Die Aktion 1911-1932:

berlin chronicle

Publizistische Opposition und literarischer Aktivismus

der Zeitschrift im restriktiven Kontext [Die Aktion,
1911-1932: Journalistic Opposition and Literary
Activism in the Context of Constraints]. Erlangen
and Jena: Verlag Palm & Enka, 1996. Erlanger Studien,
vol. 107.
Beinert, Michael, ed. Joseph Roth in Berlin: Ein Lesebuch
fr Spaziergnger [Joseph Roth in Berlin: A Reader for
City Walkers]. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1996.
Benjamin, Hilde. Georg Benjamin. Leipzig: Hirzel
Verlag, 1987 [3rd rev. ed.]
Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood Around 1900. Trans.
by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass., and London:
The Belknap Press of Harvard U. Press, 2006.
Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood ca. 1900. Trans. and
with commentary and afterword by Carl Skoggard.
Portland, Ore.: Studio Publications, 2010.
Benjamin, Walter. Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert
[Berlin Childhood ca. 1900]. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann;

sources

afterword by Theodor W. Adorno. Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften [Collected
Writings]. 14 vols. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Herman
Schweppenhuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1974-1991.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.
Ed. and with introd. by Hannah Arendt; trans. by Harry
Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007 [reprint ed.].
Benjamin, Walter. On Hashish. Trans. by Howard
Eiland et al.: introd. essay by Marcus Boon. Cambridge,
Mass., and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard U.
Press, 2006.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. 4 vols. Ed. by
Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings; trans. by Rodney
Livingstone et al. Cambridge Mass., and London:
The Belknap Press of Harvard U. Press, 1996-2003.
Each volume includes a detailed narrative chronology of
events and developments in Benjamins life.

berlin chronicle

Benjamin, Walter. Sonette [Sonnets]. Ed. and with

an afterword by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am
Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986. Includes an appendix:
Documentation on Benjamin and Heinle.
Benjamin, Walter. The Correspondence of Walter
Benjamin, 1910-1940. Ed. and annotated by Gershom
Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno; trans. by Manfred
R. Jacobson. Chicago and London: The U. of
Chicago Press, 1994 [originally issued in German in
1966 in two vols. under the title Briefe (I: 1910-28; II:
1929-40)].
Bilski, Emily D., ed. Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New
Culture, 1890-1918. Berkeley and London: University of
California Press, 1999. See especially the essay by Sigrid
Bauschinger, The Berlin Moderns: Else Lasker-Schler
and Caf Culture.
Daudet, Lon. Paris vcu [Paris as lived]. ditions
Gallimard: Paris, 1929; repr. 1969.
Doorn, Hermann van, and Willem van Reijen. Aufenhalte und Passagen. Leben und Werke Walter Benjamins:

sources

Eine Chronik [Sojourns and Passages. The Life and Work

of Walter Benjamin: A Chronicle]. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001.
Dudek, Peter. Fetisch Jugend. Walter Benjamin und
Sieg fried BernfeldJugendprotest am Vorabend des
Ersten Weltkrieges [Youth Fetish. Walter Benjamin
and Siegfried BernfeldYouth Protest on the Eve of
the First World War]. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt
Verlag, 2002.
Hessel, Franz. Heimliches Berlin [Unknown Berlin].
Berlin: Ernst Rowolt Verlag, 1927.
Hessel, Franz. Spazieren in Berlin [On Foot in Berlin].
Leipzig and Vienna: Verlag Dr. Hans Epstein, 1929
[rev. ed. as Ein Flaneur in Berlin, 1984]. See especially
the chapter Alten Westen.
Kls, Ursula. Der Berliner Zoo im Spiegel seiner
Bauten, 1841-1989: Eine baugeschichtliche und denkmalpflegerische Dokumentation ber den Zoologischen Garten
Berlin [The Berlin Zoo as Reflected in its Buildings,
1841-1989: Documentation of the Architectural History

berlin chronicle

and Conservation of the Zoologischer Garten, Berlin].

Berlin: Heenemann Verlag, 1990 [3rd ed.]
Kraft, Werner. Herz und Geist: Gesammelte Aufstze
zur deutschen Literatur [Heart and Mind: Collected
Essays on German Literature]. Vienna and Cologne:
Bhlau Verlag, 1989. Literatur und Leben, new series,
vol. 35. Includes two chapters on F.C. Heinle.
Kupffer, Heinrich. Gustav Wyneken. Stuttgart: Klett
Verlag, 1970.
Max, Ursula, et al., eds. Walter Benjamins Archive. Images,
Texts, Signs. Trans. by Esther Leslie. London and New
York: Verso, 2007 [originally issued in German in 2006
as Walter Benjamins Archiv: Bilder, Texte und Zeichen].
Muthesius, Marianne. Mythos Sprache Erinnerung:
Untersuchungen zu Walter Benjamins Berliner Kindheit
um neunzehnhundert [Myth, Language, Memory:
Investigations of Walter Benjamins Berlin Childhood
ca. 1900]. Frankfurt am Main: Stromfeld/Roter Stern,
1996.

sources

Rietzschel, Thomas, ed. Die Aktion, 1911-1918.

Wochenschrift fr Politik und Literatur und Kunst,
herausgebegen von Franz Pfempfert. Eine Selection.
[Die Aktion, 1911-1918. Weekly Publication for Politics
and Literature and Art, edited by Franz Pfempfert.
A Selection]. Cologne: DuMont Bcherverlag, 1987.
Rothe, Wolfgang. Der Aktivismus 1915-1920 [Activism,
1915-1920]. Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1969.
Scholem, Gershom. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a
Friendship. Trans. by Harry Zohn. Philadelphia: The
Jewish Publication Soc. of America, 1981 [originally issued
in German in 1975 as Walter Benjamindie Geschichte
einer Freundschaft].
Tiedemann, Rolf, et al. Walter Benjamin 1892-1940. Eine
Austellung des Theodor W. Adorno Archivs Frankfurt
am Main in Verbindung mit dem Deutschen LiteraturArchiv Marbach am Neckar [Walter Benjamin, 18921940. An Exhibition of the Theodor W. Adorno
Archiv, Frankfurt am Main, in Association with the
Deutsches Literatur-Archiv, Marbach am Neckar].
Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft,

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1990 [issued as no. 55/1990 of the Marbacher Magazin].

Wipf, Hans-Ulrich. Studentische Politik und Kulturreform:
Geschichte der Freistudenten-Bewegung, 1896-1918 [Student
Politics and Cultural Reform: The History of the Free
Students Movement, 1896-1918]. Schwalbach am Taunus:
Wochenschau Verlag, 2004.
Witte, Bernd. Walter Benjamin. Mit Selbstzeugnissen
und Bilddokumenten [Walter Benjamin. With Autobiographical Testimonies and Visual Documents]. Reinbek
bei Hamburg; Rowolt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985.
Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of
Redemption. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U. of
California Press, 1994 [3rd rev. ed.].

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Many thanks for helping to inspire these Berlin Chronicle notices

must go to none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II. For without his
indefatigable philistinism, young Walter Benjamin would not
have acquired such love-hatred for their native city.
Insert: Our future author, also in sailing attire (ca. 1903).

ACK NOW LEDGEMENTS

Many of the same persons who assisted me in
preparing a companion volume dealing with Walter
Benjamins Berlin Childhood ca. 1900 are due for
another round of sincere thanks for helping with
the present book. Once again, my friend Ursula Tax
volunteered her skill and effort to lay the groundwork
for my on-site research in Berlin; she is as well-equipped
for getting practical things done as I am not. And
once again, Ursula did all that was in her power to
make me feel at home in the city and tempted me on
numerous occasions with red wine and hand-rolled
cigarettes, for which I remain eternally grateful.
The staff of the Walter Benjamin Archiv, Berlin,
were welcoming and most helpful when I returned
to inspect Walter Benjamins little chamois-covered
notebook containing the Berlin Chronicle writings.
Equally forthcoming were those who aided me
during a visit to the Museum fr Telekommunikation
Berlin, where I was initiated into the mysteries of
the Berlin address books, a remarkable source of
information about ordinary Berliners of the past.

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I owe a special debt of thanks to Sissi Tax, the poet

and translator who went over my work line for
line and who also helped me photographically
document certain of Benjamins childhood haunts
(including the former Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule,
which we inspected top to bottom together). Here is
also the place to acknowledge the willingness of Dr.
Gwendolyn Leick to draw on her Fingerspitzengefhl
to shed light on certain tricky moments in these
Chronicle notices.

Just as formerly with Berlin Childhood, so
now with the so-called Berlin Chronicle my discussions with Dr. Ronald Knox on religion, a subject
in which he is professionally expert and for which
he shows deep appreciation, have proven invaluable;
without these I would scarcely have thought to
grapple with the underlying hermetic character of
Benjamins Chronicle notices. (Of course, their
interpretation remains entirely my own responsibility.) Matthew Stadler, my publisher, proved
once again an optimistic supporterrather like
the mother everyone ought to have and many,
alas, never did. His philosophy on how books
should be nurtured and brought to term is a wise one

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

that allows every author to remain true to himself

or herself. I would like also to thank Ed Behrens
for agreeing to read my MS, for his patience, and for
his many excellent suggestions.
My life-partner Joseph Holtzman has always
been my biggest supporter and best advisor, the
one on whom I can always depend for direction
(or re-direction) and encouragement when they
are most needed. I would like to dedicate this new
Benjaminian effort to him, with heartfelt thanks.

Carl Skoggard with Joseph Holtzman (right; 2009).