Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938

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by Walter Benjamin,

Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings

Harvard University Press

Due/Published November 2002, 512 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674008960

This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven pieces, nineteen of which have never before been translated!

The centerpiece, A Berlin Childhood around 1900, marks the first appearance in English of Benjamin's account of the vanished world of his privileged boyhood, recollected in exile. No less remarkable are the previously untranslated second version of Benjamin's most famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," with its insight into the relations between technology and aesthetics, and German Men and Women, a book in which Benjamin collects twenty-six letters by distinguished Germans from 1783 to 1883 in an effort to preserve what he called the true humanity of German tradition from the debasement of fascism.

Volume 3 also offers extensively annotated translations of essays that are key to Benjamin's rewriting of the story of modernism and modernity--such as "The Storyteller" and "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century"--as well as a diary from 1938 and studies of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Eduard Fuchs. A narrative chronology details Benjamin's life during these four harrowing years of his exile in France and Denmark.

Review

The third volume in a four-volume set picks up the writing of Walter Benjamin as he enters more fully into the Arcades Project and establishes a life in exile. This volume collects a range of Benjamin’s literary and cultural essays, short stories, travel writings, diaries, letters, and reviews. The essays once again draw attention to the breadth, richness, subtlety, and stunning originality of Benjamin’s writing in its various forms. Of particular interest in this volume are “Berlin Childhood 1900” and “German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters,” both of which appear in English for the first time. “Berlin Childhood 1900" is a moving and personal account of Benjamin’s privileged childhood told from the perspective of an exile. This evocative essay details the sights, sounds, and experiences of Benjamin's childhood, offering a remarkable testament to a city he must say goodbye to and his own intellectual and personal maturation. “German Men and Women” is a montage of letters written from 1783 to 1883 by Goethe, Kant, Hölderlin, and other German writers and intellectuals. The letters are accompanied by Benjamin’s commentaries and represent his attempt to preserve an aspect of German culture endangered by Fascist revisionism. The Arcades Project also looms over many of the essays in this collection as Benjamin explores the nature of modern culture and society. This volume also includes the never-before-translated second version of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” and reviews of Brecht, Kafka, Anna Seghers, and Charlie Chaplin.