Sensory vignettes from Walter Benjamin’s Berlin childhood

Walter Benjamin’s ‘Berlin Childhood’ is a non-chronological sequence of vignettes depicting the fin de siècle world the eminent philosopher and cultural critic grew up in. Its origins lie in a 1931 magazine commission to write a series of personal reflections under the title Berlin Chronicle. This earlier version was, to quote the book’s excellent translator, Shierry Weber Nicholsen, “a more conventional autobiographical narrative” that also contained philosophical and psychological digressions omitted in Berlin Childhood. By contrast, in the manuscript we now have, Benjamin asserts that “experience takes place in the depth of the self, not on the surface... through experiences of shock, moments of sudden illumination. In the child’s vulnerable open state, the intensity of experience penetrates the depth of the self and precipitates an indelible memory”.’ Berlin Childhood’s often painful minutiae are the result.

In the first vignette, Loggias, it is sounds – opening and closing shutters, the rhythm of the railway and, carpet-beating – that open the door to childhood recollections. In The Mummerlehren it is not “the noise of field artillery or of Offenbach’s ballroom music” but the more mundane “brief rattle of coal falling from its metal container into the iron stove” which connect the reflecting adult to childhood events, “the temporality of a relationship between the past of a child on the one hand and the present of the remembering adult on the other”, as Nicholsen puts it. The result is a high order literary memoir

In Fever Benjamin evokes the opposing sensations of suffering and cosiness experienced during illness: pillows become mountains, a cave opening up in the mountain wall which “I crawled into. I pulled the blanket over my head and put my ear to the dark abyss from time to time, feeding the silence with words that return from it as stories”.

In Market Hall Benjamin describes “the wire partitions (behind which) were enthroned the almost immobile women, priestesses of the venal Ceres, market women of all fruit of field and tree, of all edible fowl, fish and mammals, procuresses, inviolable wool-clad colossi”, employing imagery from ancient classical times to summon up a world within his living memory.