There is a second literary life that would have unfolded despite, or probably precisely because of its fragmentary nature, such aftereffect as that of Walter Benjamin. Long ago, the Benjamin-Philology became a separate branch of science. The character of the open-endedness of most of Benjamin, 1940, the tragic in the French-Spanish border town of Port Bou geendeten refugee, survivors ‘ writings, and, if available, the exile and the precarious life circumstances complicated publication history of the subject of Philology, in turn, to a never-ending story.
A new milestone in the incessant stream of publications, the Critical edition, which is the Overall publisher of Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz in collaboration with the Walter Benjamin archive in Berlin’s Academy of the arts in the making. This Critical edition of the works and estate replaces the meritorious, due to the insufficient material location unfinished edition of the “Collected writings”, published since 1972 by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann schweppenhäuser, and in the first-time publication of the famous “passage work” in the year 1982 culminated.
the first edition of The childhood book was already published in 1950 by Suhrkamp
in Contrast, the “Berlin Childhood is not one of” those writings of Walter Benjamin, which were only launched in the Wake of the emergence of the Frankfurt school, the end of the sixties or, as the passage-work, at all advanced as a text corpus into the field of view. The first edition of the childhood book appeared in 1950 in the public domain, compiled by Theodor Adorno, in a linen band in the Jewelry box shows a painted view of the war-destroyed old Berlin. In the “library, University of Minnesota,” took the “Childhood” as a Band 2 to a privileged position and was later placed in the same row, each in a modified Form.
you will, however, only appears to have the best-developed writings of Benjamin, with his fragmentary surviving texts, all the generations of literary scholars in wage and bread, but at least in effort and work. In 1972, begun in “Collected writings” they found their place in the first-published volume IV.
memory as a form of Knowledge
Now for the past week as volume 11 of the “Critical edition” by Burkhardt Lindner and Nadine Werner for the first time, a source critical edition, distributed on two half-volumes, with 652 pages of text and 466 pages of commentary. You can rely on the fassung letzter Hand, the typescript from the year 1938, Benjamin’s escape from Paris in 1940, using the staff of Georges Bataille at the Bibliothèque nationale hid. It was discovered in 1981 by Giorgio Agamben and formed the basis for the since 1987 by Suhrkamp threaded expenditure.
“Berlin Childhood around nineteen hundred” – the uppercase of the year, the number is placed in the “writings” now stands under the Motto, “O brown-baked victory column / with winter sugar from the children’s days”. Benjamin has seen the victory column, still in their original location in the Royal square, and for him it was linked in with the “Sedantag”, the anniversary of the respective battle on the 2. September, 1870, from the establishment of the Empire began. But it is known to be not a description of the childhood experiences of the 1892-born Benjamin, or at least only indirectly, but the memory as a Form of knowledge.
“Never again will we be able to win Forgotten all the way back,” because at the beginning of the “pieces”, as Benjamin called them, and continued: “And this is perhaps good. The Choc of having to be so destructive that we had to stop in the moment, to understand our longing.“ In this difference between the Witnessed and the Remembered, the pieces are located.
The comment band shows the constant Changes to the Text
In 1928 as a book, published collection of aphorisms of “one way street” speaks of Benjamin, even of the “time, since you have to live with myself stories in bed. Your half-blown Because the child can feel.“ Of half-blown Because, through the Tiergarten, or the dark hallway of his parents ‘ apartment in the electors, street 154, to act as the pieces of “Childhood”.
The creation and publication of history is the most involved. Since 1932, Benjamin wrote intensively and hoped to be able to you in the following year as a book publish. The coming to power of the Nazis dashed these hopes. Previously, but even after that, Benjamin was able to publish individual pieces in Newspapers, and also the last of his approximately 90 radio broadcasts denied Walter Benjamin on 29. January 1933 – the day before Hitler’s coming into power, with the Miniatures from the “Childhood”. The present commentary draws the constant Changes made to Benjamin – he wrote still new “pieces”, as well as the constant disappointment of failed publication attempts, in which the list of negative publishing houses of Rowohlt over Kiepenheuer up to the Amsterdam exile publisher Querido enough.
had to Write as a vaccine against homesickness
In a letter by the end of 1937, Benjamin explains his Writing as a kind of “vaccination, which should make me against the homesickness for the city immune, in which I spent my Childhood”. In another letter says: “I had to learn the methods of vaccination several times in my inner life as a salutary; I thought I was in this situation and called the images, which maintain awaken in exile, the homesickness, the strongest – Childhood – with the intention of in me.” Benjamin hides, finally, the typescript of the fassung letzter Hand in the national library in Paris, and embarks in June 1940, on the direction of escape the South.
Now, the “Berlin Childhood”, with all variations, additions and deletions, and every Detail, the calling of Benjamin, from the memory, and as known it can be assumed – about “Ohm Krüger”, on the tauentzienstrasse, is meticulously explained. The work is the “death mask of the conception,” a much quoted aphorism from the “one way street”, but here it behaves a little differently: First, the meticulous having in all directions, branching execution is Benjamin’s conception, or perhaps rather his intention – emerge.
It is the reminder of the aims that transcends the Personal to the social is, in any case, it was Benjamin. Nevertheless, you alone shall be liable to the images of Benjamin from the time of his Childhood calling.
Burkhardt Lindner, Nadine Werner (Hg.): Walter Benjamin. Berlin chronicle/ Berlin Childhood around nineteen hundred. Critical Edition Of Bd. 11., Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2019. 652 and 466 p., 89 €.
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collection “encounters with Benjamin” views of a year, hundreds of spirit
Peter Becker
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