Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900
“Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.”
As one might expect from a diverse and elliptical thinker like Herr Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900 is far from a straightforward memoir. Though ostensibly about his experiences growing up in an upper middle-class Jewish family, it eschews the traditional focus on people and events in order to explore the idea of memory itself – this is, after all, the man who translated Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu into German. Nonetheless a sketchy portrait of the author as a child does emerge, as do snippets of the West Berlin he knew at that time, from markets and parks to streets and classrooms.
You can read more about Walter Benjamin here.
Käthe Kollwitz, The Diary And Letters Of Käthe Kollwitz
“I went to the Old Museum yesterday. The depressing amount of half-good stuff, even in sculpture, was such a letdown that I told myself I’d run over to the National Gallery and see something really good for a change.”
German artist Käthe Kollwitz kept a diary between 1909 until her death in 1945. She was 42 when she started it, and these collected entries chart her personal thoughts about art, life and war during some of Berlin’s most tumultuous times. Having lost a son in World War I and a grandson in World War 2 – not to mention the turn-of-the-century suffering she witnessed through the work of Karl, her doctor husband – Kollwitz was a renowned socialist and pacifist, which comes through in these pages. The diary entries are supplemented by correspondence between her family and close friends and a foreward by her son, Hans Kollwitz.
You can read about Berlin’s excellent Käthe Kollwitz museum here.
Princess Evelyn von Blücher, An English Wife in Berlin
“Exactly what was the real cause of the war no one seems to know, although it is discussed night and day. One thing grows clearer to me every day: neither the people here nor there wished for war, but here they are now being carried off their legs with patriotism, at seeing so many enemies on every side.”
Princess Evelyn von Blücher moved from England to Berlin before the outbreak of World War I and stayed right through until the end of it. While her (aristocratic) husband worked with the German Red Cross, she took care of English prisoners. Written ostensibly for her mother, her…