Sanders Isaac Bernstein visits some of Walter Benjamin’s former Berlin homes…
“I have long, indeed for years, played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life—bios—graphically on a map,” wrote Walter Benjamin from the Italian seaside in 1932. The failed academic turned roving philosopher, feuilletonist, and literary critic had begun a project he was to work on for most of the life remaining to him—A Berlin Chronicle (1932), which became the longer Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1938).
With these two texts, Benjamin sought to map the Berlin of his childhood—a project that rhymed with his other major work of his final years, the unfinished Arcades Project, which looked to the nineteenth-century Parisian arcades for a prehistory to twentieth-century modernity.
He set out to follow the French writer Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time Benjamin had translated, and the writing of his friend, the Berlin flaneur Franz Hessel, whose rendering of Berlin Benjamin had once called “an Egyptian dreambook for the waking.” He also modelled his project in part on “Paris Vécu,” the memoir of the French writer Leon Daudet, who had covered his city street by street. “‘Lived Berlin’ does not sound so good,” Benjamin wrote, “but is as real.”
Despite various claims that Benjamin “was no Berliner” (Werner Fuld in his 1979 biography), that “in restlessness Benjamin found his identity” (as Wilhelm van Reijen and Herman van Doorn elaborate in their treatment of Benjamin’s life and work), and that Paris was the real centre of his work, no theoretical lens can refute that Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin on July 15, 1892—and most of his life, despite frequent trips away, took place amidst its streets, cafés, and parks.
It was among Berlin’s hills he learned to ride a bike. He suffered his “first great disappointment of [his] life…one afternoon on Peacock Island” when he failed to find a peacock feather, proving the place, he claimed, “a peacock island that bore no peacock earth.” It was in the city where he “was taken unawares by the awakening of the sex drive (whose time had come)” when he demurred to attend temple on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, to instead ogle the women walking the street.
It was in Berlin that he first stayed out at Viktoria Café, on Friedrichstraße and Unter den Linden, until three in the morning. And it was also in Berlin where his best friend, Fritz Heinle, committed suicide, a moment that marked him for his entire life. Benjamin also wrote broadcasts about his hometown for radio stations in Berlin and Frankfurt in the late twenties and early thirties, giving talks on Berlin’s dialect, its markets, and its toys (his radio program was at least partially aimed at children).
Though he always took trips away, Berlin was there, on his mind, in his thoughts. As he wrote in Berlin Childhood, the project began out of a sense of possible forced departure: “in 1932, when I was abroad, it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasti…