I was distorted by similarity to all that surrounded me. Like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear. What do I hear?
— Walter Benjamin
In the afterword to Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900), published posthumously in 1950, Theodor Adorno insightfully remarked that the book could be seen as the subjective counter-part to the Arcades project:
This book belongs to the ensemble of the prehistory of modernity that Benjamin worked on during the last fifteen years of his life and forms a subjective counterpoint to the mass of documents that he collected for the projected work on the Parisian arcades. The histori-cal archetypes that he wanted to develop in this work, based on their pragmatic, social, philosophical origin, were going to sparkle in the book on Berlin, triggered by the immediacy of the memory, with the violence of the pain caused by that which one will never see again and which, once lost, ends up coagulating in the allegory of its own ruin.1 Whereas the Arcades was an extensive collection of quotations and obser-vations about nineteenth- century industrial culture and technological mediation, intended as a compendium of cultural, historical, and ideological features of an era and place to which Benjamin felt attached, Berlin Child-hood was in a sense a way of grounding these experiences in a more personal setting, in a cryptic yet portentous catalog of things, small events, and places evoked in the form of fragmentary miniatures. Encapsulated in enigmatic titles like “Loggias,” “Butterfly Hunt,” “Tardy Arrival,” “The Fever,” “Pea-cock Island and Glienicke,” “Crooked Street,” “Mummerehlen,” “Hiding
Places,” “A Christmas Angel,” “The Little Hunchback” are images of Ber-lin and of the parents’ house in the West End district, of courtyards and streets, markets, zoo, ice- skating, and historical monuments: each one evoked in masterful prose poetry, the fragmentary character of the text making the reader dwell— literally and metaphorically— in and on each of these (textual) places. And this is where Berliner Kindheit rejoins the Arcades book: if the quotations in Arcades are strategically blown out of a fossilized past and placed in a new structure of dialectical juxtapositions and temporal discon-tinuities where they can be read more closely, in the same way the fragment privileged by Berliner Kindheit singles out and brings to the fore a place, a moment, a state of mind, on which both the narrator and the reader are brought to linger. Each fragment is a renewed attempt by the exiled Jew to reconnect with a world lost to National Socialism, and more generally to an advanced modernity alienated from itself.
The farewell represented by Berlin Childhood is thus twofold. The title suggests the image of the child playing at the threshold between centuries, a reminder that Benjamin, as Hannah Arendt suggested, was a man of the nineteenth century, for whom late modernity was an experience in alienation:
His gestures and the way he held his head when listening and talking;
the way he moved; his manners, but especially his style of speaking, down to his choice of words and the shape of his syntax; finally, his downright idiosyncratic tastes— all this seemed so old- fashioned, as though he had drifted out of the nineteenth century the way one is driven onto the coast of a strange land. Did he ever feel at home in the twentieth century? One has reason to doubt it.2
Indeed, throughout his writings, Benjamin deplores the loss of the auratic through mechanical reproduction and the modern incapacity to communi-cate experience.3 In Berliner Kindheit, for instance, the telephone is portrayed as a symbol of inadequate communication that spoils established ways of living: “Not many of those who use the apparatus know what devastation it once wreaked in family circles. The sound with which it rang between two and four in the afternoon, when a schoolfriend wished to speak to me, was an alarm signal that menaced not only my parents’ midday nap but the historical era that underwrote and enveloped this siesta” (BC, 49). More dra-matically, however, Benjamin’s is a farewell bid to a Berlin where all places were like so many dwellings, at a moment when the exiled writer had no proper abode. The attempt, then, to renew with the lost world of childhood in these fragments points, in more than one way, to the essay form, both in the sense of fragmentary writing that breaks the spell of beginnings and end-ings, as his friend Adorno put it in “The Essay as Form”;4 and as an always renewed rhetorical effort to convince an audience (i.e., readership) to follow a certain mental trajectory: Benjamin’s own introduction to Berliner Kindheit
could be read, in keeping with the consecrated practice of ancient rhetoric, as both expositio— the place where the author states his intentions— and as cap-tatio benevolentiae, the gesture of modesty, in Benjamin’s case, made toward the reader, to join and follow him:5
Ich halte es fűr möglich, dass solchen Bildern ein eigenes Schicksal vorbehalten ist. Ihrer harren noch keine geprägten Formen. . . . Dage-gen sind die Bilder meiner Grossstadtkindheit vielleicht befähigt, in ihrem Innern spätere geschichtliche Erfahrung zu präformieren.
In diesen wenigstens, hoffe ich, ist es wohl zu merken, wie sehr der, von dem hier die Rede ist, später der Geborgenheit entriet, die seiner Kindheit beschieden gewesen war.6
I think it is possible that such images are reserved a fate of their own.
No fixed forms are stamped on them yet. . . . Perhaps the images of my childhood city are suitable for pre- forming, in their intimate core, later historical experience. I hope they reveal the extent to which the one who is here discussed was later deprived of the shelter he had enjoyed in his childhood.
The effort underwriting these fragments is that of measuring the depri-vation of his exile against the meaningfulness of the childhood home and experiences, but also to decipher, in the keeping of childhood’s surroundings, forebodings of a future to come. In more ways than one, though: the idea points to a Benjaminian locus, that of an everyday at best inchoate, which therefore cannot be approached as a fully conscious experience, hence the need to create poetic forms to articulate Erlebnisse and transmit them as Erfahrung.7 Beyond that, however, Berliner Kindheit evokes the young man surrounded by things endowed with a prophetic quality he could only inti-mate, but never fully decipher, things with which the child appears to have had not an objective, but an existential relationship: his world is animistic;
things have eyes and look back.8 A child playing at the threshold between centuries, often lingering at the threshold between ignorance and knowledge, trying to seize the “fugitive knowledge” with which things seem to tease him:
Berliner Kindheit reveals itself— this is how I will read it here— as a book about thresholds: between insides and outsides; the phenomenal and the symbolic; otherness from, and intimacy with, things. Above all, it contem-plates the threshold between the experience of childhood (sutured around the self thrilled at its own emergence in language, and keen to explore the house and the city), and the disjointed present of exile, a wandering without abode.
The Arcades project was in many ways one about thresholds. Paris rep-resented for Benjamin the capital of the nineteenth century, a city whose boulevards were formed by houses that “[did] not seem made to be lived in, but [were] like stones set for people to walk between.”9 In other words, Paris
was a city in which outside was at the same time inside, a coincidence epito-mized in the arcades, the city’s “true nature in quintessential form.” In Paris, Benjamin thought, “a stranger feels at home because he can inhabit the city the way he lives in his own four walls.”10 The Parisian arcades thus inspired in him the dream of an authentic Schwellenkunde, a science of thresholds: “The threshold,” he mused, “is a zone. And in fact a zone of passage [Űbergang].
Transformation, passage, flux— all are contained in the word threshold. . . . We have become quite poor as far as threshold experiences go. Falling asleep is perhaps the only such experience that has remained to us.”11
These reflections reverberate in Berliner Kindheit, to which Benjamin extends his meditation on thresholds. As an exile deprived of “a proper abode,” he maps out nostalgically a social geography of intimacy and com-fort protective of the child’s emerging self, a geography best evoked by the idea of threshold (as transformation, passage, flux), in the relationality cap-tured in objects and, retrospectively, in dialectical images. The threshold is the privileged space affording access to a “fugitive knowledge” that the adult is all the more eager to grasp, since his present is historically precarious. It is not clear, however, that Berlin Childhood offers solace, given the glimpses he catches at the social periphery of the lives of servants, beggars, basement dwellers, and so on, whose brief portrayal is all the more poignant given his own circumstances.
The very first section of the book gestures to the Arcades, with its evoca-tion of the loggias, the liminal space where everything— the book, the city, childhood— begins. The last paragraph of the section cites (and thus resites) the passage from the foreword (quoted above), in which Benjamin designates himself in the third person:
Seitdem ich Kind war, haben sich die Loggien weniger verändert als die anderen Räume. Sie sind mir nicht nur darum nahe. Es ist vielmehr des Trostes wegen, der in ihrer Unbewohnbarkeit fűr den liegt, der selber nicht mehr zum Wohnen kommt. An ihnen hat die Behausung des Berliners ihre Grenze. Berlin— der Stadtgott selber— beginnt in ihnen. Er bleibt sich dort so gegenwärtig, dass nichts Flűchtiges sich neben ihm behauptet. In seinem Schutze finden Ort und Zeit zu sich und zueinander. Beide lagern sich hier zu seinen Fűssen. Das Kind jedoch, das einmal mit im Bunde gewesen war, halt sich, von dieser Gruppe eingefasst, auf seiner Loggia wie in einem längst ihm zuge-dachten Mausoleum auf. (S, 387)
In the years since I was a child, the loggias have changed less than other places. This is not the only reason they stay with me. It is much more on account of the solace that lies in their uninhabitability for one who himself no longer has a proper abode. Berlin— the city god
itself— begins in them. The god remains such a presence there that nothing transitory can hold its ground beside him. In his safekeep-ing, space and time come into their own and find each other. Both of them lie at his feet here. The child who was once their confederate, however, dwells in his loggias, encompassed by his group, as in a mausoleum long intended just for him. (BC, 42)
This passage mentally zooms in on the loggias as a place meant to set limits (Grenze), not as one for dwelling, and the consolation they offer to the exile who has no proper abode (der selber nicht mehr zum Wohnen kommt) lies precisely in their uninhabitability (Unbewohnbarkeit). They suggest the idea of threshold as that which separates, which does not grant the comfort of a place; and if it is one, it can only be a mausoleum. However, throughout Berliner Kindheit the threshold is also valued as that which means passage, access to higher, esoteric knowledge— that is, as a privileged place. Although fragmentary, the text is not just a collection of disconnected fragments; rather, they relate through an exchange of relays (images, metaphors, motifs) that
“fills in” the liminal space separating them.
Suggestively, the first section (Loggien) ends with a meditation on lim-inality and is followed by Kaiserpanorama (opening up a panoramic view onto the city), and Die Siegessäule (Victory Column), which symbolically elongates the “panorama” on a vertical plane, giving it historical perspec-tive. Reading Berliner Kindheit appears rather like mental flânerie, a sort of losing one’s way in the text like in a city, both advancing and tarrying; it is like following the flâneur’s motto, “see everything, touch nothing” (that is, attach yourself to nothing), not even to what might occasionally look like the core of a fragment. Granted, each section, by virtue of being isolated graphi-cally on the page, is singled out, and one therefore lingers on it as on a small whole, but the text also reads metaphorically like a constellation waiting to be reconfigured, motifs and images to be blown out and rearranged in new patterns. Importantly, thresholds in Berliner Kindheit are not (only) zones that separate, but also zones of passage, of connection, of transmission, in keeping with Benjamin’s persistent interest in related ideas like the commu-nicability of experience, the transmissibility of truth, the translatability of a text.
“We have become quite poor as far as threshold experiences go. Falling asleep is perhaps the only such experience that has remained to us,” Benja-min says in the Arcades passage quoted earlier, to which he adds, later on, the symmetrical moment: “Can it be that awakening is the synthesis whose thesis is dream consciousness and whose antithesis is consciousness? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the ‘Now of recognizabil-ity,’ on which things put on their true— surrealistic— face.” This reflection, on which Benjamin elaborates poetically in Der Mond and Wintermorgen,
casts the idea of threshold in terms of movement seized in almost static form, movement as a dialectical synthesis between before and after. Adorno pointed to this aspect in Benjamin’s writing in the following terms: “To understand Benjamin properly, one must feel behind his every sentence the conversion of extreme agitation into something static, indeed, the static notion of move-ment itself.”12 As the above reflection on awakening suggests, movement as stasis is cast first of all in relation to the temporality of memory, understood by Benjamin not in the Bergsonian sense of a repository of images, but as a place of synthesis between past and present. The image— a Denkbild— is thus for Benjamin dialectical; it is dialectics at a standstill:
What differentiates images from the “essences” of phenomenology is their historic index. . . . These images are to be thought of entirely apart from the categories of the “human sciences,” from so- called habitus, from style, and the like. For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says above all that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And indeed, this acceding “to legibility” constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by those images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a spe-cific recognizability. . . . It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherin what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill.13
The image, then, is a gathering of moments awakened to consciousness; but it is also a thing— understood as gathering14— which captures a luminous meaning (eine Bedeutung), a prophecy awakened from slumber: a revela-tion. The notion of image is significant here because this is how Benjamin introduces Berliner Kindheit, as “Bilder, die im Exil das Heimweh am stärk-sten zu wecken pflegen— die der Kindheit— mit Absicht in mir hervor” (S, 385, my italics). Writing Berlin Childhood becomes a question of recognizing those privileged moments from childhood which, legible in the present of the writing, become enlightened moments of awakening; moments which, like monads, encapsulate everything else. In his 1929 essay “On the Image of Proust,” Benjamin made this remark: “A remembered event is infinite, because it is merely a key to everything that happened before it and after it.”15
The fragment as image, the image as monad: Benjamin’s writings— and Berliner Kindheit is no exception— document a fascination with the minia-ture, the infinitesimally small; as Arendt points out, “For him the size of an object was in an inverse ratio to its significance— the smaller the object, the more likely it seemed that it could contain in the most concentrated form everything else.”16 Reading the meanings of things in retrospect, writing
them as a form of longing: both of these gestures have at their core the idea of movement which Benjamin attempted to grasp in almost static form (as Adorno said), as an essence, as a metaphor. The following passage from “The Reading Box” is remarkable in that it brings together all these elements: writ-ing and readwrit-ing, but also two other instantiations of the idea of movement, grasping and walking, as well as the suggestion of a monad, of something that potentially contains everything else.17 Everyone, muses Benjamin in this passage,
has encountered certain things which occasioned more lasting hab-its than other things. Through them, each person developed those capabilities which helped to determine the course of his life. And because— so far as my own life is concerned— it was reading and writing that were decisive, none of the things that surrounded me in my early years arouses greater longing than the reading box. It con-tained, on little tablets, the various letters of the alphabet inscribed in cursive, which made them seem younger and more virginal than they would have been in roman style. . . . The longing which the reading box arouses in me proves how thoroughly bound up it was with my childhood. Indeed, what I seek is just that: my entire child-hood, as concentrated in the movement [Griff] by which my hand slid the letters into the groove, where they would be arranged to form words. My hand can still dream of this movement, but it can no longer awaken so as actually to perform it. By the same token, I can dream of the way I once learned to walk. But that doesn’t help. I now know how to walk; there is no more learning to walk. (BC, 140– 142) The reading box appears here like a monad: the recipient, virtually, of all pos-sible words, hence of all pospos-sible writing, and anticipating the later passion for naming. Symbolically, the childhood is concentrated in the movement of the hand, the Griff (literally, the grasp), the gesture with which the child would relate to the world of things, would take it into possession— the most intimate relationship one can have with objects, thought Benjamin— would define it as a space of intimacy, in other words, of proxemics. This last word in itself aptly gives access to the manifold relationship to space and objects in which the child delights in Berliner Kindheit, therefore it seems worth
has encountered certain things which occasioned more lasting hab-its than other things. Through them, each person developed those capabilities which helped to determine the course of his life. And because— so far as my own life is concerned— it was reading and writing that were decisive, none of the things that surrounded me in my early years arouses greater longing than the reading box. It con-tained, on little tablets, the various letters of the alphabet inscribed in cursive, which made them seem younger and more virginal than they would have been in roman style. . . . The longing which the reading box arouses in me proves how thoroughly bound up it was with my childhood. Indeed, what I seek is just that: my entire child-hood, as concentrated in the movement [Griff] by which my hand slid the letters into the groove, where they would be arranged to form words. My hand can still dream of this movement, but it can no longer awaken so as actually to perform it. By the same token, I can dream of the way I once learned to walk. But that doesn’t help. I now know how to walk; there is no more learning to walk. (BC, 140– 142) The reading box appears here like a monad: the recipient, virtually, of all pos-sible words, hence of all pospos-sible writing, and anticipating the later passion for naming. Symbolically, the childhood is concentrated in the movement of the hand, the Griff (literally, the grasp), the gesture with which the child would relate to the world of things, would take it into possession— the most intimate relationship one can have with objects, thought Benjamin— would define it as a space of intimacy, in other words, of proxemics. This last word in itself aptly gives access to the manifold relationship to space and objects in which the child delights in Berliner Kindheit, therefore it seems worth