Walter Benjamin'sBerliner Kindheit um 1900: Longing, Enchantment and the Material Subject

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer an interpretation of Walter Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit um 1900 [Berlin Childhood Around 1900]. Exploring the style and the content of Benjamin's text, both of which portray the world of his childhood as a place of enchantment, I suggest that Benjamin creates in this text a conception of the self as displaced into the surrounding material world. I argue that, in doing this, Benjamin seeks to explore the materiality of the subject and erase its subjection to time, creating a self that is constituted only by space. I seek to show that this is part of Benjamin's strategy of exploring a decentered conception of agency. In all this, I suggest, Benjamin converts his own childhood into a work of art in which there is a longing for redemption that cannot finally be achieved but that expresses an important understanding of the truth of a human life.