Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938 »

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis.

Howard Eiland is Lecturer in Literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Michael W. Jennings is Professor of German, Princeton University.

Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie—such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven brilliant pieces, nineteen of which have never before been translated.

The centerpiece, A Berlin Childhood around 1900, marks the first appearance in English of one of the greatest German works of the twentieth century: a profound and beautiful account of the vanished world of Benjamin's privileged boyhood, recollected in exile. No less remarkable are the previously untranslated second version of Benjamin's most famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," with its striking insights into the relations between technology and aesthetics, and German Men and Women, a book in which Benjamin collects twenty-six letters by distinguished Germans from 1783 to 1883 in an effort to preserve what he called the true humanity of German tradition from the debasement of fascism.

Volume 3 also offers extensively annotated translations of essays that are key to Benjamin's rewriting of the story of modernism and modernity—such as "The Storyteller" and "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century"—as well as a fascinating diary from 1938 and penetrating studies of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Eduard Fuchs. A narrative chronology details Benjamin's life during these four harrowing years of his exile in France and Denmark. This is an essential collection for anyone interested in his work.

Publishers Weekly

Over the past few years, Harvard's systematic presentation of the work of German cultural critic Benjamin (1892-1940) has proved a revelation, including the first English translation of many minor texts that show him pioneering the denkbild (or prose "thought figure") that structures swaths of his work and, most wonderfully, the uncategorizable riches of The Arcades Project. This third of four planned volumes from MIT lecturer in literature Eiland and Jennings, professor of German at Princeton, offers two major texts that are new to English (translated from the German by various hands), as well as a fascinating re-translation of one of the cornerstones of Benjamin's reputation, here rendered as the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." The editors present the so-called "second version" of the essay, while the "third version" will appear in volume four; it's difficult to say at this point which will become the standard on campus for this oft-assigned text. But the real revelation is "Berlin Childhood around 1900," appearing for the first time in English, giving a window into the sophisticated phenomenological world of the young Benjamin as recalled by the older exile (and enhanced by several of the 12 halftones here). The piece takes its place alongside One-Way Street (volume one) and "A Berlin Chronicle" (volume two) as a major, short monograph-like work, though the two versions included here are somewhat confusingly presented. Other pieces will be familiar ("Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century"; "Brecht's Threepenny Novel"), but "German Men and Women," another short book in itself, won't be: this series of 27 letters dating from 1783 to 1883, selected and edited by Benjamin and published by the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1931-1932 (and as a book with introductory pieces by Benjamin in 1936), will be fascinating to anyone interested in Romantic literature and culture. In short, this is another splendid volume that will leave aficionados on campus and off awaiting the final installment. (Dec.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Paris Old and New, 1935

Brecht's Threepenny Novel

Johann Jakob Bachofen

Conversation above the Corso: Recollections of Carnival-Time in Nice

Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century

Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on the Essay "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century"

Problems in the Sociology of Language: An Overview

The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression

Rastelli's Story

Art In a Technological Age, 1936

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version

A Different Utopian Will

The Significance of Beautiful Semblance

The Signatures of the Age

Theory of Distraction

The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov

German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters

Letter from Paris (2): Painting and Photography

Translation—For and Against

The Knowledge That the First Material on Which the Mimetic Faculty

Tested Itself

Dialectics and History, 1937

Addendum to the Brecht Commentary: The Threepenny Opera

Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian

Fruits of Exile, 1938 (Part 1)

Theological-Political Fragment

A German Institute for Independent Research

Review of Brod's Franz Kafka

Letter to Gershom Scholem on Franz Kafka

The Land Where the Proletariat May Not Be Mentioned: The Premiere

of Eight One-Act Plays by Brecht

Diary Entries, 1938

Berlin Childhood around 1900

A Note on the Texts

Chronology, 1935-1938

Index

Illustrations

The Galerie Vivienne, Paris, 1907

Walter Benjamin at the Bibliothèque Nationale, 1937

Honoré Daumier, La Crinoline en temps de neige

The Kaiser Wilhelm Bridge, Berlin, early twentieth century

The Victory Column on Königsplatz, Berlin, early twentieth century

The goldfish pond in the Tiergarten, Berlin, early twentieth century

Berlin's Tiergarten in winter, early twentieth century

Market hall on Magdeburger Platz, 1899

Interior of a typical middle-class German home, late nineteenth century

Courtyard on Fischerstrasse in Old Berlin, early twentieth century

Walter Benjamin and his brother Georg, ca. 1902