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The “Berlin Chronicle” Notices

Perhaps no other book better reveals the raw development of Walter Benjamin’s thought than The “Berlin Chronicle” Notices. This volume is a transcription of the forty notices that Benjamin had densely handwritten on a small leather and parchment notebook; though edited posthumously, the texts preserve the exploratory nature of Benjamin’s thinking in fragmented memory-sketches of his home city of Berlin. As an antecedent to the more deliberately composed Berlin Childhood Circa 1900, this writing was never meant to be published. The notices are presented here with Carl Skoggard’s new translation and commentary, with explanatory notes and illustrations.

 

Berlin Childhood Circa 1900

This reprint of Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Circa 1900 revisits an iconic document by one of the century’s most influential thinkers, with a new translation and commentary by the scholar Carl Skoggard. As a partially related and expansion upon the more serial writing of Benjamin’s Berlin Chronicle, this writing preserves Benjamin’s memories of boyhood enchantment in his now-lost childhood home. This volume also contains an appendix of historical material: maps, illustrations and diagrams, locating each of the book’s episodes in the broader fabric of Benjamin’s life and work.