Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings | 3: 1935–1938

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.