Bookplanet: Walter Benjamin autobiography

Review of BERLIN CHILDHOOD AROUND 1900, by Walter Benjamin.
BY SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS

Walter Benjamin, a literary critic, essayist and philosopher, sought the future in the present, in the past, in the shadows of the moment and the very aura of places. He intended his memoir "Berlin Childhood Around 1900" as a goodbye to a city he loved but knew he could never again inhabit. Begun in Spain and Italy in 1932, it was finished in 1938 but wasn't published until 1950, 10 years after he died of an intentional overdose of morphine while fleeing the gestapo.

Benjamin regarded the book as a series of "expeditions into the depths of memory," an act of "digging" for the future. He described, for example, his experience as a child waiting in a remote corner of a zoological garden for the rare appearance of an otter, especially in the rain, which Benjamin loved. "It would whisper to me of my future, as one sings a lullaby beside the cradle," he wrote. "In such places, it seems as if all that lies in store for us has become the past."

Street names "speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs," he wrote of his imaginary journeys. Courtyards, bells and door handles loomed in memory. On visits to aunts and to his grandmother, objects in their homes took on a significance that was often greater than his relatives. Childhood books were recalled as the unraveling of cloth bindings "hanging ... like Indian summer on the branches of the trees ... fragile threads of a net in which I had become tangled when learning to read."

It was this tension between "form and content, [the] veil and what is veiled" that Benjamin brought to his explorations. Remembering a nursery rhyme, he wrote, "Early on, I learned to disguise myself in words, which really were clouds."

Writing of his experiments with hashish, opium, mescaline and the morphine derivative euco- dal from 1927 to 1934, Walter Benjamin used equally evocative language: "You follow the same paths of thought as before, only they appear strewn with roses." Here are some of the more amusing examples from "On Hashish":

"Oven turns into cat."

"Smiling and fluttering are related."

"Feeling of understanding Poe much better now."

"Aversion to information."

Increasing the dose, Benjamin observed, increased the "collusion with nonbeing," as well as a sense of closeness with the human race. "One becomes so tender [that one] fears that a shadow falling on the paper might hurt it." He also described the sensation of a volume of Kafka becoming "integrated into the sculptural form of my own body."

Benjamin and his friend, philosopher Ernst Bloch, experienced what they called "winks from nirvana," a sense of well-being during and after their experiments. Relationships between outside and inside, connection and distance, the vivid and the veiled are noted; rooms seem to have the personalities and auras of the peeling layers of events that have taken place within them. At times, Benjamin was overwhelmed by the "blizzard-like production of images"; at others, by the similarities between objects and the ability to recognize something in every face, creating feelings of familiarity, a lessening of loneliness.

There are moments of insight and pure, radiantly beautiful writing in these fragments: "Curtains are interpreters of the language of wind" or that maternal caresses are a way to "wash life in the flow of time." Benjamin did not romanticize or exploit his experiments for any literary purpose. "We penetrate the mystery only to the extent that we recognize it in the everyday world," he insisted. But oh, what a world, boundless and bursting with color and meaning.