Walter Benjamin's Berliner 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 decentred 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Enchantment
• self
• agency
• materiality
• art
• redemption

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Christopher Hamilton is Reader in Philosophy at King's College London. He is the author of five books, including A Philosophy of Tragedy (2016), and has published work on, amongst others, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Simone Weil, as well as in ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. His philosophical approach is interdisciplinary and draws extensively on literature and film. He is at present working on a book on philosophy and autobiography.

Notes

1. All translations from this text into English in this paper are mine.

2. I take it that this idea is close to Nietzsche's idea of the affirmation of life in the willing of the eternal return of the same.

3. In his “The Presence of the Baroque,” Dominik Finkelde (2009, 69) remarks: ‘Curiously, Benjamin left no imprint on the works of West German author Peter Weiss, as might have been expected’. I do not know what the historical evidence for this claim is, but it seems implausible to me.

4. I have explored this further in Hamilton 2018 (forthcoming).

5. Cf. Eli Friedlander (2012, 110).

6. Quoted in Alex Ross (2017).

7. cf. Jean Améry ([1968] 1994, 14–15).

8. For an excellent study of modernism, see Gabriel Josipovici (2011).

9. Is this (part of) what the Buddhists mean when they say there is no self? I suspect it is.