Berlin Childhood Around 1900

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century is translated into English for the first time in book form.

This book of new research and commentary by Carl Skoggard brings philosopher Walter Benjamin's engaging autobiographical text into a new translation that is faithful to Benjamin's voice. Berlin Childhood circa 1900, Skoggard writes, "conjures Benjamin's earliest years in a series of mysterious tableaux. But it also reflects an urgent moment in his adult life—one that posed challenges to everything he had thought and felt previously." Our Jank Edition is illustrated with thirty black & white photographs and includes a foldable, color map of Berlin, circa 1900, offset-printed by Container Corps, Portland, Ore.

An account of the post-imperial disintegration of East Central Europe. In its aftermath, the disintegrated parts passionately cleave to their dispossession by generating political and literary sacrificial narratives. The monograph investigates their interaction.

The evocative and riveting stories of four brothers—Gershom the Zionist, Werner the Communist, Reinhold the nationalist, and Erich the liberal—weave together in The Scholems, a biography of an eminent middle-class Jewish Berlin family and a social history of the Jews in Germany in the decades leading up to World War II. Across four generations, Jay Howard Geller illuminates the transformation of traditional Jews into modern German citizens, the challenges they faced, and the ways that they shaped the German-Jewish century, beginning with Prussia's emancipation of the Jews in 1812 and ending with exclusion and disenfranchisement under the Nazis. Focusing on the renowned philosopher and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem and his family, their story beautifully draws out the rise and fall of bourgeois life in the unique subculture that was Jewish Berlin. Geller portrays the family within a much larger context of economic advancement, the adoption of German culture and debates on Jewish identity, struggles for integration into society, and varying political choices during the German Empire, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi era. What Geller discovers, and unveils for the reader, is a fascinating portal through which to view the experience of the Jewish middle class in Germany.

A man reflects on family memories—that may or may not be true—in this novel of “sharply composed vignettes with a keen sense of timing and humor” (Publishers Weekly). Ben is an artist closing in on forty, and it’s hard for him to be sure about the past. His parents are both dead, and his brother, who has mental issues, is a lousy source of information. So when Ben finds himself with a particularly persistent memory that keeps nagging at him, he doesn’t know where to turn to answer the question: Did his mother really assassinate a prominent neo-Nazi? In a novel that “shows maturity of vision without sacrificing the childish sense of play and absurdity his readers expect from him,” Stuart Ross sends Ben ranging through childhood summers at an Ontario cottage, teenage alienation in a Toronto suburb, a disastrous college career, and the calamity that precipitates his brother’s institutionalization—as he tries to sort through the events of his life, both real and surreal (The Globe and Mail, Toronto). “A writer with an original sensibility.” —The Vancouver Sun

Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography is not merely the most extensive and insightful treatment of Benjamin 's autobiographical writings.

This study moves the acclaimed Turkish fiction writer Bilge Karasu (1930–1995) into a new critical arena by examining his poetics of memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul’s Beyoğlu, once a cosmopolitan neighborhood called Pera. Karasu established his fame in literary criticism as an experimental modernist, but while themes such as sexuality, gender, and oppression have received critical attention, an essential tenet of Karasu’s oeuvre, the evocation of ethno-cultural identity, has remained unexplored: Excavating Memory brings to light this dimension. Through his non-referential and ambiguous renderings of memory, Karasu gives in his Beyoğlu narratives unique expression to ethno-cultural difference in Turkish literature, and lets through his own repressed minority identity. By using Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical work as a heuristic premise for illuminating Karasu, Gökberk establishes an innovative intercultural framework, which brings into dialogue two representative writers of the twentieth century over temporal and spatial distances.

A companion volume to Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) memoir "Berlin Childhood circa 1900, The "Berlin Chronicle" Notices" is now in a new translation by Carl Skoggard. The German-Jewish philosopher, theorist and critic Walter Benjamin began to ruminate on his comfortable Berlin childhood in 1932, not long before he would flee Germany for good to escape the Nazis. The resulting "Berlin Chronicle" notices--40 in all--do not result in a linear narrative but instead remain fragmentary recollections of Benjamin's young years, from his early childhood to the threshold of adulthood. More generally, they are a series of profound explorations of memory and of the ways memory relates to place. Rich in and of themselves, these notices greatly illuminate "Berlin Childhood circa 1900," written by Benjamin months later. This translation, in a charming pocket-sized format, comes with an extensive commentary, a historical map of Berlin and numerous illustrations.