BERLIN CHILDHOOD AROUND I900

slept beneath the downy covering that enveloped the

psyche like a cocoon. It was then that I would benefitfrom a gaze which seemed to register scarcely a third ofwhat it actually took in. Yet even in those far-off days,when my mother used to scold me for my contrarinessand my indolent dawdling, I obscurely sensed the possi-bility of eventually escaping her control with the help ofthese streets, in which I seemed to have such difficultyfinding my way. At any rate, there could be no doubt thatan idea (unfortunately, an illusory idea} of repudiatingmy mother, those like her, and the social class to whichwe both belonged was at the bottom of that unparalleledexcitement which drove me to accost a Whore in thestreet. It could take hours before I made my move. Thehorror I felt in doing so was no different from that whichwould have filled me in the presence of an automaton re-quiring merely a question to be set in motion. And soI cast my voice into the slot. The blood was singing inmy ears at that point, and I could not catch the wordsthat fell from the thickly painted lips. I fled the scene.But how many times that night didl repeat the mad rou-tine? When I finally came to a halt beneath an entrance-way, sometimes practically at dawn, I had hopelessly en-snared myself in the asphalt meshes of the street, and itwas not the cleanest of hands that disentangled me.

I93I2.I934 VERSION

The Moon

The light streaming down from the moon has no part inthe theater of our daily existence. The terrain it illumi-nates so equivocally seems to belong to some counter-earth or alternate earth. It is an earth different from thatto which the moon is subject as satellite, for it is itselftransformed into a satellite of the moon. Its broad bosom,whose breath was time, stirs no longer; the creation hasfinally made its way back home, and can again don thewidows veil which the day had torn off. The pale beamthat stole into my room through the blinds gave me tounderstand this. The course of my sleep was disturbed;the moon cut through it with its coming and going.When it was there in the room and I awoke, I was effec-tively unhoused, for my room seemed willing to accom-modate no one besides the moon.The first things that attracted my gaze were the two

cream-colored basins on the washstand. By day, it neverentered my head to dwell on them. In the moonlight,however, the band of blue that ran around the upper part

of the basins was a provocation. It simulated a wovenband encircling a skirt-hem. And in fact the brim of eachbasin was curled like a frill. Between the two basinsstood pot-bellied jugs, made of the same porcelain with

BERLIN CHILDHOOD AROUND IQOO

the same floral pattern. When I climbed out of bed, they

clinked, and this elinking was communicated over thewashstands marble surface to basins and bowls, glassesand carafes. As happy as I was to receive from my noctur-nal surroundings a sign of lifebe it only the echo ofmy ownit was nonetheless an unreliable sign, and waswaiting, like a false friend, to dupe me at the very mo-ment I least expected it. This was when I lifted the carafewith my hand to pour some water into a glass. The gur-gling of the water, the noise with which I put down firstthe carafe and then the glassit all struck my ear as rep-etition. For every spot on this alternate earth to which Iwas transported appeared wholly occupied by what oncehad been. Thus, each sound and each moment came to-ward me as the double of itself. And when I had enduredthis for a while, I would draw near my bed gripped by thefear of finding myself already stretched out upon it.This anxiety did not altogether subside until I once

again felt the mattress under my back. Then I fell asleep.The moonlight withdrew slowly from my room. And, of-ten, the room already lay in darkness when I awoke fora second or third time. My hand would necessarily bethe first to brave emergence from the trench of sleep,in which it had taken cover before the dream. And justas one sometimes falls prey to a previously unexploded

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shell even after a battle has ended, so my hand was con-stantly expecting to be overtaken on its way by a pre-viously delayed dream. When the nightlight, flickering,then brought peace to my hand and me, it appeared thatnothing more remained of the world than a single, stub-

born question. It may be that this question nested in thefolds of the door-curtain that shielded me from noise. Itmay be that it was nothing but a residue of many pastnights. Or, finally, it may be that it was the other side ofthe feeling of strangeness which the moon had broughton. The question was: Why is there anything at all in theworld, why the world? With amazement, I realized thatnothing in it could compel me to think the world. Itsnonbeing would have struck me as not a whit more prob-lematic than its being, which seemed to wink at non-being. The moon had an easy time with this being.My childhood was already nearing its end when, at

last, the moon seemed willing to assert its claim to theearth by daylight, a claim which previously it had madeonly at night.85 High above the horizon-large, but pale-it stood, in the sky of a dream, looking down on the streetsof Berlin. It was still light outside. Gathered around mewere the members of my family, their bearing a little

stiff, like that of figures in a daguerreotype. Only my sis-ter was missing. Where is Dora?I heard my mother ex-

BERLIN CHILDHOOD AROUND I900

claim. Suddenly, the full moon up in the sky began evermore rapidly to expand- Coming nearer and nearer, ittore the planet asunder. The railing of the iron balcony,on which we all had taken our places overlooking thestreet, broke into a thousand pieces, and the bodies whichhad been there flew apart in all directions. The funnelcreated by the moons approach sucked everything in.Nothing could hope to pass through it unchanged. Ifthere is pain now, then theres no God, I heard myselfconclude, and, at the same time, I collected what Iwanted to take across. I put it all in a verse. It was myfarewell. O star and flower, spirit and dress, love, grief,time, and eternity!B But even as I hastened to entrustmyself to these words, I was already awake. And onlynow did the horror which the moon had just inspiredseem to grip me for all time, without any hope of re-prieve. For this awakening set no limit to the dream, asothers did, disclosed no goal, but instead revealed to methat its goal had escaped the dream, and that the sover-eignty of the moon--which I had come to know as achildhad dissolved before another succession of theworld.

Complete Table of ContentsI932.-I 934 Version

Piotes

Credits for Illustrations

Index

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NOTES To PAGES r45154

of dragoons under the command of General Carl-Ludwig Ernstvon Prittwitz, circa 18o6.

73. Hokusai [r76o1849) was a japanese artist. A play onwords in the German is lost here: the child hears in the last twosyllables of Kleptomanin the word Ahnin, meaning ancestor.The book in question is Ans eigener Kraft [The Power Within;3 vols., 1886-1887), by the German actress and writer Wil-helmine von Hillern [1 8 36-1 91 6).

74. Benjamin is referring to Iames Fenimore Coopers novelThe Last of the Mohicans [1 816), and to Conradin or Conrad theYounger (1252-1268), king of Ierusalem and Sicily, and last ofthe I-Iohenstaufens.

v5. Leselabyrinth, the labyrinth of readings. It should beborne in mind that lesen, like Latin legere, means both to readand to gather. Lese is a collecting, a harvest.

v6. S011 und Haben {18 5 5 ), a novel of commercial life, by theGerman author Gustav Preytag (1816-1895 ). The other title pre-sumably refers to Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities(I859)

77. See note 38 above.78. See note 39 above.79. The first part of Cabinets was incorporated in revised

form into The Sock in the 1938 version of Berlin Childhood(see above). The remaining portion of Cabinets, which Benja-min cut in 1938, is translated here.

8o. The reference is to tales by the German writer E. T. A.Hoffmann (17715-1 822): Die Fermate, Das Majorat, andHaimatochare [which Benjamin spells I-Ieimatochare, per-haps to recall a childhood misprision stemming from the wordHeimet, native land).

NOTES To PAGES 156-164

81. So wuchs und so vermummte sich die Habe derKindheit.

82.. See Das Marienkind, story number 3 of the K1'nder- undHausmrirchen (Nursery and Household Tales) of the BrothersGrimm.

83. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 212, 215 {I1,:.>. andIIa,9).

84. Der Mond hatte ein leichtes Spiel mit diesem Sein.85. Benjamin struck this concluding paragraph in his 1938

revision of the text, and changed the end of the preceding para-graph.

86. This is the last line of Eingang jEntry), a poem by Clem-ens Brentano (1778-1842).

87. The word order in the German is rather darker in its ef-fect: das Regiment des Mondes . . . fiir eine weitere Weltzeitgescheitert war. The last note sounded is one of failure.(Scheitern means to fail or to go to pieces, as in a shipwreck.)

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