ABSTRACT
This intriguing claim by Walter Benjamin is found in a letter to Martin Buber of 23 February 1927, a letter written a few weeks after Benjamin’s return to Berlin following a two-month sojourn in the new Soviet capital and just prior to the completion of an essay on the city for Buber’s journal, simply to be entitled ‘Moscow’. As a statement of intent, I suggest that this passage provides the key to understanding the numerous and impressionistic city portraits composed in the mid to late 1920s, fragments which Benjamin termed Denkbilder (‘thoughtimages’).2
