ABSTRACT
In ‘Berlin Childhood around 1900’ Benjamin remarks: ‘the images of my
metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later
historical experience’ (Benjamin 2002: 344). Only a writer as attuned to the
particularities of his material environment as Benjamin could qualify so profound
an experience by a tentative ‘perhaps’. As we shall see, the idea that historical
experience (both for the individual and collectively) is made possible through
images attached to material objects comes to dominate Benjamin’s thinking
increasingly over the course of his life. Undoubtedly, this idea is intimately
connected with a heightened sense of the precariousness of those material
places in which the writer had grown up as a child and inhabited as a mature
man.
