ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Bryher's depiction of Berlin in The Heart to Artemis and then discusses Benjamin's picture of his Berlin childhood, before bringing the two together in a quite different city, Paris. It also considers the importance of space and place for the writing of the self, focusing upon two works that take Berlin as the material geography that infuses and shapes the inner narrative of the self: Bryher's The Heart to Artemis and Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900. The chapter explores how two writers engaged with the material spaces of Berlin in their life writing, trying to understand the relation in Bryher and Benjamin between finding something and losing something, between discerning the shape of one's life and becoming exiled from a city. Berlin, then, is a city with a long history of theorising the psychology of urban experience and 'geographical emotions'.
