Walter Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, in Berlin. The polymathic Benjamin was perhaps best known for his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, on what happens to how we see and experience art when it is no longer tied to place, ritual, tradition. But he was a wide-ranging essayist, memoirist, critic, and translator. Below, an excerpt from A Berlin Chronicle, which Benjamin wrote in 1932, from Spain, and which was never published in his lifetime:

I never slept on the street in Berlin. I saw sunset and dawn, but between the two I found myself a shelter. Only those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me. I always found quarters, even though sometimes tardy and also unknown ones that I did not revisit and where I was not alone. If I paused thus late in a doorway, my legs had become entangled in the ribbons of the streets, and it was not the cleanest of hands that freed me.

Reminisces, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. And these quite certainly do not, even for the Berlin years that I am exclusively concerned with here. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years apear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of recollection. This strange form–it may be called fleeting or eternal–is in neither case the stuff that life is made of…. Noisy, matter-of-fact Berlin, the city of work and the metropolis of business, nevertheless has more, rather than less, than some others, of those places and moments when it bears witness to the dead, shows itself full of dead; and the obscure awareness of these moments, these places, perhaps more than anything else, confers on childhood memories a quality that makes them at once as evanescent and as alluringly tormenting as half-forgotten dreams.

*Photo courtesy Laura Appleyard.