The Archive

An absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin's personal manuscripts, images, and documents from his own collection.

The works of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, arts and dreams. This beautifully designed book gives an insight into Benjamin's habits of collecting and archiving through some of his most personal documents. From notebooks in which every conceivable space is covered with handwriting, and a heartfelt traveller's series of postcards, to a sequence of Benjamin's own photographs, and lists that include a collection of his son Stefan's early words and sentences, this wonderful collection testifies to Benjamin's complex and kaleidoscopic passion for the ephemera of human life. Illustrated throughout in color and b/w.