Walter Benjamin

Abstract

Cultural theorist and political philosopher Walter Benjamin (b. 1892–d. 1940) reflected on the thought processes and imaginative life of the child both in dedicated writings and, tangentially, in his major works. As a young man Benjamin wrote essays critical of high school education, and he was a supporter of the German Youth Movement until he became disillusioned with its nationalist tone. Subsequently Benjamin’s engagement shifted toward early childhood and took many forms: he collected antique children’s books; recorded the sayings and opinions of his infant son; made radio broadcasts for children; composed a memoir of his own childhood years in Berlin; and devoted a number of prose fragments to aspects of drama for young people, play, toys, and the numinous qualities of childhood reading. Influenced by the German Romantic view of the purity of a child’s vision that removes the subject-object barrier, Benjamin suggests in these works that in the course of developing an intense relationship with its immediate locality the child simultaneously absorbs and animates the innate qualities of the natural or manufactured object. Benjamin also regarded language play, witnessed in the utterances of his young son and the magical resonance of his own childhood misunderstandings, as essential to the formation of memory images and the imagination. He does not, however, present an idealized vision of childhood, since children are engaged in a cycle of destruction as well as renewal, and play with the detritus of daily life is essential to the growth of the child’s autonomy—as indeed are acts of mimesis and an immersion in the imaginative world of the book and its illustration. Alongside these observations on the child’s intellectual and imaginative development, Benjamin assumes the role of mentor in broadcasts for children that seek to encourage a historical and political consciousness in the young. He returns to his student interest in education in essays on the nature of colonial and proletarian pedagogy, and in a manifesto on proletarian children’s theater. Initially, little critical attention was paid to Benjamin’s writings on childhood in the English-speaking world, partly because of their gradual appearance in English translation. It is only in recent decades that the significance of Benjamin’s illuminating reflections on childhood, play, and education has become apparent, and that the autobiographical Berlin Childhood around 1900) has gained recognition as an expression in serial “thought-images” of the speculation on memory and materialist historiography that is essential to his philosophy.