The archive

This work is an absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin’s personal manuscripts, images, and documents from his own collection. The works of the literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, arts and dreams. It book gives an insight into Benjamin’s habits of collecting and archiving through some of his most personal document. 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.