One-Way Street. Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (Ulitsa s Odnostronnim Dvizheniem)

This collection comprises two brilliant memoirs written by Walter Benjamin in the mid-1920s ('One-Way Street') and the early 1930s ('A Berlin Childhood at the Turn of the Century'). Both are composed of fragments that insightfully analyze the fabric of everyday life. Recurring themes—the interplay of past and present, the silent march of history, nostalgia, collecting, and so on—closely connect this seemingly unimportant autobiographical prose with Benjamin's major theoretical projects on Baudelaire, the cultural history of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and, more broadly, the fate of modernity.