TOPOLOGIES OF MEMORY: SPACE IN WALTER BENJAMIN’S BERLIN CHILDHOOD AROUND 1900
TOPOLOGIES OF MEMORY: SPACE IN WALTER BENJAMIN’S BERLIN CHILDHOOD AROUND 1900

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the dialectical relationship between public and private space in Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and argues that Benjamin’s recollections dissolve the boundaries between these spheres, turning the city of Berlin into a topology of memory where the external world becomes inseparable from the self. The public and the private continuously transform into one another: the street becomes domestic, and the room opens toward the city. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the paper interprets Benjamin’s city as an imaginative dwelling. Benjamin’s remembered spaces embody this mutuality: they are both shelters and thresholds, both intimate and public. His autobiographical writing is thus organized not around temporal progression of events, but around spatial points to which memory is bound and which are continually re-created within memory.

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