Taking a Walk on the Map of the City of the „Self”

In 2020, Kijárat Publishing House published a carefully crafted selection of Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical writings from important periods of the writer’s life, entitled The Chronicle of the Inner World. The collection of literary texts, in the outstanding Hungarian translation of Anna Zsellér, compiled writings of different genres which are centred around two cities, Moscow and Berlin. Moscow is about the two months that Benjamin spent in the Soviet capital in the winter of 1926–1927, while the diary and letters, which are integral to the genesis of the series of essays on everyday life in the Soviet Union, outline in intricate details the personal challenges raging behind the rather matter-of-fact theoretical text. Benjamin wrote The Berlin Chronicle in Ibiza in 1932, a memoir of his homeland inspired in part by a personal crisis: the growing rise of fascism forced the writer to leave Germany. The prose gave way to a version in verse, which is also included in the selection, along with two short autobiographies written by Benjamin himself in 1928 and 1940.
Benjamin’s autobiographical writings are fascinating attempts, from both a literary and a social theoretical point of view, to define the place of writer, bourgeois and intellectual in the structure of contemporaneous societies in constant political transformation. Anna Zsellér accurately points out that Benjamin’s interest in writing about Moscow is driven by the critical question of “whether and if so, how the materialist dialectic can be used with both scientific and aesthetic rigor” (Zsellér [Benjamin] 2020: 213), while in the texts on Berlin, the author reveals that he seeks to discover how the experience of the metropolis “strikes the native of the bourgeois class” (Benjamin, quoted by Zsellér [Benjamin] 2020: 218). Benjamin’s literary activity was thus fundamentally characterised by his desire to depict and understand differences between social classes, but his writings also reflect on the primarily bourgeois traditions that determine the literary character of autobiographical and reminiscence-driven texts. The tension between art and society is thus one of the main dilemmas in the selected texts, not only in the choice of subject matter, but also in the creation process of their particular literary character.