Conceived in the early Thirties, the Berlin Childhood belongs in the orbit of that primal history of the modern world on which Benjamin was working during the last thirteen years of his life. It forms the subjective counterpart to the masses of materials brought together for the project on the Paris arcades. The historical archetypes he wished to lay out in their social-pragmatic and philosophical provenance in the study of Paris were to be illuminated by lightning flashes of immediate remembrance in the Berlin book, which throughout laments the irretrievability of what, once lost, congeals into an allegory of its own demise. For the images this book unearths and brings strangely near are not idyllic and not contemplative. Over them lies the shadow of the Third Reich. And through them dreamily runs a shudder at the long forgotten.