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 great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, arts and dreams. This beautifully designed 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.