Restless narrative of the infancy in modernity: Berlin Childhood around 1900 by Walter Benjamin

Abstract

This study has Berlin childhood around 1900, by Walter Benjamin, as its object. The book contains 42 imagetic frames, in which the philosopher aims to depict German bourgeoisie in the beginning  of the twentieth century from the perspective of the child he once was. Nonetheless, the author forsakes the traditional and linear autobiographic project, on the basis that memory is not cohesive, and that past is always articulated. In this way, the narrative Benjamin builds in Berlin childhood around 1900 is a constelational, fragmented and discontinous one, which can be read in a hypertextual fashion. Thus, this study aimed at developing the hypertext narrative in this book, associating its diverse images. For that, we created the web site literateias.com.br, where the book has been made available with hyperlinks that unite the frames with each other. We also developed the idea that this discontinuous narrative is a hall- mark of the modern individual, who is uncentered and fragmented, and who arises still in the nineteenth century. It can be concluded, finally, that hypertext also occurs in printed text, and that it is characteristical of the questionings brought about by modernity, such as the end of the grand narratives. The difference is that current hypertexts own an ideal support, namely, the computer’s screen, which boosts the resources and the associations that constitute them. In this sense, the construction of the web site literateias.com.br has proven to be fundamental, since it elicited the hypertextual character of Berlin childhood around 1900 while at the same time bringing new breath to Benjamin’s work, which can be reinterpreted in light of this new support.

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DOI: http:/dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2017.27170