Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, in Berlin. The polymathic Benjamin was perhaps best known for his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, on what happens to how we see and experience art when it is no longer tied to place, ritual, tradition. But he was a wide-ranging essayist, memoirist, critic, and translator. Below, an excerpt from A Berlin Chronicle, which Benjamin wrote in 1932, from Spain, and which was never published in his lifetime:
I never slept on the street in Berlin. I …
