The Brightness of Reflection

In my current review, I present the book with the title Chronicle of the Inner World, translated and edited by Anna Zsellér, containing the autobiographical writings of Walter Benjamin, throughout highlighting the details of its two most significant texts, the Moscow Diary and the Berlin Chronicle. The former was written in the winter of 1926–27, during Benjamin’s one-month visit in soviet Russia, while the latter, containing his recollections of his hometown and the years of his youth, he wrote in 1932 in Ibiza. These writings that simultaneously function as autobiographical texts and cityscapes, are to be considered remarkable mainly because of their authentic critical attitude. In the Moscow Diary, this critical attitude stems from the inability to fully commit to the soviet dictatorship of the proletariat, in the Berlin Chronicle it is triggered by the repugnance towards the contradictions of the bourgeois lifestyle. These texts are characterized by a serene contemplation peculiar to Benjamin’s style, that penetrates into the depths of things and phenomena and unravels their hidden, inner essence.