(Email, University of Virginia)
Recollecting the Lost World through the Sound of Language in Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit
What is the relationship between sound, memory and language? Walter Benjamin seems to speculate on these questions in his work Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (1939), his most refined and polished surviving autobiographical document. The more than forty separate texts of Berliner Kindheit differ from the usual chronological, biographical writing. They are not organized according to any temporal sequence and they stand as topographical snapshots next to each other rewriting the topography of childhood in terms of excerpts, in which Benjamin surveys the various quarters and neighborhoods of Berlin. Anamnesis is aimed at the world of things and places, rather than at personal identity, the childhood memories of the people and the events are triggered by sounds and noises.
Berliner Kindheit was written in close temporal and theoretical conjunction with the critical and philosophical questions which preoccupied Benjamin in the 1930s. Among those theoretical writings were the two essays on the similar: “The Doctrine of the Similar” and “On the Mimetic Faculty”, which concentrate on the transitional moment in the history of mimesis, namely the moment of rupture when the experience of sensuous correspondences passes over into the experience of non-sensuous ones to find its manifestation in language. Rejecting the ‘bourgeois’ theory that language has an arbitrary relation to its objects, Benjamin believes that all language is onomatopoetic. By that he means that the language does not only have the capacity of the sensuous imitation of a natural sound, but that the non-sensuous similarity is mainly at the root of language. Thus language demonstrates the highest manifestation of the mimetic genius, and through these non-sensuous similarities it becomes the reminder of a lost world of experience.
In the numerous episodes of the Berliner Kindheit, Benjamin discusses the mimetic faculty in language, and bemoans its disappearance from other spheres of life in the age of reproduction. The childhood the adult tries to remember is gone too, but the childhood memories are reborn through sounds and noises, echoes and rhymes which mingle into unforgettable images. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyze the function of the mimetic faculty in language, and the merging of sound and memory into one constellation in Benjamin’s childhood recollections.
