Victorian Childhood, Interwar Retrospect

This essay considers two 1930s memoirs about childhoods in the 1890s: Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900 and Virginia Woolf's "A Sketch of the Past". For both writers the exercise of retrospect is doomed to interruption by the political conditions of the interwar years: the advance of the Nazis, the dislocation of exile, the menace of warplanes overhead. The present-tense basis for retrospect is unsteady, and the work that results is a peculiar amalgam of reconstruction and disintegration. The essay closes with a brief consideration of what can seem like an analogous situation today, decades into the twenty-first century, as we try to summon our own childhoods from a previous century.