“This prose is among the works by Benjamin from the early period of the modern era, over the history of which he worked during the last fifteen years of his life. It is an attempt by the writer to set something personal against the masses of material he had already collected for his essay on Parisian street passages. The historical archetypes that Benjamin intended to derive from the sociopragmatic and philosophical genesis unexpectedly stood out vividly in the ‘Berlin’ book—steeped in the immediacy of memories and in grief for the irretrievable, lost forever, which for the author became an allegory of the decline of his own life” (Theodor Adorno).