Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century is translated into English for the first time in book form.

This book of new research and commentary by Carl Skoggard brings philosopher Walter Benjamin's engaging autobiographical text into a new translation that is faithful to Benjamin's voice. Berlin Childhood circa 1900, Skoggard writes, "conjures Benjamin's earliest years in a series of mysterious tableaux. But it also reflects an urgent moment in his adult life—one that posed challenges to everything he had thought and felt previously." Our Jank Edition is illustrated with thirty black & white photographs and includes a foldable, color map of Berlin, circa 1900, offset-printed by Container Corps, Portland, Ore.

A companion volume to Walter Benjamin's (1892-1940) memoir "Berlin Childhood circa 1900, The "Berlin Chronicle" Notices" is now in a new translation by Carl Skoggard. The German-Jewish philosopher, theorist and critic Walter Benjamin began to ruminate on his comfortable Berlin childhood in 1932, not long before he would flee Germany for good to escape the Nazis. The resulting "Berlin Chronicle" notices--40 in all--do not result in a linear narrative but instead remain fragmentary recollections of Benjamin's young years, from his early childhood to the threshold of adulthood. More generally, they are a series of profound explorations of memory and of the ways memory relates to place. Rich in and of themselves, these notices greatly illuminate "Berlin Childhood circa 1900," written by Benjamin months later. This translation, in a charming pocket-sized format, comes with an extensive commentary, a historical map of Berlin and numerous illustrations.

The book examines individual and collective visions for the material world of children, from utopian dreams for the citizens of the future to the dark realities of political conflict and exploitation. Surveying more than 100 years of toys, clothing, playgrounds, schools, children's hospitals, nurseries, furniture, posters, animation and books, this richly illustrated catalogue illuminates how progressive design has enhanced the physical, intellectual, and emotional development of children and, conversely, how models of children's play have informed experimental aesthetics and imaginative design thinking.

A brilliant, sinuous exploration of family and childhood memory by one of the most original British philosophers of the twentieth century. Germs is about first things, the seeds from which a life grows, as well as about the illnesses it incurs, the damage it sustains. Written at the end of his life by Richard Wollheim, one of the major philosophers of the late twentieth century, the book is not the usual story of growing up and getting on but a brilliant recovery and evocation of childhood consciousness and unconsciousness, an eerily precise rendering of that primitive, formative world we all come from in which we do not know either the world or ourselves for sure, and things—houses, clothes, meals, parents—loom large around us, as indispensable as they are out of our control. Richard Wollheim’s remarkably original memoir is a disturbing, enthralling, dispassionate but also deeply personal depiction of a child standing, fascinated and fearful, on the threshold of individual life.

The true story behind the film The Nasty Girl: A memoir by a German woman who uncovered her hometown’s war crimes and complicity with the Nazis. Nestled along the Danube in southern Germany, Passau is a pleasant tourist destination known for its historic buildings and scenic views at the intersection of three rivers. But for decades, the small Bavarian city suppressed an intimate association with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Born in Passau in 1960, Anna Rosmus discovered those dark secrets as a teenager—sordid stories of slave labor, forced abortions, and a massacre of Russian POWs. In 1994, she set out to commemorate the forgotten Holocaust victims who had died there, expecting little if any controversy. What she encountered instead was an obstructionist city council, a virulently resentful local population, and an unsettling degree of latent anti-Semitism in a town whose several hundred Jewish citizens had been sent to concentration camps. Eventually the death threats led to her own emigration from Germany to the United States. Anna Rosmus has been hailed by Marc Fisher of the Washington Post as “a rigorous researcher burning with a passion to tell the story that must be told.” In Out of Passau, she explores not only the disturbing World War II history of her hometown, but also the life-changing fallout that resulted from her determination to recognize those who had lost their lives.