Stuck for summer reading ideas? Why not find inspiration from Walter Benjamin? Since he was a student, the German philosopher and culture critic wrote down and numbered every book he read in a journal. The small black notebook catalogues Benjamin’s reading from the age of 22 in 1917 until 1939, shortly before he left Paris fleeing from the Nazis. It begins with number 462—earlier entries are lost—and ends with number 1712, Robert Hichens’ Le Toque noire. Putting to shame the more leisurely reader, Benjamin was averaging more than one book a week.
The notebook is on show this month at Berlin’s Galerie Max Hetzler as part of Irrkunst, an exhibition on the ceramicist Edmund de Waal, the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes. Irrkunst is De Waal's first exhibition in Berlin, which, he says, is a city he feels he knows "through the writings of Walter Benjamin". Building upon this influence, De Waal collaborated with the Walter Benjamin Archive to exhibit the philosopher’s original manuscripts alongside his own works in the show. (The gallery in west Berlin looks out onto Benjamin’s former school.)
“What you have here is an archive of Benjamin’s knowledge. You’re reading the story of his own education,” says Ursula Marx, a researcher at the archive. Generally, Benjamin noted only the author and title of the books in his list, but he sometimes included where and when he read a book, whether he read it only in part, and on some rare occasions included his opinion, describing some works as “schund” (trash), or “albern” (silly).
Proust and Baudelaire feature heavily, as do the stars of Russian literature (Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Gogol) and German philosophy (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx). But Benjamin’s love of mystery novels is one of the more unexpected revelations—he was planning to write his own crime novel with the playwright Bertholt Brecht. Three Agatha Christies are listed, two books by Arthur Conan Doyle as is The Red House Mystery, the only crime novel written by A.A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh.
• Edmund de Waal: Irrkunst, Max Hetzler, Berlin, until 16 July