I shall focus my comments on the recently published Passagen-Werk, 2 Benjamin's major but unfinished study of Paris in the 19th century, which was concerned with the origins of mass culture, and which occupied him from 1927 until his suicide in 1940. In line with the specific interests of this conference, I will consider his argument that the recently out-of-date objects of mass culture possessed political, indeed, revolutionary power for his generation, and this will take us by a somewhat circuitous route to Imperial Berlin, the scene of Benjamin's own childhood. Any argument based on the Passagen-Werk is necessarily tentative, due to its extremely ambiguous status as a text. Its goal was to reconstruct history with a political focus on the "present," but between 1927 and 1940 the political nature of the present changed considerably, and thus so does the tone of the reconstruction. Moreover, although surely Benjamin's major literary effort, the Passagen-Werk is not only unfinished; it is not a"work" at all. It consists ofreserach notes with some commentary, carefully numbered and collected in folders (Konvoluts) to which Benjamin gave identifying keywords ("Arcades," "Fashion," "Ancient Paris," "Boredom," Haussmannization," etc.) as well as letters which he arranged A-Z; a-z. It might best be described as