"This book must not lay claims, not even in a single instance, to forms such as those which the Berliner Kindheit displays .... The prehistory (Urgeschichte) of the 19th century which reflects itself in the glance of the child playing on its threshold has in that book a totally different face than in the signs which it [i.e. the prehistory] engraves on the map of history" (PW, 1139).* The quote is from a letter in which Benjamin responds to Adorno's lengthy criticism of the expose6 composed in 1935 for the "Passagenarbeit." In this first expose, which was followed in 1939 by a second, revised version, the project of an essay "Pariser-Passagen" begun in the late 1920s received the new, more all-encompassing title: "Paris, die Hauptstadt des 19. Jahrhunderts." And by this point in time yet another book project had split off from that essay about the Paris passages, the plans of which have been published (PW, 1041 ff.): the Berliner Kindheit um 1900, begun in 1932. Both projects, the book about childhood and the book about the Paris passages, sought to redeem what Benjamin wanted to accomplish first of all with that essay as with one sweep of the hand. His concern was, as he writes Scholem in 1928, to enter upon "the inheritance of Surrealism with all the authority of a philosophical Fortinbras" (PW, 1089). This encounter with Surrealism can only be sketched here in broad strokes. Special consideration should be paid to Aragon's Paysan de Paris from which Benjamin translated excerpts; its description of the Passage de l'Opera represents the decisive source of inspiration for the Passagen-Werk. Attention should also be paid to Franz Hessel, with whom Benjamin translated Proust and tested out a surrealist, flaneur-based "Tiergarten-mythology." In his two essays, "Die Wiederkehr des Flaneurs" ("The Return of the Flaneur") and "Surrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europaiischen