Is it really possible to confine yourself? Bourgeois domesticity and city in "Berliner Kindheit um 1900", by Walter Benjamin

Abstract

When, in 2020, millions of people have been persuaded, even forced to stay home , to stay away from others and protect themselves , few people have wondered what home meant. The practice and the concept of home appeared to take the domestic bourgeois space as given, as well as the idea that its inhabitants should be protected from the threats coming from outside. Walter Benjamin s ways of remembering his childhood in Berlin may appear parallel and premonitory of the present context, as if this context had already been defined or sketched not only around 1900, but also in some of Goethe s texts.