Libro de los pasajes (Book of the Passages)

For thirteen years, from 1927 until his death in 1940, Walter Benjamin worked on the major work that was to be the book on Paris, the so-called “Book of the Passages”, a philosophy of 19th century history. A good part of the major texts he wrote during the last ten years of his life – the essay on the work of art, the works dedicated to Baudelaire and the theses “On the Concept of History” – emerged from the “Passages”. Everything that is preserved from this enormous work -thousands of notes and fragments- was first published in the fifth volume of Surhkamp’s “Complete Works”, which is the one we now present in its entirety for the first time in Spanish. Throughout its pages, the reader can see how the “Book of the Passages” stands as one of the most wonderful fragments of German literature, comparable to Friedrich Schlegel’s “Philosophische Lehrjahre” and Nietzsche’s “Will to Power”.