The Storyteller

Benjamin states, ‘The ideal of the experience formed by shock is the catastrophe. In gambling this becomes very explicit; by persistently raising the stakes, in the hope of retrieving what is lost, the gambler steers toward total ruin

In ‘Programme for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre’ (1929), Benjamin observes: ‘Just as the first action of the Bolsheviks was to hoist the Red flag, so their first instinct was to organize the children.

He argues further that children’s play proposes a mode of thinking that extends beyond itself, much like folk art, another ‘primitivist’ form that has the character of a model: ‘Folk art and the worldview of the child demanded to be seen as collectivist ways of thinking.

But play is not something that resides in a world far from worldly affairs. Play involves toys, and toys emerge from the world of work, from particular webs of social relations, as Benjamin observed of the Russian toys that he saw in a Soviet museum during a 1926–7 visit

To travel is to leave behind the familiar.