Part 1: Dreams and Daydreams

dream
1.
Schiller and Goethe: A Layman's Vision
2.
In a Big Old City: An Unfinished Novel
3.
A scene with a patient with hypochondria
4.
The Empress's Morning
5.
Evening Shepherd
6.
Second Self: A Story for New Year's Eve Reflection

dream
7.
Dreams from Ignaz Jezober's Book of Dreams
8.
So close
9.
Dream in Ibiza
10.
Self-portraits of a dreamer
Grandson | Observer | Suitor | Scholar | Secret Keeper | Almanac Compiler
11.
Dream 1
12.
Dream 2
13.
One more time
14.
Letter to Toot Blaupotton Carter
15.
A Christmas Carol
16.
moon
Welty's "Moonlit Night" | Water Glass | Moon 1 | In the Dark | Dream | Moon 2
17.
diary
18.
Book Review: Albert Béguin, The Romantic Soul and Dreams

Part 2: Travel

Cities and Mobility
19.
The hidden story
20.
airman
21.
The Death of the Father: A Novel
22.
Siren
23.
Scattered in the dust: Novelle
24.
D...y mansion
25.
Book review: Franz Hessel, Intimate Berlin
26.
Book Review: Crime Fiction on the Journey

Landscapes of land and sea
27.
Nordic seas
City | Flowers | Furniture | Light | Seagull | Sculpture
28.
Stories of Loneliness
Wall | Pipe | Light
29.
Mascote's Voyage
30.
cactus fence
31.
Book Review: Landscape and Travel

Part 3: Play and Education

32.
Book Review: Frankfurt Children's Song Collection
33.
Sentence fantasy
34.
1927 wall calendar produced by Die Literarische Welt
35.
puzzle
A foreigner's answer | Concisely
36.
Radio Game
37.
Short stories
Why we call elephants 'elephants' | How ships were invented, and why we call them 'ships' | Funny story: When people didn't exist yet
38.
Four stories
Warning | Signature | Wish | Thanks
39.
Not a minute too much or too little
40.
Lucky Hands: A Conversation About Gambling
41.
Colonial Education: A Review of Alois Yalkotszy's Fairy Tale and Modernity
42.
A Green Foundation: A Review of Tom Seidemann-Freud's Introduction to Play 2 and Introduction to Play 3—Further Discussion on Introductions to Play

Editor's Note: Walter Benjamin and the Allure of Wordplay
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Editor's Note
About Paul Klee

Arendt, Adorno, Brecht, Butler, Eagleton, Zizek, Sontag, Coetzee, Berger…
A witness to modernity admired by numerous modern intellectuals
I wanted to hold on to the memories that passed by “like a flash”
Walter Benjamin, a writer who cannot be categorized into anything
The only literary collection published under his name, first translated in Korea

Includes over 50 paintings by Paul Klee, a modernist painter loved by Benjamin.
Highly recommended by Judith Butler and John Coetzee

Walter Benjamin's literary collection, "Stories of Solitude," which brings together his novels, dream accounts, and folk tales for the first time, has been translated and published in Korean.
Although relatively less well-known due to his work in the philosophy of language, media theory, and literary criticism, Benjamin wrote novels, dreams, tales, fables, parables, and riddles throughout his life.
Judith Butler, an American philosopher who is more knowledgeable about Benjamin's thought than anyone else, said of this book, "It is a tremendous gift that will recalibrate reading Benjamin in a surprising way."

The forty-two stories in this book explore themes that preoccupied Benjamin throughout his life: the dream world that straddles the threshold between the realms of reason and fantasy, the erotic tensions of metropolitan life, the imagination unleashed during movement and travel, the unique potential of human language in children, the importance of play spaces and activities, and the unique relationship between gambling, fortune-telling, and wishing.
Meanwhile, this book adds liveliness to the story by including paintings by Paul Klee, a modernist artist loved by Benjamin, on the pages where each short story begins.

What kind of literature did the great writers and thinkers dream of?
His literary works became a sounding board for Benjamin's theory.

Benjamin had little interest in the boundaries between literary and critical writing.
Even in many of his sentences known to date, literary flashes are glimpsed, and furthermore, his writing itself is of a kind that could not have arisen without poetry.
Therefore, readers who have encountered Benjamin's writings have probably imagined Benjamin writing a literary work at least once.
"If Benjamin were to write fiction, what kind of works would he have created?" "What kind of literature would Benjamin have wanted to craft from the stories he imagined?" This literary collection, which includes novellas, dream accounts, philosophical fables, parables, tales, and riddles, provides a captivating answer to these long-standing questions.
This book is all the more special in its publication because it contains texts that were largely unpublished during Benjamin's lifetime and have long been overlooked.

Another special aspect of this book is that the works included here predate Benjamin's ideas and movements of thought.
For example, the tsar's low-ranking official Shuvalkin and the Jewish pietist beggar who appear in "Four Stories" reappear in an essay on Franz Kafka.
The 'Kaiserpanorama' that appears in "The Second Self" echoes the text in "One-Way Street" while also bringing to mind "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and the autobiographical sketches placed in "Childhood in Berlin circa 1900."
In this way, this book exemplifies how Benjamin directed, performed, and presented his theoretical interests.

Benjamin's theory and practice-experiment on storytelling
Connecting the possibilities of storytelling in an age where the transmission of experience is impossible

Benjamin's continued literary writing stems from his own theory of narrative.
He dealt with the theory of 'storytelling' in several texts, and 'The Storyteller' is a representative example.
Here he argues that before World War I, experiences were passed down from generation to generation in the form of folk tales and fairy tales.
However, the “red thread of experience” that had connected generations was severed with the war.
The survivors' "fragile bodies" kept them silent, unable to speak of their experiences being caught in the "field of effluent and explosion that devastated all directions."
The possibility of transmitting experience was disappearing.
He reimagines the possibilities of transmitting experiences that are disappearing.

The method Benjamin found was to convey experience by telling stories that imitate the oral tradition, rather than using the language of 'journalism', which evaporates experience.
He layers voices in his literary texts, mimicking oral traditions.
For example, a captain tells a story to a passenger, a friend tells another friend about a strange experience, a person tells another friend about an acquaintance, and the person who heard the story tells us the story he heard.
These stories create a world of quotes, enigmatic sayings, and perspectives.
This extends the long tradition of storytelling and retelling.
And it is here that experience finds new ground.
In other words, what Benjamin attempted was to revitalize the orality of storytelling under changing conditions.
So what kind of stories are needed in the trenches? The themes he repeatedly explored through his literary experiments included dreams and fantasy, travel and alienation, play and educational theory.

A world of stories that push forward in an outrageous way and then crumble like a child
The book's structure: (1) Dreams and Daydreams, (2) Travel and Movement, (3) Play and Education Theory

This book divides Benjamin's literary works into three parts: Dreams and Dreamworks, Travel and Movement, and Play and Education.
In the essays included here, Benjamin focuses on content while pushing form in surprising directions, to the point where it might collapse on its own.
First, the writings in Part 1 are centered around dreams and visions.
If the dreams he had at night reflect and exaggerate the suffering of this world today, the fantasy works he wrote depict a vision of a 'world without suffering.'
The recurring theme of eerie wanderings in dreamlike landscapes reflects and exaggerates such suffering, and the colors depicted in "In a Big Old City" and "The Faun in the Evening" come alive against the backdrop of a vision of a "world without pain."

Part 2, which deals with travel, consists of stories of passing through landscapes on land and at sea, stories of passing through cities large and small, and the erotic longings stimulated there.
Traveling means leaving behind the familiar.
Travel opens up new rules and a new life.
For example, in "The Voyage of the Mascote," the ship is a magical city on the sea.
Madness is the norm and the captain has no authority.
Travel also visualizes thresholds.
Train stations and ports are gateways to another world.
In travel stories like "The Nordic Sea," the threshold separating the world of rational reason and the world of fantasy is lowered.
Above all, travel - movement - leads somewhere.
It also lures you to places you shouldn't go, like in "The Hidden Story."
Here, events sometimes happen and sometimes don't happen.
But those who go there witness many things they would not have known if they had not gone there.

Part 3 presents play and educational theory as two intertwined aspects of Benjamin's thought.
Several pieces explore puns and play.
In light of Benjamin's thinking, adults should learn the joy of wordplay and play from children.
In that vein, there are also gambling and fortune telling.
The theme of "Lucky Hand" is a game disguised as gambling.
Learning through play is also a key aspect of utilizing science and technology, and "Not a Minute Too Much or Too Little" addresses the question of how to learn to interact with the radio medium in a playful way.

The forty-two essays in this book are mostly short.
Benjamin experimented with narrative form, compressing the energy of a story into a short piece, thus concentrating that energy to the maximum possible intensity.
It creates a condensation of realities that already exist and realities that might one day exist and permeates them.
Such writings, while presenting something of the world that is tangible and recognizable in a realistic way, also make what we encounter and what appears before us sometimes magical, fantastical, overwhelming, and mystical.

The works included in this book were written in fragments during Benjamin's unstable life, constantly moving from place to place, and were therefore largely unpublished during his lifetime. Therefore, until they were properly edited, they might have seemed like meaningless, scattered fragments.
However, thanks to the diligent editing and categorization of Benjamin scholars, the commentary that penetrates Benjamin's thoughts and art theory, and finally the effort to link each text with the paintings of Paul Klee, the modernist painter Benjamin loved, this collection completes the mysterious constellation that is Benjamin.

The value of "Stories of Solitude" goes beyond the fact that "Benjamin attempted to write literary works amidst the perilous political reality and existence, and this is the first book to compile them."
This book visualizes a previously undiscovered context, examining how to interpret Benjamin's lifelong interests—storytelling as a transmitted experience, dreams and fantasies, travel, and the problem of alienation prominent in modern capitalist society—through his thought.
As Judith Butler praised, this book will transform the mechanism of reading Benjamin and will establish itself as a book that condenses the starting points of Benjamin's own thought.

『Stories of Loneliness』 is a complete translation of Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness (London and New York: Verso, 2023), edited and translated by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, and Sebastian Truskolaski. The Korean edition is co-authored with Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften III, IV, VI, VII (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1991).
The title on the cover is written in German, as used by Benjamin, and, judging that it is closely related to this book, I have additionally translated and included “The Moon” from “Childhood in Berlin around 1900.”
All were approved by the original editors.