"This prose is one of Benjamin's works on the initial period of the modern era, on the history of which he worked for the last fifteen years of his life, and is an attempt by the writer to contrast something personal with the masses of materials he has already collected for an essay on Parisian street passages. The historical archetypes that Benjamin in this essay intended to derive from the socio-pragmatic and philosophical genesis unexpectedly vividly appeared in the "Berlin" book, imbued with the immediacy of memories and sorrow about that irrevocable, lost forever, which became for the author an allegory of the decline of his own life" (Theodor Adorno).