“Countless Constellations”: Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Literarization

In the spring of 1927, a few months after his stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926–27, the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin reflects on his travels and his own subsequent literary production in several letters to friends and colleagues. In a short note to the journalist Siegfried Kracauer he mentions his essay “Moscow,” albeit as a side note, and describes it as