ABSTRACT
One of the more familiar stories within the repertoire of German folk literature for children is that of the “bucklichte Männlein,” the little hump-backed man. Narrated in eight short, rhymed verses, it describes a series of encounters between a child from whose perspective the story is told and the title character, the “bucklichte Männlein.” The tale has an uncanny quality. For wherever the child goes, the little man is always already there; whatever the child wants to do has either already been (or is about to be) ruined through the little man’s interference. Walter Benjamin, who concludes his posthumously published autobiographical narrative, “A Berlin Childhood Around 1900” (“Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert”), with his memory of this childhood story, suggests that it can be seen as paradigmatic of the relationship between experience and representation; a relationship in which, as he points out, the two dimensions are so inseparable that neither one can be said to precede nor to follow the other one.
