"The Benjamin are the brothers Walter and Georg and their sister Dora, children of a Jewish family from the upper bourgeoisie of Berlin." This is how this chronicle of a "German family" opens. But the history of this family, which begins "around 1900", reaches beyond the truncated lives of the three brothers who faced National Socialism and succumbed to persecution, war and exile: Walter, the philosopher, critic and Writer; Georg, the doctor and communist activist, and Dora, the sociologist and activist.
The family history continued with Hilde Benjamin, Georg's wife, and their son Michael. Hilde was, as Minister of Justice of the German Democratic Republic, the main person in charge of the criminal prosecution of Nazi criminals; in West Germany she will be known disparagingly as "Hilde the bloodthirsty." Michael, on his part, occupied himself with family memory, determined to rethink, based on his political and intellectual legacy, the present and the future of Germany.
The Benjamin chronicle covers a century of contemporary German history. The story about the members of this family allows the author, at the same time, to propose an unbiased reflection on the consequences of the division of Germany into two states and two societies, on the role that the Cold War assigned to each of them and on the forgetfulness brought about by an accelerated reunification. In this way, through previously unpublished documents and letters, it is also a personal guide to the places of memory of its protagonists. «The Benjamin, a German family. Their lives are faced with oblivion and a rhetoric that today is once again inflated with nationalism. '

Reviews and criticisms:

- «A choral biography offers new readings on the life of Walter Benjamin. In the profuse bibliography on the German thinker, an approach was lacking that would delve into his ties with the people who accompanied him during his childhood and part of his adult life, as well as those who bear his surname. (The country)

- "An excellent choral biography based on the life of the famous thinker and which is, at the same time, the chronicle of Germany from 1900 to today". (The reason)

- «Born into the opulence of the Berlin bourgeoisie at the beginning of the century, none of the three would survive Nazism. Walter, Georg and Dora condense in their lives the sad history of the Germanic country during the 20th century and the echoes it has left today ”. (The Cultural)