Benjamin was 13 years into this project when he had to leave the manuscript behind to flee Occupation forces in Paris in 1940. As he left it, the book was a sort of thematized commonplace book, organizing quotations from and comments on hundreds of texts. He had been attempting to understand a true history that had been obscured by the modern commodification of things in 19th-century Paris. Many scholars treat this book as the keystone to Benjamin's thought, and he himself considered it his most important project.
