--probably, maybe my favorite passage of Benjamin-- in which he says that "Children are relentlessly attracted, not so much to construction sites, but to the heaps of rubble that are produced at construction sites because they like to build new things out of that which has been discarded." And clearly what he's about here is the Weinmar Republic, which had a chance not to do as it did (which is to take the old building materials that the Kaiser and the powers that be had used all along and to rebuild something that wasn't very new out of those) but rather to take those things which had not been contaminated, which had not been a part of a structure of oppression (apparently the rubble, the detritus, that which nobody wanted) and rebuild something new and child-like out of it. 