Michael Jennings describes the process of composition, "Working feverishly through the summer and fall of 1938 in [ ] Denmark, where he was the guest of his friend the great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin completed the middle third of the Baudelaire book and submitted this text as an essay entitled 'The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire' to the "Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung" (Journal for Social Research) in New York."