One-Way Street: Childhood and Improvisation at the Close of the Book

Abstract

Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street emerges from a profoundly subversive orientation in his thought. It is the application in the present of a skeptical posture toward the European cultural legacy, a skeptical posture typical of Benjamin in his relation to the university institution. The proximity of One-Way Street to disruptions in the processes securing cultural transmission appears in the transformation of the book's relation to Gershom Scholem and Asja Lacis, the antithetical colleagues closest to Benjamin at the time he wrote it. The satirical force originally associated with his student friend Scholem and their shared parody the “University of Muri” gives way to an ever greater sensitivity to childhood per se as a principle of counter-experience, a sensitivity Benjamin found embodied in Asja Lacis's proletarian children's theater. At the intersection of the satiric university that debunks all prior authority and the proletarian children's theater that vests an unexpected pedagogic potency in the future generation, One-Way Street gestures toward everything adult authority necessarily obliterates and by which it must eventually be obliterated in turn.

Keywords:

• Walter Benjamin
• Asja Lacis
• Muri
• One-Way Street
• revolutionary pedagogy

Notes

Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin—Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), 76. Translated by Harry Zohn under the title of Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York: New York Review of Books, 1981), 72. Hereafter cited as GF and SF with page numbers.

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. 7 Vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980–1991), 4: 1016–17. Hereafter cited as GS with volume and page number.

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 5 vols., ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999), 2: 389 (hereafter cited as GB with volume and page number). Selections translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson as The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 222 (hereafter cited as C with page number).

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. 4 Vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 2: 54. Hereafter cited as SW with volume and page number. GS 2: 287.

Thus, to the much-commented-upon texts of Benjamin's on the status of theology in his thought, N7a,7 in the Arcades Project—”My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink” (GS 5: 588; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999], 471; hereafter cited in the text as AP with page number)—and the first of the Theses on the Concept of History, where the wizened dwarf theology animates the chess machine of historical materialism, should doubtless be added Benjamin's Muri review of the travel writer Theodor Däubler's nonexistent Athos and the Atheists, which reveals, on the basis of “fragmentary inscriptions from Athos, undeniable archeological testimonies, deciphered painstakingly from weathered slabs” that “the Atheists—that is, ‘Those from Athos’—were a sect of ardent ecstatics formerly resident all over the island, second to none in the bitterness of their self-chastisements, who were denounced in the 11th century by a scribe in the pay of the Greek patriarch Euthymios on the basis of vulgar Greek and no doubt intentionally falsified etymology with the name of deniers of God and thereby delivered over to the persecutions of the authorities” (GS 4: 442–43).

Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927), 16th edition (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), 172. Translated under the title Being and Time, by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 161.

“Curiosity is altogether inauthentically futural, in such a way that it does not await a possibility but in its greed only desires possibility as something real. Curiosity is constituted by a dispersed making present that, only making present, thus constantly tries to run away from the awaiting in which it is nevertheless ‘held,’ although in a dispersed way” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 318). “Die Neugier ist ganz und gar uneigentlich zukünftig und dies wiederum dergestalt, daß sie nicht einer Möglichkeit gewärtig ist, sondern diese schon nur noch als Wirkliches in ihrer Gier begehrt. Die Neugier wird konstituiert durch ein ungehaltenes Gegenwärtigen, das, nur gegenwärtigend, damit ständig dem Gewärtigen, darin es doch ungehalten gehalten’ ist, zu entlaufen sucht” (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 347).

It is upon this volatile fissure in communicable experience, the fissure between adult and child as it is mnemonically incorporated into adult awareness, that Benjamin's autobiographical Berlin Childhood around 1900 is constructed. Indeed, that text can be seen as a complement to One-Way Street, most visibly in the common inclusion of important sections called “Kaiserpanorama,” one of which describes a Kaiserpanorama and the other of which is a Kaiserpanorama. This contrast, a mnemonic dislocation that objectifies and names phenomena in Berlin Childhood that are directly evoked in One-Way Street, governs the entire relation between these texts. One-Way Street is a Berlin street without ever naming Berlin, while Berlin Childhood is centrally concerned with the evocative mnemonic power of referential names. This dislocation, however, is far too complicated to be addressed in the present essay, and we do well to recall Benjamin's emphatic remark to Gretel Karplus on 16 August 1935, in which he emphasizes that his work on the Parisian arcades, work that emerges directly from the presentational strategies of One-Way Street, must hold the mnemonic register of Berlin Childhood at arms length: “It is precisely this book [i.e., The Arcades Project] that may not anywhere lay any claim to forms such as those offered to me by my Berlin Childhood. … The Ur-history of the nineteenth century reflected in the vision of the child playing on its doorstep has a totally different countenance than that in the signs that they engrave on the map of history” (C 507; GB 5: 144).

Lacis, Asja. Revolutionär im Beruf: Berichte über proletarisches Theater, über Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator, ed. Hildegard Brenner (München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1971), 25–26 (quoted in GS 2: 1495).

 Walter Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8, Einbahnstraße, ed. Detlev Schöttker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 40–44. Hereafter cited in the text as WuN with volume and page number. SW 1: 463–66; GS 4: 113–16.