The Patient's Angel: One-Way Street Read with Benjamin's Kafka

Abstract

Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street can be read as a gesture toward Franz Kafka. Benjamin's primary intention in writing this book was to create what he called a “plaquette for friends,” a privately printed brochure collecting dreams, aphorisms, and jokes from and for his close acquaintances. This idea already has a special affinity to Kafka's intimate method of writing and his experimentation with a variety of small literary forms. And a search for traces of Kafka in One-Way Street discovers them on many pages, not only in formal experiments but also in motifs. This essay considers thirteen such motifs: process, law, dream, animals, gesture, shame, laughter, forgetting, memory, scripture, death, catastrophe, and hope. In so doing, it assesses One-Way Street as a link between Kafka's parables, Benjamin's early readings of Kafka, his first reviews and discussions of the author, and his great Kafka essay from 1934. Under the auspices of Benjamin's Kafka interpretation, One-Way Street reveals itself as a collection of dreams, a book of gestures and alienation, and—like Kafka's Trial—a book for those who live in cities. Such books have no indoctrinating intentions but are all the more significant for that.

Keywords:

• Bertolt Brecht
• gesture
• Franz Kafka
• process

Notes

This article has been translated from the original German by Lisa Beesley (Vanderbilt University).

All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995–2000). Further citations are marked in the text as GB with volume and page number; here, GB 3: 303. Where available, references have also been provided to the selection of the correspondence translated in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), and marked in the text as CB with page number. The cited letter here is not included in that translation.

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989). Hereafter cited as GS with volume and page number. Here, GS 7: 459, 464.

The second reading is recorded in 1934; cf. GS 7: 468, where evidence of his reading of The Judgment (Das Urteil) and The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) can also be found.

For the thirteen terms, following each citation from One-Way Street is the title (in small capitals) of the text from which the citation was taken. On the right, the corresponding Kafka terms are given in capitals. References to One-Way Street are provided to three editions: first, to the English translation in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), hereafter SW 1 with page number, and second, to the recent critical edition, Walter Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8, Einbahnstraß, ed. Detlev Schöttker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), hereafter WuN 8 with page number. For convenience, references are also provided to the widely cited Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 81–148 (hereafter GS 4 with page number).

In German, “Process” designates a legal trial as well as the equivalent to the English “process,” and is the title of Kafka's unfinished second novel: Der Proceß.

In the appendix to the new Suhrkamp edition in the Werke und Nachlaß: WuN 8: 361.

See her article “Dreams of the Collective—Or How to Wake Up?” in this issue.

Heiner Müller: Fatzer ± Keuner. In: Ders.: Werke 8: Schriften. Hrsg. v. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), S. 224.

“Breite[s], lautlose[s] Lachen.” Franz Kafka, Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa, ed. Roger Hermes (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008). Further references as Kafka, Die Erzählungen, 191, 193, 524; GS II/2, 430. Translated as: Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum Glazer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 163, 228, 365.

Kafka, Die Erzählungen, S. 285f; The Complete Stories, 414f.

“zum Tode hin (irgendwann eintretend), sondern vom Tode her’ (in jedem Moment sichtbar) geschrieben wurden, […] noch keinen seien, noch keinen poetischen Begriff.”

“vom Bild des Todes her skandiert und rhythmisiert—von Reflexionen über Todesstrafe, Totenmaske, Totenkopf, Todesnachricht, Totenehrung und Tötung.” Lorenz Jäger, ‘Den Rhythmus schlägt der Sensenmann. Ein Beispiel von Editionsphilologie auf höchstem Niveau: Walter Benjamins „Einbahnstraße” von 1928 im Rahmen der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe,” FAZ, 6 (March 2010).

Kafka, Die Erzählungen, 283; The Complete Stories, 410.

“Oh, Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung—nur nicht für uns,” GS II/2, S. 414.

“Du gehst vom Nichts der Offenbarung’ aus […], von der heilsgeschichtlichen Perspektive des anberaumten Prozeßverfahrens. Ich gehe von der kleinen widersinnigen Hoffnung, sowie den Kreaturen denen einerseits diese Hoffnung gilt, in welchen andererseits dieser Widersinn sich spiegelt, aus,” GB IV, S. 478.

“von Engeln durchwirkte,” GB VI, S. 112 (Letter to Scholem, 12 June 1938).

“eine Erkrankung der Tradition,” GB VI, S. 112 (Letter to Scholem, 12 June 1938).

“vielfach so heitere,” GB VI, S. 112 (Letter to Scholem, 12 June 1938).

“wirklich Kafkas Hoffnung”; “Es ist die Quelle seiner strahlenden Heiterkeit.” GB VI, S. 113.

“Hebel hat mich gerufen,” GS II/3, S. 1445.

“Es ist eine alte, vielleicht leidige Neigung bei mir, eigene Gedanken gelegentlich der Verfolgung von fremden aufzustöbern,” GB VI, S. 79.

“der Insasse des entstellten Lebens”; „verschwinden, wenn der Messias kommt, von dem ein großer Rabbi gesagt hat, daß er nicht mit Gewalt die Welt verändern wolle, sondern nur um ein Geringes sie zurechtstellen werde,” GS II/2, S. 432.

“mit mächtigen Zieraten.” Kafka, Die Erzählungen, 250; The Complete Stories, 401.

Bertolt Brecht, Werke, Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Klaus-Detlef Müller, and Werner Mittenzwei, vol. 22, Schriften 2 (Berlin and Weimar, Frankfurt am Main: Aufbau, Suhrkamp, 1993), 630.