Einbahnstraβe

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© J. Wallace 2015. All Rights Reserved.

Notes

[1] Benjamin's book has been reprinted many times. I rely on the 1955 version, which lacks the well-known cover montage created by the Russian photographer, Sasha Stone. See Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße (Frankfurt: Surkamp Verlag, 1995). Edmund Jephcott undertook the now-standard English translation of One-Way Street, only a portion of which appears in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). The full translation appears in Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 444–87. Page numbers below refer to this edition. Page numbers in brackets refer to the Surkamp Verlag edition.

[2] Benjamin's dedication of One-Way Street: “This street is named Asja Lacis Street after her who as an engineer cut it through the author.” Lacis was a Latvian theatre director who shaped Benjamin's Marxism and with whom Benjamin fell into unrequited love over the course of an on-again, off-again affair, a liaison that provoked Dora Benjamin to write of her soon-to-be ex-husband that, “[a]ll he is at this point is brains and sex” (quoted in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014], 316).

[3] One-Way Street's publication coincided with the publication of Benjamin's “failed” Habilitation thesis, Origin of German Tragic Drama.

[4] Eiland and Jennings, A Critical Life, 301; One-Way Street, 449. In part, this is to say that One-Way Street very much embodies Benjamin's thinking in his 1920 essay, “The Concept of Criticism,” and his magisterial work of 1924, “Goethe's Elective Affinities.”

[5] With respect to the latter, it is well worth an afternoon to read an introductory textbook, such as Robert Dahl and Bruce Stinebrickner, Modern Political Analysis (6th ed.) (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002).

[6] The dynamic “speaks” to the “secret” interests that drive the production of the book review.

[7] The other aphorism is: “Arc Lamp—The only way of knowing a person is to love that person without hope.” Taken together, these two lines are nothing less than an allegory of Benjamin's 1916 essay, “On Language As Such and on the Language of Man.”

[8] Benjamin, “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 59.