The Porous Coupling of Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis

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Notes

notes

I am grateful to reviewers for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and to Moira Gatens for stimulating me to reflect upon the gender–genre problematic.

1. Scholem's puzzlement, especially in regard to what attracted Benjamin to Lacis during and after the erotically frustrated and disappointing episode recorded in Benjamin's Moscow Diary, is discussed in detail later in this paper.

2. Original German text: Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 6: 427.

3. The meeting is described in Lacis’ autobiography in a passage quoted in Smith 140.

4. The essay was composed in 1922 and published in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's journal Neue Deutsche Beiträge in 1924–25.

5. “Publisher's Note” in Benjamin, One-Way Street, 36. From 1930 to 1933, Benjamin published an average of fifteen articles per year in this paper, using it as “a forum for a politicised discussion of the literary writer's social situation” (Buck-Morss 34).

6. See Ingram. Apart from her own article, Ingram remarks that “an obituary and a book review represent the extent of the interest Lacis has so far generated in English” (160). She is referring here to Haus, “In Memoriam Asja Lacis” and Parmalee, review of “Revolutionär im Beruf.” To this list should be added a short article by Zipes. Ingram is excluding texts in which Benjamin is the main focus, and mention of Lacis is only incidental or secondary.

7. The dissertation was eventually published in 1928 as Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels [The Origin of German Tragic Drama] (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1928); reissued in 1962 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp).

8. Excerpts from Benjamin's text first appeared within an article by Lacis, “Das ‘Programm eines proletarischen Kindertheaters.’” The full German text of the “Program” was published soon afterwards, along with a memoir by Lacis: “Städte und Menschen. Erinnerungen,” Sinn und Form 21 (1969): 1326–57. An English translation of the “Program” and a short memoir by Lacis appeared in Performance 1.5 (1973): 24–32.

9. See Zipes 23–24. The intention to erase the record of Lacis’ importance for Benjamin is even more flagrantly displayed in the fact that when the “Naples” essay was published in 1955 as part of Benjamin's Schriften, Lacis’ name as co-author was omitted, and the dedication of his book One-Way Street to Lacis was also removed. See Ingram 159.

10. Asja Lacis, Revolutionär im Beruf: Berichte über proletarisches Theater, über Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator, ed. Hildegard Brenner (Munich: Rogner, 1971). This work has also been published in French as Profession: Révolutionnaire. Sur le theatre prolétarien: Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin, Piscator, trans. and intro. Philippe Ivernel, afterword by Hildegard Brenner (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1989). A more personal memoir written in Russian was also published five years after Lacis’ death, entitled Krasnaya Gvozdika, Vospominanya [The Red Carnation] (Riga: Liecma, 1984). For a comparison of the German and Russian memoirs, see Ingram 159–77.

11. Zipes 23–24. Such theatre groups included Theater im Märkischen Viertel, Gruppe Spielumwelt, Grips, and TAT.

12. Benjamin, Moscow Diary 21. This diary entry also testifies to the difficulties involved in working with these “wild” children: Benjamin relates Lacis’ anxiety over an incident in which a child in her care had “bashed in the skull of another of her children […] (which could have had grave consequences for Asja; but the doctors were convinced that the child would be saved).”

13. Scholem reports that Benjamin and Kellner's marriage had effectively already ended by 1923, before Benjamin met Lacis, and from that time onwards Walter and Dora lived together only as friends, primarily for the sake of their son, but “presumably out of financial considerations as well” (Scholem 94). In spite of this, Kellner reacted very badly to Benjamin's request for a divorce, and saw Lacis as “the only real calamity” their marriage was unable to withstand. She wrote to Scholem at the time of the divorce suit, claiming that under the spell of Lacis, her “poor Walter” had been reduced to a creature who “consists only of head and sexual organs, everything else has been completely shut off, and you know, or can imagine, that in such cases it doesn’t last long until the head is also switched off” (qtd in German in Hans Putties and Gary Smith, Benjaminiana: Eine Biografische Recherche (Giessen: Anabas, 1991) 144–45; English translation in Ingram 169).

14. This was a recurrent complaint, in which Lacis’ co-ordination of movement was affected. It seems to have been a neural disorder, rather than a psychological condition, as has often been assumed: see Ingram 172–73.

15. Quoted in Sontag 14. Scholem also says that “to deal with Benjamin one had to have the greatest patience oneself. Only very patient people could gain deeper contact with him.”

16. After the trip to Russia, Benjamin published a short article on “Russian Toys” in the Sudwestdeutsche Rundfunkzeitung, which appears to have been part of a longer manuscript, now lost. The article is included as an appendix to Benjamin, Moscow Diary 123–24 (translation by Gary Smith).

17. This visit is related in Benjamin, Moscow Diary 30 (entry for 17 December). In a letter of 26 December 1926, addressed to Jula Radt (the other of the three great loves of his life), Benjamin describes this visit like something out of a fairy tale: “There have been many beautiful things: a sleigh ride through the Russian winter woods to visit a pretty little girl in a first-rate children's clinic” (appendix to Benjamin, Moscow Diary 123).

18. Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, “Naples” in Benjamin, One-Way Street 169. Buck-Morss notes that the concept of “porosity,” which is central to this essay, was suggested by Lacis (Buck-Morss 26).