(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

LOST ORDERS OF THE DAY: BENJAMIN’S EINBAHNSTRASSE
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at the same time close to and distant from one another, and the range
of his metaphorical and literal language even makes the borders of the
thought-figures themselves seem to disappear. In this sense Benjamin is
even nowadays a very contemporary thinker and writer. But in other cases
he is a product of his time and circumstances: a German-Jewish thinker
between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. To continue a Benjaminian
mythology and a new Benjamin cult is the worse thing that could
happen to him and his work.
His afterlife meandered on diverse paths. His son Stefan, who stayed
in London after the war and died in the 1970s, married a Chinese
woman, who was a Buddhist. And nowadays his two granddaughters,
Mona Jean and Kim Yvon, are Benjamin’s last close relatives. His ideas,
which emerged in a distinctly German context, have now spread all over
the world, and no one knows what will grow from them and where, in
which culture and in which constellation we will see a new blossoming of
his thoughts.
Notes
1
See Chronology, 1924, SW 1:510–11. In 1925 they wrote together the text
“Naples,” which was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung the same year (GS
IV.1:307–16; SW 1:414–21). See also Benjamin’s “Programm eines proletarischen
Kindertheaters” (1928/29; GS II.3:763–69; “Program for a Proletarian
Children’s Theater,” SW 2:201–6).
2
See the contribution of Dominik Finkelde in this volume.
3
See Scholem, Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1975), 194.
4
Letter to Scholem, 22 Dec. 1924, Gesammelte Briefe in 6 Bänden, ed. Christoph
Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995–2000), II:510;
The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and
Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1994), 257. These works will henceforth be referred to in
the text as GB and CWB respectively.
5
Letter to Scholem, 29 May 1926, GB 3:161. In his review Gérard Raulet
shows the early relationship of Benjamin to the Constructivists in Berlin: “One-
Way Street,” in Benjamin–Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. Burckhardt
Lindner (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006), 363.
6
See his letter to Herbert Blumenthal, Venice, 3 Jun. 1912; GB 1:53–54.
7
Palladio’s design is close to Louis Aragon’s description of the Passage de l’Opéra
in his Paris Peasant, which Benjamin, in his Passagen-Werk, reads as a enigmatic
image of heaven and hell. See Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (AP, h°, I).
8
See “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire,” GS I.2:605–54; SW 4:313–55. See
also Wolfgang Bock, Walter Benjamin — Die Rettung der Nacht (Bielefeld: Aisthesis,
2000), 429–30.