(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

LOST ORDERS OF THE DAY: BENJAMIN’S EINBAHNSTRASSE
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a certain rhetoric: not the common book that has a distanced reader, but
politically engaged papers, pamphlets, programs, and posters would be the
new media upon which Benjamin tried to focus his interests.
From Dream to Awareness and Back
In his second piece, “Frühstücksstube” (“Breakfast Room”), Benjamin
goes on to give rules for telling about the dreams of the night the following
morning. Never do so without having eaten, he proclaims; otherwise
you will miss the distance that you essentially need and you will
speak as if you are still sleeping. In a nutshell it contains his later critique
of psychoanalysis, which he would explain in his second article about
Baudelaire. 8 Benjamin situates his interests between the traditional
categories of rules of writing and advice about daily life and also with
philosophical reflection, technical terms of psychoanalysis, and political
agendas. He stands at a lateral axis to the bourgeois institutional separation
in the area of intellect, in that he brings in new ideas but also refers
to the older tradition of the arcanum, which has to be put into action
and which he himself helped to found.
The Real Politician
This position implies political engagement and to this path also belongs
an image of the emerging politician. In the texts “Ministerium des
Innern” (“Secretary of the Interior”) and “Feuermelder” (“Fire Alarm”)
he sketches the conflict between the anarchic-socialistic and the conservative
politician and he praises the moment of kairos, a quality of time that
one has to use or it passes by.
These texts continue a course of reflection that Benjamin started with
his Zur Kritik der Gewalt (1919; The Critique of Violence), with “Sur
Scheerbart” (his essay on the utopian novel Lesabéndio by Paul Scheerbart
from 1920), and probably in a lost essay, “Der wahre Politiker” (The
Real Politician). 9 To this context also belongs a book, Dialectic in Daily
Life, that he later planned with Herbert Marcuse. 10 In these reflections he
again cultivates a heroic intellectual attitude that differs from his practical
existence. This difference allowed him to develop his lucid reflections but
it also separated him from their fulfillment in reality.
Between Germany and France
As a translator of Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, of Marcel Proust,
and of other works, Benjamin was strongly influenced by French writers
and their artistic tradition. 11 This was not very common for a German
intellectual of his period. The French and the Germans were at that
time arch-enemies. The notion that the French were associated with the