(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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WOLFGANG BOCK
to this old connection, it takes people by surprise by itself — as was the
case in the First World War and would likely be the case in Benjamin’s
perspective on the Second World War. In this sense the development of
the technical sphere for Benjamin is not a war between humans and nature
but a problem of justice and grace among human beings and in this case
one of the key issues concerning coming civilizations.
With this enigmatic ending of the collection Benjamin turns back to
his first item — as a program to put these ideas into action. The construction
principle of his book is cyclic.
III. A Surrealist in His Own Right
Very similar to the works of Philippe Soupault, André Breton, or Louis
Aragon and the idea of surrealistic pictures, but also alluding to Dada
and Paul Scheerbart, Walter Benjamin in Einbahnstraße writes surrealistic
pieces. 17 The two purest are “Polyclinic” and “Stückgut: Spedition
und Verpackung” (“Mixed Cargo: Shipping and Packing”). In
the first one Benjamin relates the writing process in a café to a surgical
operation — connecting also the medical meaning of the operator (that
is, the surgeon) to the one in the film business, that is, the cameraman.
He marks a reference to Comte de Lautréamont’s (a pseudonym
of the author Isidor Ducasse, 1846–70, later popular with the surrealists)
“beautiful as . . .” poems, among them the well known “accidental
meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a surgeon’s table.”
But in this paradox, the author is patient and doctor in one person and
tries to perform a kind of auto-operation. 18 In “Stückgut” (“Mixed
Cargo”) the pursuit of the previous thought continues, but he concentrates
now on his experience with drugs: the streets of Marseille here,
for example, shrink down to a book. In “Madame Ariane Zweiter Hof
Links” (“Madame Ariane: Second Courtyard on the Left”), Benjamin
follows the conception of his writings which allow him also to interpret
the para-psychological and mystic phenomena in his literary and political
program of promoting awareness.
Benjamin outwardly emphasized a rational wake-up call and an overturning
of superstition to promote political action. But in another sense
he also goes back to dreams and contemplation. He had his own interpretation
of the sources of surrealism. In the 1920s he spent a great deal of
time in France and in 1933 he again fled to Paris. His support of a progressive
position brought him into contact with the French avant-garde
and he became intellectually close to the surrealists. But even in the early
1930s, when he lived and worked as an immigrant in Paris, he did not
have the close personal contact with them as one might assume. His intellectual
closeness to them probably came from with his personal access to
the body of ideas upon which the surrealists based their work.