In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

94 ARRAYS
has become an Einbahnstrape, a one-way street-a way with no possible
return.
But can Asja Lacis, who inspired the great and unhappy love of Walter
Benjamin's life, be pleased to be addressed as an "engineer"? Surprisingly,
perhaps, the way in which she conceives of her job as the director
of a "proletarian children's theater" in the Soviet Union (von Soden and
Schmidt, 81f£.) allows for such associations between her profession and
that of an engineer. Unlike what she would call the "bourgeois tradition"
in education and art, her work with proletarian children is directed
toward an explicit function and goal-the goal of active politicization.
Professing the credo of materialism, "revolutionary" pedagogues, in
addition, often base their work on a mechanistic conception of the
human psyche. Such is the case with Ivan Petrovich Pavlov: "Pavlov's
studies will, presumably, have decisive importance for philosophers.
Likewise for teachers, politicians, judges, and artists ... On the basis of
the study of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes, a fundamentally
new pedagogical technique will come into being" (Toller, 182). To treat
a comrade with the technical competence and the violent "sobriety" of
an engineer can therefore be an acceptable form of interaction among
revolutionary Marxists [see Sobriety vs. Exuberance]-so long as this
style is justified by a shared goal.
On Monday, December 6, Benjamin arrives in Moscow, where Asja
Lacis is being treated at a sanatorium after suffering a nervous breakdown
(Benjamin, Tagebuch, 177). During the two months he spends in
the Soviet Union, the encounters with his beloved will be a long chain
of frustrations culminating in a lonesome New Year's Eve: "More in the
spirit of exploration than from genuine emotion, I asked her to come
outside and give me one last kiss to mark the waning of the old year. But
she wouldn't. I left, and spent New Year's Eve alone, but not sad" (86).
Despite his desperate efforts, the exploration of Asja Lacis' mind is
turning into an expression of Benjamin's unfulfilled love. This is why he
wants to convince himself that Asja's refusal to kiss him is not a "sad"
event, and this must also be why he tends to describe their relationship
with those metaphors of revolutionary engineering which he feels will
please her. His more spontaneous reactions to the popularity of this
language in the Soviet Union, however, are of an almost aggressive
skepticism: "Everything technical is sacrosanct here; nothing is taken