Walter Benjamin - One-Way Street

ONE-WAY STREET

WALTER BENJAMIN

TRANSLATED BY

Edmund Jephcott

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Michael W. Jennings

PREFACE BY

Greil Marcus

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
2016

This work is a translation of a selection from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, unter Mitwirkung von Theodor W. Adorno und Gershom Scholem, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhuser, copyright 1972, 1974, 1977, 1982, 1985, 1989 by Suhrkamp Verlag.

One-Way Street originally appeared in English in Walter Benjamin, Reflections, edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott.

English translation copyright 1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Published by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Preface copyright 2016 by Greil Marcus.

Introduction and notes copyright 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Cover design: Graciela Galup

Cover art: Erwin Piscator entering the Nollendorftheater, Berlin 1929 (detail). Gelatin silver print by Sasha Stone, courtesy the National Gallery of Art, gift of Henrick A. Berinson and Adam J. Boxer. Ubu Gallery, New York.

978-0-674-05229-1 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-54592-2 (EPUB)

978-0-674-54591-5 (MOBI)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Benjamin, Walter, 18921940, author. | Jephcott, E. F. N., translator. | Jennings, Michael William, editor, writer of introduction. | Marcus, Greil, writer of preface.

Title: One-way street / Walter Benjamin ; translated by Edmund Jephcott; edited and with an introduction by Michael W. Jennings; preface by Greil Marcus.

Other titles: Einbahnstrasse. English

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. | Translated from the German. | One-Way Street? originally appeared in English in Reflections by Walter Benjamin. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015039382

Subjects: LCSH: Aphorisms and apothegms. | Epigrams. | Philosophy, German20th century.

Classification: LCC PN6283 .B413 2016 | DDC 838/.91209dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039382

In Memoriam

MIRIAM BRATU HANSEN

19492011

• by Greil Marcus
• by Michael W. Jennings

Greil Marcus

One day in 1924, a German man in his early thirties steps into a European street. Businesses, shops, signs, public announcements: in the two years that it takes him to reach the end of the street, he notes everything that catches his eye, until the outlines of a city come into view.

Filling Station

Breakfast Room

Number 113

For Men

Standard Clock

Come Back! All Is Forgiven!

Manorially Furnished Ten-Room Apartment

Chinese Curios

Gloves

Mexican Embassy

To the Public: Please Protect and Preserve These New Plantings

Construction Site

Ministry of the Interior

Flag

at Half-Mast

Imperial Panorama

Underground Works

Coiffeur for Easily Embarrassed Ladies

Caution: Steps

Attested Auditor of Books

Teaching Aid

Germans, Drink German Beer!

Post No Bills

Number 13

Ordnance

First Aid

Interior Decoration

Stationers

Fancy Goods

Enlargements

Antiques

Watchmaker and Jeweler

Arc Lamp

Loggia

Lost-and-Found Office

Stand for Not More than Three Cabs

Monument to a Warrior

Fire Alarm

Travel Souvenirs

Optician

Toys

Polyclinic

These Spaces for Rent

Office Equipment

Mixed Cargo: Shipping and Packing

Closed for Alterations

Stamp Shop

Si Parla Italiano

Technical Aid

Hardware

Tax Advice

Legal Protection for the Needy

Doctors Night-Bell

Madame Ariane: Second Courtyard on the Left

Costume Wardrobe

Betting Office

Stand-Up Beer Hall

No Vagrants!

To the Planetarium

At the same time, in Paris, a man in his mid-twenties enters the Passage de lOpra, and, as if sighting the first mans itinerary from across their borders in advance, subsumes his long list down to essentialsFor Men, Coiffeur for Easily Embarrassed Ladies, and Stamp Shopand catches them all, catches all of life, in a single glimpse.

Two hairdressers follow the stamp dealer in single file, the first a ladies hairdresser, the second a Salon for Gentlemen. The specializations involved in your functions as hairdressers to the two sexes are by no means lacking in pungency. The laws of the world are inscribed in the letters across your shop fronts.

A few years after that, in 1930, a Berlin filmmaker cuts hundreds of street soundsmachines starting up, men talking, policemen blowing whistles, children asking questions, doors closing, bells gonging, women singing, pianos playing, with whistling, percussion, or cuckoo clock noises framing it allinto a rhythmic eleven-minute movie without images (it may have been screened as such in a theater), a radio play in which, from then to now, any inhabitant of any industrialized nation could instantly find a place.

Almost fifteen years later, in 1944, a German refugee from the Third Reich, living in Los Angeles, drawn like the first man to a philosophy of names and phrases, begins another map, using philosophical fortune cookies instead of commercial shingles.

Articles may not be exchanged

Baby with the bath-water

Plurale tantum

Tough Baby

To them shall no thoughts be turned

English spoken

On parle franais

Paysage

Dwarf fruit

Pro domo nostra

Cat out of the bag

Savages are not more noble

Out of the firing-line

Johnny-Head-in-Air

Back to culture

The Health unto Death

This side of the pleasure principle

Invitation to the dance

Ego is Id

Always speak of it, never think of it

Inside and outside

Freedom of thought

Unfair intimidation

Just short of ten years after that, again in Paris, a twenty-year-old, a believer in something he and his fellows call psychogeography, looks at the city as if to leap off of the infinity marked by the first mans last sighting and the prolegomenon to all future cataloging of commercial establishments in the second mans last sentence, listing the most suggestive street names the city has given up.

Bains-Douches des Patriarches

Machines trancher les viandes

Zoo Notre-Dame

Pharmacie des Sports

Alimentation des Martyrs

Bton translucide

Scierie Main-dor

Centre de recuperation fonctionnelle

Ambulance Saint-Anne

Cinquime avenue caf

Rue des Volontaires Prolonge

Pension de famille dans le jardin

Htel des Etrangers

Rue Sauvage

Et la piscine de la rue des Fillettes. Et le commissariat de police de la rue du Rendez-vous. La clinique medico-chirurgicale et le bureau de placement gratuity du quai des Orfvres. Les fleurs artificielles de la rue du Soleil. Lhtel des Caves du Chteau, le bar de lOcan et le caf du Va et Vient. Lhtel de lEpoque.

Like others before them and after (Thomas De Quinceys explorations of London in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821, Ed Ruscha with his photo-book Every Building on the Sunset Strip in 1966, Laura Oldfield Ford with her excavations of a ruined London hidden in plain sight in her zine Savage Messiah from 2006 to 2009), these fiveWalter Benjamin, with One-Way Street, written between 1924 and 1926 and published in 1928; Louis Aragon, with The Passage de lOpra, written in 1924 and published as the first chapter of his