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In 1971, the chief editor of the Berlin journal Alternative Hildegard Brenner wrote that: "[t]he name of Asja Lacis should have been mentioned two decades ago by those who knew of the historical connections. This did not happen. The 1955 publication of Benjamin's Schriften saw the removal of the dedication of One-Way Street to his `girl-friend in Riga'; the name of Lacis as co-author of the `Naples' essay was also stricken." 1 Another three decades have passed, and Lacis has yet to receive the recognition she deserves. Credit given her as co-author of "Naples" in Benjamin's 1978 collection of essays, Reflections, linked her name irrevocably with Benjamin's. 2 She would now seem to be firmly ensconced in Benjamin studies as the femme fatale responsible for seducing him with Marxist materialism away from his Jewish heritage and faithful wife. The blurb on the back of the 1986 English translation of Benjamin's Moscow Diary offers a succinct summation of this myth:
1. Hildegard Brenner, "Nachwort," Asja Lacis, Revolutionar im Beruf: Berichte uber proletarisches Theater, uber Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator, ed. Hildegard Brenner (Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1971, 1976) 113. All quotations from Lacis's work are my own.
2. Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, "Naples," Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) 163-73.
Perhaps the primary reason for this trip was his affection for Asja Lacis, a Latvian Bolshevik who would remain an important intellectual and erotic influence on him throughout the twenties and thirties. 3
3. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge & London: Harvard UP, 1986).
It goes on to hail the diary as:
on one level, the account of his masochistic love affair with this elusive - and rather unsympathetic - object of desire. On another level, it is the story of a failed romance with the Russian Revolution.
The parallelism in this passage between Benjamin's romance with both Lacis and the revolution suggests that the former has been fashioned to fit the narrative of a "failed romance." The forces behind the creation of this "elusive - and rather unsympathetic - object of desire" remain unexplored. An obituary and a book review represent the extent of the interest Lacis...