Diary of a reality deception

Walter Benjamin's month and a half spent in 1926/1927 Moscow have nothing to do with the "revolutionary tourism" or contemporary emotional - but nothing more than emotional- descriptions on Soviet Russia. In a way, proportions kept, it's a kind of clarification with himself he needed, whatever the personal and intellectual risks.

Why he's there? Three main reasons, all of them having the same personal importance: to clarify its tormented relationship with his Latvian love and muse, Asja Lācis; to get a deep knowledge of the situation in Russia, and following to it to make a choice whether joining the Communist Party.

While waiting to meet Asja suffering in sanatorium, he's on a permanent peregrinations through Moscow - in the upheaval of the New Economic Policy, visiting from churches, small shops, streets, courtyards, going to theatre to see live Meyerhold or Stanislavki's artistic visions. or to buy lots of toys or look at the artistic or propaganda posters - whose Nazi translations are coming shortly. The low quality of human contacts, because lacking the knowledge of Russian, is impeding him to go right at the core of the world around, but he still insists to be present. Later on, his Moscow journey will be shared in Martin Buber's Die Kreatur. His intention as set in a previous letter to Buber: "I want to construct a portrayal of the city of Moscow at this moment, in which everything factual is already theory, and which thus refrain from all deductive abstraction, all prognostication, indeed, within limits, from any kind of value judgements". He's not a revolutionary propagandist, but a writer, an intellectual able to offer his personal view, acknowledging in the same time the strict limits set by the time. And, in fact, the time in revolutionary periods is getting new significations. Any moment could bring something new, a minute could reverse an entire situation. In his 1926/1927 Moscow, people are still longing from the aristocracy period, while on proletarian clothes: they are still Christmas marks, women are looking for tailored, individual clothes, the small shops are still open. But daily people's life is moving very very fast. The private life is almost absent for those involved in the revolutionary project. The human relations are changing: if you stop seeing somebody for a couple of days, sooner it will be impossible to reach him because he's part of a new social group, in another far-away place. You enter or you die, including from the social point of view.

The outcome. On the personal side, his relationship with Asja is over. Later on - in 1928 -, he separated from his wife Dora and even he will live together with Asja for two months, in Berlin and Frankfurt. But that's all. In ideological/political terms he concluded that "The life in Russia is for me too difficult within the Party, and outside the Party it doesn't offer too many chances, remaining still difficult". In the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction he will outline that "All efforts to render politics aesthetic leads to one thing: war". He kept himself disengaged and confered himself the freedom to see, even it was about his personal life or the political environment.

And his trip is closed. "With the large suitcase on my knees, I drove weeping through the darkening streets to the station". It was his choice to face the reality.