The Patient's Angel: One-Way Street Read with Benjamin's Kafka

Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street can be read as a gesture toward Franz Kafka. Benjamin's primary intention in writing this book was to create what he called a "plaquette for friends," a privately printed brochure collecting dreams, aphorisms, and jokes from and for his close acquaintances. This idea already has a special affinity to Kafka's intimate method of writing and his experimentation with a variety of small literary forms. And a search for traces of Kafka in One-Way Street discovers them on many pages, not only in formal experiments but also in motifs. This essay considers thirteen such motifs: process, law, dream, animals, gesture, shame, laughter, forgetting, memory, scripture, death, catastrophe, and hope. In so doing, it assesses One-Way Street as a link between Kafka's parables, Benjamin's early readings of Kafka, his first reviews and discussions of the author, and his great Kafka essay from 1934. Under the auspices of Benjamin's Kafka interpretation, One-Way Street reveals itself as a collection of dreams, a book of gestures and alienation, and-like Kafka's Trial-a book for those who live in cities. Such books have no indoctrinating intentions but are all the more significant for that.