This is Asja Lācis. A name forgotten for most of a century, her importance in the history of radical politics, thought, pedagogy, and theatre can’t be overstated.
She was the girlfriend of quite possibly the most influential theoretical writer of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin. She was Latvian, and was instrumental in the proletarianization of art in the early post-revolution Soviet Union — also a renowned expert on children’s theater, devising a revolutionary pedagogy. She introduced Bertolt Brecht, the greatest playwright of the 20th century, to the theorist of experimental theater that would forever radically change his work and secure its redoubled place in history. In her time, she was known around the Soviet world as preeminent purveyor of the artistic avant-garde. She was also a puppeteer.
Asja — adorable, young, politically outspoken (as a left Marxist) and fearless, inexhaustible, with a ferocious intellect and a lust for adventure that burned in equal brightness, esteemed, socially uninhibited. Walter Benjamin, older, politically and spiritually at a bit of a dead end, painfully awkward and quietly but numinously brilliant, bookish. She and he traveled Europe together over the course of the 1920s, and he told her at enormous length and detail of his nearly unreadably dense and opaque university-rejected monograph on German baroque tragic theater, a dizzying and cerebrally teeming thing, more about the “representation of eternal ideas…the ‘constellations’ of truth” which Lācis finally had to simply lay to rest, firmly stating a litany of clear objections to his thesis. She also met Gershom Scholem, the great Kabbalah scholar and Benjamin’s mentor and perhaps best friend, who was at the time trying to persuade him to settle in Palestine—to embrace Zionism. Benjamin waffled as he often did, under the imposing weight of his older friend, and Lācis finally cut in, unable to bear the thought: “the path of thinking persons leads to Moscow, not Palestine.” That decided that.
But her influence on him far exceeded any of these nudges. He was intoxicated by her impassioned, reasoned, humanistic devotion to that early horizon of revolutionary change and possibility. She’d devoured Marx, and Benjamin at the time still hewed to a kind of old anarchism. But he knew that history was in motion, proving the truth of her Marxism, and the result of this change of heart was the chronicle of texts headed under the name One Way Street — without whose existence, with its invention of the “imminent (or internal) critique” of the objects and things of culture and commerce we could hardly say Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Habermas, or any of the major thinkers of the new Marxian critical theory could have existed as they did. By the 60s their thinking had permeated radical social movements across the West, owing their method to texts of OWS like the Lācis-Benjamin joint masterpiece on Naples (“Naples”). The imprint of Lācis, the worldly, astonishingly brilliant and beautiful artist and provocateur lives forever in the discourse and assumptions taken for granted by the left, filtered through the crystalline literary magic of a man who saw himself first and foremost as a book collector.
