BENJAMIN, Walter.

£12,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Einbahnstrasse. Scarce first edition of the philosopher's literary reflections, his only non-academic work that he lived to see published. "In its typeface and format - a photomontage by Sasha Stone adorns the cover - as well as in its fragmentary style, it is demonstrably one of the most significant products of the German language avant-garde in the 1920s" (Witte, p. 91).This work denounces the "pretentious, universal gesture of the book" to champion the immediacy of language in flitting fragments of text - street signs, leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. The medium of Einbahnstrasse reflects this message: the typography and layout are inspired by Bauhaus and constructivist aesthetics, while the street-scene cover design has become the most famous work of the Russian-born photographer Sasha Stone. Since writing his postdoctoral work The Origin of German Tragic Drama in 1925, Benjamin had became a prominent cultural critic and "a prolific book-reviewer, travel-reporter, and radio-scriptwriter, forsaking his more esoteric diction for an often disconcertingly concrete language, metaphysical for more topical terrains" (publisher's note, 1997, p. 33)."The pivotal position of One-Way Street within Benjamin's work, however, is not due only to its compact register of the sudden mutation in his critical, aesthetic, and political opinions in the mid-twenties. It above all lies in the fact that in the same swift movement with which Benjamin passed from the banks of tradition

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