Search results

"In these times, when my imagination is preoccupied with the most unworthy problems between sunrise and sunset, I experienced at night, more and more often, its emancipation in dreams, which nearly always have a political subject. I would really like to be in a position to tell you about them someday. They represent a pictorial atlas of the secret history of National Socialism." So writes Walter Benjamin to his friend Gershom Scholem on March 3, 1934. Benjamin was unable to tell this "secret history" after the seizure of power by the National Socialists; Nevertheless, the dream has a central importance in his thought. So it seems legitimate to read in this sense the text entitled "Cellar" in "One-Way Street", where he condenses reflections on friendship, on the psychological repression, and the sacrificial symbolism. This text Benjamin's can be compared with another dream-vision called "The monastery church" present in "The adventurous heart" Ernst Jünger's, which has also a sacrificial symbolism (a sacrifice that can be read as an allegory of the complicated relations of the author with the National Socialism). The juxtaposition of these two texts can bring out a so-called "Third Reich of Dreams" (as the title of a book of 1966 of the German-Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt), to examine in a metaphorical and historical sense, as antinomical issues of a visual paradigm between dream and politics in the literary discourse.