the term with flexibility and adaptability in the individual who dwells in abiding places
and transit areas, and with a flexibility in the structure of time as well. That time has
become transparent amounts to a writing on the wall for Benjamin. It is a feature of
revolutionary moments that the linear course of time is interrupted and that a new
calendar is introduced or that the clocks are stopped. It is no coincidence, then, that
he refers to Russia in this connection. Russia, which Benjamin had visited in the win-
ter of 1926–1927, was, after all, the country where communism was gradually be-
coming a reality (this quotation dates from 1929) and which constituted the hope of
many left-wing intellectuals, including Benjamin.
References to Russia appear elsewhere in his work. In his essay “Surreal-
ism,” for instance, he recalls an experience he had in a Russian hotel, where he was
astonished by the number of bedroom doors left open by the guests. It made him re-
alize that “to live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an
intoxication, a moral exhibition that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own
existence, once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of petit-
bourgeois parvenus.”^101
3
Reflections in a Mirror62
Interior of one of the houses for
the Bauhaus professors, built by
Walter Gropius in Dessau, 1926.
(From Walter Gropius,
Bauhausbauten Dessau, 1930,
fig. 132, photo by Consemüller.)