Proletarian children's theatre pioneer who led Walter Benjamin to Marxism and Brecht
Benjamin dedicated One-Way Street (1928): 'This street is named Asja Lacis Street, after her who as an engineer cut it through the author.'
Latvian theatre director who pioneered proletarian children's theatre after the Revolution, drew Walter Benjamin toward Marxism in 1924, and collaborated with Brecht and Piscator. After ten years in camps, returned to lead the Valmiera Theatre.
Career Timeline
- 1915–1917Studies at Komissarzhevsky Theatre School, Moscow; teaches at Latvian refugee school
- 1918–1920Founds experimental children's theatre in Orel; develops proletarian children's theatre method
- 1920–1924Heads theatre studio at Riga People's University; assists Brecht on Edward II in Munich; meets Benjamin on Capri
- 1925–1930Proletarian theatre in Riga; runs first children's cinema in Moscow; Soviet film trade mission, Berlin
- 1930–1935Asst. director for Piscator's The Revolt of the Fishermen; Latvian State Theatre; publishes Revolutionary Theatre in Germany
- 1938–1948Arrested; ten years of imprisonment and exile in Kazakhstan
- 1950–1957Chief director, Valmiera Drama Theatre; rehabilitated 1955, party membership restored 1956
Related historical events
The Encounter with Benjamin: His Turn to Marxism
In the summer of 1924, Lācis met the German literary critic Walter Benjamin on the Italian island of Capri. At the time, Benjamin was steeped in Jewish mysticism and German idealism, and knew little of Marxism. Lācis, a Bolshevik theatre director from a working-class Latvian background, opened an entirely different world to him.
Benjamin later recalled: 'She was a Latvian Bolshevik from Riga, and she lived within the certainty that Bolshevik practice gave her.' An intimate relationship and an intellectual exchange unfolded simultaneously. At Lācis's invitation, Benjamin visited Riga in 1925 and Moscow in the winter of 1926–27, producing his Moscow Diary: a vivid record of Soviet daily life, Lācis's theatre work, and above all the inner conflict of an intellectual confronting Bolshevik reality.
Lācis explained to Benjamin the political and educational significance of proletarian children's theatre. Deeply impressed, he wrote 'Programme for a Proletarian Children's Theatre' (1928) and dedicated it to her. The tribute in One-Way Street, published that same year, symbolically registers his intellectual debt. Benjamin's turn to Marxism became a decisive inflection point in his thinking in the late 1920s, and the figure who set that turn in motion was Asja Lācis.