Is Dadaism as sign and gesture the opposite of Bolshevism?” Ball asks in his diary on June 7, 1917. “Strange incidents: when we had the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich at Spiegelgasse , there lived at Spiegelgasse 6, opposite us, if I am not mistaken, Mr. Ulyanov-Lenin.” A year and a half later in Bern, Ball meets Walter Benjamin, whom he introduces to Ernst Bloch, newly author of The Spirit of Utopia (1918). Benjamin is very impressed by Bloch; at this point his scales of history still tilt in favor of hope. Several years later, at the end of “One-Way Street (1923–26),a textual montage that works to relay, through imagistic vignettes and abrupt cuts,the shock experiences of industrial war and mediated metropolis, Benjaminwrites: “In the nights of annihilation of the last war, the frame of mankind wasshaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first attempt of mankind to bring the new boy under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its convalescence.” …