An Unexpected Arrival in Riga
In November 1925, Walter Benjamin arrived in Riga without having announced his visit to the woman he had come to see. He was thirty-three, an established German literary critic and philosopher whose writings were increasingly concerned with the relationship between everyday experience, art, and modern society. Riga, then the capital of the recently established Republic of Latvia, was not a destination chosen for an academic engagement. Benjamin had travelled there to find Anna Lācis, the Latvian theatre director known as Asja, whom he had met in Italy the previous year.
His arrival became the subject of one of the short autobiographical passages later included in One-Way Street. Benjamin recalled walking through an unfamiliar city for two hours, knowing that Lācis might appear at any moment. The possibility of unexpectedly encountering her transformed ordinary surroundings into a succession of alarming and exhilarating impressions. Tramcars, entrances, and street corners acquired an intensity quite different from their everyday appearance.
The episode, preserved in the fragment commonly translated as “Ordnance”, tells us little about Riga's buildings or street plan. Instead, it records how anticipation altered Benjamin's perception of a place he barely knew. Other passages from the same visit would describe the city much more concretely.

Asja Lācis and the Reason for the Journey
The connection between Benjamin and Riga began with Lācis herself. Born in 1891, she had developed an experimental approach to theatre, particularly performances involving workers and children. Her professional activities connected Latvia with theatrical developments in Russia and Germany, and brought her into contact with figures including Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator.
Benjamin met her on the Italian island of Capri in 1924. Their acquaintance developed into a complicated personal and intellectual relationship. They also collaborated on the essay “Naples”, published in 1925, which examined how the architecture and social life of the Italian city continually intersected.

By the time Benjamin visited Riga, Lācis was engaged in political theatre and cultural education. As Andris Brinkmanis documents in his research on Lācis, she was working with the dramatic section of the Riga trade unions' central organisation.

A surviving poster dated 1 November 1925 advertises a discussion of workers' theatre introduced by Lācis. Preserved in Riga's Literature and Music Museum collection, it provides tangible evidence of her professional activities during the period.

Lācis's commitments left relatively little time for her visitor. According to Brinkmanis's examination of Benjamin's correspondence, he spent part of his stay working on a translation of Marcel Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah. His solitary walks also supplied material for an altogether different kind of writing.

The Market Beside the Daugava
One of Benjamin's most substantial Riga descriptions concerns the Daugavmala market, a trading area beside the Daugava River at the edge of the Old Town. It appears in a passage entitled “Stereoscope”, later published in One-Way Street.

The English translation reproduced by the Latvian National Museum of Art begins with a crowded collection of wooden stalls stretching along the waterfront. Benjamin notices small steamships lying beside the embankment, their funnels sometimes barely visible above the quay. Larger vessels are moored farther downstream.

This was an established feature of Riga's commercial geography. The National Library of Latvia's historical photographic collection records that a market on the Daugava waterfront was mentioned in written sources as early as 1571. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, food trading occupied part of the embankment adjoining the Old Town.

Benjamin encountered the market during its final years. Riga City Council had decided in 1922 to develop a new central food market, partly because the existing riverside facilities had become inadequate. The familiar market pavilions, incorporating structures from former German military airship hangars, would not open until 1 November 1930.

The market Benjamin described was therefore not today's Riga Central Market, but its older predecessor.

Apples, Painted Signs, and the Colours of Commerce
Benjamin's market description is remarkable for the small details that attract his attention. He records stalls selling fish, meat, footwear, and clothing, alongside women offering brightly coloured paper rods. Their appearance is compared with seasonal objects more commonly encountered in Western Europe around Christmas.

Nearby, he finds an apple market. The contrast between the fruit and its surroundings becomes one of the passage's most memorable visual effects. Apples are arranged in piles or packed in straw, and their colours compete with the red of a church visible beyond the stalls.

Moving away from the market, Benjamin turns to painted advertisements on the buildings. Shops announce their goods through enormous representations of ropes, luggage, clothing, tools, and other objects. He notices women's faces painted on a shopfront selling corsets and millinery, and another building decorated with pictures of coal and sugar sacks.

These are not comprehensive records of Riga's commercial architecture. They are selected impressions, shaped by Benjamin's attention to scale, colour, and visual surprise. Everyday objects appear enlarged, displaced, or unexpectedly theatrical.

In a Latvian translation of “Stereoscope” published by Satori, the accompanying editorial commentary discusses Benjamin's use of montage-like writing, comparing his method with cinematic close-ups.

What survives is a view of the city assembled through its smallest visible details.

A City Written in Fragments
Benjamin's Riga observations belong to an experimental form of writing rather than a conventional account of travel. One-Way Street, published in German as Einbahnstraße in 1928, consists of short texts arranged under headings that evoke urban signs, notices, advertisements, and everyday objects.

Some passages are autobiographical; others concern books, dreams, childhood, domestic life, or the city. Rather than guiding the reader through a continuous argument, the book creates connections between apparently separate experiences.

The Riga passages illustrate this approach particularly clearly. In “Ordnance”, the city is transformed by Benjamin's anticipation of meeting Lācis. In “Stereoscope”, observation proceeds through a sequence of market stalls, colours, vessels, and painted surfaces. Neither passage attempts to provide a complete portrait of Riga.

The book also contains one of the most direct acknowledgements of Lācis's importance to Benjamin. Its opening dedication names a metaphorical street after her, describing her influence through the image of an engineer cutting a road through the author.

The documenta 14 research account of Lācis identifies several passages in One-Way Street associated with Benjamin's Riga visit. Their presence makes the city part of an important stage in his literary development, without establishing that Riga alone produced the book's distinctive form.
From Riga's Streets to the Paris Arcades

Benjamin is particularly associated with his later, unfinished Arcades Project, an extensive investigation of nineteenth-century Paris, its covered shopping passages, consumer culture, architecture, and historical imagination.

According to Brown University's research bibliography, Benjamin began the project in 1927, two years after his Riga visit. It remained unfinished at his death in 1940.
There is a meaningful connection between these writings, but also an important distinction. Benjamin's surviving Riga observations concern the riverside market, shopfronts, and streets; they do not establish that he investigated Riga's covered shopping arcades. His later Parisian research was a much larger historical undertaking, developed through extensive reading, quotations, and collected notes.

What connects the two is his willingness to examine urban life through objects and details that more traditional historical accounts might overlook. Commercial displays, architecture, and seemingly minor encounters could reveal how people experienced their surroundings.

Benjamin was not alone in attending to the modern city. In Latvia, poets such as Aleksandrs Čaks, Austra Skujiņa, and Lūcija Zamaiča also explored the changing environment of Riga through literature. Their interests were not identical to his, but they belonged to a wider European reassessment of the city as a subject for art.

Riga's significance lies partly in this intersection: an international intellectual encountered a city whose own writers and artists were developing new ways of describing urban experience.

The Survival of Benjamin's Riga
Much of the physical environment Benjamin described has changed. The Daugavmala market disappeared following the development of the new Central Market, while the advertisements and small commercial establishments that interested him survive primarily through historical records, photographs, and written descriptions.

His visit has nevertheless left traces in Riga's cultural memory. In March 2015, a commemorative plaque was unveiled at Dzirnavu iela 53, marking the philosopher's association with the city.
Latvian readers have also gained greater access to his writings. In 2024, the publisher Neputns released Vienvirziena iela, containing Igors Šuvajevs's Latvian translations of One-Way Street and Berlin Childhood around 1900, with an introduction by the poet and researcher Artis Ostups.
Benjamin's observations featured again in the Latvian National Museum of Art's 2026 exhibition Wandering the Streets: Urban Visions of Latvian Modernists. Bringing together literature, paintings, graphic works, and photographs, the exhibition examined how artists and writers experienced Riga, Berlin, and Paris during a period of cultural transformation.

Benjamin left no comprehensive history of Riga. His surviving observations are partial, subjective, and sometimes deliberately strange. Precisely because they concentrate on ordinary things, however, they preserve aspects of the city's everyday appearance that might otherwise receive little attention.

The wooden market stalls have vanished, but the fragments of Riga that Benjamin noticed remain accessible in his writing.