Understanding Brecht

(Paperback, New edition)

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The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices continued to discuss, argue and correspond on topics as varied as Fascism and the work of Franz Kafka. Faced by the onset of the midnight of the century, with the Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution in Russia, both men, in their own way, strove to keep alive the tradition of dialectical critique of the existing order and radical intervention in the world to transform it. In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamins most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brechts oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniquessuch as the famous estrangement effectBenjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in crisis-ridden society. This volume contains Benjamins introductions to Brechts theory or epic theatre and close textual analyses of twelve poems by Brecht (printed in translation here) which exemplify Benjamins insistence that literary form and content are indivisible. Elsewhere Benjamin discusses the plays The Mother, Terror and Misery of the Third Reich, and The Threepenny Opera, digressing for some general remarks on Marx and satire. Here we also find Benjamins masterful essay The Author as Producer as well as an extract from his diaries that records the intense conversations held in the late 1930s in Denmark (Brechts place of exile) between the two most important cultural theorists of this century. In these discussions, the two men talked of subjects as diverse as the work of Franz Kafka, the unfolding Soviet Trials, and the problems of literary work on the edge of international war.

Reviews

A small bomb of ideas and vital argument. * Guardian *
He does not abolish the distance between us and Leskov, or Brecht, or Kafka; he brings it to life. * Times Higher Education Supplement *
If the killing of Lorca was Fascism's first crime against literature, Benjamin's death was undoubtedly the second. * The Listener *
Reading Walter Benjamin's Understanding Brecht is like stumbling on a heap of gold that has been buried in a coal cellar for more than 30 years. * New Society *
Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century. -- George Steiner

Author Bio

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.