Introduction by Stanley Mitchell<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated by Anna Bostock<\/p>\n\n\n\n
144 pages \/ 3 September 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New edition<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this volume we find collected together Benjamin’s most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor Bertolt Brecht. Benjamin’s work still exerts an influence over philosophical and cultural thinking today.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018midnight of the century\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Understanding Brecht<\/em> we find collected together Benjamin\u2019s most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht\u2019s oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques\u2014such as the famous \u2018estrangement effect\u2019\u2014Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in crisis-ridden society. This volume contains Benjamin\u2019s introductions to Brecht\u2019s theory or epic theatre and close textual analyses of twelve poems by Brecht (printed in translation here) which exemplify Benjamin\u2019s insistence that literary form and content are indivisible. Elsewhere Benjamin discusses the plays The Mother<\/em>, Terror and Misery of the Third Reich<\/em>, and The Threepenny Opera<\/em>, digressing for some general remarks on Marx and satire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here we also find Benjamin\u2019s masterful essay \u201cThe Author as Producer\u201d as well as an extract from his diaries that records the intense conversations held in the late 1930s in Denmark (Brecht\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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