ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From International Socialism (1st series), No.58, May 1973, pp.25-26.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Understanding Brecht
Walter Benjamin
New Left Books, £2.25
The publication in English of any of the relatively unknown works of Walter Benjamin is itself a significant event. But an encounter between two German Marxists as dissimilar in style of thought as Benjamin and Bertold Brecht is especially interesting.
Benjamin came from a Jewish bourgeois family, studied philosophy, and after the First World War worked as an essayist and literary critic in Berlin and Frankfurt. He fled to Paris when Nazis came to power, where he lived until 1940; after the fall of France, he was caught trying to flee across the Pyrenees and committed suicide just before being handed over to the Gestapo.
The work he left behind him reveals a curious blending of Marxism (which he encountered in its Lukacsian forms in the early twenties), culure, criticism, and Jewish mysticism; but his major importance lies in the relations he tried to establish between revolutionary theory and the experimental art-forms rife in the Europe of the 1920s and ‘30s.
It is here that his relation with Brecht is significant. Benjamin met Brecht in the late 1920s and became one of his first critical champions. At first glance it’s difficult to see much theoretical common ground between the two writers. The heavily neo-Hegelian Marxism of Benjamin – subtle, esoteric, concerned primarily with forms of consciousness rather than with productive relationships – sits uneasily with the sharply practical bent of a man who placed beside his typewriter a small wooden donkey around whose neck was written: ‘Even I must understand it’.
Yet the true common ground was established in Benjamin’s admiration for Brecht’s creation of the ‘epic’ theatre – the theatre which broke decisively with the mystifications of bourgeois drama and transformed the relations between actors and audience, text and performance, song and diaglogue, the theatre and society.
The grounds of Benjamin’s enthusiasm for epic theatre are clear enough in his classic essay on The Author as Producer, reprinted as a chapter in this book. There Benjamin poses a question which is relatively original in Marxist aesthetics: he asks first, not what a cultural work’s position is vis-à-vis the productive relations of its time, but what its position is within them.
He means by this that the artist must himself be understood as a producer, located within the production process, working with certain techniques which it is his task to transform, within the determinants of capitalist culture. Rather than merely supplying material for the existing cultural apparatus, the revolutionary artist must see himself as an engineer whose task is to adapt that apparatus to the ends of working-class revolution.
Brecht’s epic theatre has done precisely this: its importance lies not simply in providing revolutionary drama but in ‘revolutionising’ the theatrical apparatus itself, transforming the mode of cultural production rather than merely producing new cultural artefacts.
Benjamin’s concept of the artist as producer is of central importance to any Marxist cultural theory; to speak of ‘imaginative production’ rather than ‘imaginative creation’ is already to put some of the assumptions of bourgeois Romanticism into question.
The rest of the book consists of a series of articles on various aspects of Brecht’s work, reprinted from Benjamin’s journalism. A few of these are brief fragments which don’t dig particularly deep; others, such as the piece on What is Epic Theatre? and the sensitive critical commentary on Brecht’s poems, reveal Benjamin’s superb interpretative powers at their best.
Fragmentation is, indeed, a characteristic of Benjamin’s work: apart from his early book The Origins of Germany Tragedy, much of his output consists in brief articles, notes and essays. Those who are led by the title of this book to anticipate a full-length study of Brecht will be disappointed, and not unreasonably: to have had a book by Benjamin on Brecht with all the detailed analysis and ambitious theoretical perspective of the study of German tragedy would have been valuable indeed.
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 10.3.2008