Understanding Brecht

Walter Benjamin, Stanley Mitchell, Anna Bostock

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English

Verso
03 December 2024

Theatre Studies; Literary studies: from c 1900 -; Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers

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 Benjamin’s most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht’s oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques—such as the famous ‘estrangement effect’—Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in crisis-ridden society. This volume contains Benjamin’s introductions to Brecht’s theory or epic theatre and close textual analyses of twelve poems by Brecht (printed in translation here) which exemplify Benjamin’s 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 Benjamin’s 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 (Brecht’s 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.

By: Walter Benjamin
Introduction by: Stanley Mitchell
Translated by: Anna Bostock
Imprint: Verso
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 9mm
Weight: 122g
ISBN: 9781804294796
ISBN 10: 1804294799
Pages: 144
Publication Date: 03 December 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction by Stanley Mitchell What is Epic Theatre? [First version] What is Epic Theatre? [Second version] Studies for a Theory of Epic Theatre From the Brecht Commentary A Family Drama in the Epic Theatre The Country where it is Forbidden to Mention the Proletariat Commentaries on Poems by Brecht Brecht's Threepenny Novel The Author as Producer Conversations with Brecht Bibliographical Notes Index

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.

Reviews for Understanding Brecht

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