Benjamin and Brecht by Erdmut Wizisla

Author:Erdmut Wizisla
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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Brecht on Benjamin

‘Expert Opinions’

Brecht followed Benjamin’s work attentively and with a sympathy undimmed by differences over content. His opinions are pointed, sometimes polemical, and always committed to Benjamin’s topics. Admittedly, they do not provide a counterpart to Benjamin’s essays on him, but they reciprocate the critic’s interest and show that the relationship was a mutual one. Brecht’s statements on the texts ‘Problems in the Sociology of Language’, ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ and ‘On the Concept of History’ are among the few perceptive contemporary reactions to Benjamin’s work. In Benjamin, Brecht saw above all an advocate, a critic who strategically supported him, and he valued him as a partner in discussions, whose knowledge and opinions were of benefit to him. How enduringly he was affected by Benjamin’s fate is shown by four poems in which he made creative use of the news of his friend’s death.

Brecht’s interest in Benjamin the critic, who made no secret of his approval, without doubt had self-serving features. For a start it corresponded to his strategy of influencing the reception of his own works and dramatic productions, but it did not end there. An entry by Benjamin in a notebook of 1929 is like a reflection of Brecht’s attitude to the public: ‘Ad vocem Brecht/We are, God knows, too isolated to allow ourselves to make enemies of our opponents.’* If the reference is to a spoken aphorism of Brecht’s, this would recall his quarrelsomeness, but also his efforts to disarm presumed or actual opponents by making a pact with them.

Brecht involved Benjamin in his work, as he did many of his friends and acquaintances, making manuscripts available to him with requests for criticism, and sending him textual variants asking him for his preference. He expected ‘expert opinions’ from his friend.† From 1933 Margarete Steffin acted as gobetween, and her letters also reflect Brecht’s interest in his critic. In the spring of 1934, for example, when Brecht and Eisler were working on the first version of Roundheads and Pointed Heads, they needed ‘someone who is not so deep inside the material and could therefore take a more objective view of how things are going’. Steffin asked whether Benjamin would not like to be that someone.* Similarly, in the case of The Threepenny Novel, whose creation Benjamin had followed in the autumn of 1933 in Paris, Steffin wrote that Brecht would gladly send him the revised version of the novel, as they were ‘no longer “cool observers” by the umpteenth reading’.1

A particular sign of Brecht’s confidence in Benjamin was his request to the latter to accompany the publication of his Gesammelte Werke by Malik Verlag with one or two major essays on Brecht’s work. As early as the planning stage, in the autumn of 1935, Margarete Steffin had asked Benjamin:

I have a little project in mind: sayings from Brecht’s works. I’m sure such a little volume would be useful and would also mean a great deal to him. It occurred to me that – if [Wieland] Herzfelde were to publish it, which is not out of the question – you might write a preface to it.

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