Walter Benjamin was a German literary critic of unusually wide interest who moved from a background in the German-Jewish upper bourgeoisie toward commitment to the working-class movement. He was 48 years old when he killed himself in 1940 while attempting to escape from occupied France to Spain. Among his achievements in a productive and rich literary life, he translated works by Baudelaire and Proust into German, produced a stream of literary essays and reviews through which he rediscovered many hitherto buried facets of German and other literature, became a personal friend of Bertolt Brecht and the first critic to be taken seriously by him, was driven into exile in 1933, and worked until his death on a unique study of nineteenth-century Paris, a collage of contemporary texts and Marxist cultural history.

Benjamin’s essays on Brecht were written in the 1930s. This collection, first published in West Germany in 1966, contains everything now available that he wrote about Brecht, except for a radio talk given in 1932. It includes his theoretical accounts of Brecht’s in some ways unfortunately named ‘epic theatre’, reviews of his plays, commentaries on his poetry, a review of the ‘Threepenny Novel’, and a remarkable diary of ‘Conversations’ with Brecht (these two items are not discussed in this review), and the talk entitled ‘The author as producer’. This material is introduced by Stanley Mitchell, in a piece packed with thought and rich in ideas, which also contains an important critical evaluation of Benjamin’s aesthetic position and its consequences. Thanks to John Willett’s The theatre of Brecht, and his translations, Brecht on theatre and The Messingkauf dialogues, we now have every opportunity to learn what epic theatre is, even if we still have too little opportunity to see it; although – as Stanley Mitchell suggests – the spread of street-theatre and agitprop could bring us nearer to it. Benjamin’s two essays on epic theatre printed here – two versions, in fact, of the same essay – are introductions inspired with real feeling, full of intricate but essential thought, which require and repay several readings.

‘Epic’ theatre is a ‘narrative … not tied to time’ (Brecht found the phrase in Aristotle) which is also an ‘applied’ theatre – in other words, has a purpose outside itself and is not only a spectacle, though Brecht always stressed that it should always give the pleasure of a spectacle as well. Its effect is achieved with the same equipment as the ordinary, or as Brecht called it, ‘culinary’, theatre – stage, props, actors, make-up, etc. – by introducing certain techniques as a result of which the stimulation in the audience of emotional recognition and empathy for character is subordinated to the provocation of social and intellectual curiosity and concern about situation. In Benjamin’s words, epic theatre repeatedly ‘brings the dialectic to a standstill’ on the stage in order to reveal it to the public. This it does by using ‘gestures’ – typical reactions to certain situations and conditions – which, as Benjamin puts it, ‘test them [the conditions] on men’. The gesture – or non-verbal communication – can be a shrug of the shoulder, a particular way of smiling, of hesitation, of repetition, etc, all of which can occur in the same character in different contexts. Whereas the conventional, naturalistic theatre focuses on what such gestures reveal about certain characters, Brecht focused on what they reveal about the nature of the contexts, and he saw them as the most striking and direct way of confronting the public with such revelations.

These two short pieces by Benjamin are masterpieces of compression, and a reminder that, for all their differences of background and temperament, Benjamin and Brecht shared a mental agility and terseness of expression which sharpens the awareness of the reader.

Benjamin’s ‘commentaries’ on Brecht’s poems (printed in English translation in this volume) are explicitly not literary exercises but, as Benjamin says, ‘proceed from the classical nature of the text and hence, as it were, form a prejudgment’. They are good examples of how a close textual reading of a poem can be employed to capture the unity of form and content, and not – as so often – to separate the two. The first commentary, on the Mahagony Songs (from the Brecht/Weill opera, The rise and fall of the city of Mahagony) remains somewhat obscure, because the songs are inevitably divorced from their context here. It would be better to start with the last of all, on the ‘Legend of the origin of the Tao-te Ching on Lao Tzu’s way into exile’, Brecht’s famous account of how a great work of literature and philosophy is, in the words of the poem, ‘elicited’ by a working man – a customs officer. This poem thus contains, transfigured, as it were, in a Chinese miniature, Brecht’s concern with the purpose of intellectual work and its relation to the masses. What Benjamin chooses to emphasize in his reading of it is the friendliness of the great philosopher – a friendliness which lies between the lines of the poem rather than at its centre. In showing how this friendliness is the motive force of the philosopher’s action, Benjamin highlights Brecht’s own friendliness for ‘those things which are inconspicuous, and sober and inexhaustible, like water’, a friendliness which motivated the poem, much as the customs man ‘elicited’ the ‘Tao-te Ching’.

The most important single piece in this volume is the talk entitled ‘The author as producer’, originally given in Paris in 1934. First published in English translation in the New Left Review three years ago, it has already had an influence in Britain; Stuart Hall, for instance, uses it very effectively in his analysis of Picture Post in a recent issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies. (no. 2, 1972). The following passages show how contemporary this talk of nearly forty years ago has remained.

‘Let us follow [Benjamin says] the subsequent development of photography. What do we see? It has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it … It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment’.
And later:
‘I have spoken of the way in which certain modish photographers proceed in order to make human misery an object of consumption. Turning to the New Objectivity [i.e. ultra realism in the arts] as a literary movement, I must go a step further and say that it has turned the struggle against misery into an object of consumption. In many cases, indeed, its political significance has been limited to converting revolutionary reflexes, in so far as these occurred within the bourgeoisie, into themes of entertainment and amusement which can be fitted without much difficulty into the cabaret life of a large city’.

‘The author as producer’ goes straight to the core of the question, what is an author’s position vis-à-vis the relations of production and what should he produce? The starting-point is Plato’s strictures on art in the Republic; namely, that it has no place in a perfect community. Benjamin points out that this is indeed the only logical conclusion to Plato’s belief that only applied art – art with a social purpose – is valid, and he defends it. He goes on to stress that it is not enough for the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois writer to be committed to the proletarian cause, let alone be its ‘well-wisher’ or ‘intellectual patron’, but that he must fight in its ranks; and Benjamin argues that the only way he can do this is by becoming a manufacturer of cultural innovations which can be used to serve that cause. Thus, according to Benjamin, the non-proletarian intellectual must become a technician, a manufacturer of formal innovations which can be used as tools in the struggle of the proletariat. As practical examples, he cites Sergei Tretyakov – the exemplary Soviet revolutionary writer subsequently executed in the purges in the late 1930s – and Brecht.

The question arises, does Benjamin’s insistence on the role of technique represent an unwarranted narrowing-down of the problem?

‘Before I ask [he writes]: what is a work’s position vis-à-vis the production relations of its time, I should like to ask: what is its position within them? This question concerns the function of a work within the literary production relations of its time. In other words, it is directly concerned with literary technique.’

There appears to be an elision here, of ‘function … within … relations’ and technique – of the areas of the relations of production and the means of production, at the expense of the former. It is on this elision, or ‘collapsing’, that Stanley Mitchell puts his finger in his introductory essay. In accounting for it, he suggests that Benjamin’s over-emphasis on technique was a reflection of the particular phase of technical innovation in which he lived. That is undoubtedly particularly true of Benjamin, and it is worth considering why, for other writers and critics reacted to the same phase in a different way.

These issues, firstly, whether Benjamin does indeed reduce the role of the non-proletarian writer – and thus by implication possibly also the proletarian writer in this way; secondly, if so, whether such a reduction is desirable or not; and thirdly perhaps, why he does so, are not just academic debating points, but touch on the whole question of the nature of art before, during, and after the revolution. It is to be hoped that Artery can pursue their discussion.

What seems certain is that, on the evidence of his own personality and literary tastes, the somewhat austere Platonism implicit in Benjamin’s attitude to art in the Paris talk, a Platonism whose social utilitarianism has similarities with Freud’s individual utilitarian theory of art as sublimation – one suggests art is unnecessary in a perfect society, the other that it is unnecessary in a perfectly fulfilled personality – was uncharacteristically Spartan and ascetic. Perhaps it can be best examined in the light of the spirit in which Benjamin – scion of the bourgeoisie that he was, isolated from the proletariat but impelled by historical forces into its ranks and towards its ideas – cited the words of the German eighteenth-century aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: ‘It is not what a man is convinced of that matters, but what his convictions make of him’

This was the spirit which swept Benjamin, a complete social stranger, on to the shores of the working-class movement at a time when it was the leading force in the struggle against fascism. In such circumstances, it was understandable that he felt that what he could most usefully offer were formal suggestions – technique. Whether that was true or not, his desire to make a fundamental contribution led him on to ascribe to the technique of literary production a function at least equal to, if not more important than, the transformation of social relations, about which he clearly felt that he had little to say.

Benjamin himself rejected the form/content dichotomy, indeed he implicitly equated the two. It is interesting that Georg Lukács, who came from a very similar social background, reacted in virtually the opposite way. Whereas it can be said that Benjamin tended towards collapsing content into form, Lukács tended towards precisely the opposite. What both positions have in common is that they underestimate the problem of the consciousness of the audience, either taking it for granted, or assuming that it is passive. Brecht was outstanding in avoiding this and in achieving a completely new relationship with his public.

Nevertheless, the beneficial, revolutionary impact Benjamin’s work continues to have in Germany, and could have in: the English-speaking world as well, speaks for the extent to which he was ultimately true to Lichtenberg’s demanding maxim. That is why it can stand as his epitaph.

Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, London: New Left Books, 1973

[ Artery, no. 6, 1973 ]