Old and New on Benjamin and Brecht

Another Brecht

In a lengthy letter to Gerhard [!] Scholem dated July 21, 1925, Walter Benjamin describes the beginning of the end of the now famous ›tragedy‹ of the rejection of his Habilitationsschrift about the German Baroque Trauerspiel by the faculty of Frankfurt University. Even its initial sponsor, Schultz, no longer supports him; »[w]ie die Dinge weiter verlaufen sollen, ist ganz dunkel«. In the context of such ›darkness‹, Benjamin nevertheless gratefully writes that, by contrast, at least according to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, »Brecht habe nun die Arbeit mit höchstem Beifall aufgenommen«. 1

Readers of Erdmut Wizisla’s 2004 account of Benjamin’s and Brecht’s acquaintance under review here might not stumble over the possibility that already in 1925, the latter knew the former’s arcane study of seventeenth-century poetry, politics, and thought – even though it was not published until several years later. After all, Wizisla begins his account of history of their relationship with the first meeting of the two in Berlin in November of the prior year in the company of Asja Lacis, whom Benjamin had met while completing the drafting of the Trauerspiel book on Capri in the summer of 1924 (pp. 55 et seq.). Indeed, Wizisla even suggests the intersection of Benjamin’s thoughts on the »antiaristotelische Ästhetik« common to the Baroque plays with Brecht’s notion of »epic theater« in his (Benjamin’s) Was ist episches Theater? (pp. 178 et seq.)

As legitimate as the association of »BB« with Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book might seem, however, the Brecht of Benjamin’s 1925 letter to Scholem was not Bertolt, but, rather, Walther Brecht (1876–1950), who was a professor of Germanistik in Vienna from 1914 to 1926. During those years, this Brecht in fact became a close friend (and later the »Nachlass-Verwalter«) of Hofmannsthal, and it was he who had read and endorsed an early draft of Benjamin’s thesis in 1925. It was also this Brecht who wrote one of several letters of support to the rector of the Hebrew University, Judah Magnes, in the spring of 1928, for Benjamin in his hopes for a »Lehrauftrag für neue deutsche und französische Literatur« there (GB III, 351). (In his letter of recommendation, dated April 29, 1928, Brecht, surely not ignorant of the fate of the Trauerspiel book by this time, ironically writes of Benjamin that he is to be considered »ein sehr ernst zu nehmender und zukunftsreicher junger Gelehrter.« 2 ) This Brecht was, finally, also the thesis advisor of the soon-to-be goose-stepping Herbert Cysarz, with whose 1924 Deutsche Barockdichtung. Renaissance, Barock, Rokoko Benjamin is in fact in constant dialogue in the Trauerspiel book. 3 Walther Brecht was not of his student’s political persuasion, however; although »zwangsemeritiert« from his position as the University of Munich in 1937 because of his »nichtarische Ehefrau«, he was reinstated in that position and allowed to retire with honor, so to speak, a second time in August of 1946. 4 That this Brecht was involved in the early assessment of the scholarly contribution represented by the Trauerspiel book tells us much about the academic milieu in which it is fact arose.

Between Theology
and Materialism

Walther Brecht’s history of contact with Walter Benjamin is of course not the subject of Wizisla’s densely documented book on Benjamin’s sometimes tense friendship with Bertolt Brecht. I mention the former – and much less well-known – Brecht and his impact on Benjamin, however, in the interest of indicating the road not taken by Wizisla in his fascinating study. Much of the excellent existing criticism on Benjamin, from such early studies as Hannah Arendt’s early 1971 Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht. Zwei Essays and Gerschom Scholem’s 1975 Walter Benjamin – Geschichte einer Freundschaft, up through Michael Jennings’ 1987 Dialectical Images. Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism and Beatrice Hanssen’s 1998 Walter Benjamin’s Other History. Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels, reads Benjamin as ›always already‹ caught in the tense struggle between the warring camps of mystical-theological and materialist-political readings of his work as these camps were represented by a select few great minds (and, just as importantly, a select few strong individual personalities), of which Adorno, Scholem and Brecht are conventionally the most significant. 5 Even though it is Wizisla’s service to have complicated this well-known and now nearly predictable narrative by emphasizing the figure and role of Bert Brecht in the mix, his book likewise represents Benjamin primarily as a man and thinker situated, if not immovably wedged, between opposing friends and the philosophical and methodological positions for which they stood.

Benjamin und Brecht thus does not tamper substantially with the critical orthodoxy that it is primarily in terms of these relationships, which were to a significant degree affectively as well as intellectually determined (cf. Wizisla on the degree to which Benjamin and Brecht were simply quite different »in Mentalität und Charakter […] Brecht, der beinahe sechs Jahre jüngere, agiler, streitlustiger, selbstbewußter« and Benjamin, »dessen Natur eher besonnen und grüblerisch, zuweilen depressiv [war]«, p. 65), that we are to understand Benjamin, as in conversation, that is, only with a series of similarly exceptionalized writers and thinkers. Such an approach fails to look behind the polemics about which of these ›great men‹ best understood him or most influenced and supported him (or not) in the course of his too short academic, literary, and critical life and career, to the ways in which Benjamin actually fit into – rather than broke with – the vexed realities of day-to-day life for the majority of Weimar’s intellectual class. Walther Brecht and his students – academics all – belonged to this cohort; the similarity of their work to Benjamin’s – and of his work to theirs – has in fact been too little acknowledged in work on Benjamin, as we continue to read the figure of martyred German-Jewish intellectual through the lens of what Michael Jennings already in 1987 designated as the »myth« of the academic outsider. 6

From Meierottostraße
to Skovbostrand

A great deal of Wizisla’s thickly documented book fits into this dominant pattern of Benjamin reception, then, as it draws upon his imposing knowledge as director of both the Brecht and Benjamin archives in Berlin of the corpus of both men’s published and unpublished work to draw a detailed picture of their relationship between 1924 and 1940, from their first rather unsuccessful meeting in the Pension Voß in Meierottostraße in Berlin to their meetings in Paris and time spent together in Danish Skovsbostrand between 1933 and 1938. Wizisla reports that »aus dem letzten Lebensjahr Benjamins […] kaum noch Spuren der Kommunikation nachweisbar [sind]« (p. 112). 7 We do hear from numerous other contemporaries, most of whom – Helene Weigel, Hannah Arendt, Ernst Bloch, Gretel Karplus (Adorno), and Siegfried Kracauer, as well as, of course, Adorno and Scholem – were nevertheless equally as illustrious and who are introduced by Wizisla mostly in supporting roles in the drama that is primarily about the tense relationship between the two principals.

Others, such as the important, but controversial member of the Frankfurt School, Karl August Wittfogel, whose work was to have been crucial to Benjamin in reconceptualizing the second edition of the Trauerspiel book, receive somewhat less than their due, their names appearing more or less unglossed and primarily in the long lists that Wizisla periodically cites or draws up himself (pp. 82, 83, 126, 161) by way of indicating the wider intellectual circles in which Brecht and Benjamin moved. 8 No stone is left unturned in the treatment of secondary criticism of the two main actors, however, as both it and a rich array of archival materials are inventoried in the dense array of footnotes on each page (the most exceptional of these is the mammoth one that spans three pages, 51–53, which is so inclusive that it practically crowds out the main text). For anyone beginning work on either Benjamin or Brecht, Wizisla provides an excellent overview of the field.

Controversies
and Contexts

The homage effect is nevertheless that which determines the shape of most of this study. In an introductory chapter, Wizisla first takes the reader through the thickets of some of the familiar discussions of what he (Wizisla) calls the »Streit im Freundeskreis« (pp. 19–40) over whether Benjamin’s relationship with Brecht was or was not a good thing. In their agreement that it was not Scholem and Adorno were uncharacteristically in agreement, as Wizisla credits Hannah Arendt with noting (p. 25). Only the women in Benjamin’s life, so Wizisla, really understood the chemistry of Brecht’s and Benjamin’s »Beziehung« (p. 35). The chapter closes with a report on the controversial Frankfurt edition(s) of Benjamin’s works insofar as these suppressed or misrepresented the relationship.

In Chapter Two, Wizisla gives a detailed, biographically-based account of Brecht’s and Benjamin’s contact (a more schematic year-by-year »Chronik« of this contact is available in an appendix, pp. 329–348), including both what Wizisla calls »gruppenbildende Vorgänge« (p. 77), collective encounters and plans for publications and discussion groups between 1929 and 1933, all designed to create a »Gegenöffentlichkeit« (p. 84), and the more one-on-one bond between the two that emerged, as Wizisla writes, out of an »Exilsituation« (p. 93) that demanded that each occasionally act on the other’s behalf as literary agent and intellectual (and especially publication) entrepreneur. Historical background is frequently inserted to give a flavor of the dangerous events that were impacting the two men’s lives.

Benjamin on Brecht /
Brecht on Benjamin

The final two chapters are also focused resolutely on this »Zweierbeziehung«, albeit in a somewhat less personalized way. In Chapter Four, »Benjamin über Brecht«, Wizisla helpfully accounts for the some eleven texts (only five of which were published in his lifetime) that Benjamin devoted to Brecht’s work between 1930 and 1939, for example, asserting that Benjamin’s commentaries on Brecht, when taken together, make visible »eine bemerkenswerte Kontinuität in Benjamins kritischer und philosophischer Arbeit« (p. 171) while also providing »einen neuen Standard» against which to judge contemporary receptions of Brecht« (p. 212); Benjamin combined a focus on the political and an acknowledgment of the aesthetic aspect of Brecht’s work, which, according to Wizisla, many critics at the time saw as antithetical to his political engagement.

In Chapter Five, the focus shifts to »Brecht über Benjamin«; initially, Wizisla is refreshingly direct that, while Brecht may have been interested in Benjamin’s work, his (Brecht’s) commentaries can in no way be said to have formed a »Pendant zu Benjamins Aufsätze über ihn« (p. 227). Indeed, they were often quite »eigennützig«. Gradually, however, Wizisla adopts a somewhat stronger position on Brecht’s intellectual debts to Benjamin which is nevertheless based on somewhat weaker claims that »es kann als selbstverständlich gelten« (p. 252) that the two would have shared work, that Brecht »fraglos« knew Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße (p. 238), and that finally it »kann als sicher […] gelten« that Brecht owned a copy of the 1955 edition of Benjamin’s work (p. 278). Wizisla’s account of Brecht’s concern for the publication of Benjamin’s work after the latter’s death and his several poems on his friend (pp. 278–287) nevertheless forms a moving conclusion to the book.

Collaboration

Chapter Three, which describes Brecht’s and Benjamin’s collaboration in planning the journal Krise und Kritik in 1930–31, forms a welcome exception to the dyadically organized narrative of Wizisla’s book and does so by embedding their »Beziehung« in a thick description of both the publication politics and professional self-reflection and self-criticism, as well as the theorization of what Brecht apparently first called »eingreifendes Denken« (p. 139) on the part of public intellectuals during the pre-Nazi years. Wizisla takes previous scholarship by Bernd Witte and Rolf-Peter Janz in the late 1970s and early 1980s to task for having paid too little attention to this »Zeitschriftenprokjekt«. Although readers today might be somewhat irritated by this discussion, at the time of the original publication of this material in article form in 1992, Wizisla’s critique was well deserved.

Fascinating citations from correspondence of the publisher Ernst Rowohlt (pp. 117 et seq.) in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach and contemporary newspaper clippings (available in the Brecht Archive) are juxtaposed with original documentation of the planning discussions for the journal from the Benjamin Archive (that are then reproduced in the photographs that fill a documentary appendix to the book, pp. 291–327), as Wizisla weaves his way through a complex description of ramifications of the »crisis of the intelligentsia« (»Krise der Intelligenz«) for the some 50,000 unemployed junior academics (»Jungakademiker«) that Michael Stark estimates to have crowded the unemployment roles in the 1920s in Germany (p. 140, note 79).

Claims and Illusions

The detailed account of the context in which Krise und Kritik rose and fell, i.e., never proceeded to production, is nevertheless indebted to (and explained as an explicit commentary on) the same polemical discussion about Benjamin’s turn away from his ›early‹ »metaphysical« period to a more »political« stance that dominates much Benjamin criticism to date; »der politische, zum Eingreifen in den Tageskampf Entschlossene [hat seine] keineswegs frühe[n] ›metaphysische[n]‹ Intentionen vergessen« (p. 115). Finally, even though he does chart the »prinzipiell divergierende politische und ästhetische Positionen« that divided the group behind the project, Wizisla continues to give the »persönliche Spannungen« among the members of the group that planned the journal perhaps somewhat undue weight in its failure (p. 150).

The chapter nevertheless ends with the claim that the project (»Anspruch«) of a journal in which intellectuals could see their work as implicated in the significant events and issues (»Belange«) of their own times should not be seen as an »illusion« (p. 163). Such an assertion sounds a hopeful note for the readers of books like Wizisla’s (and for the writer of this review) that, in the early twenty-first century, there is still room – and perhaps increased need – for the »eingreifendes Denken« to which both B. Brecht and Benjamin were committed on the part of both the more and the less well-known members of the guild.