Understanding Brecht - Walter Benjamin

Brecht, Brecht, Brecht. The name appears everywhere, in my reading, in my life, in day-to-day thumbing through periodicals. People refer to him with brevity and sadness and seriousness. He plays a role which is beyond my understanding in European culture and somehow his presence is still felt across European literary circles today, even though he passed around 50 years ago. This book provides something of an insight into where Brecht came from but through the eyes of another wonderful writer, taken early by the menace of Fascism, Benjamin grapples with the meaning and thought of Brecht, the power of what he was trying to do in early theater and the world he was seeking to change. I think this, more than anything else, influences my thinking here. Brecht was writing poetry and plays, alongside staging them himself, but the purpose was greater than the simple act. This was not about money or fame, it was about changing the world. Catching the last great rush of socialist belief before it was crushed by Stalin and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Looking into writing from Jewish authors of the 1930s, it breaks, it breaks the feelings which these worlds, crashing in on themselves as the world closed in around them, must have experienced and how Brecht, in his vantage point, was able to navigate better than Benjamin who was not. This is a book of literarcy criticism but set against the backdrop of a collapsing world. The world falling in on itself as it hurtled towards what seemed certain fascist takeover and unending misery, which was then replaced with a war which destroyed most of Europe and left a split between two worldviews which divided the continent and the implications of which still echo through our collective minds.