Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht

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This study reveals and explores for the first time the importance of the friendship between Benjamin and Brecht - personally, for their lives as writers, and the effect it had on their other friendships. These two figures, at the height of their creative power in a period of impending political crisis and breakdown, formed part of a brilliant constellation of writers and creators in Weimar Germany, mainly in exile after 1933, which included Theodor Adorno and his wife Gretel, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Helene Weigel (Brecht's wife), Bernard von Brentano, Siegfried Kracauer, Margarete Steffin, among others. Benjamin's broad cultural interests, including literature, film, photography, architecture and philosophy, and especially his multi-facetted approach, meant that partisans of different political ideologies tended to claim him jealously as their own. His friendship with the increasingly political Brecht, then discovering Marxism, was seen as a great danger to his own talent by at least two of his closest and most persuasive admirers, Adorno and Scholem, who tended to ignore or play down Benjamin's own stubborn political commitment. The book brings alive the force-field of this constellation, both as the Weimar Republic declined into Nazi dictatorship, and as the external opposition to that new regime was being established, with all the vicissitudes of emigration, whether in Paris, Moscow, or Denmark. As the struggle continued, friendships and enmities diminished or increased as circumstances changed. However, the focus of this book remains the relationship, which was above all a working relationship, between Benjamin and Brecht. Some found hard it to accept, but recorded and explored here fully for the first time, it can be seen to throw new light on nearly two decades of European intellectual life in its most crucial period