The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and laywright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices continued to discuss, argue and correspond on topics as varied as Fascism and the work of Franz Kafka.

In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamin's most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht's oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques, Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in a crisis-ridden society. Alongside his fascinating analyses of Brecht's “epic theatre” and commentaries on his verse, we find Benjamin's masterful essay “The Author as Producer,” as well as an extract from his diaries that recounts the intense conversations on aesthetics and politics between two of the most important cultural theorists of our time.

“He does not abolish the distance between us and Leskov, or Brecht, or Kafka; he brings it to life.” — Times Higher Education Supplement

“A small bomb of ideas and vital argument.” — Guardian

Walter Benjamin was born in Germany in 1892 and died in Spain in 1940. His other books include Illuminations and, with Verso, One-Way Street, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.