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Archive of Benjamin and Brecht

    Chris Crawford
    21 October 2020
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    Bertolt Brecht on Georg Lukács

    Benjamin, Brecht, and Adorno, each in their own way, try to square their admiration for the early work of Georg Lukács with his later work, after his reputation gained official authority and was swallowed up by the ambience of the Comintern.

    Esther Leslie
    07 July 2017
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    Ice Is Set On Fire

    "A poem about drowning refugees, those who drown in view, in view of the shore, in view of others, speaks across times to tell us that it is not enough to learn to read, to learn to see – but also to act."—Esther Leslie on how Bertolt Brecht and War Primer teaches us how to read and how to act. 

    Stuart Jeffries
    09 June 2017
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    On War Primer

    Brecht’s verses say uncomfortable truths rather than toe party lines and so offer us a still vital critique of the economic forces behind war, of how wartime rhetoric becomes a lie machine unfairly demonising and dehumanising our foes.

    David Lau
    08 June 2017
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    Manual of War: on Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer

    Brecht considered War Primer part of “a satisfactory literary report on my years in exile,” as he wrote in a 1944 journal entry. Since this first English language reception of War Primer on the centenary of Brecht’s birth in 1998, what are we now to make of his poignant modernist epic of four-liner lyrics and scrapbook photos? Today, in our post-crash era, with its renewal of Marxism, Brecht the formalist can be freed from a series of postmodern qualifications. War Primer’s historical intervention can be seen in a new way today. With the far right politically relevant again, Brecht’s image-by-image analysis of social democracy, America, and fascism, which is the veritable heart of War Primer, possesses fresh relevance.

    Verso Books
    07 June 2017
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    Bertolt Brecht: A Primer

    40% off all our Brecht reading until June 11

    "I am a city still, but soon I shan’t be –

    Where generations used to live and die

    Before those deadly birds flew in to haunt me:

    One thousand years to build. A fortnight to destroy."

    Bertolt Brecht's War Primer is a terrifying series of short poems by one of the world’s leading playwrights, set to images of World War II.

    Verso Books
    20 September 2016
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    Frankfurt School Bookshelf

    In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century.  Here we present our Frankfurt School reading.

    Walter Benjamin
    30 August 2016
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    Walter Benjamin: Conversations with Brecht

    Stuart Jeffries
    02 August 2016
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    The Storm Blowing from Paradise: Walter Benjamin and Klee's Angelus Novus

    What was so marvellous to Benjamin about this goofy, eternally hovering angel with hair that looks like paper scrolls, aerodynamically hopeless wings and googly if rather melancholy eyes? “This,” he wrote in one of his greatest essays, “is how one pictures the angel of history.”

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