July Days in Skovsbostrand: Brecht, Benjamin and Antiquity

Abstract

It is common to stress intellectual differences between Brecht and Benjamin. However, Benjamin’s visits to Brecht in Denmark provided the occasion for productive critical exchanges. This paper identifies significant common ground in the analysis of history the two undertake in the face of fascism. Taking a cue from their understanding of chronicle history, a common dialectical view of temporality is suggested in Benjamin’s essays on the modernism of Kafka and Kraus and Brecht’s exile poetry. The sense that historical understanding requires an imaginative dislocation is central in Brecht’s responses to Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire. A careful reading of Brecht’s notes on Baudelaire, as well as on Benjamin’s book‐project,makes possible a reconstruction of their debate. Baudelaire’s ‘Les petites vieilles’ focusses their views of the relationship between antiquity and modernity. While Benjamin reads there the modern artist’s resignation, Brecht sees parallels with the false classicism of the Nazi spectacle and its petty bourgeois audience. The ‘Parzellenbauer’ from Der achtzehnte Brumaire shows Brecht reflecting on similar issues within a similar historical dynamic in his novel on Julius Caesar and Caesarism, and thus effectively doubling the explanatory force of the relationship between antiquity and modernity which fascinated Benjamin.