Introducing Walter Benjamin

Benjamin’s intense engagement with Kafka’s work began with a short esoteric text, “Idea for a Mystery Play” (1927). He reviewed Kafka’s story, “The Great Wall of China”

. Here he praises Atget who always photographed Paris without people, as a surreal empty location.

“A Short History of Photography” (1931)

The first Blitzkrieg bombing of an urban population befell the Basque capital of Guernica (1937), “immortalized” by Picasso’s painting of that event. We might ask, in Benjamin’s spirit, how does the painter compare with the camera-man in such an age of mass destruction? The painter is like the magician who heals the sick by the “laying on of hands”.

“This is the situation in politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

It will lose its aura …

As a model of “radical form and content”, Benjamin offered the newspaper: “a vast melting-down process which not only destroys the conventional separation between genres, between writer and poet, scholar and popularizer, but also questions even the separation between author and reader.”

The instinct to scavenge the significant fragment and connect dis-similarities in order to shock an audience into fresh recognition – this was the essence of Brecht’s aesthetic.

Renaissance painting, with its cult of secular beauty, first challenged the ritualistic basis of artistic production. A long, hard struggle for artistic autonomy then began, which, via Romanticism, culminated in the pinnacle of aestheticism …

The “tactic of attrition” is summed up in Brecht’s poem on the Chinese sage Lao Tzu whose maxim is “The hard thing gives way.”