The Invalidity of all Guarantees: A Conversation between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin (1934) - Couverture souple

Young, Augustus

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1872468853 ISBN 13 : 9781872468853

Editeur : Labyrinth Books, 2016

Synopsis

Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin see each other every day during a long summer in Denmark, 1934. Benjamin is a guest in Brecht’s farmhouse. He keeps a diary of their conversations. Brecht’s young family, and servants, are present in the background, as is his wife Helene (‘Helli’) Weigel, the actress. Helli is preparing the lead role in his play The Mother for Brussels. Their fortunes in exile from Hitler’s Germany are in marked contrast. Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins is big in Paris and his Threepenny Novel had just been published in Amsterdam. Benjamin is cash-strapped and working on a pot-boiler, Ordinary Moments in the Letters of Famous Men, under the pen name Detlef Holz. He is also writing an essay for the tenth anniversary of Kafka’s death for a Jewish news-sheet (Judische Rudschau, 1934), and doesn’t expect to get paid. Benjamin’s health is poor – serious heart and lung problems - and his personal life is in parenthesis. The divorce papers for his marriage to Dora Sophia have just come through. ‘The Invalidity of All Guarantees’ is a conjectural reconstruction of a conversation spread over eighteen days and nights. Brecht, recovering from an operation on his foot , hobbles around. Benjamin, is in mourning for his library left behind in Berlin. Sometimes Brecht spits cigars of laughter at the ceiling. Benjamin is more muted in his amusement, tipping off the ash from his cigarette. He noted in his diary a few days previously that ‘the baiting stance of Brecht’s thoughts have worsened’, and wondered if he had outstayed his welcome. Brecht was being his usual blunt self in advising Benjamin ‘not to build on the good old days, but on the bad new one’. However, he writes a touching poem about two friends playing chess under a pear tree (an event captured by a series of remarkable photographs). A few years later Brecht was to write in his play Mother Courage and Her Children, ‘I don’t trust him. We’re friends’. The notion that friendship must be based on intellectual sympathy is brought down to earth by Brecht, ‘We disagree with those whose opinions are as perfectly clear as our own’. But, despite his innate truculence, he recognised with Samuel Beckett that friendship is a compromise between protecting one’s ego and giving another ‘attention’. Brecht wasn’t just cutting corners when he said, ‘Friendship is what makes love worthwhile’. Benjamin wouldn’t be so sure, but in the photographs of the time, he looks like a man who could do with a hug. Brecht’s early play The Jungle of the Cities is about the impossibility of realising a fight to the death with another man. In their summer together in Denmark it was a fight to the life. It was always going to be a losing battle with a man who Arendt said ‘never learned to swim with or against the tide… His clumsiness guided him like a sleep-walker to the epicentre of misfortune.’ Brecht wrote several poems about Benjamin’s death. The best known is ‘On the Suicide of the Refugee WB’ (1942). However, in the friendship between intellectuals the necessary compromise to sustain it shows in how ideas are affected by the emotions, and the emotions by ideas. The duologue reflects their mutual changes of mind.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Augustus Young was born in Cork, Ireland, worked in London as an epidemiologist and now lives in France. His first collections of poems, Survival (1969) and On Loaning Hill (1972), already manifested a departure from the ‘reach for the shovel’ tendency in Irish writing. Since then he has regularly published collections of poems, including Danta Gradha: Love Poems from the Irish (1975, 1980), the three-part extended verse work The Credit (1980/1986) and Lampion and His Bandits: Literature of the Cordel in Brazil (1994). This period is covered in detail in The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (1996). More recent poetry publications include Diversifications (2009), a revised edition of Rosemaries (2009, first edition 1976), Days and Nights in Hendon (2002) and Lightning in Low Places (2000). He has also published many scientific papers. The widely acclaimed autofiction Light Years (2002), his first full length work in prose, was followed by Storytime (2005), The Secret Gloss: A Film Play on the Life and Work of Soren Kierkegaard (2009), and The Nicotine Cat and Other People (2009). Augustus Young’s poems and prose appear in anthologies and periodicals in Ireland, America and the UK, and international online reviews (Cyphers, Sniper Logic, Books Ireland, London Magazine, Hopscotch, Modern Poetry in Translation, Leviathan Quarterly, Arete, Ars Interpres, Stand, An Sionnach, New Hibernia Review, Temporel, Golden Handcuffs, Carte Allineate etc).

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Labyrinth Books
• Date d'édition: 2016
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1872468853
• ISBN 13: 9781872468853
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 222
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg