Life as Script: Benjamin’s study of Brecht in Svendborg

Abstract

The principle of the ‘gesture’, which according to Walter Benjamin is crucial for Bertolt Brecht’s early conception of the ‘epic theatre’, can as well be understood as the structural principal of Benjamin’s descriptions of the later Brecht in his exile in Svendborg in the 1930s. According to Benjamin the actor in epic theatre should be able to treat gestures in the same way as a typesetter treats the writing of words with spaced letters. Gestures thus are produced where the flow of action is interrupted. In Benjamin’s writings about Brecht this principle of the latter’s theatre becomes crucial for the philosopher’s style. Gestures as interruptions turn Benjamin’s biographical descriptions of Brecht into an epic theatre. Its stages are in the first place the pages of Benjamin’s writing, but not only. Rather Brecht himself becomes an ‘empty stage on which the contradictions of our society are acted out’, that is to say not an individual but rather a ‘dividuum harbouring and hiding many possibilities’, comparable to the characters of Brecht’s most radical plays, written in the years between 1926 and 1933, as, for example, A Man is a Man, Fatzer or The Decision. Benjamin thus holds on to what can be called a ‘theatre of potentiality’ in a moment when Brecht, deprived of his theatre, his friends, his way of living and producing, temporarily gives up his earlier conceptions in order to return to a more conventional theatre. According to Ludwig Jäger a script is produced retrospectively by the act of a transcription as that which must have preceded this transcription, but has not become visible up to the very moment of this transcription. In this respect Brecht’s life in exile is turned into a script in Benjamin’s notes.

Notes

1 Nägele points out the proximity of the conception of the gesture to that of the cesura in Hölderlin’s annotations on Oedipus and Antigone (1991: 135–66, especially pp. 152–3).