July days in Skovsbostrand: Brecht, Benjamin and Antiquity

It is common to stress intellectual differences between Brecht and Benjamin . However, Benjamins visits to Brecht in Denmark provided the occasion for productive critical exchanges. This paper identifies significant common gro und in the analysis of history the two undertake in the face of fascism. Ta king a cue from their understanding of chronicle history, a common dialecti cal view of temporality is suggested in Benjamins essays on the modernism o f Kafka and Kraus and Brechts exile poetry. The sense that historical under standing requires an imaginative dislocation is central in Brechts response s to Benjamins study of Baudelaire. A careful reading of Brechts notes on B audelaire, as well as on Benjamins book-project,makes possible a reconstruc tion of their debate. Baudelaires Les petites vieilles focusses their views of the relationship between antiquity and modernity. While Benjamin reads there the modern artists resignation, Brecht sees parallels with the false classicism of the Nazi spectacle and its petty bourgeois audience. The Parz ellenbauer from Der achtzehnte Brumaire shows Brecht reflecting on similar issues within a similar historical dynamic in his novel on Julius Caesar an d Caesarism, and thus effectively doubling the explanatory force of the rel ationship between antiquity and modernity which fascinated Benjamin.