WALTER BENJAMIN
179
of ideas, moved to the center of Brecht's endeavors. These different
activities are converging at present in the idea of a philosophical
didactic poem. Brecht's scruples originate in the question whether-in
view of his whole previous production, but especially its satirical part
and above all the
Threepenny Novel-he
would find the necessary
credit with the public for such an approach. In this doubt two different
trains of thought come together. On one hand there are the misgivings
lO
which, the more intense Brecht's concern with the problems and
methods of the proletarian class-struggle became, the satirical and even
more the ironic standpoint must as such be exposed. These
misgivings-of a primarily practical nature-would, however, be
misunderstood if they were identified with other, more fundamental
considerations. This deeper layer of scruples concerns the artistic and
playful element in literature, but above all those moments which
sometimes, in part, make themselves refractory to reason. These heroic
efforts of Brecht to legitimize art to reason have thrown him back time
and again on the parable, in which artistic mastery is proved by the
final abolition in it of all elements of art. And it is just this concern
with parable that is now prominent in more radical form in the
considerations surrounding the didactic poem. In the course of the
conversation itself I tried to explain to Brecht that such a didactic poem
would have to justify itself less to the bourgeois public than. to the
proletarian, which would presumably take its criteria less from
Brecht's earlier, partly bourgeois-oriented production than from the
dogmatic and theoretical content of the didactic poetry itself.
"If
tbis
didactic poem is able to mobilize for itself the authority of Marxism," I
told him, "the fact of your earlier production will hardly shake it."
4th October,
1934. Yesterday Brecht left for London. Whether he
is now and then particularly .tempted by me, or whether he has recently
become generally more prone to it than earlier: what he himself called
the "baiting" stance of his thought is now far more noticeable in
conversation than earlier. Ind\ed, I am struck by a particular term that
stems from this attitude. He is especially fond of using the concept of
"nobodies" with great intent. In Dragl1'>r I read
Crime and Punishment
by Dostoyevsky. First of all he blamed this as the chief cause of my
illness. And to back up his argument he told me how in his youth a
protracted illness, the germ of which he had probably carried for a long
time, had broken out when, one afternoon, already too weak to protest,
he had listened to a school-fellow playing Chopin on the piano. Brecht
attributes to Chopin and Dostoyevsky an especially detrimental influ–
ence on health. But he took up every other possible position against my
