WALTER BENJAMIN
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not a community. They are quite simply enemies of production.
Production makes them uneasy.
It
can't be trusted.
It
is the unpredict–
able. You never know where it will end. And they themselves do not
want to produce. They want to play the apparatchik and supervise
others. Each of their criticisms contains a threat." We found ourselves,
I do not know how, discussing y.oethe's novels; Brecht only knows the
Elective Affinities.
In it, he said, he had admired the elegance of the
young man. When I told him that Goethe wrote the book at sixty he
was very surprised. The book was entirely without philistinism. That
was 'an immense achievement. He could applaud this since German
drama, even in the most important works, bore philistine traces. I
remarked that as a result the
Elective Affinities
had had a miserable
reception. Brecht: "I'm glad to hear it. The Germans are a dreadful
people.
It
is not true that you cannot draw conclusions about the
Germans from Hitler. In me, too, everything is bad that is German.
What makes Germans unbearable is their narrow-minded self–
sufficiency. Nothing like the free imperial cities, e.g. the detestable
town of Augsburg, ever existed elsewhere. Lyons was never a free city;
the independent cities of the Renaissance were city-states-Lukacs is an
adoptive German. He has almost completely run out of wind."
In the
Best Tales of the Robber Woynok
by Seghers, Brecht
praised the signs it gave that she had freed herself from her commis–
sion. "Seghers cannot write
to
a commission, just as I, without one,
would have no idea how to start." He also approved the central role
given in these stories to a stubborn outsider.
26th July.
Brecht yesterday evening: "There is no longer any
doubt-the struggle against ideology has become a new ideology."
29th July .
Brecht reads me a number of polemical disputes with
Lukacs, studies for an essay that he is to publish in
Das Wort.
They are
disguised but vehement attacks. Brecht asks my advice concerning their
publication. Since he tells me at the same time that Lukacs now has an
important position "over there," I say that I cannot advise him. "These
are questions of power. Someone over there ought to say something.
After all, you have friends there. " Brecht: "Actually I have no friends
there. The Muscovites haven't any either-like the dead. "
3rd August.
In the evening of July 29th, in the garden, a
discussion arose on the question whether a part of the cycle "Children's
Songs" should be included in the new volume of poems. I was not in
favor, because I thought the contrast between the political and private
poem expressed the experience of exile particularly clearly; this effect
should not be weakened by a disparate collection. I hinted that in his
proposal Brecht's destructive character, which calls into question what
