from UberBenjamin — Benjamin writing on Brecht by Heissenbuttel…

“In the struggle against them, nothing must be left out. They have nothing small in mind. They plan for thirty thousand years. Monstrous things. Monstrous crimes. They stop at nothing. They strike at everything. Every cell flinches under their blow. That is why none of us must be forgotten. They cripple the child in the womb. We must never leave the children out.< While he was talking like that, I felt a violence that was on a par with that of fascism; I want to say a violence that springs from no less profound depths of history than the fascist one. It was a very strange feeling, new to me. It then corresponded to a turn that Brecht’s thought took. > They plan desolations of icy proportions. That’s why they can’t come to an agreement with the church, which is also a passage for thousands of years. They have also proletarianised me. They have not only taken away my house, my fishpond and my scales, they have also robbed me of my stage and my audience. From where I stand, I cannot admit that Shakespeare was fundamentally a greater gift. But he couldn’t have written in advance either. By the way, he had his characters in front of him. The people he portrayed were walking around. He barely managed to extract a few traits from their behaviour; he left out many equally important ones.<” (Conversations with Brecht, 1938) (machine translation from uber benjamin)