Not that the outstanding qualities of the German original – its meticulous scholarship, its sure-footed negotiation of the tangled pathways of the cultural and political debates among German émigrés in the 1930s, its astute evalu­ation of the affinities and differences between the two protagonists – have been lost in translation. They are simply shown to better advantage in this larger-format, elegantly presented volume (whose combination of foot­notes and endnotes is a model of its kind), with its cogently arranged set of five chapters, lengthy appendix of minuted discussions relating to the projected periodical Crisis and Criticism (1930–31), and carefully chosen photographs.

It may be that these days the name Walter Benjamin has a more tempting cachet than that of Bertolt Brecht for cultural theorists and writers on any topic from photography to the flâneur, porosity to performativity. Thus it is all the more appropriate that the author has approached his task in the spirit of Hannah Arendt’s observa­tion, apropos the Benjamin-Brecht relationship:

There is indeed no question but that [Benjamin’s] friendship with Brecht – unique in that here the greatest living German poet met the most important critic of the time, a fact both were fully aware of – was the second and incomparably more important stroke of good fortune in Benjamin’s life.

On the face of it, the two men would not appear to have much in common, apart from mutual friends, an interest in the relationship between politics and literature, and the formulation of a set of personal and political positions and theses which might be opposed to the emerging totalitarianism in Germany. The philosopher and social theorist Ernst Bloch, for example, remarked as far back as 1930 that ‘The alliance of the pure man of genius, Benjamin, with the unwashed genius Brecht is exceedingly curious’; while the writer Günther Anders (who was both Benjamin’s second cousin and Arendt’s first husband) sums up the relationship in even more vivid and revealing detail:

I experienced the two of them, Brecht and Benjamin, together only a few times, in Berlin before 1933. After more than fifty-five years, I can’t remember what was discussed, but I do remem­ber that Benjamin understood Brecht far better than Brecht understood Benjamin. Benjamin was used to interpreting literature: Brecht, although bubbling over with enthusiasm, was not used to the complexities of the brooding WB. Their ‘friendship’ was therefore prob­ably, as one might say, asymmetrical. [all emphases as in the original]

Not the least of the merits of Er­dmut Wizisla’s approach is the way he tracks down observations from con­temporaries in order to throw an often contradictory light on what was, in ef­fect, a relationship where contradiction and animated disagreement were more crucial than cosy blandishments. More­over, if anyone emerges with real credit from his teasing out of the tensions of the fraught moments but constant, underlying deep respect of both men for each other’s ability and personality, it is not the disciples and apparently supportive colleagues (the abstruse and oracular Adorno and Horkheimer, lumped together and caustically labelled by Brecht during his American exile as ‘the superclown’, Benjamin’s close friend and editor Gershon Scholem, along with Klaus Mann and the opportun­istic cultural commissar Kantorowicz, are particularly egregious examples of supporters given to mean-spirited re­sponses and comments), but the many women who showed understanding for the value of the relationship: Arendt, Brecht’s wife Helene Weigel, his lovers and collaborators Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau, and Benjamin’s sister Dora.

At all points, Wizisla is exemplary in his even-handed evaluation of the respective positions of both men on a variety of topics – Kafka, Baudelaire, Brecht’s theory of epic theatre, Ben­jamin’s theses on the philosophy of history – and in his masterly handling of the voluminous secondary literature. Nowhere are the thoroughness and deft­ness of his approach better illustrated than in the detective work he has under­taken to uncover the fraught history re­lating to the unrealised project for Crisis and Criticism, which was intended to provide a vehicle for a range of left-wing views on literature and politics. In thirty closely argued pages, complemented by a twenty-page appendix, Wizisla provides a model example both of how to reconstruct the building blocks of this ambitious project and an analysis of the reasons for its subsequent, and possibly inevitable, collapse.

This particular collapse is less dis­turbing to the modern reader than the other, more ominous collapse taking place first, before the participants’ eyes (pre-1933) and then, both offstage and onstage, during their different yet analogous experiences of the years in exile. Even at the distance of seven decades it is still sobering to revisit the wonderfully alive accounts of Ben­jamin’s and Brecht’s discussions in the latter’s house and garden in Svendborg, the subsequent letters and diary en-tries, and the animated disagreements about Kafka and Baudelaire, all the while waiting for the event that will put an end to the personal, though not the literary, relationship – Benjamin’s suicide in 1941, alone in a small hotel room in a Spanish border town, despairing of being able to cross this particular frontier.

In one of his most frequently quoted lines, Brecht poses the question: ‘What kind of times are they, when / A talk about trees is almost a crime?’ The cover of Wizisla’s book features three photos of Brecht and Benjamin playing chess (a passion of both men, though their approach was markedly different, with Benjamin given, as Bre­cht noted in his four-line epigram after his friend’s death, to ‘attrition tactics’). And it is clear from Brecht’s poetry, diary entries and accounts from others that conversations about trees, Chinese poetry and the value of quotations were as indispensable to him as the radio he relied on for news of those other events that demanded his attention. Perhaps the most moving anecdote in this de­finitive combination of biography and what the Germans call Geistesgeschichte (barely adequately translated by ‘history of ideas’) is that which tells of Benjamin reciting from memory and explaining Brecht’s unforgettable poem ‘Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao-te-Ching on Lao-Tzu’s Road into Exile’ – a work which belongs in any anthology of twentieth-century poetry – to prisoners and French officers in the prison camp where he was interned in 1939. Alas, as Brecht’s subsequent epigram implies, the consolations and encouraging gestures of poetry were helpless in the face of his friend’s despair in his final moments: ‘An enemy who could drive you from your books / Will not be worn down by people like us.’