Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption - Monoskop

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motes passivity by tending to absorb the viewer within its parameters. He referred to his technique as a process of
alienation (Verfremdung), which he counterposed to the identification of the viewer with the work (and its
characters) in traditional theater. By alienating the viewer Brecht sought to forestall an illusory, merely aesthetic
resolution of the conflicts that have arisen in the drama and spur the viewer to rational, independent judgmentnot just
judgment about art, but judgment about crucial facets of life itself which serve as the drama's content. In epic theater,
reason was meant to triumph over emotion. Because it opposed all catharsis, the false purging of emotional tension
with the conclusion of the play, Brecht at times referred to his dramaturgy as a theory of non-Aristotelian drama.
Thus, the "effect" Brecht sought to promote was one of critical, rational distance rather than immediate identification
in relation to the events on the stage. In this sense however, it is important to distinguish between Brecht's early
"anarchistic" plays and his transition to the Lehrstücke, beginning with Der Flug der Lindberghs and his adaptation
of Gorky's Die Mutter in 1929. For whereas the effect intended by the earlier plays was one which merely
emphasized provocation or a heightening of social awareness on the part of the audience, in the Lehrstücke the social
content of the drama became much more explicitif not didactic.
Benjamin had originally intended to write a comprehensive appraisal of the poet's work, but this intention, like so
many others, never came to fruition. Nonetheless, his commentaries on Brecht's work are characterized throughout
by an attitude of unqualified approbation. To him, the theory of epic theater represented the only vital alternative to
the congealed state of the bourgeois arts; moreover, Brecht's work had, more generally, assimilated the most
advanced techniques of contemporary art forms such as radio and film, and placed them for the first time within the
framework of a truly radical aesthetic program. As such, Benjamin viewed it as his mission as critic to facilitate the
reception of epic theater among the public in generaland among left-wing intellectuals in particularalong the lines
which had already been sketched on various occasions by the playwright himself. Hence, the predominantly
restrained, exegetical quality of his essays on Brecht, in
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