‘Daring, Unusual Things’: Bertolt Brecht’s Photo-Epigrams as Poetic Inventions

Abstract

This essay explores the aesthetics of Bertolt Brecht’s compositions of poetry with photography in the so-called photo-epigrams of his 1955 book War Primer. The photo-epigrams have mostly been viewed and appreciated as interventions in photography; but in this essay I aim to show their novelty and efficacy as poetic inventions. To do so, I draw on Karl Marx’s and Walter Benjamin’s views apropos the decline of poetry under modern, industrial capitalism to argue that Brecht, in his photo-epigrams, is responding to—and attempting to counter—a specific problem at the heart of modern poetry: the crisis in perceptibility and accessibility. By coupling poems with photographs—in unique and uniquely politicised ways—Brecht provides a resonant critique of the deadly ideologies of the ruling classes engaged in World War II, as well as a method for addressing the decline in the readability of poetry in the modern era.

Shock and the materialist conception of art: Considerations for a politicised cultural psychology

“…Instead, and with the development of a politicised cultural psychology in mind, I consider some of the ways by which artistic shock serves as a theoretical, stylistic, formal, and substantive undercurrent in their work. Specifically, I outline how Brecht's instrumentalist understanding of artistic shock sought to attain a political truth upon which to act and how, for Benjamin, shock served as means to liberate our perceptions of emancipatory possibility (see Alizadeh, 2019;Ezcurra, 2012;Martel, 2013).…”

“…Brecht was not interested in attracting bourgeois audiences. He insisted that ordinary people would willingly engage with complex, artistic shock if such art spoke directly to their material realities (Alizadeh, 2019). However, far from attempting to represent these realities, Brechtian theatre endeavours to make strange our experience of reality so that we might question it (Malherbe, 2022b).…”

“…As explicated earlier, Brechtian theatre emphasises to audiences that stage actors are embodying their subjectivity through predetermined identifications (i.e., lines that were rehearsed beforehand). Brecht makes similar use of the alienation effect in his 1955 book War Primer , which paired war photography with lines of poetry that did not speak to the photographs in any discernible way (Alizadeh, 2019). In Brecht’s plays and in War Primer , artistic shock is used to demonstrate how static identification acts impose symbolisation onto material conditions and human subjectivity in ways that feel inadequate and unsatisfying.…”