Here’s a Glimpse of What You Can Expect:
At the heart of this four-part drama is the predicament of intellectuals during times of extreme political repression and persecution—the marginality and danger attached to some of society’s most thoughtful and adventuresome members. The core “case study” is of Walter Benjamin, the Weimar Republic’s most original and wide-ranging cultural critic, in company with the diverse, in many ways incongruous cadre of close friends with whom he was in deep intellectual exchange before and during the exile from Germany inaugurated by the Nazis’ seizure of power. Benjamin’s interlocutors include his wife, Dora Kellner Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Gretel Karplus Adorno, Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem, and Bertolt Brecht. The piece takes off in Benjamin’s Berlin apartment on the evening of March 16, 1933, the last in his native city. The Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, has served Hitler, as a pretext for extreme dictatorial measures, bringing the democratic rule of the Weimar Republic to an abrupt end. The writing is on the wall for artists and intellectuals already marked as undesirables. The inconceivable hasn’t quite happened: yet it is a looming prospect, even an eventuality, to artists and intellectuals engaged in open-ended inquiry.
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We look forward to welcoming you to Soirée at Walter Benjamin’s, and we can’t wait to share this exceptional production with you.
Sincerely,
The Soirée at Walter Benjamin’s Production Team
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Henry Sussman,
Yale University Department of German, 2002-17;
Co-editor, Feedback: www.openhumanitiespress.org/feedback