Destruction preservation, or the edifying ruin in Benjamin and Brecht

Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s radio piece for children, “The Fall of Herculaneum and Pompeii,” part of a mini-series on natural-historical disasters broadcast on Radio Berlin in 1931 and Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer, a collection of “photo-epigrams” compiled between 1937 and 1944, bookend a period of displacement, personal and political catastrophe and intense reflection on the uses and abuses of mythical thought and the humanist paradigm. Specific to the moment of their production and deploying genres and registers that speak to projects of transformation of enemy practices and “defunct forms,” these writings may also be seen as staging dialectical negotiations of preservation and destruction, set in aftermath sites where ruin and critical recollection hold the line of defence against “dark times” and prepare the ground for radical edification in the future.