Vulgar, Crude, Foolish: Brecht, Teaching, Fascism

Abstract

This essay examines some senses in which we might think of Brecht’s Marxism as vulgar, placing particular emphasis on his interest in the vulgar as vulgate: the teaching of practical knowledge in the common tongue. The essay then contrasts Brecht’s vulgar Marxism with his concept of crude thinking, arguing against Walter Benjamin’s influential interpretation of the concept to claim instead that if we examine how Brecht presents crude thinking in his 1934 Threepenny Novel, we see that for him, crude thinking is not something to be emulated and learned; it is ultimately fascist thinking. Yet precisely because it is an anomalous moment in his work, diametrically opposed to his vulgar Marxism, crude thinking also gives a glimpse of a different Brecht who would have recognized how European fascism has recapitulated European colonialism and reckoned more adequately with the psycho-political mechanisms and force of racialized identification and projection.

Key Words:

• Walter Benjamin
• Bertolt Brecht
• Crude Thinking
• Fascism
• Vulgar Marxism

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the participants—Edward Baring, Anna Kornbluh, Lars Lih, Yahya Madra, Maliha Safri, and McKenzie Wark—in the Vulgar Marxism symposium held virtually at Drew University for their questions about the first version of this essay; to Marc Silberman and an anonymous reader, whose readers’ reports for Rethinking Marxism significantly helped the process of revision; and to Michael Rothberg for further questions and suggestions. None of them, of course, is responsible for the errors that remain.

Notes

1 Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht by Bertolt Brecht. Translation copyright © 2019, 2015 by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine. Underlying copyright © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

2 I’m grateful to Daniel A. Siedell for the references to Koerner’s work, which I first learned about from his excellent unpublished essay, “The Hunchbacked Dwarf, Blotting Paper, and Left-Handed Blows: Walter Benjamin and Radical Theology.”

3 Schonfield (2016) is a notable exception.

4 See Moses (2021). On the postwar memory of these events see Rothberg (2009).