The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions

An exploration of the interaction of aesthetics and politics in Bertolt Brecht's “photoepigrams.”

From 1938 to 1955, Bertolt Brecht created montages of images and text, filling his working journal (Arbeitsjournal) and his idiosyncratic atlas of images, War Primer, with war photographs clipped from magazines and adding his own epigrammatic commentary. In this book, Georges Didi‑Huberman explores the interaction of politics and aesthetics in these creations, explaining how they became the means for Brecht, a wandering poet in exile, to “take a position” about the Nazi war in Europe. Illustrated with pages from the Arbeitsjournal and War Primer and contextual images including Raoul Hausmann's poem‑posters and Walter Benjamin's drawings, The Eye of History offers a new view of important but little‑known works by Brecht.