Considerations about “O autor como produtor”

Abstract

Our contribution aims at presenting certain remarks on the essay “Der Autor als Produzent” (“The author as producer”). The text was written by Walter Benjamin in April 1934 for a conference delivered by the writer before a working class audience when he was exiled in the French capital. Doubtlessly, “The author as producer” is one of the most significant essays in German from the exile period for it records not only Walter Benjamin’s political engagement in his struggle against German fascism but also the deep chasm established in the politics of the German left since the end of the First World War, between Germany’s Social Democratic Party and the country’s Communist Party. Furthermore, Walter Benjamin forwards a series of categories for dealing with the relationship between writer and society: on one side, those truly “producers” as “progressive writers” (fortgeschrittene Schriftsteller), and “operating writers” (operierende Schrifsteller), capable of transforming the means of production; and, on the other hand, those labeled as “left-wing bourgeois writers” (linksbürgerliche Schriftsteller), regarded as “present-day” writers (Routiniers), who sympathize with the working class only in the plan of the ideas, but not in the plan of revolutionary action. In his essay, Benjamin spares no criticism to great figures of the German literary scenario such as, for instance, Kurt Hiller, Erich Kästner, Walter Mehring, Kurt Tucholsky and Alfred Döblin, while electing Bertolt Brecht, the musician and composer Hanns Eisler and the artist John Heartfield as authentic representatives of the progressive literature and art. Benjamin’s text mirrors, so to speak, the many-sided setting where the German left found itself and foregrounds the position of the writer himself as “producer”, “operative” and “progressive”.