Ideas, some say, do not belong to a single person, not even the one who originally voiced them. True, unlike palpable products such as books, they call for more sophisticated legal efforts to be protected, or discerned at all, than private property. But regardless of whether ideas might naturally, as it were, tend towards a sort of software communism, it remains beyond dispute that some of them are primarily associated with at least two persons. The history of ideas, particularly in German literature and philosophy, offers a few outstanding examples of intellectual couples: Goethe and Schiller, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Marx and Engels, or, a little less illustrious, Horkheimer and Adorno. Or—as the present volume suggests—Benjamin and Brecht. What again did they share?

Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, who first met in 1924 and became friends by the end of that decade, have indeed been friends, above all else; and in some ways perhaps also comrades, though neither of them ever joined the untouchable Party they both marvelled at from afar. However, they never co-authored a single piece of text, at least not publicly. If they had done so, they would have probably come up with a play of two peculiarly stubborn characters. A likely stage design for a performance of that would-be drama can be found on the frontispiece of this beautifully illustrated book, picturing two chess players sitting back to back, staring at the chequerboard on the table or at the invisible photographer (the audience, respectively), but never looking at each other.

Brecht, more or less overtly, drew his inspirations from many different sources among which the writings of Benjamin played only a minor part, at best. Most of what Benjamin brought up remained fairly enigmatic to him, as Brecht quite bluntly, or ironically, admitted. Who knows if, or in which regard exactly, he might have recognized his friend's genius, as did, from different angles, Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. Benjamin, in turn, was very much impressed, almost awed, by Brecht, both his personal demeanour and his works. And he wrote articles on some of these works which are now considered among the best ever written on Brecht.