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PROD U C T ION, REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
5. Centered around the yearbook Das Ziel (The Goal), "Activism'l was a political stance that fused Nietzschean ideals with a pacifist socialism. Prominent figures associated with the movement included the German author and editor Kurt Hiller (1885-1972)~ who edited the yearbook; the theater critic Alfred Kerr; and the novelist Heinrich Mann. The young Benjamin had been a vocal opponent of Hiller's ideas. "New Objectivity" (Neue Sachlichkeit) was the term coined by the museum curator G. F. Hartlaub for a new tendency toward figuration in postwar German painting. It gradually came to designate the Weimar "period style" in art, architecture, design, literature, and film: cool, objective, analytical. 6. Heinrich Mann (1871-1950), German novelist and essayist, was the brother of Thomas Mann. Many of the disputes between the brothers over the years stemmed from Heinrich's left-liberal activism. Alfred Doblin (1878-1957), German novelist, is best known for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). He, too, was a prominent left-liberal voice in Weimar. 7. Kurt Hiller, Del' Sprung ins Helle (Leipzig: Lindner, 1932), p. 314. 8. In place of this sentence, the original manuscript contained a different one, which was deleted: "Or, in Trotsky's words, 'If enlightened pacifists attempt to abolish war by means of rational argument, they simply make fools of themselves, but if the armed masses begin to use the arguments of reason against war, this means the end of war.'" 9. Wissen lmd Verandern (Know and Change; 1931) was Doblin's apology for his humane, party-independent, and frankly mystical socialism. 10. Bertolt Brecht, Versuche .1-3 (Berlin: Kiepenheucl', 1930). 11. In Zurich in 1916, artists, writers, and others disgusted by World War I, and by the bourgeois ideologies that had brought it about, launched Dada, an avant-garde movement that attempted to radically change both the work of art and society. Dadaist groups were active in Berlin, New York, Paris, and elsewhere during the war and into the 19208. 12. John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfelde; 1891-1968), German graphic artist, photographer, and designer, was one of the founders of Berlin Dada. He went on to reinvent photomontage as a political weapon. 13. Albert Renger-Patzsch, Die Welt ist schon: Einhu.ndert photograpbische Aufnahmen (Munich: K. Wolff, 1928). In this book, the German photographer Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966) arranged his photographs of plants, animals, buildings, manufactured goods, and industrial landscapes-often close-ups of isolated details-around formal rhymes. 14. Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) was a German composer best known for his collaborations with Brecht. He became the leading composer in the German Democratic Republic, for which he wrote the national anthem. 15. The "perceptive critic" is Benjamin himself; see his essay "Left-Wing Melancholy" (1931), in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-.1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 423-427. Erich Kastner (1899-