How Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin Pioneered a New Way of Creating

“I think in the heads of others,” Bertolt Brecht declared, capturing how he and the Mitarbeiter (an intimate group of collaborators) borrowed and lent their intellects and competencies to one another. His friend Walter Benjamin borrowed the metaphor in his 1934 essay, “The Author as Producer,” stressing its usefulness for socialists and antifascists: “Politically, it is not private thinking but, as Brecht once expressed it, the art of thinking in other people’s heads that is decisive.”

Here Brecht and Benjamin were not advocating for manipulating the thoughts of others, but imagining an extraordinarily intimate dialectical collectivity: Physically impossible intellectual interdependence. Here Benjamin suggests a binary between the private and the political, but the collaborative life on Svendborg Sound, where the Mitarbeiter made their home in exile, lived in the middle space between those extremes: A space inhabited by profoundly politicized, deeply intimate friends and comrades. Probably without knowing it, Brecht and Benjamin echoed the quintessentially Danish Gruntvig’s desire to “get most of the good brains under one hat.” They might have said they wanted to get most of the good brains under one thatched roof, and the house at Skovsbostrand 8 allowed them to do just that.

Brecht and Benjamin were not advocating for manipulating the thoughts of others, but imagining an extraordinarily intimate dialectical collectivity.

This intimate intellectual collaboration was tied to the “respect and affection” that “being friendly” required of this community. “Love is the art of producing something with the other’s talents,” Brecht wrote in the same Herr Keuner story in which he described the essential social elements “respect and affection.” Despite disagreements that could be unsettling (Benjamin described one series of conversations with Brecht in 1934 as an “agonizing acid test”), in their interactions the Mitarbeiter presumed both respect and affection.

This is especially clear in some of editor and dramaturg Margarete Steffin’s letters to Brecht, in which she switches, from one paragraph to the next, between assiduous colleague, staunch friend, and besotted lover. Not just working together, but using one another’s talents to produce intellectual and creative work, particularly that which advocated socialism and combatted fascism, was for the Mitarbeiter nothing short of an act of love—for Brecht, the definitive act of love.

This intersection of love and use was central to Brecht and Steffin. Translators Tom Kuhn and David Constantine have shown them as being engaged in a “dialectic [of] using and being used […] a loving and fighting collaboration, a commitment to serve, to use and be used, in a matter which, quite rightly, they understood to be one of life or death.” Political urgency was never far away for these refugees; it was not separate from interpersonal relationships, domestic life, or creative work. Part of their commitment to the political was a willingness to use and be used.

As the actress Helene Weigel (Brecht’s wife, and friend to Benjamin and Steffin) demonstrated in a letter to the director Erwin Piscator, for the Mitarbeiter use, and even using one another, did not have a negative connotation. Brecht noted the troublesome and slippery quality of this value, however, writing that what makes exploitation so morally unacceptable is that the desire to be useful is so strong in humans. Wanting to be used was natural, even good; it was capitalism that introduced exploitation into the equation. Of course, simply being anticapitalists did not inoculate the Mitarbeiter against exploiting one another. But their understanding of use as essentially positive underwrote the casual ways they consented to being used, particularly intellectually, by one another.

They did not always willingly consent to being used intellectually by other colleagues. Although Brecht and Benjamin borrowed freely back and forth from one another, incorporating themes, insights, and even language from their conversations into their individual projects, Benjamin in particular was not as free with other friends. He was perturbed when Ernst Bloch seemed to be making a habit of using his ideas, and unhappy with Theodor Adorno when he lifted concepts from their shared conversations and incorporated them into his own work—in both instances without attribution. Yet no such friction seems to have existed between Brecht and Benjamin.

Similarly, when it came to attribution, Brecht and Steffin were extremely casual about their collaboration. But Brecht insisted that Steffin be given public credit for projects they did together for a friend outside the group. When Martin Andersen-Nexø, a well-known Danish writer and friend of Karin Michaëlis, asked Brecht to translate some of his multi-volume memoir into German, Brecht was transparent about their division of labor. Nexø wanted Brecht to be identified as translator, but Brecht was clear that the translations would be made jointly by him and Steffin, and that as the lead translator, her name would have to precede his for publication. “I have no objection to putting my name to it,” he wrote Nexø in April of 1938, “only then it would have to be Margarete Steffin and Bertolt Brecht, because everyone knows I don’t know Danish and I know that most of the work will actually be done by Grete.”

In the end, the translation was attributed to “Margarete Steffin und Bertolt Brecht.” (In another inversion of their habitual roles, Brecht took the lead in communicating with Nexø’s publishers on thorny issues, though he directed them to follow up with Steffin.) Amongst this small group of Mitarbeiter, borrowing labor, ideas, and even language from one another’s work and from conversation was highly permissible—but that permission was idiosyncratic to the group and did not automatically extend to colleagues in their wider circle.

Their stable division of labor and system of collaboration was functional enough that it is often only visible at moments of breakdown (for example, those letters in which the various Mitarbeiter wonder somewhat crossly why a draft or a critique has not arrived from one who promised it). It was organic enough that no systemic description of it was made. Yet we see it in the moments when they came into the process of one another’s work as interlocutors, providers of source material, co-writers, editors, critics, and, in Weigel’s case, in rehearsal and performance as the actress-author responsible for the development of central roles. Moreover, in their writing, Benjamin, Brecht, and to a lesser extent Michaëlis, developed a theoretical orientation that shows how they understood the work of collaboration, as socialists and antifascists attempting to create a body of work equal to the demands of the age.

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It was clear to the Mitarbeiter that the era of fascism and late-stage capitalism required a new way of approaching intellectual and artistic productivity. As Marxists, they recognized that a liberal age had given rise to liberal notions of authorship and individualized methods of creation, but that those notions and methods were no longer sufficient. Brecht observed through Herr Keuner that “there are innumerable people who boast in public that they are able to write great books all by themselves, and this meets with general approval.”

Yet he saw the products of this solitary labor as woefully inadequate. “Without help, with only the scant material that anyone can carry in his hands,” Herr K. laments, these solitary writers “erect their cottages! The largest buildings they know are those a single man is capable of constructing!” Rather than respect the lonely, self-reliant genius, Herr K. scorns the idea that legitimate literature is created autonomously by a single individual. Instead he characterizes such literature as meager in size, short on meaning, lacking connection to the past and usefulness to the present or future. A literature made by one individual, he implies, can offer the community what it needs no more than a single-room cottage can provide for an awakened urban mass. Apartment buildings, museums, and public spaces are called for, and they need to be built not just for the community but by it, as Brecht noted in his praise poem for the beautiful Moscow subway system, constructed by the very Muscovites who would use it.

Their understanding of use as essentially positive underwrote the casual ways they consented to being used, particularly intellectually, by one another.

This attitude toward co-creation and re-use illuminates the Mitarbeiter’s rejection of more conventional methods. Benjamin affirmed Brecht’s sense of the limited possibilities of singly-authored literature, revealing it as a contingent historical form rather than the final result of a natural process. He reminded his readers that “Not always were the forms of commentary, translation, indeed even so-called plagiarism playthings in the margins of literature; they had a place[.]” These contributions also had a place on Svendborg Sound, where not only could plots and themes be recycled between works and shared among writers, but where commentary and translation were valued as highly as the writing of the “original” works—works which, of course, frequently depended in very real ways upon commentary and translation.

Shifting our understanding of creative productivity so that it includes these types of labor, weighted more equally with “original” writing, allows us to recognize Benjamin and Steffin (the primary commenter and translator, respectively) as co-equals with Brecht in the written work produced on the Sound. It shows how re-use of source material from Michaëlis’s broad oeuvre as storyteller and novelist constitutes an intimate conversation between Mitarbeiter who understood re-working and re-imagining as acts of respectful innovation, and illuminates Weigel’s real contributions in the production of scripts.

And it begins to reveal the system by which these Mitarbeiter worked, not as guild subalterns around a master but through a division of labor in which each participant contributed something uniquely valuable, according to her skills and talents. “[T]he division of labor has transformed creation in many important spheres,” Brecht later asserted. “The act of creation has become a collective creative process, a continuum of a dialectical sort in which original invention, taken on its own, has lost much of its meaning.”

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From Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950 by Katherine Hollander. Copyright © 2026. Available from Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.