Ai's work exists in that spot between necessity constraint, but also freedom and creativity. He is just such a versatile writer. And again, that i think, ties in with this idea that he's appealing to so many different people in so many different audiences. I mean, as kevin mentioned earlier, the the radio work is is really quite extraordinary. This has been written mainly for ten ages. Sometimes there are small lectures about something like a the berlin brass factory, or toy shops in berlin,. The earthquake in lisbon am from the past, and so on. But some times, though, he's working with sound. He's working in the gonre of the
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most celebrated thinkers of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, critic, historian, an investigator of culture, a maker of radio programmes and more. Notably, in his Arcades Project, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, examined how the new media of film and photography enabled art to be politicised, and politics to become a form of art. The rise of the Nazis in Germany forced him into exile, and he worked in Paris in dread of what was to come; when his escape from France in 1940 was blocked at the Spanish border, he took his own life.
With
Esther Leslie
Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London
Kevin McLaughlin
Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English, Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University
And
Carolin Duttlinger
Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson