Paratekstualna obfitość: Fotografia i tekst w Elementarzu wojennym Bertolta Brechta [przeł. A. Lipszyc]
Paratextual profusion: Photography and text in Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer [trans. A. Lipszyc]

Summary/Abstract: Brecht himself called War Primer the photo-epigrams. Each of them comprises a photo – usually cut out from an illustrated magazine – placed against the black background and provided with a four-verse poem by the author. The theme of the book is World War II. Critics have commonly treated the book as a didactic work which offers a Marxist correction of the “Western” history of war. This article however rejects such an interpretation and situates the book in the context of Brecht’s and Benjamin’s writings from 1920s and 1930s devoted to photography and concentrates not only on the relationship between photographs and the poems but on, quite numerous paratexts (original newspaper captions, titles, explanatory notes, introduction, text on the dust jacket, first pages, as well as the author’s signature), and proves that various modes of addressing the reader, constructed by the text do not allow for the transmission of a uniform ideological message.

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