No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

Discussing expressionism / Ernst Bloch
Realism in the balance / Georg Lukacs
Against Georg Luckacs / Bertolt Brecht
Conversations with Brecht / Walter Benjamin
Letters to Walter Benjamin / Theodor Adorno
Reply / Walter Benjamin
Reconciliation under duress ; Commitment / Theodor Adorno

Reflections in conclusion / Fredric Jameson