Unlike those leading Marxists who commented on literature only occasionally, being preoccupied with political, economic and philosophical theory and practice, and unlike Lukács, who returned to literary criticism after active communist politics, Walter Benjamin was a literary critic long before he became a Marxist, and his work as a Marxist was directed almost exclusively at problems of literature. He found himself in tragic circumstances. The victory of Nazism forced him to leave Germany. He had already become convinced that the proletarian revolution was the only solution to humanity's crisis, and yet he found the communist parties' prescriptions to writers and artists to be the very opposite of revolutionary and thus destructive of any development in literature and art. Consequently, his life and work in the 1930s suffered from isolation and hostility (he died, by his own hand, in September 1940, on realising that he was about to be handed over to the Gestapo by police at the French-Spanish frontier). Only in Bertolt Brecht did he find any sympathetic understanding, and that intellectual relationship was very close.² With the exception of the period of intellectual collaboration with Brecht, Benjamin was virtually isolated.