With an accute sense of urgency the leftwing playwright Bertolt Brecht and the media theorist Walter Benjamin tried to formulate an emancipatory and anti-fascist artistic theory and practice. When fascism, according to Benjamin, amounted to an aestheticisation of politics, revolutionary communism was engaged in the politicisation of the arts. Brecht and Benjamin (and also some of the Russian Futurists) mark the starting point of a participative paradigm in art which aims at using technical media in an emancipatory way.
