As Wikipedia reports,”The proper English translation of Verfremdungseffekt is a matter of controversy. The word is sometimes rendered as defamiliarization effect, estrangement effect, distantiation, alienation effect, or distancing effect.”

Verfremdungseffekt is the word used by Bertholt Brecht to describe the intended audience effect of his plays. Rather than have the audience identify with the characters and immerse themselves in the action he worked to force the maintenance of some critical distance. He used techniques that forced the involvement of the intellect as well as the emotions.

I wonder if we could do a translation as detachment and make a connection with the Buddhist admonishment about attachment to things of this world. Brechtian theatre as Buddhist theatre? How very Zen.

If nothing else, it solves the semantic problem of the often used translation of alienation which caries with it a lot of negative ballast.

As expressed in my previous comments on photography, it is necessary to provide some distance (detachment) from the subject in the making of photographs. At the simplest level this is true because you are dealing only with the visual aspects of the subject. Subject becomes object as the visual is extracted for the photographic record.

It’s interesting that such a wide range of words get offered up as the equivalent of verfremdungseffekt. The next question that comes up is whether this element of art is requisite on the creative side. Is the artist necessarily alienated from the rest of society? Or is the artist gifted with the power of being able to create a distance from his subject matter that others cannot? All these profound questions emanate from a German word that has no precise equivalent in English.