Walter Benjamin writes about a conversion with Bertolt Brecht

He thinks that Marx and Engels, had they read "Le Bateau ivre," would have sensed the great historical movement of which it is the expression. They would have clearly recognized that what it describes is not an eccentric poet going for a walk, but the flight, the escape of a man who cannot live any longer inside the barriers of a class which - with the Crimean war, the Mexican adventure - was then beginning to open up even the most exotic lands to mercantile interests.