Marginalia in Brecht’s own copies of Unter dem Banner des Marxismus create a picture of his studies, between 1927 and 1934, in response to Lenin's call, issued in 1922, for a study of Hegelian dialectics "from a materialist standpoint." Taken together with their marginalia and the primary sources they cite, the articles by W. Adoratski, A. Deborin, and Wilhelm Reich published between 1925 and 1930 characterize the environment in which Brecht developed his understanding of dialectics and his aesthetics of epic theater.The intellectual underpinnings of this aesthetics, this chapter suggests, entail at least three concepts that are useful for epic theater’s anti-illusionist purposes: cause and effect (and its reversal) in history, including theater history; the relation of art (a material product of the “thinking brain”) to reality ("Art follows [reflects, contradicts] reality" – Brecht); and the dynamic in untenable antagonisms that, once recognized, portends their resolution (class struggle). Following Brecht’s close reading of these distinctions may help clarify the place in Brecht's theater of “militant materialism” and Lenin’s reflection theory of knowledge.

This chapter examines Bertolt Brecht’s complicated and fraught relationship with his homeland Germany. Brecht was always attracted by the adventure of foreign lands and was particularly fascinated by the cultures of the United States and East Asia. He was devastatingly critical of Germany and its cultural traditions, and during the Hitler dictatorship he was one of the fiercest intellectual opponents of Nazism, producing some of the most articulate and best-known literary and cultural attacks on Hitler’s Third Reich. Brecht also severely criticized what he, together with Friedrich Engels, referred to as “deutsche Misere” (German misery), i.e. the slavish fealty of German intellectuals to political power. However, during the Third Reich and later Brecht also insisted on the hope for a certain kind of German normality and nonjingoistic patriotism that recognized the qualities and achievements of other nations and peoples. For this reason, Brecht’s conception of a national feeling that is also open toward other cultures has the potential to be of use in today’s multicultural Germany.

This chapter is divided into three sections examining Brecht’s literary influences, his achievements as a writer of fiction, and his legacy. It considers Brecht’s admiration for prose writers including Döblin, Büchner, Grimmelshausen, Wodehouse, Kipling, and Hašek. It argues that these readings, alongside Brecht’s interest in Nietzsche and the Vienna Circle, helped to inform his understanding of language as a form of practical intervention. Brecht sees language as a rhetorical tool kit, a “handle” that can be used to change reality. The chapter also argues that Brecht’s fiction is characterized by “blunt thinking,” employed as a means of ideological critique. This is shown by a consideration of Brecht’s two masterworks of short philosophical fiction, Stories of Mr. Keuner and Refugee Conversations, and his three experimental novels, Threepenny Novel, the Tui-Novel, and The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar. The chapter concludes with some brief observations about Brecht’s enduring significance for German prose fiction from the mid-twentieth century until the present day, also noting his influence on the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

This essay places Brecht within the context of exile from Nazi Germany, follows him on his journey through Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the Soviet Union, and reviews his years in American exile where he joined the German-speaking émigré community in Los Angeles: soon an Enemy Alien. The essay captures Brecht's lived experience of exile as it enters his writing, from his journal entries and correspondence to his numerous poems – which offer sharp insights into the exilic fate, its contemporary dimensions as well as historical antecedents. Furthermore, the essay calls attention to the precarious situation of writers in exile, deprived of publication venues and severed from audiences, and surveys Brecht's own publishing network and its virtual elimination toward the late 1930s. Finally, the essay brings Brecht into contact with other exiles, such as Joseph Roth, Oskar Maria Graf, Anna Seghers, Lion Feuchtwanger, as well as Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and investigates the extent to which the exilic “we” in Brecht's exile poetry – suggesting a community of exiles conjoined in their effort to combat Nazismcorresponded to an existing sense of togetherness and shared responsibility among the exiles, Brecht included: a “people's front” in the spirit of Heinrich Mann.

This essay focuses on Brecht’s commitment to women’s emancipation on the basis of his interest in the writings and activism of Marx, Engels, Bebel, Lenin, Clara Zetkin, and Rosa Luxemburg; his collaborative work over the years with numerous women writers and theater practitioners; and his ability as a playwright to create some of the most intriguing female characters in the history of theater. The essay goes on to examine Brecht’s reception by feminist theater critics and practitioners, to provide a summary of productions of his plays with leading women actors in the US and the UK, and to discuss two productions set in Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda) based on Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children.

This article examines the key biographies of Bertolt Brecht that have appeared since Brecht’s death in 1956, exploring the way that Cold War politics helped to determine how Brecht was seen in Germany and the English-speaking world.Whereas left-leaning and socialist biographers tended to admire and praise Brecht, anti-communist and anti-socialist biographers condemned him for his revolutionary politics and leftist commitments.The 1970s and 1980s witnessed renewed interest and admiration for Brecht even in the capitalist West; however, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990, renewed recriminations against communism and socialism led to further attacks on Brecht and his legacy, culminating in John Fuegi’s 1994 biography Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. In more recent times, however, ongoing problems with globalization and capitalism have led to a renewed appreciation for and heightened interest in Brecht, his life, and his works.

Although Brecht entered the South African repertoire only in the 1950s, 1930s political theater drew communists and other leftists local and expatriate including Kurt Baum who worked with Piscator and thus in the same milieu as Brecht in 1920s Berlin. Despite notoriety as a leftist writer, Brecht featured as a star of European art theater and a sign of high culture on university stages in the1950s and in subsidized theaters in the 1960s striving to represent “Western civilization” against alleged threats from communism or African nationalism. In contrast, the anti-apartheid theater of the 1970s–1990s from Fugard and Serpent Players to Junction Avenue Theatre with Purkey, Makhene and others, and the Market Theatre with Simon and others deployed the Lehrstück, epic theater, and Brechtian pedagogy to challenge the power of state and capital with activists and workers as well as professional performers. Postapartheid theater has borrowed from Boal as well as Brecht to create participatory dramaturgies for tackling crises such as AIDS, gender violence, and corruption in state and local government.

This article explores Bertolt Brecht’s significance for the most advanced forms of contemporary experimental and avant-garde theater.Brecht is one of the most popular and most-produced playwrights world-wide, and certainly in Germany; however many mainstream productions tend to deprive his work of its radical political and aesthetic edge.Nevertheless, contemporary avant-garde and experimental theaterwould be fundamentally unthinkable without Brecht, and it is particularly indebted to the most radical phase of Brecht’s career, when he and his team were working on learning plays (Lehrstücke) in the late 1920s and early 1930s during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Brecht’s conception of a separation of the elements, of putting mechanisms of power clearly on display, and of creating collective agency that, via script-based theater, tendentially removed power from the hands of writers and directors, are fundamental building blocks of contemporary experimental theater. The article explores such forms and their impact on the basis of experimental work by Robert Wilson, Wanda Golonka, and She She Pop.

This article, a personal reflection by the respected Eastern German writer Kerstin Hensel, explores Bertolt Brecht’s significance for the development of East German literature and culture. The socialist regime in East Germany sought to coopt Brecht’s legacy for its own purposes, and by the 1970s and 1980s Brecht had therefore become something of a lifeless classic throughout much of the GDR. However, his approach to theater and writing still had the potential to unsettle and inspire younger writers occasionally, and Brecht had a major influence on some of the most famous East German writers and playwrights, including Heiner Müller, Peter Hacks, and Volker Braun. Hensel shows via a close-reading the way that themes and tropes from one of Brecht’s most famous poems influenced Volker Braun in one of his poems and then Henself herself, who consciously placed herself in the tradition of both of her predecessors.

This article explores Brecht’s origins and life in Augsburg from the time he was born in 1898 until he left Augsburg for Berlin in 1924. Brecht came from a well-educated and prosperous middle-class family, and he was raised as a Lutheran by his mother, although he soon rejected any form of Christian religious belief. From an early age he demonstrated great promise and ambition as a writer and soaked up influences from all around him, including the fairs that occurred in Augsburg on a regular basis. He read widely and was influenced by what he read. Among his most important influences were Frank Wedekind, Georg Büchner, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine.In his adolescence Brecht became the center of a group of friends in Augsburg devoted to literature, music, and a nonconformist approach to life. In Augsburg Brecht experienced the Bavarian Revolution after the end of World War I.Brecht’s first plays Baal and Drums in the Night reflect some of his experiences and thoughts while living in Augsburg, and his revolutionary first book of poetry, Domestic Breviary, also emerged above all out of his life in Augsburg.

This essay sketches Brecht’s impact on the development of German Studies as a discipline in the United States, and then briefly comments on the contemporary understanding of what German Studies is and does in the US academy and what Brecht might have to do with that. In other words, this essay is intended neither as an overview of Brecht scholarship in the North American or German (East and West) academic contexts nor as review of Brecht in performance or performance studies. Rather, the essay questions what kind of notion of academic work the various incarnations and evocations of Brecht and Brechtian practice have authorized in the US.

This essay outlines Brecht’s relation to Marxism along three dimensions. First, it examines his Marxist influences including Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Karl Korsch, and Fritz Sternberg. Second, it explores Marxist reactions to him, particularly those of GeorgLukács and Theodor Adorno. Lastly, it investigates his influences on Marxist thought vis-à-vis Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Rancière, and others. It shows that not only was his work heavily influenced by the movement, his thought also occupies an often-unrecognized central position within it.

The article gives an overview on the reception of Brecht in Brazil spanning the decades from 1960 to the present. During that time Brazil underwent many economic, political and cultural changes without which the special appeal of Brecht’s work cannot be fully understood. In the beginning Brecht helped Brazilian theater to break away from traditional bourgeois theater. In the 1960s he became the most performed playwright, and this popularity continued well into the first phase of military rule. The article then focuses on a number of leading theaters that performed or adapted Brecht plays, as well as on artists such as Augusto Boal who sought to develop Brecht’s theater techniques further. Brecht’s impact remains strong even under conditions that have changed in recent decades. Aside from the plays that shed light on the conditions of capitalism it is also Brecht’s attitude in approaching reality and his search for artistic means that have influenced various generations of Brazilian theater directors and activists.

Bertolt Brecht, the most influential playwright of the twentieth century, is unthinkable without music.Many of his poems, as well as his forty-eight completed dramas and roughly fifty dramatic fragments, are connected to music.There is hardly another writer or dramatist of the twentieth century who based his work as clearly and decisively on the complex relationship between music, text, and drama.Brecht worked with some of the most important composers of the twentieth century, in particular Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau.Although Brecht rejected some of the aesthetic ideas and ideology of Richard Wagner, in his ambition to combine the arts together and to leave a major legacy, he nevertheless in some respects ultimately came to resemble Wagner.The music connected to Brecht‘s texts is performed and passed on in the media throughout the world, from the early recordings made by the young Brecht himself all the way to innumerable versions of his “Ballad of Mack the Knife” created and spread by the globalized music market.