One reserves a special kind of disappointment for what one has once loved. This highly personal, polemical “Versuch” by former GDR writer Uwe Kolbe is a book of disappointment, by turns frustrating and intriguing. The modest title on the front cover, Brecht, suggests only part of the target, however. Even if it is “eine Rede mit Brecht, anhand von Brecht, über, gegen und für Brecht” (15–16), in truth it is the subtitle that more accurately suggests the larger and more distinctive purview of the work: the Brecht tradition in and after the GDR, and finally the relationship between politically engaged literature and power in the twentieth century.

Born in East Berlin in 1957, a year after Brecht's death, Kolbe is known as one of the last generation of GDR writers, those “born into” the established socialist state. His collection of poems Hineingeboren (published with Aufbau in 1980 and Suhrkamp in 1982) became emblematic of the frustrations of the generation who would go on to throng the streets and squares during the demonstrations of 1989/90. In 2014 his novel, Die Lüge, charted an autobiographically inflected account of the relationship between an artistic son and his father, representative of the orthodox socialist establishment (Kolbe's own father worked for the Staatssicherheit). During the reading tours associated with the book Kolbe found himself trying to make the fraught relationship with power in the GDR comprehensible, and took recourse to a single word that always worked: Brecht. Now this essay of sorts, or speech or at one point open letter, mines the same territory and unpacks the “lie,” as Kolbe sees it, at the heart of the GDR literary establishment. He identifies among the “old men” of the GDR cultural elite a cynical falsehood in their relationship with power: one that as a consequence he believes prolonged the existence of the socialist state (33). The original model for that lie he sees in its purest form in Brecht: “Es hätte ohne Brechts Anpassung an die Verhältnisse in der DDR die Anpassung so vieler Intellektueller an dieselben so lange und so geschmeidig nicht gegeben” (42).

The book then starts by offering a biographical sketch of Brecht's life and writing.