This chapter examines Brecht’s approach to film not as a mimetic means of reproducing reality but as an indexical means of producing reality. It considers key passages of “The Threepenny Trial” and several interwar fragments in order to elucidate Brecht’s distinction between actual and functional reality and to elaborate the concept of the cognitively capable masses, whose collective perception made recognition of actual reality possible. It then offers brief analyses of the key films Brecht worked on, Kuhle Wampe and Hangmen Also Die!, which provide examples of the strategies Brecht employed to bend film to his aims of modeling mass-based cognition and reality production. These attempts opposed industrial norms, cultural convention, and the regulatory force of the state. They succeeded infrequently if at all, as Brecht himself acutely realized. Assessing the success and failure of these experiments allows greater insight into the potential of the medium of film in the second quarter of the twentieth century and creates potentially useful points of comparison to the complex relationship between representational media and the networked production of reality in our own times.

When we think of the many ways in which Brecht's work, ideas, and texts have been and are being received, refashioned and recycled, we should of course think—and perhaps in the very first place, rather than at the end of this volume—of the use and usefulness of Brecht in the creative arts, in literature, and the theater in the first instance, but not just there: also in film, in multimedia dialogue, in the visual arts, and so on. Brecht himself was a restless experimenter, and many since have been inspired by his experiments to go on and continue that method, in sympathy with or, occasionally, in bitter opposition to Brecht's own spirit. As we have seen, Brecht entertained a lively dialogue with a very wide range of literary and cultural traditions, always weighing up what he could take from them, adapt, and develop. His innovations often come about in the process of recycling the old, for example his “Epic Theater” as a form of reception of the theater of antiquity and of the Early Modern. As a writer, Brecht was of course not only an innovator in the theater, but also opened up new (and old) poetic forms, experimented with subject matters and registers previously thought “unliterary.” He experimented with what were then new media: writing poems to be distributed as records, plays for the radio, and film treatments, and he created his own multimedia and cross-genre works, the photo-epigrams of War Primer, and even made a “Proposal to combine architecture and lyric poetry.” What fruitful territory this is! It is hardly surprising that later artists have taken up the challenge to continue and develop the experiments.

It is less easy for a primarily academic conference to reflect this sort of work in practice. But for the Oxford symposium we were determined also to develop a cultural program, and the pieces that follow are the best we can do by way of traces of all such activity—the work that can at least somehow be represented in linear written form. Some of this work also leaves a more lasting trace, in the form of photographs and filmic accounts, on the website of the Symposium: http://brecht.mml.ox.ac.uk/ibs-symposium. When this is taken down, we hope to transfer at least a proportion of the material to an Oxford University media and research archive and/or to the IBS website.

The forty-first Brecht Yearbook features a set of essays focused on the special interest topic Teaching Brecht, along with a diverse mix of new research contributions that, once again, demonstrate the breadth and diversity of Brecht-related scholarship. The special section opens the volume. Guest editors Per Urlaub and Kristopher Imbrigotta offer an introductory essay that guides us into the work of contributors from three continents and a multiplicity of disciplines. Each essay provides a window into fascinating moments of teaching and learning that expose the productively porous bounds between, as Urlaub and Imbrigotta put it, stage and page, classroom and community.

The volume continues with the latest piece of work by intrepid theater scholar and oral historian Margaret Setje-Eilers. Her interview subject this time is Annemone Haase, who worked at the Berliner Ensemble from 1959 to 2001. As she did in her work that formed the special section on Manfred Karge in BY 38, Setje-Eilers again poses questions that open lines of thought and illuminate moments recent and distant, onstage and backstage, in art and in life. Her interview enriches our understanding, not only of the remarkable career of Haase but also of the cultural and historical forces that shaped her life in the theater.

We remain in the company of remarkable women as we move into the volume's open-topic research articles, first with a piece by eminent scholar Helen Fehervary that is targeted in its examples and sweeping in its basic claim. Fehervary's essay on Brecht's collaborations with women, which contemplates relationships that evolved in the early Weimar days as well as in later career stages in exile and in the GDR, is refreshing in its cool distance from the heat of familiar Brecht-and-women polemics and counterpolemics. In its stress on art instead of romance, it guides reader attention to the creative work to which Brecht and collaborators from Elisabeth Bergner to Anna Seghers contributed as peers.

Fehervary's article pairs fascinatingly with an article that zooms in on Skovsbostrand, in which Katherine Hollander delves into the spatial, political, material, and intellectual conditions of peer collaboration in a very specific place and time of exile. The method is surgically precise, and the insights have broad ramifications.