The Brecht Yearbook 46 presents the second volume of contributions from the 16th Symposium of the International Brecht Society, which took place in Leipzig in June 2019 under the title Brecht Among Strangers. It was organized jointly by the IBS and the Centre of Competence for Theatre (CCT) at the University of Leipzig, in cooperation with Schauspiel Leipzig and the Leipzig Institute for Theatre Studies.

Last year, twenty contributions from this symposium were published in volume 45 of The Brecht Yearbook. Under the headlines “Among Strangers—Brecht's Figures of Strangeness,” “From East to West and Vice Versa—Geographic Interconnections,” and “Global Estrangements— Brecht in the Age of Globalization,” the volume featured analyses of. “Brecht among strangers” that revealed the experience of strangeness as the linchpin of Brecht's entire artistic oeuvre. His plays, prose, and poems as well as his texts on theater work and the other arts, and on politics and society, suggest that the experience of foreignness will be the foundation of. future community among strangers. By engaging with the idea of the foreign—not only in theater—in and after Brecht, the contributors demonstrated in various theoretical and historical contexts that the thinker and practitioner Brecht is still enormously topical and relevant, especially in times of increasing worldwide migration and. growing fear of the foreign.

With this issue, the editors pursue equally ambitious goals. The second volume of contributions is again devoted to Brecht's relevance in. world of strangers living together. The confrontation with what is strange within oneself poses special challenges today. The foreign in. Brechtian context does not mean something exotic or far-off that makes one feel safe in one’s own already familiar position. It should rather be understood as. radical strangeness that rejects integration and exists first and foremost within oneself (i.e., one's supposed home, culture, biography, identity). The contributions in this volume assume. decidedly contemporary perspective aimed at the “application” or “appropriation” of Brecht's theoretical and practical examples. The focus of this volume is on contemporary transformations of his themes, questions, and suggestions—for example, of his learning play theory, or of his plays in regionally specific stagings—for. “theater among strangers.”

Das goldene Zeitalter der Kriminalliteratur erreichte international seinen Höhepunkt in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren, die Zeit zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen, im deutschen Kontext repräsentiert durch die Weimarer Republik. Kriminalerzählungen gibt es allerdings schon seit Beginn der Geschichte, da das Thema von Schuld und Sühne bzw. die Darstellung von Verbrechen, Enthüllung und Strafe wie auch die Frage nach dem Ursprung des Bösen die Menschheit seit jeher faszinierten. Die Erzählungen der Tausendundeinen Nacht enthalten einige der frühesten bekannten Beispiele von Kriminalliteratur. Traditionell zählen Kriminalromane zur Trivialliteratur, auch wenn klassische Werke wie etwa Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostojewskis Roman Schuld und Sühne oder Friedrich Dürrenmatts Romane Der Richter und sein Henker oder Der Verdacht diese Themen literarisch anspruchsvoll verarbeiten. Als eigenständiges Genre trat der Krimi zunächst in der Romantik in Erscheinung. Eine erste deutsche Kriminalerzählung ist E. T. A. Hoffmanns Novelle Das Fräulein von Scuderi aus dem Jahr 1819. Im Amerika des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts trug Edgar Allan Poe mit seinen dunklen Werken, etwa seiner Erzählung “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” (1841), zur Entwicklung des Genres bei. Spätere amerikanische Autoren wie Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett und James M. Cain hatten einen hartgesottenen Stil, den Bertolt Brecht besonders bei Chandler bewunderte. Der “hard-boiled detective” dieser amerikanischen Autoren war eine Reaktion auf die geradlinigen, vorwiegend britischen “Whodunits,” die mit dem Ausbruch des Zweiten Weltkriegs ihr Ende fanden. Im frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhundert waren die Hauptautoren dieses goldenen Zeitalters der Kriminalliteratur alle Briten: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham und Ngaio Marsh. “Wie die Welt selber wird auch der Kriminalroman von den Engländern beherrscht,” notierte Brecht um 1938 (BFA 22.1, 505).

Ebenso wie andere Intellektuelle der Weimarer Republik—Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin und Kurt Tucholsky—schätzte Brecht Kriminalromane. Als er vor seiner Reise ins amerikanische Exil viele seiner Bücher in Schweden zurücklassen musste, schrieb er im April 1941 resigniert in seinem Journal: “Meine beiden Produktionsmittel, die Zigarren und die (englischen) Kriminalromane, gehen aus und müssen rationalisiert werden” (BFA 26, 480). Trotz der Transportschwierigkeiten in der Emigration stehen heute 290 Kriminalromane in Brechts Nachlassbibliothek.

Saskia Fischer. Ritual und Ritualität im Drama nach 1945: Brecht, Frisch, Dürrenmatt, Sachs, Weiss, Hochhuth, Handke. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2019. 478 Seiten.

Saskia Fischers Studie geht von der Beobachtung aus, dass sich erstaunlich viele Autor*innen “nach dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges bis in die Mitte der 1960er Jahre explizit auf eine rituelle Ästhetik” beziehen (5). Dies mag im Wissen um die “nationalsozialistische Ritualkultur” zwar verwundern (ebd.), wird im Rahmen einer umfassenden kulturellen Wiederaneignungsbewegung nach 1945 aber plausibel. Das ästhetische und politische Risiko lag darin, dass die sinnliche, emotional verbindende, intensive Gemeinschaftserfahrung von Ritualen durch Inszenierungsstrategien so überwältigend wirken kann, dass sie jegliche kritische Haltung unterbindet. Warum also und wozu sind die Stücke (und Autor*innen), die hier besprochen werden, um eine Wiederaneignung ritueller Formen bemüht?

Es handelt sich um die Dissertationsschrift Fischers, die in den letzten Jahren als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin sowohl am Bielefelder Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB 584) Das Politische als Kommunikationsraum in der Geschichte als auch an der Forschungsgruppe “Felix Culpa”—Guilt as. Culturally Productive Force am Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung der Universität Bielefeld beteiligt war. Fischer ist inzwischen wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Leibniz Universität Hannover und habilitiert zu Poetiken des Widerstands.

Individualismus, Kritik und Wissensorientierung werden nach wie vor als europäische Werte gefeiert. Im Wunschdenken einer modernen, aufgeklärten Gesellschaft scheinen daher Rituale als gemeinschaftsfördernde und stabilisierende, spirituelle und sinnlich erfahrbare kulturelle Praktiken kaum Raum zu haben. Doch zeigt die Empirie etwas Anderes: Religiöse Feiertage, Geburt, Hochzeit, Bestattung, Amtseinsetzungen und Erinnerungsfeiern— Rituale und Ritualität prägen unseren Alltag, ob im Privaten, im öffentlichen Raum oder in virtuellen Welten. Der zur Regeneration und Selbsterkenntnis von Hochleistungsarbeiter*innen der westlichen Gesellschaften beinahe schon obligatorische Aufenthalt in einem indischen Ashram, von dem danach zumindest einige der rituellen Handlungen in den durchgeplanten Arbeitsalltag überführt werden, mag dafür nur ein Beispiel sein. Denn rituelle Praktiken können wandern und sich trotz ihrer konventionalisierten Form ausdifferenzieren oder neu entstehen. Sie sind nicht an kulturelle oder historische Kontexte gebunden, sondern erhalten immer wieder neue Formen und Funktionen.

This article argues that Brecht’s unique musicality as a poet led to a rich and rarely paralleled collaboration with musical composers. While the young Brecht sketched out his own music for his early poetry and songs, he soon turned to professional composers as partners. The article focuses on Brecht’s three major musical collaborators, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. In addition to the innovative works that Brecht created with these composers, they also stimulated important theoretical writings that led to new forms of opera, as in Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, or a revolutionary aesthetics of film music, as in Eisler/Adorno’s Composing for the Films, which is strongly influenced by Brecht.

Brecht Among Strangers was the title of the sixteenth symposium of the International Brecht Society (IBS), which took place in Leipzig from June 19 to 23, 2019. It was organized by the Centre of Competence for Theatre (CCT) at the University of Leipzig, in cooperation with the Leipzig Institute of Theatre Studies and Schauspiel Leipzig. More than one hundred academic presentations by Brecht scholars from five continents, two keynotes, five roundtables, four workshops, and twelve theater performances were devoted to the question of the foreign in Brecht's work and its significance for the present. Our choice of topic proved to be doubly contemporary: on the one hand, it (finally) took up the frequently underestimated role that strangeness and the experience of foreignness play in Brecht's life and work. Brecht was confronted with the strange throughout his life. He was exposed to it everywhere he went, and anywhere he lived he was a stranger among strangers. Furthermore, he turned the experience of being a stranger into the linchpin of his entire artistic project. His plays, prose, and poetry as well as the texts he wrote about theater and the other arts and about politics and society tell us that the experience of being alien is the precondition for the possibility of a future community among strangers. On the other hand, the subject of the symposium Brecht Among Strangers could not have been more pertinent and relevant to the challenges of the present. Brecht's intense confrontation with foreignness is more relevant now than ever in an era when, on a daily basis, fear and hatred of foreigners continue to demonstrate a fundamental inability to live among strangers even in a period of increasing globalization and migration. The overarching goal of the symposium Brecht Among Strangers, therefore, was to contribute to cosmopolitan conviviality: living together as strangers among strangers.

In Brecht's work, the strange is not simply that which is exotic and distanced. It does not mean merely strangers (or foreigners) from other countries, together with customs and moral attitudes that may appear strange (or foreign) to those who “belong”—who perceive themselves, however correctly, to be “at home.” A perspective that takes its cues from Brecht starts by exploring what seems to be radically alien in one's own world (culture, background, personality): a strangeness that resists facile integration.

Brecht's works have been discussed in many international contexts; the Brecht Yearbook alone published two issues on Brecht in Asia and Africa (1989) and Brecht in/and Asia (2011). Brecht's reception in Turkey, however, has received little attention so far. Only one dissertation, Albert Nekimken's Brecht in Turkey, 1955–1977 (1998), focuses on Brecht's impact on Turkish dramatists and Turkish revolutionary theater. This dearth of research on Brecht's reception in Turkey may be particularly surprising since the Turkish-German community represents the largest minority in Germany and since Brecht's plays and theatrical theories played an important role in left-wing artistic movements in Turkey.

Ela Gezen's book now fills this important lacuna. Following an introduction, her monograph is divided into three chapters. The first chapter offers a historical overview of Brecht's reception in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s, between Turkey's first military coup in 1960 and its third one in 1980. The following two chapters focus on two Turkish-German artists whose work is strongly influenced by Brecht: Aras Ören and Emine Sevgi Özdamar.

The first chapter, “Intersections of Politics and Aesthetics: Bertolt Brecht in the Turkish Context,” concentrates on cultural relations between Germany and Turkey as they relate to Brecht. Transnational cultural practices are never unidirectional (15); and while many Turkish citizens emigrated to Germany for economic or political reasons beginning in the 1960s, in an earlier period, during World War II, Turkey took in German and Jewish intellectuals: Leo Spitzer, Ernst Reuter, and Erich Auerbach are famous examples. Brecht could have traveled through Turkey as well, as he expressed in a 1941 letter from his Helsinki exile to Hanns Eisler, but the route through Turkey never materialized. Brechtian theater came to Turkey after the 1960 military coup, when a new constitution established a parliamentary democracy in Turkey and allowed freedom of expression. Marxist literature was translated into Turkish and new socialist journals emerged— such as Yön, Ant, and the arts and theater journal Oyun and its successor Tiyatro. New theater ensembles were established in the 1960s and theater departments were founded at major Turkish universities, for example, the Ankara University Theater Institute (19).

Navid Kermani has emerged as a major public intellectual in Germany, raising the nation's conscience particularly on questions of immigration and religious tolerance. Born in Siegen, Germany, as the son of Iranian parents, Kermani is an author of literary works and of essays, as well as a scholar of religion. He studied “Orientalistik” (Near Eastern Studies), philosophy, and drama in Cologne, Cairo, and then Bonn, where he completed his doctorate in 1998 and his Habilitation in 2005. Throughout his studies he worked in theaters, as a directorial assistant (“Regieassistent”) and later as dramaturge at the Schauspiel Frankfurt and the Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim, a theater that played an important role in the development of migrant theater, especially Turkish-German theater, in the 1980s. (Mülheim, incidentally, is also the German city in which Brecht's Fatzer is set.) Besides writing journalistically for Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others, he is the author of an astounding variety of books. He authored creative prose works such as the children's book Ayda, Bär und Hase (2006) and novels such as Das Buch der von Neil Young Getöteten (2002), Dein Name (2011), or Große Liebe (2014). He wrote travel reports on his many voyages to the Middle East and North Africa that invite comparisons to the work of the Weimar-era “rasende Reporter” Egon Erwin Kisch. Kermani's journalistic writings and travel reports from regions in turmoil include the books Schöner neuer Orient: Berichte von Städten und Kriegen (2003) and Ausnahmezustand: Reisen in eine beunruhigte Welt (2013).