Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama - Hardcover

Fuegi, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802115292 ISBN 13: 9780802115294

Publisher: Grove Pr, 1994

Synopsis

A revolutionary portrait of one of the world's greatest theater artists examines his achievements as the product of his relationships with lovers and colleagues--whose work the charismatic and manipulative Brecht appropriated to fashion himself into a major literary force. 15,000 first printing.

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Reviews

Bertolt Brecht, according to this gripping, myth-shattering biography, regularly cheated his closest co-workers and lovers, publishing their literary works under his own name and concealing his wealth in secret bank accounts while posing as a penurious Communist proletarian. Many of Brecht's poems, stories and songs, plus huge sections of some of his most famous plays, were written by his lover Elisabeth Hauptmann, declares Fuegi, who bases his sensational charges on surviving manuscripts, interviews with members of Brecht's circle, contemporaneous diaries and contracts. The Threepenny Opera , he concludes, was almost exclusively the work of Hauptmann, who silently endured Brecht's exploitation, hoping he would divorce his wife and marry her. Professor of Germanic and Slavic literature at the University of Maryland and author of two previous studies on Brecht, Fuegi further argues that substantial unacknowledged contributions to other famous Brecht plays were made by two of his mistresses. Terrified of abandonment and of emotional involvement, Brecht, in Fuegi's scathing portrait, continually played his multiple lovers against one another. The author deduces that Brecht was bisexual and, from his late teens to mid-20s, preoccupied with homosexuality. A founder of the International Brecht Society, Fuegi presents Brecht as a shrewd manipulator, with close friends on both the left and the radical right, who made puny contributions to the anti-Hitler effort until the Nazis took away his German citizenship, and who remained silent while Stalin persecuted his friends in the Soviet Union. Fuegi's brilliant, graphic portrait of Brecht and his circle is certain to spark controversy. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Emulating the breadth characteristic of the epic theater, Fuegi (Germanic & Slavic Lit./Univ. of Maryland) determines that Brecht's theater wasn't really Brecht's theater after all and that Brecht himself, that rather heroic figure of 20th-century drama, was, in fact, a pig of a human being. A misogynist, a liar, and a thief, Bertolt Brecht used and misused people on all sides. Possessed of mesmeric powers that the author compares to those of Hitler, Brecht had no difficulty seducing any number of men and women who would meet his literary as well as his sexual needs. In time, he produced five children by as many women and saw at least a half dozen more offspring aborted. A good deal of his energy seems to have been spent juggling multiple relationships, which Fuegi recounts in great detail to somewhat numbing effect. The most fascinating segments of this hefty volume are those that tell the stories behind Brecht's most famous works. The Threepenny Opera emerges as primarily the work of Elizabeth Hauptmann (Brecht's long-term sometime lover) and Kurt Weill, with final touches by Brecht, all fused together during a volatile journey toward opening night. Similarly, Mother Courage was the product of the conflicting voices of Brecht and Margrete Steffin (another lover), a combination that Fuegi openly admires as resulting in a resonance and insight that neither writer could have accomplished alone. In any case, such revelations inspire the reader to return to the plays themselves for reexamination. Finally, these theatrical tales are set against the political backdrop of the times: the rise of Hitler (whom we meet as an unemployed scenic designer) and encounters with the watchful eyes of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the HUAC. A painstakingly researched, if sometimes ploddingly written, work that effectively weaves together the disparate threads that went into the theater we equate with the name Brecht. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Fuegi, a major Brecht scholar, has been compiling this book since the middle 1960s. The result is a detailed, thoroughly researched critical biography of an icon of modern drama. Its revisionist view meticulously portrays the famed poet/playwright as an exploiter and thief of the work of his closest friends, lovers, and collaborators, especially such women as Elizabeth Hauptmann and Ruth Berlow. It has long been suspected-but until now inadequately documented-that Brecht made a career out of artistic parisitism. Perhaps new editions/translations of Brecht will now have to carry the names of several authors. This book will be controversial and corrective, but it will also generate much new and important work in Brecht studies. For most serious theater collections.
Thomas E. Luddy, Salem State Coll., Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Bertolt Brecht is generally regarded as one of the greatest twentieth-century authors, whose plays revolutionized dramatic practice, whose poems are widely anthologized, and whose Communist sympathies and residence in post-World War II East Berlin made him a cultural icon for Marxists worldwide. Fuegi aims to change Brecht's status. He believes Brecht wrote very little in the dramas that made him famous; rather, he systematically plagiarized and "collaborated" with lovers and colleagues by signing his name to plays they essentially wrote. Indeed, Fuegi's Brecht is a thoroughly disreputable character, an authoritarian monster of greed and egoism who enslaved others with his charisma, exploited them ruthlessly, then, with no warning, abandoned them, often to conditions of desperate want. Fuegi's massive effort examines every aspect of Brecht's career and personality, and ranges from his childhood in Augsburg through his early successes and his exile to his return to East Germany. If Fuegi's representation, certain to be controversial, is even partially correct, then, for instance, what was deemed the drama of Brecht becomes the drama of Brecht, Elizabeth Hauptmann, Ruth Berlau, and Grete Steffin. Fuegi is persuasive, but only subsequent scholarship can confirm his thesis. John Shreffler

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802115292
• ISBN 13: 9780802115294
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 732