Books by Bertolt Brecht
Mother Courage and Her Children (Penguin Classics)
Mother Courage and Her Children is a classic in the repertory of Western theater. Written in response to the outbreak of World War II, this "chronicle play" of the Thirty Years War follows one of Brecht's most enduring characters, Courage, as she trails the armies across Europe, selling provisions from her canteen wagon. However, Courage pays the highest price of all. One by one, her children are devoured by violence, but she will not give up her livelihood-the wagon and the war.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The Good Person of Szechwan (Penguin Classics)
The authorized, definitive editions of two of Bertolt Brecht's most enduring works
The Good Person of Szechwan is one of Bertolt Brecht's most popular works. When three gods come to earth in search of a thoroughly good person, they encounter Shen Teh, a goodhearted but penniless prostitute, who offers them shelter. Rewarded with enough money to open a tobacco shop, "Angel of the Slums" Shen Teh soon becomes so overwhelmed by the demands of people seeking assistance that she invents a male alter ego, "Tobacco King" Shui Ta, to deal ruthlessly with the business of living in an evil world. The Good Person of Szechwan is a masterpiece of minimalist design and elegance that shines a light on human nature and social mores.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The Threepenny Opera (Penguin Classics)
Brutal, scandalous, perverted, yet humorous, hummable, and with a happy ending- Bertolt Brecht's revolutionary masterpiece The Threepenny Opera is a landmark of modern drama that has become embedded in the Western cultural imagination. Through the love story of Polly Peachum and "Mack the Knife" Macheath, the play satirizes the bourgeois of the Weimar Republic, revealing a society at the height of decadence and on the verge of chaos. Complemented with music by Kurt Weill, it was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz into the theater, and the song "Mack the Knife" became one of the most popular and widely recorded songs of the twentieth century.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Mother Courage and Her Children
Widely considered one of the great dramatic creations of the modem stage, Mother Courage and Her Children is Bertolt Brecht’s most passionate and profound statement against war. Set in the seventeenth century, the play follows Anna Fierling (“Mother Courage”), an itinerant trader, as she pulls her wagon of wares and her children through the blood and carnage of Europe’s religious wars. Battered by hardships, brutality, and the degradation and death of her children, she ultimately finds herself alone with the one thing in which she truly believes—her ramshackle wagon with its tattered flag and freight of boots and brandy. Fitting herself in its harness, the old woman manages, with the last of her strength, to drag it onward to the next battle. In the enduring figure of Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht has created one of the most extraordinary characters in literature.
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The Threepenny Opera (English Edition)
Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre - it became a popular hit throughout the western world.
Published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, this edition features extensive notes and commentary including an introduction to the play, Brecht's own notes on the play, a full appendix of textual variants, a note by composer Kurt Weill, a transcript of a discussion about the play between Brecht and a theatre director, plus editorial notes on the genesis of the play.
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The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht
Times Literary Supplement • Books of the Year ("The most generous available English collection of Brecht’s poetry.")
A landmark literary event, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is the most extensive English translation of Brecht’s poetry to date. Widely celebrated as the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht was also, as George Steiner observed, “that very rare phenomenon, a great poet, for whom poetry is an almost everyday visitation and drawing of breath.” Hugely prolific, Brecht also wrote more than two thousand poems―though fewer than half were published in his lifetime, and early translations were heavily censored. Now, award-winning translators David Constantine and Tom Kuhn have heroically translated more than 1,200 poems in the most comprehensive English collection of Brecht’s poetry to date. Written between 1913 and 1956, these poems celebrate Brecht’s unquenchable “love of life, the desire for better and more of it,” and reflect the technical virtuosity of an artist driven by bitter and violent politics, as well as by the untrammeled forces of love and erotic desire. A monumental achievement and a reclamation, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is a must-have for any lover of twentieth-century poetry.
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Stories of Mr. Keuner
Stories of Mr. Keuner gathers Bertolt Brecht's fictionalized comments on politics, everyday life and exile. Written from the late 1920s till the late 1950s, Stories of Mr. Keuner is the precipitate of Brecht's experience of a world in political and cultural flux, a world of revolution, civil war, world war, cultural efflorescence, Nazism, Stalinism and the Cold War—in short, the first half of the twentieth century.
Mr. Keuner said, "I, too, once adopted an aristocratic stance (you know: erect, upright and proud, head thrown back). I was standing in rising water at the time. I adopted this posture when it rose to my chin."
"At first, they appear almost innocuous, these so-called stories, anecdotal fragments often of a single page or less. Brecht's scenarios seem so simple, his style so direct. He expressly wished what he wrote to be useful. Here he succeeded brilliantly: These pieces are small enough to be carried away whole, but what they say is big enough to be equal to the reader."—Johnathon Keats, SF Gate
"Stories of Mr. Keuner finally puts in English translation this startling and stunning body of work, not only encouraging a broader appreciation of a playwright famed for fighting inhumanity in his time, but also effectively questioning integrity in our own day."—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
"The first English translation of the great playwright’s discursive semifictionalized observations on German life and politics, as spoken by the eponymous Keuner (his name from the German "keiner," meaning "no man"), a "thinking man" obviously inspired by Plato’s Socrates. Written between the 1920s and ‘50s (and collected for the first publication in 1956, the year of Brecht’s death), they’re brief (often single-paragraph) aperçus generally employed to deflate contemporary pretensions regarding religion, patriotism, capitalism, exile, and other themes engaged more fully in their author’s celebrated poems and plays (e.g., "I am for justice; so it’s good if the place in which I’m staying has more than one exit"), but most effectively adumbrated in this revealing coda to an indisputably major, and still challenging, body of work."—Kirkus Reviews
Bertolt Brecht wrote The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, The Life of Galileo and many other plays, poems and theoretical writings. Ardent antifascist, friend to Walter Benjamin and wily ally of the COmmunists, Brecht was often on the run, "changing countries more than shoes." As Hitler's armies advanced, Brecht fled to Denmark, Sweden, Finland and the U.S. before finally settling in East Germany after the war, where he became director of the renowned Berliner Ensemble.
Martin Chalmers (1948-2014) had translated works by Victor Klemperer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hubert Fichte and Elfriede Jelinek, among others. Mr. Chalmers lived in London, where he wrote extensively on German literature, film, history and culture.
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Love Poems
by Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Ghigna, Bertolt Brecht
Sensual, earthy love poems that formed the basis for the popular movie Il Postino, now in a beautiful gift book perfect for weddings, Valentine's Day, anniversaries, or just to say "I love you!"
Charged with sensuality and passion, Pablo Neruda’s love poems caused a scandal when published anonymously in 1952. In later editions, these verses became the most celebrated of the Noble Prize winner’s oeuvre, captivating readers with earthbound images that reveal in gentle lingering lines an erotic re-imagining of the world through the prism of a lover’s body: "today our bodies became vast, they grew to the edge of the world / and rolled melting / into a single drop / of wax or meteor...." Written on the paradisal island of Capri, where Neruda "took refuge" in the arms of his lover Matilde Urrutia, Love Poems embraces the seascapes around them, saturating the images of endless shores and waves with a new, yearning eroticism. This wonderful book collects Neruda’s most passionate verses.
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Love Poems
by Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Ghigna, Bertolt Brecht
In a career that has spanned more than a quarter century, Nikki Giovanni has earned the reputation as one of America's most celebrated and contoversial writers.Now, she presents a stunning collection of love poems that includes more than twenty new works.
From the revolutionary "Seduction" to the tender new poem, "Just a Simple Declaration of Love," from the whimsical "I Wrote a Good Omelet" to the elegiac "All Eyez on U," written for Tupac Shakur, these poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which Nikki Giovanni is beloved and revered.
Romantic, bold, and erotic, Love Poems expresses notions of love in ways that are delightfully unexpected. Articulating in sensuous verse what we know only instinctively, Nikki Giovanni once again confirms her place as one of our nations's most distinguished poets and powerful truth-tellers. In a career that has spanned more than a quarter century, starting with her explosive early years in the Black Rights Movement, Nikki Giovanni has earned a reputation as one of America's most celebrated and controversial writers. Her mind-speaking work has made her a universal favorite and a number-one best-seller.The love poems-the revolutionary "Seduction," the whimsical "I Wrote a Good Omelet," and the tender "My House" to name just a few-are among the most beloved of all Nikki Giovanni's works. Now, Love Poems brings together these and other favorites with over twenty new poems. Romantic, bold, and erotic, Love Poems will once again confirm Nikki Giovanni's place among the country's most renowned poets and truth tellers.
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Love Poems
by Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Ghigna, Bertolt Brecht
An historic publication in which the legendary German poet and dramatist emerges, quite like Goethe, as a poet driven by Eros. Bertolt Brecht is widely considered the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, and to this day remains best known as a dramatist, the author of Mother Courage, The Threepenny Opera, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, among so many other works. However, Brecht was also a hugely prolific and eclectic poet, producing more than 2,000 poems during his lifetime―indeed, so many that even his own wife, Helene Weigel, had no idea just how many he had written.
"A thieving magpie of much of world literature," the full scope and variety of his poetic output did not become apparent until after his death. Now, the English-speaking world can access part of his stunning body of work in Love Poems, the first volume in a monumental undertaking by award-winning translators David Constantine and Tom Kuhn to translate Brecht's poetic legacy into English. Love Poems collects his most intimate and romantic poems, many of which were banned in German in the 1950s for their explicit eroticism.
Written between 1918 and 1955, these poems reflect an artist driven not only by the bitter and violent politics of his age but, like Goethe, by the untrammeled forces of love, romance, and erotic desire. In a 1966 New Yorker article, Hannah Arendt wrote of Brecht that he had "staked his life and his art as few poets have ever done." In these 78 poems, we see Brecht's astonishing and deeply personal love poems―including 22 never before published in English―many addressed to particular women, which show Brecht as lover and love poet, engaged in a bitter struggle to keep faith, hope, and love alive during desperate times.
Featuring a personal foreword by Barbara Brecht-Schall, his last surviving child, Love Poems reveals Brecht as not merely one of the most famous playwrights of the twentieth century but also one of its most fiercely creative poets.
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Love Poems
by Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Ghigna, Bertolt Brecht
Twenty-one heartfelt verses speak of love and devotion in this gift-sized book of poetry. All of the poems are dedicated to the poet's wife, but husbands and lovers, too, will appreciate the tender sentiment and care of these sweet thoughts. The slim hardcover is a fitting "little something extra" for an anniversary, birthday, or just-because gift, and will match any bouquet or box of chocolates.
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Love Poems
by Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Ghigna, Bertolt Brecht
Twenty-one heartfelt verses speak of love and devotion in this gift-sized book of poetry. The poems are dedicated to the poets wife, but others will appreciate the tender sentiments expressed. The perfect gift for special occasions or everyday thoughtfulness.
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Love Poems
by Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Ghigna, Bertolt Brecht
Longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
An historic publication in which the legendary German poet and dramatist emerges, quite like Goethe, as a poet driven by Eros. Bertolt Brecht is widely considered the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, and to this day remains best known as a dramatist, the author of Mother Courage, The Threepenny Opera, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, among so many other works. However, Brecht was also a hugely prolific and eclectic poet, producing more than 2,000 poems during his lifetime―indeed, so many that even his own wife, Helene Weigel, had no idea just how many he had written.
"A thieving magpie of much of world literature," the full scope and variety of his poetic output did not become apparent until after his death. Now, the English-speaking world can access part of his stunning body of work in Love Poems, the first volume in a monumental undertaking by award-winning translators David Constantine and Tom Kuhn to translate Brecht's poetic legacy into English. Love Poems collects his most intimate and romantic poems, many of which were banned in German in the 1950s for their explicit eroticism.
Written between 1918 and 1955, these poems reflect an artist driven not only by the bitter and violent politics of his age but, like Goethe, by the untrammeled forces of love, romance, and erotic desire. In a 1966 New Yorker article, Hannah Arendt wrote of Brecht that he had "staked his life and his art as few poets have ever done." In these 78 poems, we see Brecht's astonishing and deeply personal love poems―including 22 never before published in English―many addressed to particular women, which show Brecht as lover and love poet, engaged in a bitter struggle to keep faith, hope, and love alive during desperate times.
Featuring a personal foreword by Barbara Brecht-Schall, his last surviving child, Love Poems reveals Brecht as not merely one of the most famous playwrights of the twentieth century but also one of its most fiercely creative poets.
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The Life of Galileo (Modern Plays)
Arguably Brecht's greatest play, A Life of Galileo charts the seventeenth century scientist's extraordinary fight with the church over his assertion that the earth orbits the sun.
The figure of Galileo, whose 'heretical' discoveries about the solar system brought him to the attention of the Inquisition, is one of Brecht's more human and complex creations. Temporarily silenced by the Inquisition's threat of torture, and forced to abjure his theories publicly, Galileo continues to work in private, eventually smuggling his work out of the country.
Brecht's beautiful depiction of the explosive struggle between scientific discovery and religious fundamentalism is captured masterfully in this new translation by RSC writer-in-residence, Mark Ravenhill.
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Man Equals Man: And the Elephant Calf
Set in British colonial India, this groundbreaking play shows a man being disassembled and reconstructed into a soldier. Reissue.
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Der Untergang des Egoisten Johann Fatzer (Edition Suhrkamp) (German Edition)
Text: German
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Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui
“Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui,“ subtitled "A Parable Play," is a 1941 play by German playwright Bertolt Brecht. It chronicles the rise of Arturo Ui, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the opposition. The play is a satirical allegory of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany prior to World War II. Brecht’s decision to frame the rise of Hitler as the story of Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago was an attempt to provide a milieu familiar to American audiences. The work was meant for the American stage as a warning against the dangers of fascism.
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Die Massnahme zwei Fassungen : Anmerkungen
»Die Maßnahme ist nicht für Zuschauer geschrieben worden, sondern nur für die Belehrung der Aufführenden. Aufführungen vor Publikum rufen erfahrungsgemäß nichts als moralische Affekte für gewöhnlich minderer Art beim Publikum hervor. Ich gebe daher das Stück seit langem nicht für Aufführungen frei«, stellt Brecht 1956 fest. Die vorliegende Ausgabe präsentiert, der erheblichen Unterschiede wegen, die Fassungen von 1930 sowie von 1931 im Paralleldruck und dokumentiert somit die Umarbeitung des Stückes, die Brecht nach der Uraufführung unter Berücksichtigung von Zuschauerreaktionen und Kritiken vornahm.
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Edition Suhrkamp, Nr.1, Leben des Galilei
Das Schauspiel Leben des Galilei wurde 1938/39 im Exil in Dänemark geschrieben. Die Zeitungen hatten die Nachricht von der Spaltung des Uran-Atoms durch den Physiker Otto Hahn und seine Mitarbeiter gebracht.
Die Uraufführung der ersten Fassung des Stückes erfolgte 1943 am Schauspielhaus Zürich, die der zweiten Fassung 1947 in Beverly Hills (Coronet Theatre).
»Das Leben des Galilei wird vermutlich neben der Heiligen Johanna der Schlachthöfe und dem Kaukasischen Kreidekreis und einigen Stücken Lyrik Brechts größten Anspruch auf Unsterblichkeit begründen.« W. E. Süskind
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Saint Joan of the Stockyards
In this version of the story of Joan of Arc, Brecht transforms her into 'Joan Dark', a member of the 'Black Straw Hats' (a Salvation Army-like group) in twentieth century Chicago. The play charts Joan's battle with Pierpont Mauler, the unctuous owner of a meat-packing plant. Like her predecessor, Joan is a doomed woman, a martyr and (initially, at least) an innocent in a world of strike-breakers, fat cats, and penniless workers. Like many of Brecht's plays it is laced with humor and songs as part of its epic dramaturgical structure.
The play, which was never staged in Brecht's lifetime, is published here with a new translation, a full introduction and Brecht's own notes on the text.
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Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Modern Classics)
Brecht's operatic play produced with Hauptmann, Neher and Weill was first staged in 1930. The story is that three criminals create the city of Mahagonny. Drinking, gambling, prize-fights and similar activities are the sole occupation of the inhabitants, and money rules. Mahagonny is threatened by a hurricane at the end of Act 1, which despite much anticipation and causing much distress simply bypasses the city. In Act 2 following the hurricane nothing is forbidden and various scenes of debauchery occur. Jenny and Jim try to leave but Jim cannot pay his debts and is arrested. Another character arraigned for murder, bribes his way out of it, but Jim has no money and is condemned to death for not paying for his whisky. The opera ends with discontent destroying the city, which burns as the inhabitants march away.
Translated and with commentary by Steve Giles, this critical edition is the first translation into English of the approved Versuche text of 1930/1.
An important addition to Brecht scholarship, this edition contains a full introduction to the play, Brecht's writing and notes on the work, editorial notes and variants, and a study of contemporary productions and responses.
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Brecht Collected Plays: 4 Round Heads & Pointed Heads; Fear & Misery of the Third Reich; Senora Carrar's Rifles; Trial of Lucullus; Dansen; How Much Is Your Iron?
Now in paperback, the long-awaited volume of Brecht's classic plays from the 1930s
Volume 4 of Brecht's Collected Plays contains works from the 1930s, straddling fateful years in German political and cultural history - as well as in Brecht's own life. Round Heads and Pointed Heads, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is a powerful political allegory on Nazi racial policy and conditions in the Germany Brecht had to leave in 1933. The Trial of Lucullus, a starkly pacifist text originally written in response to a commission from Swedish radio, portrays the Roman general tried by the Underworld for his military triumphs. Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, unique in Brecht's work, consists of some thirty short scenes of life under the Nazis between 1933 and 1938, designed for use by groups in exile. Señora Carrara's Rifles is based on J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea, but relocated by Brecht in the Spanish Civil War. Also included are two one-act plays, Dansen and How Much is Your Iron?, minor works designed for amateurs in Scandinavia, where the Brechts lived till spring 1941.
The volume includes an introduction and notes by Tom Kuhn and John Willett, as well as Brecht's own notes on the texts.
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The Threepenny Opera
Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. It focuses on the feud between Macheaf - an amoral criminal - and his father in law, a racketeer who controls and exploits London's beggars and is intent on having Macheaf hanged. Despite the resistance by Macheaf's friend the Chief of Police, Macheaf is eventually condemned to hang until in a comic reversal the queen pardons him and grants him a title and land. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre - it became a popular hit throughout the western world.
Published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series in a trusted translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett, this edition features extensive notes and commentary including an introduction to the play, Brecht's own notes on the play, a full appendix of textual variants, a note by composer Kurt Weill, a transcript of a discussion about the play between Brecht and a theatre director, plus editorial notes on the genesis of the play.
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The Good Person Of Szechwan (Student Editions)
'Brecht's dark, dazzling world-view...makes an absolutely devastating impact. The play is fuelled by the brilliant perception that everyone requires such a dual or split personality to survive.' Evening Standard
Three gods come to earth hoping to discover one really good person. No one can be found until they meet Shen Te, a prostitute with a heart of gold. Rewarded by the gods, she gives up her profession and buys a tabacco shop but finds it is impossible to survive as a good person in a corrupt world without the support of her ruthless alter ego Shui Ta.
Brecht's parable of good and evil was first performed in 1943 and remains one of his most popular and frequently produced plays worldwide.
This Student Edition features an extensive
introduction and commentary that includes a plot summary, discussion of
the context, themes, characters, style and language as well as
questions for further study and notes on words and phrases in the text.
It is the perfect edition for students of theatre and literature.
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Measures Taken and Other Lehrstucke (Modern Plays)
The Lehrstücke (or 'learning-plays') lie at the heart of Brechtian theatre.
Written during 1929 and 1930, years of far-reaching political and economic upheaveal in Germany and the period of Brecht's most sharply Communist works, these short plays show an abrupt rejection of most of the trappings of conventional theatre.
The Lehrstücke are spare and highly formalized pieces intended for performance by amateurs, on the principle that the moral and political lessons contained in them can best be taught by participation in an actual production. There is nothing in the drama of the twentieth century to match the precision of their language and the economy of their theatrical technique.
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Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic by Brecht, Bertolt (2014) Paperback
Brecht on Theatre
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Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks (Bloomsbury Revelations)
Now available in Bloomsbury Revelations series, Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks presents a selection of Brecht's principal writings about the craft of acting and realising texts for the stage. It crystallises and makes concrete many of the more theoretical aspects of his other writing and illuminates the practice of this hugely influential director and dramatist.
The volume is in two parts. The first features an entirely new commentated edition of Brecht's dialogues and essays about the practice of theatre, known as the Messingkauf, or Buying Brass, including the 'Practice Pieces' for actors (rehearsal scenes for classics by Shakespeare and Schiller). The second contains rehearsal and production records from Brecht's work on productions of Life of Galileo, Antigone, Mother Courage and others.
Edited by an international team of Brecht scholars and including an essay by director and teacher Di Trevis examining the practical application of these texts for theatres and actors today, Brecht on Performance is a wonderfully rich resource. The text is illustrated with over 30 photographs from the Modelbooks.
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Brecht and the Writer's Workshop: Fatzer and Other Dramatic Projects (World Classics)
Brecht was never inclined to see any of his plays as completely finished, and this volume collects some of the most important theatrical projects and fragments that were always to remain 'works in progress'. Offering an invaluable insight into the writer's working methods and practices, the collection features the famous Fatzer as well as The Bread Store and Judith of Shimoda, along with other texts that have never before been available in English.
Alongside the familiar, 'completed' plays, Brecht worked on many ideas and plans which he never managed to work up even once for print or stage. In pieces like Fleischhacker, Garbe/Büsching and Jacob Trotalong we see how such projects were abandoned or interrupted or became proving grounds for ideas and techniques. The works collated here span over thirty years and allow the reader to follow Brecht's creative process as he constantly revised his work to engage with new contexts.
This treasure-trove of new discoveries is also annotated with dramaturgical notes to present readable and useable texts for the theatre.
The volume is edited by Tom Kuhn and Charlotte Ryland, with the translation and dramaturgical edition of each play provided by a team of experienced writers, scholars and translators.
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Fear and Misery in the Third Reich
by Bertolt Brecht, Eric Bentley
Brecht presents the vivid and changing scene of Hitler's war machine. There is a worker who only mumbles "Heil Hitlers" and a S.A. man whose suspicion of him is enough to mark him for life. There is an assaulted Jew who did no wrong and a judge who has a tragic inclination to be just. There are a mother and father who have good cause to fear that their son has informed on them. The war machine moves across Europe, bringing ruin and misery everywhere.
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Mother Courage and Her Children (Modern Classics)
In this chronicle of the European Thirty Years War and taking place between the years 1624 and 1636, Mother Courage follows the armies back and forth across Europe, selling provisions and liquor from her canteen wagon to whomever she can. One by one she loses her children to the war but will not part with her livelihood - the wagon. The Berlin production of 1949, with Helene Weigel as Mother Courage, marked the foundation of the Berliner Ensemble.
Considered by many to be one of the greatest anti-war plays ever written and Brecht's masterpiece, the play is a powerful example of Epic Theatre and Brecht's use of alienation
effect to focus attention not on individual characters but on the
issues of the play. This edition published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series offers a full introduction as well as Brecht's own notes and textual variants, setting it apart from all other editions available in the English language. The play is presented in John Willett's trusted translation.
'One of the greatest poets and dramatists of our century' (Observer).
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Tales of Mr. Keuner
From the 1920s through the 1950s, Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of short, fictionalized comments on contemporary life, politics, and thought. Through the dramatic events of the first half of the twentieth century, Brecht's Mr. Keuner offered up aphorisms, stray thoughts, and fragments of anecdote that punctured contemporary self-regard about religion, politics, business, and more. Deceptively light in tone, and bite-size in presentation, Mr. Keuner's comments bring Brecht's lacerating wit to bear on a wide range of the half-truths and public lies of his era.
This graphic novel adaptation sets a number of Brecht's Mr. Keuner pieces, newly translated, alongside cartoons by German artist Ulf K., whose spare, abstract style lends force to the underlying meanings of Keuner's pronouncements.
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Bertolt Brecht's Refugee Conversations
Published in English for the first time, Refugee Conversations is a delightful work that reveals Brecht as a master of comic satire. Written swiftly in the opening years of the Second World War, the dialogues have an urgent contemporary relevance to a Europe once again witnessing populations on the move.
The premise is simple: two refugees from Nazi Germany meet in a railway cafe and discuss the current state of the world. They are a bourgeois Jewish physicist and a left-leaning worker. Their world views, their voices and their social experience clash horribly, but they find they have unexpected common ground – especially in their more recent experience of the surreal twists and turns of life in exile, the bureaucracy, and the pathetic failings of the societies that are their unwilling hosts.
Their conversations are light and swift moving, the subjects under discussion extremely various: beer, cigars, the Germans' love of order, their education and experience of life, art, pornography, politics, 'great men', morality, seriousness, Switzerland, America ... despite the circumstances of both characters there is a wonderfully whimsical serendipity about their dialogue, the logic and the connections often delightfully absurd.
This edition features a full introduction and notes by Professor Tom Kuhn (St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, UK).
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Life of Galileo (Penguin Classics)
Galileo ranks alongside Mother Courage and Mr. Puntila as one of Brecht's most intensely alive, human, and complex characters. In Life of Galileo, the great Renaissance scientist is in a brutal struggle for freedom from authoritarian dogma. Unable to satisfy his appetite for scientific investigation, he comes into conflict with the Inquisition and must publicly renounce his theories, though in private he goes on working on his revolutionary ideas.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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War Primer
In this singular book written during World War Two, Bertolt Brecht presents a devastating visual and lyrical attack on war under modern capitalism. He takes photographs from newspapers and popular magazines, and adds short lapidary verses to each in a unique attempt to understand the truth of war using mass media. Pictures of catastrophic bombings, propaganda portraits of leading Nazis, scenes of unbearable tragedy on the battlefield — all these images contribute to an anthology of horror, from which Brecht’s perceptions are distilled in poems that are razor-sharp, angry and direct. The result is an outstanding literary memorial to World War Two and one of the most spontaneous, revealing and moving of Brecht’s works.
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Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks (Performance Books)
Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks presents a selection of Brecht's principal writings for directors and theatre practitioners, and is suitable for acting schools, directors, actors, students and teachers of Theatre Studies. Through these texts Brecht provides a general practical approach to acting and to realising texts for the stage that crystallises and makes concrete many of the more theoretical aspects of his other writing.
The volume is in two parts. The first features an entirely new commentated edition of Brecht's dialogues and essays about the practice of theatre, known as the Messingkauf, or Buying Brass, including the 'Practice Pieces' for actors (rehearsal scenes for classics by Shakespeare and Schiller). The second contains rehearsal and production records from Brecht's work on productions of Life of Galileo, Antigone, Mother Courage and others.
Edited by an international team of Brecht scholars and including an essay by director and teacher Di Trevis examining the practical application of these texts for theatres and actors today, Brecht on Performance is a wonderfully rich resource. The text is illustrated with over 30 photographs from the Modelbooks.
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Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic
This volume offers a major selection of Bertolt Brecht's groundbreaking critical writing. Here, arranged in chronological order, are essays from 1918 to 1956, in which Brecht explores his definition of the Epic Theatre and his theory of alienation-effects in directing, acting, and writing, and discusses, among other works, The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, Puntila, and Galileo. Also included is "A Short Organum for the Theatre," Brecht's most complete exposition of his revolutionary philosophy of drama.
Translated and edited by John Willett, Brecht on Theater is essential to an understanding of one of the twentieth century's most influential dramatists.
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Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays: Includes: In Search of Justice; Informer; Elephant Calf; Measures Taken; Exception and the Rule; Salzburg Dance of Death (Brecht, Bertolt)
These six plays represent the best and most humorous of Brecht's shorter works. The Jewish Wife is from the Fear and Misery in the Third Reich cycle of one-act plays, which, along with In Search of Justice and The Informer, chromicles the hardships of life in Nazi Germany. The Exception and the Rule, one of Brecht's most popular short works, grimly depicts the consequences of the mutually dependent -- yet inevitable inequitable -- relationship between the priviledged and the poor; it is included here with The Measures Taken and The Elephant Calf. Though all of these ales of horror, ad Eric Bentley calls them, have tragic undertones, they are also infused with farcical absurdities and cosmic irony so characteristic of Brecht's work.
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The Caucasian Chalk Circle
by Bertolt Brecht, Eric Bentley
Few authors have had such a dramatic effect as Bertolt Brecht. His work has helped to shape a generation of writers, theatergoers, and thinkers. His plays are studied worldwide as texts that changed the face of theater.
The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a parable inspired by the Chinese play Chalk Circle. Written at the close of World War II, the story is set in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. It retells the tale of King Solomon and a child claimed by and fought over by two mothers. But this chalk circle is metaphorically drawn around a society misdirected in its priorities. Brecht's statements about class are cloaked in the innocence of a fable that whispers insistently to the audience.
No translations of Brecht's work are as reliable and compelling as Eric Bentley's. These versions are widely viewed as the standard renderings of Brecht's work, ensuring that future generations of readers will come in close contact with the work of a playwright who introduced a new way of thinking about the theater.
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Galileo
Considered by many to be one of Brecht's masterpieces, Galileo explores the question of a scientist's social and ethical responsibility, as the brilliant Galileo must choose between his life and his life's work when confronted with the demands of the Inquisition. Through the dramatic characterization of the famous physicist, Brecht examines the issues of scientific morality and the difficult relationship between the intellectual and authority. This version of the play is the famous one that was brought to completion by Brecht himself, working with Charles Laughton, who played Galileo in the first two American productions (Hollywood and New York, 1947). Since then the play has become a classic in the world repertoire. "The play which most strongly stamped on my mind a sense of Brecht's great stature as an artist of the modern theatre was Galileo." - Harold Clurman; "Thoughtful and profoundly sensitive." - Newsweek.
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Collected Short Stories
Presents thirty-seven stories by the noted playwright, including "The Monster," "Before the Flood," and "Life Story of the Boxer Samson-Korner"
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The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Student Editions)
"One of the greatest poets and dramatists of our century."-Observer
Brecht projects an ancient Chinese story onto a realistic setting in Soviet Georgia. In a theme that echoes the Judgment of Solomon, two women argue over the possession of a child; thanks to the unruly judge, Azdak (one of Brecht's most vivid creations) natural justice is done, and the peasant Grusha keeps the child she loves, even though she is not its mother.
Written in exile in the United States during the Second World War, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a politically-charged, much-revived, and complex example of Brecht's epic theatre.
This volume contains expert notes on the author's life and work, historical and political background to the play, photographs from stage productions, and a glossary of difficult words and phrases.
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The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Modern Plays)
A morality masterpiece, The Caucasian Chalk Circle powerfully demonstrates Brecht's pioneering theatrical techniques. This version by Frank McGuinness was published to coincide with the National Theatre's production which toured the UK in 2007.
A servant girl sacrifices everything to protect a child abandoned in the heat of civil war. Order restored, she is made to confront the boy's biological mother in a legal contest over who deserves to keep him. The comical judge calls on an ancient tradition - the chalk circle - to resolve the dispute. Who wins?
This version by Frank McGuinness was first presented by the National Theatre in 1997 and revived in 2007, opening at the Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, on 8 January.
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Aesthetics and Politics
by Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch
No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.
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Mr Puntila and His Man Matti
Written in 1940 during Brecht's exile in Finland, Puntila is one of his greatest creations - to be ranked alongside Galileo and Mother Courage. A hard-drinking Finnish landowner, Puntila suffers from a divided personality: when drunk he is human and humane; when sober, surly and self-centred. The play contains some of the best comedy Brecht wrote for the theatre.
This translation by John Willett is accompanied by Brecht's own notes and relevant texts, as well as an extensive introduction and commentary by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, editor's of Brecht's collected plays in English.
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The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Student Editions)
This Student Edition of Brecht's classic satire on the rise of Hitler features an extensive
introduction and commentary that includes a plot summary, discussion of
the context, themes, characters, style and language as well as
questions for further study and notes on words and phrases in the text.
It is the perfect edition for students of theatre and literature.
Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler -- recast by Brecht into a small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade. Using a wide range of parody and pastiche - from Al Capone to Shakespeare's Richard III and Goethe's Faust - Brecht's compelling parable continues to have relevance wherever totalitarianism appears today.
Written during the Second World War in 1941, the play was one of the Berliner Ensemble's most outstanding box-office successes in 1959, and has continued to attract a succession of major actors, including Leonard Rossiter, Christopher Plummer, Antony Sher and Al Pacino.
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Brecht On Film & Radio (Diaries, Letters and Essays)
From Weimar Germany to Hollywood to East Berlin, Brecht on Film and Radio gathers together a selection of Bertolt Brecht's own writings on the new film and broadcast media that revolutionised arts and communication in the twentieth century.
Bertolt Brecht's hugely influential views on drama, acting and stage production have long been widely recognised. Less familiar, but of profound importance, are his writings on film and radio. From Weimar Germany to Hollywood to East Berlin, Brecht on Film and Radio gathers together for the first time a selection of Brecht's own writings on the new film and broadcast media that fascinated him throughout his life and revolutionised arts and communication in the twentieth century. Marc Silberman's full editorial commentary sets Brecht's ideas in the context of his other work.
"I strongly wish that after their invention of the radio the bourgeoisie would make a further invention that enables us to fix for all time what the radio communicates. Later generations would then have the opportunity to marvel how a caste was able to tell the whole planet what it had to say and at the same time how it enabled the planet to see that it had nothing to say." (Bertolt Brecht)
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Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The (Modern Plays)
Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler - recast by Brecht into a fictional, small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade in the 1930s. The satirical allegory combines Brecht's Epic style of theatre with black comedy and overt didacticism. Using a wide range of parody and pastiche - from Al Capone to Shakespeare's Richard III and Goethe's Faust - Brecht's compelling parable continues to have relevance wherever totalitarianism appears today. Written during the Second World War in 1941, the play was one of the Berliner Ensemble's most outstanding box-office successes in 1959, and has continued to attract a succession of major actors, including Leonard Rossiter, Christopher Plummer, Antony Sher and Al Pacino. This version of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is by Canadian theatre academic Jennifer Wise.
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