Translated into English for the first time, Daring To Play: A Brecht Companion is the study of Bertolt Brecht 's theatre by Manfred Wekwerth, Brecht 's co-director and former director of the Berliner Ensemble.

Wekwerth aims to challenge prevailing myths and misconceptions of Brecht 's theatre, instead providing a refreshing and accessible approach to his plays and theatrical craft. The book is rich in information, examples and anecdotal detail from first-hand acquaintance with Brecht and rehearsal with the Berliner Ensemble. Wekwerth provides a detailed practical understanding of how theatre operates with a clear perspective on the interface between politics and art.

Warm and engaging, whilst also being provocative and challenging, Daring to Play displays the continued vitality of Brecht 's true approach to theatre makers today.

Examines, then employs the metaphor of cultural impact in an effort to understand how culture works in the German-speaking world. How to gauge the impact of cultural products is an old question, but bureaucratic agendas such as the one recently implemented in the UK to measure the impact of university research (including in German Studies) are new. Impact isseen as confirming a cultural product's value for society -- not least in the eyes of cultural funders. Yet its use as an evaluative category has been widely criticized by academics. Rather than rejecting the concept of impact, however, this volume employs it as a metaphor to reflect on issues of transmission, reception, and influence that have always underlain cultural production but have escaped systematic conceptualization. It seeks to understand how culture works in the German-speaking world: how writers and artists express themselves, how readers and audiences engage with the resulting products, and how academics are drawn to analyze this dynamic process. Formulating such questions afresh in the context of German Studies, the volume examines both contemporary cultural discourse and the way it evolves more generally. It links such topics as authorial intention, readerly reception, intertextuality, andmodes of perception to less commonly studied phenomena, such as the institutional practices of funding bodies, that underpin cultural discourse. Contributors: David Barnett, Laura Bradley, Rebecca Braun, Sarah Colvin, Anne Fuchs, Katrin Kohl, Karen Leeder, Jurgen Luh, Jenny McKay, Ben Morgan, Gunther Nickel, Chloe Paver, Joanne Sayner, Matthew Philpotts, Jane Wilkinson. Rebecca Braun is Executive Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences, & Celtic Studies at the National University of Ireland in Galway and Lyn Marven is Lecturer in German at the University of Liverpool.

This volume consists of a series of essays, written by leading scholars within the field, demonstrating the types of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities underpinning German-language culture and history as these travel right around the globe. Contributions discuss the inherent cross-pollination of different languages, times, places and notions of identity within German-language cultures and the ways in which their construction and circulation cannot be contained by national or linguistic borders. In doing so, it is not the aim of the volume to provide a compendium of existing transnational approaches to German Studies or to offer its readers a series of survey chapters on different fields of study to date. Instead, it offers novel research-led chapters that pose a question, a problem or an issue through which contemporary and historical transcultural and transnational processes can be seen at work. Accordingly, each essay isolates a specific area of study and opens it up for exploration, providing readers, especially student readers, not just with examples of transnational phenomena in German language cultures but also with models of how research in these areas can be configured and pursued. Contributors: Angus Nicholls, Anne Fuchs, Benedict Schofield, Birgit Lang, Charlotte Ryland, Claire Baldwin, Dirk Weissmann, Elizabeth Anderson, James Hodkinson, Nicholas Baer, Paulo Soethe, Rebecca Braun, Sara Jones, Sebastian Heiduschke, Stuart Taberner and Ulrike Draesner.

This volume consists of a series of essays, written by leading scholars within the field, demonstrating the types of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities underpinning German-language culture and history as these travel right around the globe. Contributions discuss the inherent cross-pollination of different languages, times, places and notions of identity within German-language cultures and the ways in which their construction and circulation cannot be contained by national or linguistic borders. In doing so, it is not the aim of the volume to provide a compendium of existing transnational approaches to German Studies or to offer its readers a series of survey chapters on different fields of study to date. Instead, it offers novel research-led chapters that pose a question, a problem or an issue through which contemporary and historical transcultural and transnational processes can be seen at work. Accordingly, each essay isolates a specific area of study and opens it up for exploration, providing readers, especially student readers, not just with examples of transnational phenomena in German language cultures but also with models of how research in these areas can be configured and pursued. Contributors: Angus Nicholls, Anne Fuchs, Benedict Schofield, Birgit Lang, Charlotte Ryland, Claire Baldwin, Dirk Weissmann, Elizabeth Anderson, James Hodkinson, Nicholas Baer, Paulo Soethe, Rebecca Braun, Sara Jones, Sebastian Heiduschke, Stuart Taberner and Ulrike Draesner.

Featuring several authors hailing from "cities on the edge"--European port cities including Liverpool, Bremen, Gdansk, Istanbul, Marseilles, and Naples--this stirring collection of short stories explores these landscapes of change, from their social tensions, scars of war, and economic decline to their citizens' attempts at regeneration and startling means to thriving and surviving. In Gdansk, a German exile returns to his childhood home in search of a valuable coin collection left behind during World War II. In Naples, a young woman desperate to escape the slums becomes a Camorra mole and eventually a political powerbroker. In Liverpool, a young Spanish soccer player arrives to fulfill his dream of playing in the Premiership, but in the backstreets of Anfield he meets a local resident with a very different perspective on the game. A look at the their shared history of dissent, diversity, and economic reinvention, this riveting compilation examines the tragedy of these cities once known as gateways to the world and as harbors of wealth and innovation.

Authors and the World traces how four core ‘modes of authorship’ have developed and inflect one another in modern Germany through a series of twenty different case studies, including the work of Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Anna Seghers, Walter Höllerer, Felicitas Hoppe and Katja Petrowskaja, and original interview material with contemporary writers Ulrike Draesner, Olga Martynova and Ulrike Almut Sandig. ‘Modes of authorship’ are attitudes taken towards being an author that can be seen both in what an individual author does and in how a particular literary tradition or trend is perceived and mediated by others both within and beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s literary field. Consequently, they deliberately straddle questions of literary production and reception. Rebecca Braun sets out how the commemorative, celebratory, utopian and satirical modes interact with one another to produce a number of models of authorship that carry either foundational or otherwise normative force for society. In varying combinations and with deep roots in 19th- and early 20th-century practices, the four modes of authorship create a remarkably (and at times troublingly) stable German literature network that to a large degree still determines the way contemporary German-speaking authors enact their cultural significance in their writing, engage with their local circumstances, and are more broadly received around the world. Authors and the World provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about literary authorship.

Authors and the World traces how four core ‘modes of authorship’ have developed and inflect one another in modern Germany through a series of twenty different case studies, including the work of Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Anna Seghers, Walter Höllerer, Felicitas Hoppe and Katja Petrowskaja, and original interview material with contemporary writers Ulrike Draesner, Olga Martynova and Ulrike Almut Sandig. ‘Modes of authorship’ are attitudes taken towards being an author that can be seen both in what an individual author does and in how a particular literary tradition or trend is perceived and mediated by others both within and beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s literary field. Consequently, they deliberately straddle questions of literary production and reception. Rebecca Braun sets out how the commemorative, celebratory, utopian and satirical modes interact with one another to produce a number of models of authorship that carry either foundational or otherwise normative force for society. In varying combinations and with deep roots in 19th- and early 20th-century practices, the four modes of authorship create a remarkably (and at times troublingly) stable German literature network that to a large degree still determines the way contemporary German-speaking authors enact their cultural significance in their writing, engage with their local circumstances, and are more broadly received around the world. Authors and the World provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about literary authorship.

This book traces a longstanding concern with issues of authorship throughout the work of Gunter Grass, Germany's best-known contemporary writer and public intellectual. Through detailed close-readings of all of his major literary works from 1970 onwards and careful analysis of his political writings from 1965 to 2005, it argues that Grass's tendency to insert clearly recognizable self-images into his literary texts represents a coherent and calculated reaction to his constant exposure in the media-led public sphere. It underlines the degree of play which has characterized Grass's relationship to this sphere and himself as part of it and explains how a concern with the very concept of authorship has conditioned the way his work as a whole has developed on both thematic and structural levels. The major achievement of this study is to develop a new interpretative paradigm for Grass's work. It explains for the first time how his playful tendency to manipulate his own authorial image conditions all levels of his texts and is equally manifest in literary and political realms.