The first single-volume anthology of Brecht's writings on both art and politics This volume contains new translations to extend our image of one of the twentieth century's most entertaining and thought provoking writers on culture, aesthetics and politics. Here are a cross-section of Brecht's wide-ranging thoughts which offer us an extraordinary window onto the concerns of a modern world in four decades of economic and political disorder. The book is designed to give wider access to the experience of a dynamic intellect, radically engaged with social, political and cultural processes. Each section begins with a short essay by the editors introducing and summarising Brecht's thought in the relevant year.

"One of the greatest poets and dramatists of our century" (Observer) Brecht's Lehrstucke or short 'didactic' pieces written during the years 1929 to 1933, are some of his most experimental work. Rejecting conventional theatre, they are spare and highly formalised, drawing on traditional Japanese and Chinese theatre. They show Brecht in collaboration with the composers Hindemith, Weill and Eisler, influenced by the new techniques of montage in the visual arts and seeking new means of expression. Brecht intended them for performance by schools, workers' groups and choral societies rather than by professionals, with the idea that the moral and political lessons contained in them are best conveyed by participating in an actual production. In addition to the Lehrstucke, the volume contains The Mother, a longer play, again with music by Eisler, based on the novel by Gorky. A story of dawning political consciousness, told with irony and narrative drive, its central character is one of Brecht's great female roles. The original production starred Brecht's wife Helene Weigel and Brecht was buried with the red flag that was a prop in the production.

"Those who dismiss Brecht as a yea-sayer to Stalinism are advised to read these journals and moderate their opinion." (Paul Bailey, Weekend Telegraph) Brecht's "Work Journals" cover the period from 1938 to 1955, the years of exile in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and America, and his return via Switzerland to East Berlin. His criticisms of the work of other writers and intellectuals are perceptive and polemic, and the accounts of his own writing practice provide insight into the creation of his dramatic works of the period, the development of his political thinking and his theories about epic theatre. Also integrated into the journals are Brecht's immediate reactions to and commentary upon the events of the period: his political exile's view of the course of World War II and his account of the House Un-American Activities committee."A marvellous, motley collage of political ideas, domestic detail, artistic debate, poems, photographs and cuttings from newspapers and magazines, assembled, undoubtedly for posterity by one of the great writers of the century" (New Statesman and Society)

Bertolt Brecht's extraordinary historical novel presents an aspiring scholar's efforts to write an idealized life of Julius Caesar twenty years after his death. But the historian abandons his planned biography, confronted by a baffling range of contradictory views. Was Caesar an opportunist, a permanently bankrupt businessman who became too big for the banks to allow him to fail - as his former banker claims? Did he stumble into power while trying to make money, as suggested by the diary of his former slave? Across these different versions of Caesar's career in the political and economic life of Rome, Brecht wryly contrasts the narratives of imperial progress with the reality of grasping self-interest, in a sly allegory that points to the Weimar Republic and perhaps even to our own times. Brecht reminds his readers of the need for constant vigilance and critical suspicion towards the great figures of the past. In an echo of his dramatic theories, the audience is confronted with its own task of active interpretation rather than passive acceptance -- we have to work out our own views about Mr Julius Caesar. This edition is translated by Charles Osborne and features an introduction and editorial notes by Anthony Phelan and Tom Kuhn.

"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."

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/Busching 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.

Includes the full German text, accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

Bertolt Brecht's Me-ti, which remained unpublished in his own lifetime, now appears for the first time in English. Me-ti counselled against 'constructing too complete images of the world'. For this work of fragments and episodes, Brecht accumulated anecdotes, poems, personal stories and assessments of contemporary politics. Given its controversial nature, he sought a disguise, using the name of a Chinese contemporary of Socrates, known today as Mozi. Stimulated by his humorous aphoristic style and social focus, as well as an engrained Chinese awareness of the flow of things, Brecht developed a practical, philosophical, anti-systematic ethics, discussing Marxist dialectics, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, the Moscow trials, and the theories behind current events, while warning how ideology makes people the 'servants of priests'. Me-ti is central to an understanding of Brecht's critical reflections on Marxist dialectics and his commitment to change and the non-eternal, the philosophy which informs much of his writing and his most famous plays, such as The Good Person of Szechwan. Readers will find themselves both fascinated and beguiled by the reflections and wisdom it offers. First published in German in 1965 and now translated and edited by Antony Tatlow, Brecht's Me-ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things provides readers with a much-anticipated accessible edition of this important work. It features a substantial introduction to the concerns of the work, its genesis and context - both within Brecht's own writing and within the wider social and political history, and provides an original selection and organisation of texts. Extensive notes illuminate the work and provide commentary on related works from Brecht's oeuvre.

Everyone knows that Bertolt Brecht was one of the great 20th-century innovators in theatre - the literary-theatrical equivalent of a Picasso or Stravinsky - and Germany's greatest poet of the last century, but the playwright was also a dazzling writer of stories. Storytelling permeated his art as a dramatist; fundamentally in his plays he was a storyteller. This volume collects the complete short stories written by Brecht, including the prize-winning 'The Monster', and the fragmentary memoir ghost-written by Brecht, 'Life Story of the boxer Samson-Korner'. Brecht scholars Marc Silberman and Shuhsi Kao provide an introduction and editorial notes.Fans of Brecht will find in the 37 stories assembled here the same directness, lack of affectation, and wry humour that characterise his plays. Every lover of short stories will discover an unexpected trove of pleasure in this "mine for short-story addicts" ("Observer").

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.

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) apercus 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.

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.

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.

The city burns in the heat of civil war and a servant girl sacrifices everything to protect an abandoned child. But when peace is finally restored, the boy's mother comes to claim him. Calling upon the ancient tradition of the Chalk Circle, a comical judge sets about resolving the dispute. But in a culture of corruption and deception, who wins? Written by the grand master of storytelling and peopled with vivid and amusing characters, this is one of the greatest plays of the last century. This Caucasian Chalk Circle is translated by award-winning writer Alistair Beaton, who also wrote the bitingly witty stage play Feelgood and the celebrated TV dramas The Trial of Tony Blair and A Very Social Secretary. The play was toured by Shared Experience in 2009.

This volume gathers together, for the first time in English translation, Brecht's own writings on the new film and broadcast technologies that revolutionised arts and communication in the early part of the twentieth century This book includes all of Brecht's theoretical writing about film, radio, broadcasting and the new media written between 1919 and 1956 as well as all of his important screenplays produced during the 1920s and 1930s. Screenplays written during this time include an early sound-film adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, and a collaboration with Fritz Lang, Hangmen Also Die. Brecht's writings on the new media document his fascination with it from Weimar Germany to Hollywood and the movie industry.A must for students of Brecht and film studies alike.

Even in Germany, the true scope and force of Bertolt Brecht s poetry did not become apparent until long after his death in 1956, and even today, so many of his more than 2,000 poems have never appeared in English. Love Poems, the first volume in a monumental undertaking by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn to translate his poetic legacy into English, positions Brecht, the author of Mother Courage and The Threepenny Opera, not merely as one of the most famous playwrights of the twentieth century but also as a fiercely creative twentieth-century poet, one of the best in the whole of German literature. With a personal foreword by his own daughter, Barbara Brecht-Schall, Love Poems features 78 astonishing and deeply personal love poems many addressed to particular women that reveal Brecht as lover and love poet whose bitter struggle to keep faith, hope, and love alive during desperate times represents the essence of human relationships."

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.