Explores the storytelling of Anna Seghers and other 20th-century writers who faced the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, between conformity and resistance. While Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay "The Storyteller" (1936), lamented the decline of the storytelling tradition in the age of the modernist novel, Anna Seghers and other twentieth-century German writers went on to chronicle the century's darkest days in creative and compelling ways. This volume is at its heart a tribute to Germanist Helen Fehervary, whose work, particularly on the prose of Anna Seghers, continues to inspire scholars who examine narration and storytelling. The subtitle quotation, "for once, telling it all from the beginning," is a translation of the phrase "einmal alles von Anfang an erzahlen," from Seghers's exile novel Transit, in which she told notonly her own story but that of countless others who faced existential challenges in their attempts to escape the Nazi regime. This volume examines a number of such writers, exploring the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, as well as individual struggles involving conformity and resistance in a totalitarian state. Contributors: Peter Beicken, Hunter Bivens, Kristy R. Boney, Ute Brandes, Stephen Brockmann, Sylvia Fischer, Jost Hermand, Kristen Hetrick, Robert C. Holub, Weijia Li, Elizabeth Loentz, Michaela Peroutkova, Benjamin Robinson, Christiane Zehl Romero, Marc Silberman, Andy Spencer, Luke Springman, Amy Kepple Strawser, Jennifer Marston William. Kristy R. Boney is Associate Professor of German at the University of Central Missouri. Jennifer Marston William is Professor of German and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University.

The leading scholarly publication on Brecht; volume 43 contains a wealth of articles on diverse topics and a reconstruction of the two-chorus version of The Exception and the Rule. Published for the International Brecht Society by Camden House, the Brecht Yearbook is the central scholarly forum for discussion of Brecht's life and work and of topics of interest to him, especially the politics of literature and theater in a global context. It encourages a wide variety of perspectives and approaches and, like Brecht, is committed to the use value of literature, theater, and theory. Volume 43 opens with a reconstruction of Brecht's two-chorus version of The Exception and the Rule (Reiner Steinweg) and continues with a selection of Helmut Heissenbuttel's reviews of Brecht's work. Four articles (by Christine Kunzel, Carsten Mindt, Judith Niehaus,and Sebastian Schuller) address Brechtian aspects of Gisela Elsner's novels. The next two essays (by Hunter Bivens and Friedemann Weidauer) revisit Brecht's reflections on affect and empathy. Also included are papers from the 2016IBS "Recycling Brecht" Symposium: on Brecht's recycling of Lenin in his "neue Dramatik" (Joseph Dial), on Paul Celan as a reconfiguration of Brecht (Paul Peters), on Brecht's adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (MartinRevermann), and on Hilary Mantel's Brechtian reconfiguration of Thomas Cromwell (Markus Wessendorf). The volume features Richard Schroeder's farewell lecture on Brecht's Life of Galileo and an essay by Ulrich Plass on BerndStegemann's allegedly Brechtian reclamation of critical realism. It concludes with Zhang Wei's interview with the Chinese dramaturg, playwright, and Brecht translator Li Jianming. Editor Markus Wessendorf is a Professorin the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Honolulu.