"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."

A] revealing reflection and interpretation upon the development of post-World War II Europe. It offers a vision of imposed borders and boundaries that have become familiar yet remain disturbing; such a dichotomy is explored in various ways in the essays to make a provocative and fascinating book. The book is especially strong in the combination of the empirical and theoretical, treating borders and boundaries at many different levels from the purely physical to the social, cultural and political, as well as the symbolic. It is]...a very welcome addition to the field." . Wendy Pullan, University of Cambridge

The volume is interdisciplinary and broadly conceptualized yet it focuses on some key aspects that give the volume sufficient focus and depth. The quality of the contributions (including the substantive introduction) is consistently high... and] not merely a collection of pieces from various disciplines; instead many contributions speak to one another across individual disciplines, e.g., in a consideration of the ambivalent or contradictory effects of walls and boundaries-culturally, historically, and socially. . Friederike Eigler, Georgetown University

How is it that walls, borders, boundaries-and their material and symbolic architectures of division and exclusion-engender their very opposite? This edited volume explores the crossings, permeations, and constructions of cultural and political borders between peoples and territories, examining how walls, borders, and boundaries signify both interdependence and contact within sites of conflict and separation. Topics addressed range from the geopolitics of Europe's historical and contemporary city walls to conceptual reflections on the intersection of human rights and separating walls, the memory politics generated in historically disputed border areas, theatrical explorations of border crossings, and the mapping of boundaries within migrant communities.

Marc Silberman is Professor of German and Affiliate Professor in Theatre and Drama as well as Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published extensively on twentieth and twenty-first century German literature, film, and theater.

Karen E. Till is Lecturer of Cultural Geography at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and co-convener of the 'Mapping Spectral Traces' international network. She is author of "The New Berlin," co-editor of "Textures of Place," and working on a book project, "Wounded Cities." Janet Ward is Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and author of "Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity" and "Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany." Her current work includes a co-edited collection on (trans)nationalism and the German city, and a book project on urban destruction and reconstruction.

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").

"When the Berlin Wall opened unexpectedly on November 9, 1989, it marked a rupture of global significance. For Germany's national history the event has become, next to the defeat of 1945, the most significant date in collective memory. For Cold War Europe the Berlin Wall represented a symbol of border crisis and of difference and division. This interdisciplinary volume addresses multiple consequences of the fall of the Wall: looking back at the physical barrier, its demise, and how it has been mediated in film and television; detailing the processes of restoring and revitalizing the city and the country that had been torn asunder; recognizing the new challenges of integrating socially and politically old and new minorities; and identifying how a new European identity may emerge "after the Wall." The anthology is targeted at scholars and advanced students in history, German studies, sociology, art history, and related fields"--

How is it that walls, borders, boundaries-and their material and symbolic architectures of division and exclusion-engender their very opposite? This edited volume explores the crossings, permeations, and constructions of cultural and political borders between peoples and territories, examining how walls, borders, and boundaries signify both interdependence and contact within sites of conflict and separation. Topics addressed range from the geopolitics of Europe's historical and contemporary city walls to conceptual reflections on the intersection of human rights and separating walls, the memory politics generated in historically disputed border areas, theatrical explorations of border crossings, and the mapping of boundaries within migrant communities.

New essays by leading scholars giving a new picture of the variety of German expressionist cinema. This volume of fresh essays by leading scholars develops a new approach to expressionist film. For nearly half a century Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen have shapedthe understanding of the cinema of this period. However, fifty years on, there is a growing awareness that a new account is overdue. This attempt to rewrite the story of expressionist cinema begins with a fundamentally new interpretation of Dr. Caligari, and together with fresh views of other expressionist classics, offers new perspectives on important alternative film styles and genres that emerged in films by such eminent directors as Ernst Lubitsch, Joe May, Fritz Lang, Karl Grune, F. W. Murnau, and E. A. Dupont. In pursuing such variety, the book strives for a picture of the cinema in the early years of Weimar that in thematic as well as stylistic terms reflects the vibrant, multifaceted cultural and political developments of the period. The book is a joint venture of the Centre for European Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Film Studies at the University of Mainz, and the German Film Museum in Frankfurt. The late Dietrich Scheunemann was Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh and wrote and edited several books on German literature and on film and media.

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.

In the course of the 1970s, interdisciplinary German studies emerged in North America, breaking with what many in the field saw as a suffocating and politically tainted tradition of canon-based philology by broadening both the corpus of texts and the framing concept of culture. In the meantime the innovative impulses that characterized this response to the legacy of Germanistik have themselves become traditions. The essays in this volume critically examine a selection of those past attempts at renewal to gauge where we are now and how we move into the future: exile and forced migration, race and identity, humanism and utopian thought, solidarity and global inequality. A younger generation of scholars demonstrates how reviving and refining the questions of yore leads to new insights into literary and theatrical texts, fundamental philosophical and political ideas, and the structure of memory in ethnographic performance and photography. Looking back into the future is a self-reflexive gesture that asks how tradition inspires innovation, and it displays compelling evidence for the importance of historically informed cultural research in the field of German studies.

Eight essays, two in German, revised from presentations at a November 1998 workshop at the University of Wisconsin consider whether the nearly total neglect of German painter, filmmaker, essays, novelist, and dramatist Weiss (1916-ca.1982) since the end of the Cold War can be and should be reversed. He was a committed socialist who burst on the scene in 1964 with his film Marat/Sade and dealt with many social and political themes during his career.

First English translation of the memoirs of the vaunted theater producer Aufricht, providing an inside account of the late Weimar theater scene in Berlin and much else of interest. This is the first English translation of the memoirs of the great German-Jewish theater producer Ernst Josef Aufricht (in German 1966, rpt. 1998). The title alludes to Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera, the premiere of which was produced by Aufricht at his Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin in 1928, launching Brecht and Weill to worldwide fame. Aufricht's book is most notable for its insider's account of the Berlin theater scene from the great days of the late 1920s and early 30s. Its range, however, from school years and the military to his time as an actor and then producer, the rise of the Nazis, and finally his long years of exile in France and America, gives the picture of a complex individual with a talent for survival and a winningly understated sense of humor. The book will be of interest to an academic audience, but its reflections on a period of momentous artistic and political events will expand its appeal to a wider group: those interested in twentieth-century German history, music and theater history, as well as the general reader. A selection of photographs, some rare and many showing Aufricht's famous productions, enhances this English edition. Benjamin Bloch is a clinical psychologist who studied German and English Literature at Oberlin College. Marc Silberman is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin.

"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."

Motion picture production, distribution, exhibition and reception has always been a transnational phenomenon, yet East Germany, situated at the edge of the post-war Iron Curtain, separated by a boundary that became materialized in the Berlin Wall in 1961, resembles nothing if not an island, a protected space where film production developed under the protection of government subsidy and ideological purity. This volume proposes on the contrary that the GDR cinema was never just a monologue. Rather, its media landscape was characterized by constant dialogue, if not competition, with both the capitalist West and socialist East. These thirteen essays reshape DEFA cinema studies by exploring international networks, identifying lines of influence beyond national boundaries and recognizing genre qualities that surpass the temporal and spatial confines. The international team of film specialists present detailed analyses of over fifty films, including fiction features, adaptations of literary classics, children's films, documentaries, and examples from genres such as music, sci-fi, Westerns and crime films. With contributions by Sean Allan, Hunter Bivens, Benita Blessing, Barton Byg, Jaimey Fisher, Sabine Hake, Nick Hodgin, Manuel Koeppen, Anke Pinkert, Larson Powell, Brad Prager, Marc Silberman, Stefan Soldovieri, andHenning Wrage.

This interdisciplinary volume addresses the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall, from the revitalizing effect it had on Germany to the new challenges of integrating socially and politically old and new minorities, and forming a new European identity. It also considers how the fall was represented by the media.

Re-examines German cinema's representation of the Germans as victims during the Second World War and its aftermath. The recent "discovery" of German wartime suffering has had a particularly profound impact in German visual culture. Films from Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse (2003) to Oliver Hirschbiegel's Oscar-nominated Downfall (2004) and the two-part television mini-series Dresden (2006) have shown how ordinary Germans suffered during and after the war. Such films have been presented by critics as treating a topic that had been taboo for German filmmakers. However, the representation of wartime suffering has a long tradition on the German screen. For decades, filmmakers have recontextualized images of Germans as victims to engage shifting social and ideological discourses. By focusing on this process, the present volume explores how the changing representation of Germans as victims has shaped the ways in which both of the postwar German states and the now-unified nation have attempted to facethe trauma of the past and to construct a contemporary place for themselves in the world. Contributors: Sean Allan, Tim Bergfelder, Daniela Berghahn, Erica Carter, David Clarke, John E. Davidson, Sabine Hake, JenniferKapczynski, Manuel Koeppen, Rachel Palfreyman, Brad Prager, Johannes von Moltke. Paul Cooke is Professor of German Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and Marc Silberman is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin.

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.

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)

In the history of German cinema, film directors have developed visual and narrative responses to the anxieties and excesses of their own times and those of Germany's past. This book provides a detailed historical overview of German film from the silent era to the present, as well as close readings of individual films. Chosen for their representative significance, the 14 films featured on ""German Cinema"" cover five major historical periods of the German cinema: Weimar, the Third Reich, the early postwar years, East Germany, and the New German cinema. Each chapter analyses a single film as the point of departure for discussing authorial aspects such as film-makers' personal styles and intentions, and textual aspects such as genre, modes of narration, and address. Furthermore, the film analyses also take into account the wider context of film production and reception: on the one hand, the interactions between political issues and social change and, on the other, the continuities and ruptures at all levels in the German cinema. Along with interantionally celebrated films such as Ernst Lubitsch's ""Passion"" and Margarethe von Trotta's ""Marianne and Juliane"", ""German Cinema"" boradens the base of critical discussion by including less known works from the 1940s and 1950s from east Germany that were popular hits at the time of their release - for example, the Nazi propaganda musical ""Reuest Concert"" and the ""Heimat"" film comedy ""Black Forest Girl"" - but which have since become obscure. This book sets out to revise the reader's understanding of German film history, providing both an introduction to German film for the more general reader and, at the same time, a detailed study for experts in the field.

Brecht on Theatre is a seminal work that has remained the classic text for readers and students wanting a rich appreciation of the development of Brecht's thinking on theatre and aesthetics. First published in 1964 and on reading lists ever since, Brecht's writings are presented in this definitive edition featuring the wholly revised, re-edited and expanded text produced for the 50th anniversary of the first English publication. With additional texts, illustrations and editorial material, and with almost half the material newly translated, this edition provides a far fuller and more accurate account of the development of Brecht's work and writings. This edition features: * Clearer layout and organisation of the text * New translations of many of the Brechtian texts featured * Over 40 new, previously untranslated essays * Essay titles now correspond to the German originals * A revised selection of illustrations This selection of Bertolt Brecht's critical writing charts the development of his thinking on theatre and aesthetics over four decades. The volume demonstrates how the theories of Epic Theatre and Verfremdung evolved, and contains notes and essays on the staging of The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, Puntila, Galileoand many others of his plays. Also included is 'Short Organon for the Theatre', Brecht's most complete statement of his revolutionary philosophy of the theatre.

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.