Overview

An illuminating history of the intimate group around Bertolt Brecht which produced some of the most important works of 20th-century drama, literature, and theory while in exile from Nazi Germany. Bertolt Brecht is recognized as one of the great literary figures of the 20th century. But was he a charismatic genius or an exploitative plagiarizer, and how did his commitment to socialism inform his art? For decades, opinions on Brecht have been polarized by these questions. Building on new archival research and previously unconsidered sources, Katherine Hollander offers a fresh historical perspective by de-centering Brecht and contextualizing him within a small group of peers. This book investigates how the members of this group understood their collaborative work in the context of their commitments to fighting fascism and building socialism. It illuminates a community that coalesced first in Vienna and Berlin and intensified as it moved into exile in Denmark after 1933. Beginning not with Brecht but with the actor Helene Weigel and her mentor, the Danish feminist Karin Michaëlis, the book takes seriously the women of the group and their ideas about socialism, gender, collaboration, and art. By the time the group shifted its center to Denmark, it included dramaturg and editor Margarete Steffin and social philosopher Walter Benjamin, and saw an increase in productivity and interdependence. Through careful study of writings and correspondence, this book reveals not just how the group worked but how they understood that work as an embodiment of their evolving ideas about socialism, antifascism, and collectivity. It suggests the understudied ways that collaboration has contributed to intellectual history, dissolving the false binary around Brecht and making way for new understandings of co-creation.

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9781350433588

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Reviews

Katherine Hollander is a superb poet and a superb historian, and both of these gifts are at work here. She writes beautiful and exact sentences, she has capacious imaginative sympathy, and when we are done with her book, oversimplifications have been cleared away, and everything she considers has been newly illuminated: Brecht and each of his co-workers, exile, authorship, collaboration. For thinking about all these things we have to start fresh, and we have to start here. * Lawrence Rosenwald, Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English Emeritus, Wellesley College, USA *

Katherine Hollander is a superb poet and a superb historian, and both of these gifts are at work here. She writes beautiful and exact sentences, she has capacious imaginative sympathy, and when we are done with her book, oversimplifications have been cleared away, and everything she considers has been newly illuminated: Brecht and each of his co-workers, exile, authorship, collaboration. For thinking about all these things we have to start fresh, and we have to start here. * Lawrence Rosenwald, Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English Emeritus, Wellesley College, USA * Hollander has written a wonderfully lucid and nuanced intellectual and cultural history of the creative collaborations and networks that met in Brecht’s work of the 1930s. Her narrative loops ambitiously through the biographical and cultural backgrounds, and gives new access to lives and works we thought were familiar. The approach helps to explain how, despite the disruptions and hardships of the ‘dark times’, the years of anti-Nazi exile were so extraordinarily productive for Brecht and his team. A lively and readable book that gives breathing space and credence to these people’s own conceptions of their lives, and uncovers the dynamic power of collective productivity. Hollander offers a model of collaboration, with the power to inspire, far beyond that immediate context of the first half of the twentieth century. * Tom Kuhn, University of Oxford., UK *

Author Information

Katherine Hollander is Lecturer in Poetry and History, Tufts University, USA. She is a historian, Brecht scholar, and poet, author of My German Dictionary (2019), and editor of a student edition of Mother Courage (Methuen Drama 2022).

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