The author attempts to demonstrate a dialectic development in Brecht's work, form the self-destructive nihilism of the early work, which finds its culmination in the opera «Mahagonny», through the crisis of identity in the early «Lehrstücke», which shows itself, above all, in the conflict between Baal, the «alter ego» of the younger Brecht, and Keuner, who fulfils a similar function in the later work, to the «second optimism» of the last plays and poems.
Why did antisemitism assume its ultimate and most deadly form in Germany and not in other countries which, at the turn of the century, showed an equal penchant for blaming their Jewish citizens for all the tensions of modernity?A comparative and inter-disciplinary investigation of the whole complex of factors - economic, political, historical and social-psychological - which led to the quantum leap from "normal antisemitism" - superficially no more marked than in neighbouring countries - to the acceptance of the Nazi policy and practice of genocide. The author confronts both the paradoxes of the German-Jewish experience - the extraordinary initial success, and the devastating subsequent failure, of assimilation - and the complex patterns of assimilation and rejection in other European societies.