John Willett Bücher

This is a revised edition of John Willett's classic study, published for the centenary of Berthold Brecht's birth. Willett sets in context not only Brecht the theatre practitioner, but also Brecht the writer and man of his time

This study of Brecht's theatre, first published in 1959, traces his stylistic development as a playwright and stage director through each of his major plays and explains his evolving notion of epic theatre within the political and social climate of the 1920s, Marxism, Nazism and post-war Communism.

The period between the end of World War I and Hitler's ascension to power witnessed an unprecedented cultural explosion that embraced the whole of Europe but was, above all, centered in Germany. Germany housed architect Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus movement; playwrights Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator; artists Hans Richter, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Hannah Hoch; composers Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schonberg, and Kurt Weill; and dozens of others. In Art and Politics in the Weimar Period , John Willett provides a brilliant explanation of the aesthetic and political currents which made Germany the focal point of a new, down-to-earth, socially committed cultural movement that drew a significant measure of inspiration from revolutionary Russia, left-wing social thought, American technology, and the devastating experience of war.

Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, eine Chronik aus dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg. »Was eine Aufführung von Mutter Courage«, schrieb Brecht einmal, »hauptsächlich zeigen soll: Daß die großen Geschäfte in den Kriegen nicht von den kleinen Leuten gemacht werden. Daß der Krieg, der eine Fortführung der Geschäfte mit anderen Mitteln ist, die menschlichen Tugenden tödlich macht, auch für ihre Besitzer. Daß er darum bekämpft werden muß.«

The Brecht Yearbook is celebrating a jubilee: twenty volumes and twenty-five years of the International Brecht Society. Guest editor John Willett has assembled material from the international Brecht symposium he convened in Bourges, France, in the fall of 1992, as well as interviews, statements, and articles by poets, dramatists, and scholars who feel a critical affinity with Brecht and his legacy. This volume also includes book reviews and an index to all previous yearbooks.

The period between the end of World War I and Hitler's ascension to power witnessed an unprecedented cultural explosion that embraced the whole of Europe but was, above all, centered in Germany. Germany housed architect Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus movement; playwrights Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator; artists Hans Richter, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Hannah Hoch; composers Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schonberg, and Kurt Weill; and dozens of others. In Art and Politics in the Weimar Period , John Willett provides a brilliant explanation of the aesthetic and political currents which made Germany the focal point of a new, down-to-earth, socially committed cultural movement that drew a significant measure of inspiration from revolutionary Russia, left-wing social thought, American technology, and the devastating experience of war.