Bertolt Brecht in Context ed. by Stephen Brockmann (review)

Reviewed by: Bertolt Brecht in Context ed. by Stephen Brockmann Karen Leeder Bertolt Brecht in Context. Ed. by Stephen Brockmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. xxviii+354 pp. £84.99. ISBN 978–1–108–42646–6. This compilation of thirty-seven essays is usefully structured into three roughly equal parts: i, 'Brecht's World'; ii, 'Brecht's Work'; iii, 'The World's Brecht'. It offers a wide range of international contributions, some providing tight summaries of recent books and others venturing into surprising new areas. The result is the sense of Brecht as 'an eternal shapeshifter', as dramatist Mark Ravenhill calls him in his Preface (p. xxvi), while Stephen Brockmann's Introduction demonstrates that Brecht's position in any context is best described as uncomfortable. Part i provides necessary and important context, organized along chronological biographical lines: Augsburg (Jürgen Hillesheim), Munich (Meg Mumford), Weimar (Ronald Speirs), early poetry (Dorothee Ostmeier), music (Joachim Lucchesi), political theatre (Laura Bradley); then looking to Germany (Stephen Brockmann), women collaborators (Paula Hanssen), and interviews (Noah Willumsen); before finishing with exile (Johannes F. Evelein), the German Democratic Republic (Mark Clark), and the Berliner Ensemble (David Barnett). Hillesheim considers Brecht's formative years in Augsburg, his early influences, and the deliberate self-reinvention as a 'city-dweller' with the move to Berlin. Mumford highlights the cabaret influence of Wedekind and Valentin and the desire to subvert the social order (p. 30); Speirs adds Chaplin to the mix and offers an overview of the early dramas culminating in the important Man Is Man. Some essays offer a new lens. Lucchesi traces the experiments of the early poetry sung to guitar, and shifts Brecht closer to Wagner's practice than one might expect. Bradley provides new insights on the less known political plays and links Brecht to Piscator. Ostmeier explores the resistant female figures in Brecht's early poetry, while Hanssen gives a cautious account of Brecht's lifelong collaborations with women. Willumsen tackles Brecht's fraught relationship with the genre of the interview, followed by four pieces in which Brecht is shown as 'obstinately non-assimilationist' (p. 95)—whether in Germany as a whole (Brockmann), the precarious exile of Hollywood (Evelein), the rigid structure of the new socialist state (Clark), or even in his own newly founded theatre (Barnett). End Page 284 Part ii positions Brecht's work in relation to its various contexts: theatre (Marc Silberman), film (Theodore F. Rippey), photography (Tom Kuhn), fiction (Ernest Schonfield), and music (Vera Stegmann); Marxism (Anthony Squiers), ethics (Markus Wessendorf), dialectics (Joseph Dial), and Gestus (Sabine Hake); and East Asia (Antony Tatlow). This section will doubtless be of great use to students. Sil-berman offers an excellent overview of Brecht's practice designed to rouse the audience from 'its passive consumerist mode' (p. 116) to 'reveal sociopolitical causality' (p. 116) and stimulate dialectical thinking, but emphasizes throughout that it was developed from his collaborative work in the theatre. Hake's useful account of Gestus reiterates this central point, though a similar chapter on Verfremdung might have been helpful. Squiers's chapter on Marxism grounds the theories, tracing Marxist influences on Brecht, Marxist reactions to Brecht, and Brecht's own importance for subsequent thinkers, not only Benjamin, but also Althusser, Rancière, Jameson, and others. Rippey and Kuhn tackle aspects of the visual in film and photography respectively, revealing that this is an under-researched area, important for understanding Brecht's relationship to realism. Schonfield details Brecht's works of prose fiction, including the Threepenny Novel and the often underrated Keuner stories, also signalling the importance of these for later writers, while Stegmann's neat account of Brecht's work with composers covers Weill, Dessau, and Eisler. Wessendorf and Dial look at Brecht's ethics and dialectical thinking through the lens of Taoism (in Me-ti) and Hegelianism respectively, indicating the importance of both of these avenues to apprehend 'a world in constant flux' (p. 167). This is picked up in Tatlow's account of Brecht's many connections with Asian philosophy, culture, and aesthetics. Finally, Part iii explores the reception in various areas, generic, geographical and institutional: feminism (Helen Fehervary), biographers (Jost Hermand), editions (Erdmut Wizisla), fiction (Robert...