Volume 41, Number 20 · December 1, 1994
Giving the Devil His Due
By Michael Meyer
Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama
by John Fuegi
Grove, 732 pp., $32.50
Bertolt Brecht: Journals, 1934–1955
translated by Hugh Rorrison, edited by John Willett
Routledge, 556 pp., $39.95
After Brecht
by Janelle Reinelt
University of Michigan Press, 231 pp., $39.50
Thus Brecht wrote in his journal for December 8, 1940, using, as was one of his many eccentric habits, no capital letters. John Fuegi, in his new biography, asserts that Brecht employed precisely this method to create all his best plays, ruthlessly exploiting the work of various mistress-collaborators and other acquaintances and then denying them either the credit or the royalties to which they were entitled. The Swiss director Benno Besson claimed that he and Elisabeth Hauptmann had written 'Brecht's' version of Molière's Don Juan and that Brecht had 'hardly interfered at all.' According to Fuegi, 'it now seems indisputable' that Hauptmann wrote at least 80 percent of The Threepenny Opera and was almost entirely responsible for St. Joan of the Stockyards, as well as for most of the play adaptations credited to Brecht after his return to East Berlin in 1947. Nor was her contribution to the Brecht oeuvre confined to his plays. John Willett, his distinguished translator and editor, notes that the original manuscripts of his short stories of the 1920s often show few or no marks of his hand, and believes that at least seven of the eleven 'Berlin' stories are by Hauptmann, while Fuegi claims that a number of his poems from 1924 and large sections of his famous dramaturgical theories were likewise written by her, offering a wealth of evidence which it is difficult to ignore.
Review, 3289 words
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