Customer Reviews

Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I read this book when it first came out, and was blown away by it.

I've read (and dearly love) some of Brecht's plays and poems, but I'm not a Brecht scholar by any means, so I'm not qualified to judge its accuracy.

However, as a piece of writing, the book is superb. Its portrayal of Brecht and his (alleged) thievery and (definite) all-round knavishness is stunning. Its common-sensical and jargon-free analysis of Brecht's contriubtions to theater is refreshing.

If the book is inaccurate, though, all of that must go by the wayside. Still, two questions:

1) Why hasn't any comparably epic-sized, thorough, attention-getting book on Brecht been published in the past dozen years as a corrective to this book? (If one has been published, it's escaped my notice.)

2) Don't you think the negative reaction to this book has something to do with politics? Brecht is an icon of the Left, and people get mad when their idols are smashed.

And a final thought: Why haven't more bios of Brecht's alleged female collaborators been written in the wake of this book?

John Fuegi is no student of Brecht's career. Real scholars do not mistranslate material and improvise their own meanings. They do not embellish and even invent quotes. Fuegi has done all this and more. To say he is "inaccurate" is putting it mildly. In fact, German Brecht scholars were so outraged by this trash, they collectively authored an article listing every error -- and there was enough misinformation to fill 80 pages. An example: Their careful study of Brecht's manuscripts reveals that first drafts were in his own hand. They are not the work of his mistresses. If you want to know the truth about Bertolt Brecht's life and career, skip this nonsense and consult any work of author James Lyons, a true Brecht scholar.

This is a terribly bad book. It is full of factually incorrect assertions woven together into a distorted picture of the most influential and complex theater worker of the twentieth century. There is a total absence of critical perception or analysis, and for someone who claims to have been working so long in the field, Fuegi betrays a remarkable lack of insight into the dynamics of theater production. He pays lip-service to what he seems to believe are feminist principles, but underneath them, he shows great disregard for the opinions and achievements of the remarkable women who worked with Brecht throughout his life. Fuegi seems to have learned nothing from Brecht;his writing is plodding and turgid - all the more so in the context of Brecht's own sharpness and economy of language. Any other book on Brecht would provide a better introduction; I have only given it one star because I can't figure out how to give it less