Word: brecht
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...time," writes Book Reviewer Ted Kalem on page 100 of this issue, is "a metronome of disaster." Small t, of course. His discussion concerns the savagely humorous themes of the late German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the entire Books section this week consists of his report on a new edition of seven Brecht plays. Although he has been reviewing books for 13 years, including TIME cover stories on Shakespeare, Boris Pasternak and James Gould Cozzens, 41-year-old, Harvard-educated Ted Kalem is equally comfortable writing about playwrights, the theater and the stock market (he once did a financial advisory...
...minor omission in the CRIMSON Review article on Brecht yesterday was the title of the book under discussion. It was Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht, edited and with an introduction by Eric Bentley; Grove Press, New York, 1961. 537pp...
Submission is indeed a major theme, uniting Brecht's pre-Marxist plays with his later work. Of In the Swamp, for instance, the author tells us he is presenting a great struggle between two men ... but he offers hardly any fighting at all. The mutual preoccupation of Shlink and Garga seems far more akin to love than hate, and when, years later, Brecht writes that he sees in this play naive intimations of class struggle, he is only superimposing political analysis upon his non-Marxist work. Similarly in A Man's a Man (pre-Marxist) a simple porter, Galy...
Still further in Galileo, Mother Courage, and The Good Woman of Setzuan (three of the Marxist plays in the present volume) the playwright illustrates what each of his major characters must give up. To Brecht yielding is psychologically far more important (or intriguing) than acquisition. The roots of his negativism may lie in the vicinity of this fact...
...When Brecht returned to East Germany, he had at his disposal all that a playwright could materially desire: his own theatre, his own company, virtually unlimited state support...and yet he failed to produce the 'positive' play expected of him. This incapacity to praise the world which the Socialist camp hoped to construct has frequently been traced to an alleged reluctance with which Brecht embraced Stalinism, but there is little evidence to support this theory. It seems clear that his negativism was rooted more in psychological than political soil: his fundamental interest was not the constructive process, but disintegration...