Word: brecht
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...Bertolt Brecht...
WHEN IT CAME to raping and pillaging the works of others, no 20th-century playwright could hold a candle to Bertolt Brecht. The idiosyncratic pinko playwright ranged far and wide in his search for material to transform into his own dramas. He rivaled Shakespeare, the literary grave-robber supreme, in his audacious choice of sources. Twenties cinema, 18th century musicals, Renaissance history, Jack London stories; in Brecht's hands they all became the stuff of his proletarian "epic" theater...
...Lincoln Steffens had famously seen the future in the U.S.S.R. and proclaimed that it worked. It was less well known, notes the author, that Steffens "had previously seen it in Italy . . . where he thought it had also worked. His praise for Mussolini was as glowing as for Lenin." Bertolt Brecht told Hook that the status of defendants in the Soviet dock was irrelevant: "The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot." Hook dryly comments, "I never saw him again...
...BERTHOLD BRECHT expressed the contemporary view best: "Unhappy the land with heroes." Since Brecht wrote many things, so much of it stupid, permit me a correction: Miserable the land without heroes...
Fashionably thinking individuals have co-opted Brecht's argument. They contend that to call one man nobler than another leads inevitably to... (Please read the ellipsis as an ominous allusion to Nazism...