Fear and Misery of the Third Reich

Love Poems

Bertolt Brecht is widely considered the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, and to this day remains best known as a dramatist, the author of Mother Courage, The Threepenny Opera, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, among so many other works.

Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic

This volume offers a major selection of Bertolt Brecht's groundbreaking critical writing. Here, arranged in chronological order, are essays from 1918 to 1956, in which Brecht explores his definition of the Epic Theatre and his theory of alienation-effects

The Threepenny Opera

The Threepenny Opera was Brecht's first and greatest commercial success, and it remains one of his best-loved and most-performed plays. Based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera, the play is set in Victorian England's Soho but satirizes the bo

The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (German: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) is a political-satirical opera composed by Kurt Weill to a German libretto by Bertolt Brecht. It was first performed on 9 March 1930 at the Neues Theater in Leipzig.

Saint Joan of the Stockyards

In this version of the story of Joan of Arc, Brecht transforms her into 'Joan Dark', a member of the 'Black Straw Hats' (a Salvation Army-like group) in twentieth century Chicago. The play charts Joan's battle with Pierpont Mauler, the unctuous owner of a

Baal

BAAL, which renowned playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) wrote when he was in college, is the provocative story of a drunken, ruthless, womanizing poet and singer, a desperate antihero in the tradition of Villon and Rimbaud. The NEW YORK TIMES called th

Aesthetics and Politics (Radical Thinkers)

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over lit

Antigone - In a Version by Bertolt Brecht

Sophocles, Hlderlin, Brecht, Malina - four major figures in the world's theatre - have all left their imprint on this remarkable dramatic text. Friedrich Hlderlin translated Sophocles into German, Brecht adapted Hlderlin, and now Judith Malina has rendere

Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (Library of America)

Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic "hall of mirrors," Aldous Huxley a "city of dreadful joy." Jack Kerouac found a "huge desert encampment," David Thomson imagined