This Student Edition of Brecht's satire on the capitalist society of the Weimar Republic features an extensiveintroduction and commentary that includes a plot summary, discussion ofthe context, themes, characters, style and language as well asquestions for further study and notes on words and phrases in the text.It is the perfect edition for students of theatre and literature.Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepen...

Times Literary Supplement • Books of the Year ("The most generous available English collection of Brecht’s poetry.")A landmark literary event, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is the most extensive English translation of Brecht’s poetry to date.Widely celebrated as the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht was also, as George Steiner observed, “that very rare phenomenon, a great poet, for...

This book contains selected poems, plays, and prose by Bertolt Brecht taken from various points throughout his career. It includes translations of two prose works and provides some background information on Brecht's life and career.

One of Bertolt Brecht's best-loved and most performed plays, The Threepenny Opera was first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble).Based on the eighteenth-century The Beggar's Opera by John Gay, the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho.With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jaz...

Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. It focuses on the feud between Macheaf - an amoral criminal - and his father in law, a racketeer who controls and exploits London's beggars and is intent on having Macheaf hanged. Despite the resistance by Macheaf's fri...

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 literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

In this singular book written during World War Two, Bertolt Brecht presents a devastating visual and lyrical attack on war under modern capitalism.He takes photographs from newspapers and popular magazines, and adds short lapidary verses to each in a unique attempt to understand the truth of war using mass media.Pictures of catastrophic bombings, propaganda portraits of leading Nazis, scenes of unbearable tragedy on the battlefield - all these images contribute to an anthol...

Brecht's famous parable, written in exile in 1939-41, shows that in an unjust society good can only survive by means of evil. In it, the gods come to earth in search of enough good people to justify their existence. They find Shen Teh, a good-hearted but penniless prostitute, and make her a gift that enables her to set up her own business. But her goodness brings ruin and she must disguise herself as a man in order to muster sufficient ruthlessness to survive.Published in Methuen D...

This Student Edition of Brecht's classic satire on the rise of Hitler features an extensiveintroduction and commentary that includes a plot summary, discussion ofthe context, themes, characters, style and language as well asquestions for further study and notes on words and phrases in the text.It is the perfect edition for students of theatre and literature.Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', A...

Bertolt Brecht's Me-ti, which remained unpublished in his own lifetime, now appears for the first time in English. Me-ti counselled against 'constructing too complete images of the world'. For this work of fragments and episodes, Brecht accumulated anecdotes, poems, personal stories and assessments of contemporary politics. Given its controversial nature, he sought a disguise, using the name of a Chinese contemporary of Socrates, known today as Mozi. Stimulated by his humorous aph...

Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler - recast by Brecht into a fictional, small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade in the 1930s. The satirical allegory combines Brecht's Epic style of theatre with black comedy and overt didacticism.Using a wide range of parody and pastiche - from Al Capone to Shakespeare's Richard III and Goethe's Faus...

Bertolt Brecht's extraordinary historical novel presents an aspiring scholar's efforts to write an idealized life of Julius Caesar twenty years after his death. But the historian abandons his planned biography, confronted by a baffling range of contradictory views. Was Caesar an opportunist, a permanently bankrupt businessman who became too big for the banks to allow him to fail – as his former banker claims? Did he stumble into power while trying to make money, as suggested by the diary o...