Stephen Parker before When the Suhrkamp-Verlag advertises, with his new Brecht biography on a good 1000 pages, “the final presentation of Bertolt Brecht’s life and work”, can you be short and suspicious. There is to say about the Poet (1898-1956), who was tried in his work to the greatest possible clarity, and in his sexual and political Paths and gone astray sufficiently scandalised, really still Unknown?
for the past three voluminous Brecht biographies, the resentment poisoned by John Fuegi, in which the writer to the misogynen poison dwarf and inhuman ideologues shrinks (1086 pages), especially in the work of analysis proper of Jan button (560 pages) and the much of the Screens of the GDR-German language and literature, coined by Werner in the middle two (1400 pages) and could not find it attention to Detail and accuracy are missing.
Also, the need for true-to-life insights and menschel approach, according to popkulturellem the cult of the star, and a cozy, shiver is elsewhere supported generously. Finally, you could encounter the Poet in the cinema in a star-studded Musical Film (“Mackie Messer – Bertolt Brecht’s the Threepenny movie”), and in Heinrich Breloers new docu-fiction.
British sober time
Who wants to know more, distancing is Stephen Parker to the right place. Not only because, in addition to his brilliantly written book the works of his competitors seem a little stiff, it is likely to remain for a long time, the valid biography of the difficult classic. Parker, German language and literature Professor at the University of Cardiff, has the advantage of the UK’s sobriety and of the spatial and temporal distance to the ideologically upgraded skirmishes of the Brecht-exegesis. The Poet is for him neither hatred nor devotion to an object, but a subject of research.
one of the surprising accents, and Stephen Parker, the detailed reproduction of recorded disease history of the writer. Time of his life, the lanky Bertolt Brecht laborierte to heart and kidney problems. The forced vital, particularly in the early work of well-maintained power Meier attitude in the Pose of the wild man with a leather jacket and a cigar in the Baal-style cast against this Background, as a compensation maneuver: A water-drinker, sings of the liquor.
The description of the young people of Augsburg Punks who enjoys carefree its citizens scare games and, apparently, quite irresistible perfect courtesy with insolent impudence connects, something of the fascination of genius ancestors.
art as a Manöverzur dissociation
conversely, the neusach belong-like Coolness, as in “a reading book for city dwellers”, and the very firm defence of the feeling in the Theater to the behavior of the cold, the top of Bert Brecht’s teachings. Them also the without any major considerations used distancing maneuver, with which he keeps, many of the love relationships of the body, or rather, from the heart, remote follow. The coquette warning, “in me you have one that you can’t build,” was often enough meant quite literally.
thanks Parker, you can. these techniques of withdrawal as Try to read and understand, to protect their own weak Constitution The biographer is a fair author, therefore, he draws the next to the wife, Helene Weigel of the important women in Brecht’s life, such as the Communist Margarete Steffin, in Stalin’s Gulag died, Carola Neher, or the self-destructive Ruth Berlau, as a strong undunabhängige personalities– as the opposite of the abused victims.
The manic literary production serves not only the self-understanding and Self-stylization, but also the stabilization of such a hold-up in many ways artist’s unstable. Not very original, but fitting Stephen Parker shows that Brecht’s approach to communism as an attempt of self-discipline to understand.
Lack of Arrogance of posterity,
To the Details is visible, as well as politically naive Bertolt Brecht could still be at the beginning of the thirty years. A few months before the “seizure of power” by the national socialists, he invested his entire fortune in the purchase of a country house in Bavaria, and wasted no thought to the fact that the Emigration might be necessary. Compared to Brecht’s political radicalization (and the least loyal attitude towards the Regime of Stalin) remains Parker sober analytically.
Even if he wonders about the ideological Front and that for Brecht the dangerous intrigues of the party of pious Apparatchiks in the Moscow exile, in all its intransigence signed, he comes without the widespread Arrogance of posterity. He tries to explain the behavior of Brecht’s out of time. Carefully, he opened again and again, such as the theater piece “Galilei”, exciting interpretations of the works.
(editing Tamedia)
Created: 12.04.2019, at 18:16
