Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prelude: Eugen Brecht Goes out to Play
Part 1 Lyrical Awakening
Part 2 Dramatic Iconoclast
Part 3 Marxist Heretic
Part 4 Chastened Survivor
Part 5 Contentious Master
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index
Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, now in paperback, is the definitive, critically lauded biography of the great 20th century writer and theatre artist, described by Michael Hofmann in the TLS as "that rare thing, not only the biography of a genius, but itself a biography of genius".
Stephen Parker is Henry Simon Professor of German at the University of Manchester and was Leverhulme Research Fellow (2009-12). His publications include Sinn und Form: The Anatomy of a Literary Journal, The Modern Restoration: Re-thinking German Literature 1930-1960 (both co-authored), Peter Huchel: A Literary Life in 20th-Century Germany and he contributed to Brecht on Art and Politics.
A magisterial biography of Brecht ... Parker’s choice to present
new material very much through the prism of the artist is
compelling ... Fascinating reading.
*The Independent*
We should be grateful to [Parker] for reminding us how important,
love him or loathe him, Brecht was – and still is.
*The Sunday Times*
Stephen Parker’s Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life is that rare
thing, not only the biography of a genius, but itself a biography
of genius. Parker, a Professor of German at Manchester, has written
a foot perfect, detailed, fascinating and really inward book on a
man who was plausibly described as “one of the most complicated
human beings of the past fifty years”. It may well be the best
literary biography I have read, the intricate demands of the
subject met and unfussily answered by the insightful calm and
nuanced decisiveness of the biographer . . . His is indeed one of
the great literary lives, and Parker’s book is every bit as good as
it needs to be
*The Times Literary Supplement*
[A] masterly biography of Brecht … [A]n astonishing tour de force
based on impressive scholarship. For once the subtitle, 'A Literary
Life', is apposite, for, as the complex strands of Brecht's life
are revealed, we never forget that he is above all a writer.
*Literary Review*
British scholar Stephen Parker’s new biography replaces the monster
of Brecht & Co. with a recognizable human … Whatever percentage of
those plays he wrote, Parker reminds us that it was Brecht whose
ideas shaped their creation, Brecht who schemed and fought for
their productions, Brecht who galvanized modern theater with a
radically new performance style. He was deeply flawed man and an
enormously important cultural figure. He fully merits the nuanced
portrait he receives in Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life.
*Washington Post*
Stephen Parker has written an extraordinary work about a man he
also repeatedly finds extraordinary, giving his book unusual
liveliness and spontaneity … [T]his is by far the fullest of any
English-language source, and it is the fullest biography in any
language, making good use of the magnificent chronology of Brecht’s
life of over 1,300 pages by Werner Hecht.
*Camden New Journal*
Stephen Parker’s superb biography of a great iconoclastic writer is
impressively sourced, rich in detail, well-paced, highly readable
yet serious.
*London Review of Books*
Stephen Parker powerfully evokes Brecht’s life within a set of
historical circumstances, without sacrificing the complexity of one
to the other, in ‘Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life’… Parker strikes
a delicate balance between the historical events and the more
temperamental qualities of Brecht’s that informed his writing, be
it his lifelong inability to temper his sexual appetite or manage
his frail body. In particular, Parker emphasizes the latter in the
way that Brecht’s writings, even at his most Leninist moments,
revolve around a feeling of bodily precarity and appetite-driven
excess. Parker’s success is the caution and deliberateness with
which he traces Brecht’s multifaceted, contradictory personality
and artistic corpus…. succeeds remarkably in animating the world of
political instability and terror that Brecht lived through, where
the failure of the Left to coalesce enabled the rise of
Fascism.
*The Michigan Daily*
Parker’s Brecht is a tangle of contradictions, a man led but
sometimes disorientated by ideology, art and love. This superb
biography may not endear us to him but it certainly brings us
closer.
*The Catholic Tablet*
[A] valuable source of information and insight.
*Morning Star*
Brecht expert Stephen Parker has not only taken up [the task of
writing a biography of Brecht], but has passed it with flying
colours … His style is effervescent, but not gushing.
Unsensational. Respectful without being reverential … Two beautiful
plate sections, a bibliography and notes, as well as an extensive
index of so much more than just names (thank you!) supplement the
volume. Stephen Parker has produced a standard international
work.
*Dreigroschenheft (Bloomsbury translation)*
Stephen Parker’s superb biography of a great iconoclastic writer is
impressively sourced, rich in detail, well-paced, highly readable
yet serious.
*London Review of Books*
A remarkable feat of concentration and judicious selection, given
the overwhelming accumulated material, this story of a literary
life is an astonishing achievement . . . Parker’s biography
contains many unforgettable descriptions from all stages of
Brecht’s unusual life, from his childhood dependency and lifelong
fear of heart failure and emotional agitation, which governed so
much of his psyche and determined his tastes. [A] magisterial
biography
*Dublin Review of Books*
In [this] dynamic and lucid text bristling with narrative energy,
Parker displays an impressive mastery of his subject, filling a
number of information gaps left by previous biographies while also
challenging a good deal of myth and misinformation attaching to
Brecht ... He offers sensitive and illuminating readings of
individual works ... [This] comprehensive, insightful study is
highly likely to become and remain the standard English-language
biography for many years.
*International Feuchtwanger Society newsletter*
This is an immensely important new biography of one of the most
controversial and inspiring figures of European modernism. Parker
has a profound knowledge of the archival record and brings his
subject alive with a wealth of fascinating detail, rising above the
old ideologically blinkered debates. Brecht emerges as a flawed and
troubled man, but equally as a literary artist and cultural
commentator of extraordinary breadth, with as much to say to us
global citizens of the twenty-first century as he had to his own
contemporaries.
*Tom Kuhn, Fellow of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford,
UK*
Parker offers an eminently readable account of a life that not only
fascinates on its own terms but illuminates the contradictions of
the many worlds Brecht inhabited.
*David Barnett, Reader in Drama, University of Sussex, UK and
author of Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance and A
History of the Berliner Ensemble*
Nobody perhaps has gone further than Stephen Parker in trusting the
conviction that biographical detail - including somatic detail --
can open up new dimensions of insight into historical moments and
the lives through which they exist. The result is a book, written
with sympathy and passion, that reveals an unknown, highly complex
personality behind the canonized image of the great Marxist
playwright Bertolt Brecht… breathtaking.
*Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature,
Stanford University, USA*
At last, after twenty years of waiting, a new Brecht biography in
English that can draw on post Cold War archival sources. Parker
offers a weighty but smoothly written literary portrait – both
empathetic and critical – of this major twentieth-century writer
and thinker.
*Marc Silberman, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA*
This immense dive into the life and work of the 20th-century German
playwright and poet offers letters, diaries, and unpublished
material to shed more light on his early life, all the way through
to his ‘transformative impact on world theater and poetry,’
according to the book’s dust jacket. Written by Stephen Parker, the
book is out now. Perfect beach reading!
*Backstage.com*
The research and presentation of Bertolt Brecht’s life is thorough
and meticulous ... I learned a great deal. From his personal and
professional partnerships, to his politics, to his theatrical
works.
*www.lookingforagoodbook.wordpress.com*
Few biographies are as instructive.
*The New Criterion*
In this magisterial combination of minute detail and complete
command of the social, political, and aesthetic landscape that
Brecht surveyed?from provincial Augsburg to cloudless Santa Monica,
and above all to the ‘cold Chicago’ of the asphalt city of Weimar
Berlin, and, later, East Berlin?the contradictions and complexities
of the writer are foregrounded in a way that makes any simple gloss
on his character unthinkable… What Parker has brought into focus is
the man himself and his network of associates, and if a new
appreciation for what it meant to be Brecht, warts and all,
emerges, so too does a disruption of the familiar biographical
coordinates along the way… Parker’s biography eschews conversion
narratives in favor of presenting a figure whose ability to adapt
to rapidly changing circumstances was less a liability than a
recipe for literary, social, and political vitality.
*Bookforum*
Enter Steven Parker’s biography of Brecht, 689 pages of carefully
researched and foot-noted conjecture about this paradoxical,
irritating, overbearing, brilliant Marxist whose love life would
shame a Casanova, and whose intellectual praxis suggests that after
Shakespeare he is one of the greatest theatrical thinkers and
playwrights.
*Logos*
Parker’s achievement lies perhaps not so much in the discovery of
new archival material—although there are exceptions here, such as
in the section on Brecht’s final illness—as in the skill with which
he identifies and marshals an extraordinary wealth of detail spread
across a wide range of published primary and secondary sources,
from Brecht’s works, his collaborators’ memoirs and collections of
archival documents, through to academic studies.
*Modern Language Review*
Stephen Parker's book is the most complete biography [of Brecht] in
English to date. ... [The book] generously adds to the illumination
of the great playwright's legacy.
*Socialism Today*
In BERTOLT BRECHT: A LITERARY LIFE, Stephen Parker places the
playwright in proper perspective … [bringing] to the table new
data, including information from previously withheld medical
documents.
*OnStage*
Parker’s biography is a valuable work. It is honest and meticulous.
… A highly readable and stimulating opener to the debate.
*Sybille Fuchs*
Using a letter from the archive in which Brecht writes to his son
Stefan on the tensions pulling the artistic and political subject
between insensitivity and sensitivity, Parker finds a suggestive
prompt for investigating the contrary strains on Brecht’s body and
mind between choler and melancholy, and hardness and receptivity,
and their impact on his work pulled between parabolic clarity and
poetic turbulence (71). This approach yields fresh insights into
the young writer’s struggle to master conflicting desires and tame
a body wracked by multiple maladies— chapters on Brecht’s formation
through the 1920s illuminate his creative response to contrary
impulses, especially the play between passion and irony in the
poetry.
*Theatre Journal*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
