Editorial

Summary

The forty-first Brecht Yearbook features a set of essays focused on the special interest topic Teaching Brecht, along with a diverse mix of new research contributions that, once again, demonstrate the breadth and diversity of Brecht-related scholarship. The special section opens the volume. Guest editors Per Urlaub and Kristopher Imbrigotta offer an introductory essay that guides us into the work of contributors from three continents and a multiplicity of disciplines. Each essay provides a window into fascinating moments of teaching and learning that expose the productively porous bounds between, as Urlaub and Imbrigotta put it, stage and page, classroom and community.

The volume continues with the latest piece of work by intrepid theater scholar and oral historian Margaret Setje-Eilers. Her interview subject this time is Annemone Haase, who worked at the Berliner Ensemble from 1959 to 2001. As she did in her work that formed the special section on Manfred Karge in BY 38, Setje-Eilers again poses questions that open lines of thought and illuminate moments recent and distant, onstage and backstage, in art and in life. Her interview enriches our understanding, not only of the remarkable career of Haase but also of the cultural and historical forces that shaped her life in the theater.

We remain in the company of remarkable women as we move into the volume's open-topic research articles, first with a piece by eminent scholar Helen Fehervary that is targeted in its examples and sweeping in its basic claim. Fehervary's essay on Brecht's collaborations with women, which contemplates relationships that evolved in the early Weimar days as well as in later career stages in exile and in the GDR, is refreshing in its cool distance from the heat of familiar Brecht-and-women polemics and counterpolemics. In its stress on art instead of romance, it guides reader attention to the creative work to which Brecht and collaborators from Elisabeth Bergner to Anna Seghers contributed as peers.

Fehervary's article pairs fascinatingly with an article that zooms in on Skovsbostrand, in which Katherine Hollander delves into the spatial, political, material, and intellectual conditions of peer collaboration in a very specific place and time of exile. The method is surgically precise, and the insights have broad ramifications.