Bertolt Brecht. Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti. Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things. Antony Tatlow, ed. and trans. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 193 pages.

Summary

Me-ti is a collection of reported dialogues, aphorisms, and anecdotes prompted by the Chinese philosopher Mê Ti or Mo Di, a critic of Confucius, who Brecht read in Alfred Forke's 1922 German translation. Brecht adapted the Chinese philosophical form to present examples from his reading of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin and to produce mini-narratives in response to the experience of political exile, his discussions with Karl Korsch, doubts about developments in the Soviet Union, and questions of the ethics of personal behavior. Modern figures are given a Chinese disguise and the whole is presented as if it were the record of philosophical discussions in a classical Chinese school. Brecht wrote the passages mainly in exile in Denmark but did not prepare them for publication. Any selection and ordering of the material might have produced different emphases, as a handbook for teaching dialectical thinking, a work on ethics and virtues, a coded discussion of the contradictions of Stalinism, or of Brecht's relationship with Ruth Berlau (Lai-tu).

Editors have produced quite different compilations from the material. Uwe Johnson's 1965 Suhrkamp edition presented the passages in the sequence found in the Bertolt Brecht Archive but starting with a selection compiled by Brecht's collaborator Margarete Steffin. Johnson highlighted its fragmentary nature, established the use of the title Me-ti / Buch der Wendungen and persuaded Brecht's widow, Helene Weigel, to agree to the inclusion of the Lai-tu stories. Klaus Völker's 1967 Suhrkamp edition grouped thematically related texts, collected the Lai-tu stories at the end, and dropped the reference to the work as a fragment. Werner Mittenzwei's 1975 Aufbau edition organized the texts into a teleological sequence of five books, moving thematically from theory to revolution to the establishment of socialism. Jan Knopf and the co-editors of the 1995 volume 18 of the Berlin and Frankfurt edition (BFA) argued against editorial interventions not justified by evidence of Brecht's intentions and presented the texts in chronological order and where texts were of the same date, alphabetically. They dropped Me-ti from the title and insisted on Buch der Wendungen, selected different variants of certain texts from the previous editions and left textual inconsistencies uncorrected.