Editorial

Summary

This volume of the Brecht Yearbook features a selection of papers given at the Fifteenth Symposium of the International Brecht Society at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, that took place from June 25 to 29, 2016. It is perhaps worth noting that an event that opened a mere two days after the United Kingdom narrowly voted to leave the European Union offered a model of international cooperation and exchange. The political isolationism and the emotive arguments that seem to have won the day for the Brexiteers would surely have given Brecht, the perennial collaborator, cause for consternation. And, as ever, Brecht can furnish a suitably contradictory commentary from his poem of 1954, “Böser Morgen”: “Unwissende! schrie ich / Schuldbewußt.” (A bad morning: There are things you don't know! I cried. / Knowing I was guilty.)

The theme of the symposium, “Recycling Brecht,” very much traded on the ambiguity of the phrasing in English. “Recycling” is both an activity applied to one of the twentieth century's most productive artists and a description of the notorious recycler himself. Recycling was, in turn, understood in a number of ways. Some speakers discussed the straightforward re-use of material, while others took the term more literally, considering how something already used and used up could gain fresh utility by being taken apart and refunctioned, itself a very Brechtian modus operandi. The organizers were pleasantly surprised that a term that was originally intended as a way of attracting many and varied contributions proved useful in itself as a focus for sophisticated and ingenious interpretations of the recycling process.

We received a broad range of responses to the call for contributions. Brecht's legacy in the theater, in poetry, and in thought regularly figured in the proposals, as well as Brecht's penchant for engaging with all manner of sources in all manner of ways. In the former category, a remarkable number of panels discussed and explored Brecht's international presence, not only in his native Europe, but also in the other four continents. The breadth of reuse was considerable and revealed as much about Brecht as it did about the cultural traditions that engaged with him. In the latter category, the coincidence of the Fifteenth Symposium and the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death produced two diverse panels on the relationship between the two playwrights, while others considered Brecht's recycling practices as novelist, playwright, and theorist.