Brecht's Goldhagen?

REVIEW ESSA Y Brecht's Goldhagen? SIEGFRIED MEWS JOHN FUEGI. Brecht & CO. Biographie. Autorisiene erweitene und berichtigte deutsche Fassung von Sebastian Wohlfeil. Hamburg: Europaische Verlagsanstalt /Rotbuch Verlag 1997. Pp. 1,086. DM 98,-. Among the veritable flood of publications that appeared during the centenary of Benoit Brecht's binh in 1998, the present volume deserves special attention , inasmuch as it purpons to offer the authorized, enlarged, and corrected German translation of a highly controversial work, John Fuegi's Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama (New York, 1994). WIien Fuegi's encompassing attempt to discredit one of the most imponant playwrights and theoreticians of the theatre in this century was published in 1994 by Grove Press, it was noticed widely and stirred heated debate that went far beyond the realm of academia. Indeed, after the appearance of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), some German critics began referring to Fuegi as "Brecht's Goldhagen" because Fuegi appeared to emulate Goldhagen's single-minded determination to discredit his subject via a monocausal pattern of explanation. At any rate. issued in Great Britain under the sensationalist title The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, his Brecht and Company was reviewed in major newspapers and important periodicals of English-speaking countries as well as those in Germany; it also achieved the unusual distinction of inspiring a short novel. British author Elaine Feinstein's Loving Brecht (1992). One may wonder why a presumably academic book was able to unleash such decidedly unrestrained passions; without doubt, the promise implicit in the title of Fuegi's book, that is, the exploration of the sex life of an eminent dramatist renowned for a considerable number of liaisons against the background of the turbulent politics of Brecht's lifetime, raised high expectations on the part of readers and critics. Moreover, in addition to promising to offer a comprehensive look at the oriModern Drama. 42 (T999) 280 Brecht's Goldhagen? gins of modem drama, Fuegi's work was expected to provide a reassessment of Brecht, the man and his work, from a post-socialist, post-Wall perspective and to supersede GDR scholar Werner Mittenzwei 's two-volume Das Lehen des Bertolt Brecht (1987; reissued 1998). To be sure, Fuegi's credentials appeared impeccable, in that he was one of the co-founders of the International Brecht Society, a long-time editor of the Brecht Yearhook, and the author of a slew of publications on Brecht that spanned approximately thirty years. Alas, critics soon discovered that Fuegi's reassessment was undennined by a surprisingly large number of flaws such as factual errors, mistranslations, and uncorroborated statements. The most extensive list of these flaws appeared in a documentation comprising more than one hundred pages in volume 20 of the Brecht Yearhook (1995). It is reassuring to note that a considerable number of errors have been corrected in the Gennan translation without , however, acknowledgement of the source of the corrections. To mention only two fairly innocuous examples: geographical details that may be of little concern to North American readers but that do matter to Europeans. receive more attention in the German translation. Thus the Black Forest is no longer situated in Bavaria - although the ski resort St. Anton winds up in Switzerland rather than Austria (401). The misidentifications of historical, political, and literary figures are no longer as much in evidence - but Brecht's fellow dramatist Carl Zuckmayer inexplicably appears as a "Kabarettktinstler" ("Kabarettist") or cabaret performer (186, 201). In fact, it has been estimated that translator Sebastian Wohlfeil made approximately 2,000 changes in an attempt to address some of the shortcomings of the original American version. The result of these changes is a substantially enlarged volume (1,086 versus xi + 732 pages) that features an increased number of notes (including those by the translator), a reliable index of names, a considerable array of photos, and a bibliography, as well as an index of works by "Brecht and Co." (the two latter items were missing in the original). It can then be argued that the translation exhibits some of the meticulousness and care that one may reasonably expect in a scrupulously researched major biography...