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On Bertolt Brecht’s birthday we’re thrilled to announce the publication of the first major English language biography in twenty years:
Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life
By Stephen Parker
ISBN 978 1 408 55622
Published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
Hardback
704pp; 2 8-page plate sections
For more information click here: http://bit.ly/1edfY1o
This first English-language biography of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) in two decades paints a strikingly new picture of one of the twentieth century’s most controversial cultural icons. Drawing on letters, diaries and unpublished material, including Brecht’s medical records, Parker offers a rich and enthralling account of Brecht’s life and work, viewed through the prism of the artist.
“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
“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
A fresh reading of Brecht’s formative years in Augsburg, culminating in a deep personal crisis during the First World War, reveals how Brecht’s singular sensibility and huge ambition made him the boldest theatrical innovator of the age. Parker charts Brecht’s complex evolution into a political artist during the Weimar Republic as he contended with the rise of Nazism and with official Communism. Later, in Danish exile, Brecht found himself in conflict with his own political side based in Stalin’s reactionary Moscow (where he was branded a Trotskyist) – experiences which left their imprint upon the first Life of Galileo. New light is shed upon the stateless survivor’s frustrating years of US exile, when he was suspected of being a Soviet agent, and upon the obstacles he encountered upon his return to Europe. Finally, Parker shows how Brecht emerged from bitter struggles with the cultural bureaucracy in East Berlin to achieve his extraordinary, transformative impact upon world theatre and poetry, securing his legacy with dazzling productions of the Berliner Ensemble in Paris and London.
Parker’s biography is a powerful portrait of a great, compulsively contradictory personality, whose artistry left its lasting imprint on modern culture.
Mark Dudgeon
Senior Commissioning Editor
Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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