Brecht and the Writer's Workshop

Fatzer and Other Dramatic Projects

Bertolt Brecht, Tom Kuhn, Charlotte Ryland, Tom Kuhn

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474273305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

Brecht was never inclined to see any of his plays as completely finished, and this volume collects some of the most important theatrical projects and fragments that were always to remain 'works in progress'. Offering an invaluable insight into the writer's working methods and practices, the collection features the famous Fatzer as well as The Bread Store and Judith of Shimoda, along with other texts that have never before been available in English. Alongside the familiar, 'completed' plays, Brecht worked on many ideas and plans which he never managed to work up even once for print or stage. In pieces like Fleischhacker, Garbe / Büsching and Jacob Trotalong we see how such projects were abandoned or interrupted or became proving grounds for ideas and techniques. The works collated here span over thirty years and allow the reader to follow Brecht's creative process as he constantly revised his work to engage with new contexts. This treasure-trove of new discoveries is also annotated with dramaturgical notes to present readable and useable texts for the theatre. The volume is edited by Tom Kuhn and Charlotte Ryland, with the translation and dramaturgical edition of each play provided by a team of experienced writers, scholars and translators.

Fatzer

Translated and edited by
Tom Kuhn

Introduction

Four men, in the third year of the First World War, walk away from their tank and desert. But what next? They find their way back to one of their hometowns, a strange and fictitious Mülheim, which Brecht sometimes refers to as ‘on-the-Ruhr’ and sometimes as on the front – perhaps he was thinking as much of Mulhouse in Alsace (Mülhausen in German) as he was of the real industrial Mülheim in the north. Wherever it is, they now hunker down in a basement room where, before the war, one of them lived with his wife. They are hungry and frustrated, but, in danger from their own authorities now, they hardly dare go out. In this explosive claustrophobia they begin to imagine, and to debate: a future, a new world for themselves, social change for all. Their charismatic, visionary leader seems at times their only chance, but he, it becomes increasingly clear, is a wild egomaniac. The others painfully reconstruct themselves: A complaisant entourage becomes a criminal gang, then a collective very much with a mind of its own – but will they hold together, and will that mind be a revolutionary one, or simply murderous?

In 1926 Brecht was twenty-nine years old, when he conceived of a figure with the name ‘Fatzer’, and sketched the first scenes of a drama that would become a project which occupied him, on and off, for some four further years. Not uneventful years. This was right after his first formulations of an ‘epic theatre’, after the productions of Life Story of the Man Baal (Berlin), Man Equals Man (Düsseldorf), and Mahagonny (Baden-Baden) – years punctuated by the beginnings of the great collaborations with Elisabeth Hauptmann, George Grosz, Kurt Weill, and Hanns Eisler – years full of experiment and of concurrent projects, within and against the contemporary theatre, some triumphantly realized, but just as many discarded along the way. Fatzer is the greatest of the ruined torsos of the 1920s, with Fleischhacker, Dan Drew, and others – ultimately all eclipsed by the operas and by the learning plays. Here is a man with a keen sense that the world must surely be on the cusp of change: ‘Soon now / A new beast will emerge / Born to unleash humanity’. But who is this Fatzer? What is the ‘new’? Will we catch a glimpse of his vision, and then, of what sort of future? German literature after both the First and Second World Wars is studded with the dramas and traumas of returning soldiers, but none so bleak and claustrophobic and brutal as this. As one of the characters says, casting his eye over the soldiers and citizenry of Mülheim, ‘The more you look, the less / A human being seems human’. Brecht’s Fatzer appears like a great work that could have been. And it has attained almost legendary status in Brecht’s own oeuvre. Everyone knows it is t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Introduction
• Fleischhacker
• Fatzer
• The Bread Store
• The Real Life of Jacob Trotalong
• The Judith of Shimoda
• Garbe/Büsching
• Copyright