Content area
Full text
A BERTOLT BRECHT REFERENCE COMPANION. Edited by Siegfried Mews. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1997. Pp. xviii + 43o $95. The reader of A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion edited by Siegfried Mews learns on page 2 that Siegfried Mews considers my most recent book, Brecht fd Company (US and English editions 1994, French edition 1995, in Hebrew and German translation with 400 pages of additional material in the German version, 1997) "untenable as a scholarly work." The "evidence" for this sweeping assertion (as it turns out when one checks the bibliography), is Mews himself, who, with John Willett (who is called politely to task in Brecht fi Co.) and two others with whom I had also politely disagreed, published an attack on my work, but did not allow me to respond though I provided a detailed list of factual errors the four had made in supposedly correcting me.
Let me identify at the outset the essays in this volume that seem to me, based on what I have learned of Brecht scholarship in the last third of a century, to be of most value. There is a common-sense factual basis to the essay of the distinguished director, the former Berliner Ensemble colleague of Brecht, Carl Weber. Professor Weber tells us, based on decades of experience in theatre, who has produced Brecht in America and who has learned most from Brecht in America. Professor Marina Pianca, who has earned our gratitude for earlier scholarly work on theatre in Latin America, provides a thorough and engaging survey of the enormous and progressive impact work staged or published under the name of Brecht has had in country after country. Michael Bodden, who did a fine dissertation on Brecht and Indonesia and the Philippines, here extends his field of purview, in a critically sensitive manner, to all of Asia. Of all the essays in the Mews volume I learned most from this one.
Two other essays of the seventeen in the volume seemed to me to bring something solidly based to Brecht studies. Professor Christine Kiebuzinska gives us a finely argued theoretical piece on "Brecht and the Problem of Influence." Dr. Kiebuzinska, as a historian of ideas, knows well all the major languages of the historical criticism she...