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STAGING HISTORY: BRECHT'S SOCIAL CONCEPTS OF IDEOLOGY. By Astrid Oesmann. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005; pp. ix + 231. $65.00 cloth.
Locating the theatre and philosophy of Bertolt Brecht within the discourse of intellectual history represents a sort of Holy Grail in Brecht studies: constantly sought after, often attempted, yet never quite achieved. As a dramatist/philosopher of historical consciousness, Brecht somehow always falls between the cracks of theatre and philosophy, of Marx and the Frankfurt School, and of other icons of the theatre history discourse such as Shakespeare, Schiller, and Nietzsche. Into this debate, Astrid Oesmann delivers a solid scholarly contribution, partially undermined by a few weaknesses but in the end producing a number of important insights.
Oesmann's monograph rests on three major premises: 1) Brecht created a "genuinely theatrical concept of historical materialism" (1); 2) this theoretical posture is traceable throughout his entire output during the Weimar Republic, which runs counter to most traditional scholarship and its claim that Brecht's turn to Marxism in 1927 marks his true engagement with historical materialism on the theatrical stage; and 3) the monograph's thesis can be elucidated by drawing upon the theoretical writings of Adorno, Benjamin, Habermas, Foucault, and Nietzsche.
Although recent Brecht scholarship, as well as contemporary theatrical...