Also known as The Private Life of the Master Race, this is a sequence of twenty-four realistic sketches showing how "ordinary" life under the Nazis was subtly permeated by suspicion and anxiety. Written in exile in Denmark and first staged in 1938 it was inspired in part by his recent …  mehr→

The Lehrst cke (or 'learning-plays') lie at the heart of Brechtian theatre.Written during 1929 and 1930, years of far-reaching political and economic upheaveal in Germany and the period of Brecht's most sharply Communist works, these short plays show an abrupt rejection of most of the …  mehr→

Mother Courage and Her Children is widely regarded as Brecht's best work, a theatrical landmark and one of the most powerful anti-war plays in history. This translation by Michael Hofmann was published to coincide with the UK tour by English Touring Theatre in 2006. …  mehr→

Bertolt Brecht's extraordinary historical novel presents an aspiring scholar's efforts to write an idealized life of Julius Caesar twenty years after his death. But the historian abandons his planned biography, confronted by a baffling range of contradictory views. …  mehr→

Brecht's famous parable, written in exile in 1939-41, shows that in an unjust society good can only survive by means of evil. In it, the gods come to earth in search of enough good people to justify their existence. They find Shen Teh, a good-hearted but penniless prostitute, and make her …  mehr→

Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. It focuses on the feud between …  mehr→

„Vor allen Dingen muß allhier nicht vorbey gegangen werden, daß wir in Teutschland Frauenpersonen gehabt, und auch noch zur Zeit haben, die die Männer selbst in der Tichtkunst beschämen können. Umb das Jahr 1638 lebte Sibylla Schwartzin ... Diese war traun ein Wunder ihrer Zeit, denn sie …  mehr→

Zu Beginn seiner schriftstellerischen Karriere schrieb Stefan Heym Gedichte. Erst später fand er im amerikanischen Exil zur Prosa. Im vorliegenden Band wird erstmals eine Auswahl aus den Jahren 1930 bis 1936 veröffentlicht; sie zeigen auf eindringliche Weise, dass sich Stefan Heym schon …  mehr→