Bertolt Brecht's Dramatic Theory by John J. White

Abstract

896 Reviews to be temporally displaced Germans. Elsaghe sets aside the Joseph novels, focusing on works dealing with Germans since i87.I (The notable exception is a chapter on Lotte inWeimar, which serves as a coda to the book and takes up Mann's sense of competition with and inferiorityto Goethe. Even here the feeling is that true Germans have become a thing of the past.) Modern Jews are the most marginal of allMann's Germans. Elsaghe's exemplary Jew is Kunigunde Rosenstiel, thrice marginal: as Jew and woman and, even more beyond the pale, as a woman who writes. Elsaghe seizes on her as a stereotypical representative of the Jewish people as awhole forMann's imagination. She is female, an intimate of historical suffering (a 'Klageweib'), and strives in vain to assimilate toGermanness. This desire ismanifest in her sycophantic relationship to Leverkiihn asGerman composer, but is especially strong in her feeling for the German language: she writes him impeccably elegant letters. However, these letters have no content or significance. Since his Mann genders Jews as feminine, it might have been interesting to hear what Elsaghe would say about Mann's view of Kafka's writing. He is silent on such matters, but he does suggest thatMann, even in later works, views Jews as basically alien toGerman culture. And Elsaghe's Mann is also hostile to the idea that women might be able to write. The most far-fetched chapter takes an unassuming line from 'Beim Propheten' and speculatively inflates it to a full-scale assault on Franziska von Reventlow as awriting woman. Elsaghe does not discuss women who paint, though, just as he does not discuss the presumably defective Germanness of Austrians. The unclarified critical assumption of Elsaghe's book appears to be that novels in general andMann's novels in particular-because of their 'Popularitiitund Kanonizi tiit'-function as amode of social control, in this case regulating national identity by fixing its limits. The novel defines by force of high cultural prestige what is and what is not acceptably German forMann and his vaguely adumbrated audience. Elsaghe takes it as his task to expose the workings of this social control through 'ideologiekritische Relektiire' (p. I). However, he does not take up the nature of the problem itself. Do novels really have such a powerfully ideological effect? Elsaghe isvague on this point. What measure would apply? Or do the novels passively reflect ideology? Or could it be that novels, including 'conservative' ones, have a subversive force, as Bahktin and others propose? What is the role of novelistic irony in an 'ideological rereading' of the sort Elsaghe considers to be amuch-needed correction ofMann criticism? Rather than situate his argument among these larger problems of interpretation, Elsaghe like Coetzee's police commissioner-sticks to the moral high ground of his narrow agenda. And even if his exegeses of marginal figures do not actually present a new picture of Mann and his myriad prejudices, they do add fresh readings of widely overlooked figures. BRANDEISUNIVERSITY STEPHEND. DOWDEN Bertolt Brecht's Dramatic Theory. By JOHNJ.WHITE. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2004. 348 pp. $90; E65. ISBN I-57I I3-076-4. The Grofle kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (GBA) of Brecht's prodi gious output was rounded off in 2000 with the appearance of an 835-page Register band. The complete set dwarfs the previous Gesammelte Werke of I967. The volumes of theory in the new edition contain roughly I ,700 items, of which amere 300 were published inBrecht's lifetime. Just under a quarter of the pieces are published in the GBA for the first time. It is this wealth of material that has inspired John White to return to themuch-contested area of Brecht's dramatic theory. MLR, I0 1 .3, 2oo6 897 Clearly White cannot deal with each item individually, and so he approaches the task by identifying certain central works chronologically, although he is keen to point out that such amethodology is difficult in that Brecht, the constant reviser and deve loper, did not work in discrete phases. This ismost evident in White's final chapter, which discusses the 'monumental fragment' (p. 255), theMessingkauf project, dating from I939 to...