Editorial

Summary

The Forty-Third Volume of the Brecht Yearbook Doesn't have an overarching theme but features several sections dedicated to different topics. The volume opens with Reiner Steinweg's reconstruction of Brecht's Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The Exception and the Rule) with a right and a left chorus. Brecht had originally announced the publication of this version for volume 8 of Versuche (Experiments) but never completed it. We could not include Steinweg's extensive critical apparatus, but see his editorial report below for further information on where to find it.

The German essayist, poet, and prose writer Helmut Heißenbüttel repeatedly reviewed new editions or posthumous publications of works by Brecht or his collaborators for newspapers and radio broadcasts. In this volume we publish a selection of those reviews from the 1960s and 1970s in which Heißenbüttel, among other things, defends Brecht's journals and diaries against the accusation by such critics as Fritz J. Raddatz and Marcel Reich-Ranicki that they are of poor literary quality.

This volume includes four papers that were presented at a symposium on Brecht and the West German novelist Gisela Elsner at the Brecht House in Berlin in September 2017. Christine Künzel, first chairperson of the International Gisela Elsner Society and organizer of the symposium, provides an introduction to the main interconnections between the works of Elsner and Brecht as well as to the three essays that follow. Whereas Carsten Mindt examines Elsner's use of Brechtian V-effects in her novels to estrange the supposed normality of everyday life in West Germany after World War II, Judith Niehaus analyzes how both Elsner and Brecht practice ideological critique as language criticism at a typographical level. Sebastian Schuller makes a case for Elsner's last novel Heilig Blut (Sacred Blood) as a resistant work of literature that, twenty-five years after its publication, intervenes in present-day, neoliberal German society by confronting it with its suppressed fascist past.

The next two essays were first presented at a panel on “Brecht, Affect, Empathy” at the 2017 MLA convention in Philadelphia.