Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht

Katherine Hollander is a superb poet and a superb historian, and both of these gifts are at work here. She writes beautiful and exact sentences, she has capacious imaginative sympathy, and when we are done with her book, oversimplifications have been cleared away, and everything she considers has been newly illuminated: Brecht and each of his co-workers, exile, authorship, collaboration. For thinking about all these things we have to start fresh, and we have to start here. * Lawrence Rosenwald, Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English Emeritus, Wellesley College, USA * Hollander has written a wonderfully lucid and nuanced intellectual and cultural history of the creative collaborations and networks that met in Brecht’s work of the 1930s. Her narrative loops ambitiously through the biographical and cultural backgrounds, and gives new access to lives and works we thought were familiar. The approach helps to explain how, despite the disruptions and hardships of the ‘dark times’, the years of anti-Nazi exile were so extraordinarily productive for Brecht and his team. A lively and readable book that gives breathing space and credence to these people’s own conceptions of their lives, and uncovers the dynamic power of collective productivity. Hollander offers a model of collaboration, with the power to inspire, far beyond that immediate context of the first half of the twentieth century. * Tom Kuhn, University of Oxford., UK *