Brecht and Collaboration: New Directions, New Discussions

As long as there have been conversations about Brecht, there has been curiosity, uncertainty, and conflict about his relationship to collaboration and co-creation. Members of the International Brecht Society will be familiar with these debates as they have played out in The Brecht Yearbook, and elsewhere, over the years. Scholarly assertions and reactions have ranged from an early, sometimes puzzled interest in those figures who seemed to hover at the margins of Brecht’s creative projects, to bitter accusations of plagiarism and maltreatment, to enthusiastic defenses of Brecht himself and those of his co-creators whose reputations suffered because of these attacks. At the International Brecht Symposium in Oxford in June, 2016, we had the chance to revisit and reconceive these questions with a panel dedicated specifically to “Brecht and Collaboration.” Paula Hanssen, Vera Stegmann, and I each presented a paper on the subject of Brecht and co-creation, with Tom Kuhn chairing and facilitating the discussion that followed—a discussion which proved to be exciting and productive.