Published for the International Brecht Society, the Brecht Yearbook is the central scholarly forum for discussion of Brecht’s life and work and of topics of particular interest to him, especially the politics of literatureand of theater in a global context. It embraces a wide variety of perspectives and approaches and, like Brecht himself, is committed to the use value of literature, theater, and theory.
Volume 44 features the first publication of Gunter Kunert’s translation of Edgar Lee Masters’s poem The Hill with handwritten annotations by Brecht. A special section, Brecht’s Dramatic Fragments, includes essays on the unresolved tension between individual and collectivist resistance in Fatzer, the fragmentary aesthetic of Fleischhacker, and the first English translation and performance of the David fragments. The next section, Pure Joke: The Comedy of Theater since Brecht, features articles on the poetics of interruption in the epilogue to The Good Person of Szechwan, Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine as theater of affirmation, a reassessment of the harlequin and the chorus in post-Brechtian performance, and the performative gestures of quotation in contemporary reality-satire. The volume also includes essays on capitalist guilt and debt in The Debts of Mister Julius Caesar, Heiner Muller’s Keuneresque interview strategies, the 1962 world premiere of The Threepenny Opera in Yiddish, and Brecht’s reception of Mao Tse-tung in two of his poems. Contributors include Gerrit-Jan Berendse, Andre Fischer, Phoebe von Held, Nicholas E. Johnson, Christian Kirchmeier, Gunter Kunert, Nikolaus Muller-Schoell, Stephan Pabst, Corina L. Petrescu, David Shepherd, Katrin Trustedt, Uwe Wirth, Burkhardt Wolf, and Xue Song.

Editor Markus Wessendorf is aProfessor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Honolulu.