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Bertolt Brecht's Refugee Conversations

Hardback

Main Details

Title Bertolt Brecht's Refugee Conversations
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Bertolt Brecht
Edited by Tom Kuhn
Translated by Romy Fursland
Physical Properties
Format:Hardback
Pages:128
Dimensions(mm): Height 216,Width 138
Category/GenreDrama
ISBN/Barcode 9781350045002
ClassificationsDewey:832.912
Audience
Tertiary Education (US: College)

Publishing Details

Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint Methuen Drama
Publication Date 17 October 2019
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

Published in English for the first time, Refugee Conversations is a delightful work that reveals Brecht as a master of comic satire. Written swiftly in the opening years of the Second World War, the dialogues have an urgent contemporary relevance to a Europe once again witnessing populations on the move. The premise is simple: two refugees from Nazi Germany meet in a railway cafe and discuss the current state of the world. They are a bourgeois Jewish physicist and a left-leaning worker. Their world views, their voices and their social experience clash horribly, but they find they have unexpected common ground - especially in their more recent experience of the surreal twists and turns of life in exile, the bureaucracy, and the pathetic failings of the societies that are their unwilling hosts. Their conversations are light and swift moving, the subjects under discussion extremely various: beer, cigars, the Germans' love of order, their education and experience of life, art, pornography, politics, 'great men', morality, seriousness, Switzerland, America ... despite the circumstances of both characters there is a wonderfully whimsical serendipity about their dialogue, the logic and the connections often delightfully absurd. This edition features a full introduction and notes by Professor Tom Kuhn (St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, UK).

Author Biography

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) is acknowledged as one of the great dramatists whose plays, work with the Berliner Ensemble and critical writings have had a considerable influence on the theatre. His landmark plays include The Threepenny Opera, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Tom Kuhn is Professor of 20th-century German Literature at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, UK, and General Editor of Methuen Drama's Brecht publications.

Reviews

To have the Refugee Conversations out in English translation is a major feat because the text speaks ... to the experience of dark times ? in both past and present. * Dublin Review of Books *