Stories of Mr. Keuner - Softcover

Brecht, Bertolt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872863832 ISBN 13: 9780872863835

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2001

Synopsis

Stories of Mr. Keuner gathers Bertolt Brecht's fictionalized comments on politics, everyday life, and exile. Written from the late 1920s till the late 1950s, Stories of Mr. Keuner is the precipitate of Brecht's experience of a world in political and cultural flux, a world of revolution, civil war, world war, cultural efflorescence, Nazism, Stalinism, and the Cold War in short, the first half of the twentieth century.

Mr. Keuner said: "I, too, once adopted an aristocratic stance (you know: erect, upright, and proud, head thrown back). I was standing in rising water at the time. I adopted this posture when it rose to my chin."

"At first, they appear almost innocuous, these so-called stories, anecdotal fragments often of a single page or less. Brecht's scenarios seem so simple, his style so direct. He expressly wished what he wrote to be useful. Here he succeeded brilliantly: These pieces are small enough to be carried away whole, but what they say is big enough to be equal to the reader." Johnathon Keats, SF Gate

"Stories of Mr. Keuner finally puts in English translation this startling and stunning body of work, not only encouraging a broader appreciation of a playwright famed for fighting inhumanity in his time, but also effectively questioning integrity in our own day." San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"The first English translation of the great playwright’s discursive semifictionalized observations on German life and politics, as spoken by the eponymous Keuner (his name from the German "keiner," meaning "no man"), a "thinking man" obviously inspired by Plato’s Socrates. Written between the 1920s and 50s (and collected for the first publication in 1956, the year of Brecht’s death), they’re brief (often single-paragraph) aperçus generally employed to deflate contemporary pretensions regarding religion, patriotism, capitalism, exile, and other themes engaged more fully in their author’s celebrated poems and plays (e.g., "I am for justice; so it’s good if the place in which I’m staying has more than one exit"), but most effectively adumbrated in this revealing coda to an indisputably major, and still challenging, body of work." Kirkus Reviews

Bertolt Brecht wrote The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, The Life of Galileo, and many other plays, poems, and theoretical writings. Ardent antifascist, friend to Walter Benjamin, and wily ally of the COmmunists, Brecht was often on the run, "changing countries more than shoes." As Hitler's armies advanced, Brecht fled to Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the U.S. before finally settling in East Germany after the war, where he became director of the renowned Berliner Ensemble.

Martin Chalmers (1948-2014) had translated works by Victor Klemperer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hubert Fichte, and Elfriede Jelinek, among others. Mr. Chalmers lived in London, where he wrote extensively on German literature, film, history, and culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was the author of The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, Galileo as well as many theoretical works on the theater. As a poet, Brecht ranks with Rilke, Celan, Heiner Mueller. On Hitler's rise to power, Brecht was forced into exile. At war's end, Brecht became the director of the renowned Berliner Ensemble in East Germany.

From Library Journal:

In this collection of 86 prose fragments, Mr. Keuner (hereafter Mr. K.), the "thinking man," reflects on various issues that epitomized the volatile nature of German society between the two world wars, particularly its intellectual branch. Included are thoughts on poverty, religion, power, the profitable nature of folly, the benefits of uncertainty, small-minded nationalism, the suicidal nature of self-love, and more. Brecht compares Mr. K.'s wisdom to that of the prototypical philosophy professor who walks "clumsily" and creates "no light with [his] talking." Mr. K., on the other hand, is simply an ordinary man with an extraordinary acumen who sees so far ahead that he is able to prepare his next mistake. Autonomous and suspiciously accessible, these pieces are perhaps easier to comprehend than to classify: they are not strictly philosophical because of their visibly imaginative nature yet not strictly poetic as they teem with crudely translated language (at times so literal that they contain undertones of the commanding German idioms). Still, to label them as fiction is an easy way out: Sure, they are rooted in dialog between purposefully vague characters, and they also entertain, but their true value is most often hidden in the last sentence that not only bears the weight of each story's message but also the author's own ideology. These debatable and still timely stories belong in all academic libraries. Mirela Roncevic, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0872863832
• ISBN 13: 9780872863835
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128