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Book Reviews 
Berthold Brecht, Letters 1913-1956. Translated by 
    Ralph Manheim and edited with commentary by 
    John Willett. New York: Routledge, 1990. 288 
    pages. 
    Reading the letters and (auto)biographies of the great 
writers feeds a desire to get to know the person of the writer 
who is, however, really only present in his work. The attempt 
to make the writer an individual with whom one can empa- 
thize, whose psychology one can savor, falls into the trap of 
confusing the work of an author with his birthday cards and 
dry cleaning slips, his love affairs and his bank account. On a 
more elevated plane the academic business of researching the 
life of an author, collecting the documentary evidence of letters 
and diaries, marriage certificates and telephone accounts, fuels 
the curious expectation that we can learn something from such 
empirical data for the understanding of the plays, poems and 
novels of the author. This, of course, as far as Brecht is 
concerned, is slightly ironic: the author who has created the 
concept of the dividuum and of alienation but who at the same 
time had to keep the interest in his person alive so as to be 
able to transmit his ideas to the greatest number of fascinated 
and shocked spectators becomes the object of a study which 
attempts empathy into his individuality. The writer who has 
denied that he is somebody whom we can trust is subjected to 
a moral scrutiny where the letters serve as more authentic 
source material than his poems (7). Of course, letters and 
documents are just as fictional as any poem or drama, creating 
a persona for the interlocutor, and often much less truthful 
than what is usually called fiction. 
    On the other hand, diaries and letters do contain hints and 
pointers towards that work which should be at the center of 
our attention. And since one cannot know in advance which 
hints may or may not be useful, the selection of such documen- 
tary material becomes a difficult exercise. The selection of 
letters, as the introduction points out, is based on the German 
edition by Guinter Glaiser (Brecht, Briefe [FrankfurtlM.: Suhr- 
kamp, 1981]) and contains only the letters by Brecht, although 
those of his correspondents are sometimes referred to in the 
notes. As the German edition it omits many of the letters to 
Ruth Berlau (although it does refer to a few additional ones in 
the notes), about a hundred to his first wife Marianne Zoff 
(which became available too late for inclusion) and about fifty 
letters to Margarete Steffin (which have been released but not 
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