Hans-Thies Lehmann's latest book-length publication is not a monograph, but a collection of twenty essays taken from the late 1970s to the present. There are three new ones, and one that was written in 1988 but seems to have remained unpublished until today. Almost every essay that has appeared elsewhere has been updated or revised.
The Introduction addresses the collection's main function: to review and revise certain ‘prejudices’ (p. 8) and clichés that have accompanied Brecht's reception over the years. Lehmann bases his approach on three points, the most important of which is that the plays, poems and theoretical writings are slippery, that meaning is not that easy to pin on Brecht. Lehmann quotes no less a critic of Brecht than Adorno to support his case. The author also notes that the volume focuses on Brecht the writer for and on theatre, while acknowledging that a number of the essays nonetheless deal with Brecht's poetry. This is something of an understatement. Six of the essays are taken from Lehmann's unpublished doctoral thesis (1978) on Brecht's Hauspostille anthology of 1927 and a further essay treats the same theme. In total, the seven essays comprise 156 pages, almost half the monograph. For the most part, these essays are close readings of particular poems, followed by broader discussions of central themes, couched very much in the language of the late 1970s in which structuralism was still a dominant discourse. They thus have a somewhat quaint feel to them. And while Lehmann assures the reader in the Introduction that there are important connections between these poems and the theatre work, they remain implicit. The opportunity to include more direct references in the 2016 revisions has not been taken up.
Elsewhere, however, the essays do shed important light on aspects of Brecht's theatre. The tone is set by the opening piece, taken from the special number of the Brecht Yearbook, entitled ‘The Other Brecht’. Lehmann proceeds from the position that a new Brecht emerges when certainty concerning his writing is called into question. He takes issue with Brecht's reception as a rationalist by analysing the ways Brecht's texts undo a clear sense of logic. Later in the volume, he returns to this theme on several occasions with sustained reference to the Lehrstücke and argues that these learning plays are not concerned with lessons as such, but with the limits of learning. Lehmann's method is dialectically deconstructive: reading against received wisdoms with close attention to key moments or ideas, identifying oppositions and showing their mutual dependencies. The essay on Brecht's affinities with Kafka, for example, makes some very interesting connections, especially in terms of the two writers’ use of language. Lehmann's critique of the Brechtian category of the Fabel, the dialectical interpretation of a play's plot, is also illuminating because of its conceptual thoroughness. The Fabel, after all, has been Brecht's perennial weak spot, in that it allowed Brecht to posit a sometimes reductive binary tension between capitalism and socialism, but Lehmann's analysis goes beyond a simple critique of Fabel as redundant metanarrative in a postmodern age.
There is a certain lack of scholarliness in all the essays. Critics are rarely consulted and so comments relating to Brechtforschung (p. 159) are seldom backed up with evidence. There are also several direct quotations that are not referenced. However, as readers of Lehmann will have already seen, what he lacks in scholarly apparatus he makes up for in intellectual rigour and argumentative originality.
To conclude, then, theatre experts may well find the material on the poetry, which makes up half the collection, tangential or extraneous, but there is much to be enjoyed in the other essays. The advantage of a book like this is that one can dip into this essay or that, and careful selection will prove rewarding.
