Bertolt Brecht And The David Fragments (1919-1921)

An examination of Brecht's largely forgotten theatrical fragments of a life of David, written just after the Great War and prior to Brecht winning the Kleist Prize in 1922, and the acclaim that would launch his extraordinary career.

The volume takes Brecht's own diaries from the time as a starting point, which offer a vivid picture of the young Brecht shuttling between Munich and the family home in Augsburg, surrounded by friends, torn between women, desperate for success, and all the while with 'David on the brain'. It is this David, alluded to in the diaries and exhumed from Brecht's notebooks which the contributors to this book examine, in the context of not only Brecht's tumultuous early career and the theatrical currents of the time, but also Brecht's later work. Drawing on theatrical experiments conducted with an ensemble and the David fragments themselves, (published in English here for the first time), the authors offer new insights into the early Brecht: a writer entranced but not enchanted by the biblical David and utterly committed to translating the biblical tradition into his own evolving theatrical idiom.