Quotes From The Museum Of European History By Bertolt Brecht

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ote From The Museum Director

Inclosed here are letters from various points in the life of Elisbeth Hauptmann, one of the speculated ghostwriter for the renown playwright, Bertolt Brecht. Hauptmann worked with Brecht for several decades on and off, contributing hours of time, energy and work to his theatre collective and individual projects, with little to no accreditation. The Museum of European History has decided to include these letters to showcase the thoughts and emotions of the women who tirelessly worked to have their names and stories published, under the guise of being aided by Bertolt Brecht. While there is still scholarly debate surrounding the true authorship of works published by Brecht, the curation staff has decided to open …show more content…

This is why I tried to create colourful imagery through metaphor, metonymy and figurative language. She writes of capitalist America is such a way that defamiliarizes that context, especially for a North American reader. Many people in Canada and the United States view the competitive system they are under as a perfectly normal way of living, but when written from the perspective of a communist from Germany, this system is totally alien. It takes a structure many people are comfortable with, and looks at it from a critical lens, making the reader more sympathetic to Bess’s loneliness within this new territory. The idea of communism and it’s political philosophies also pulls in our course theme of literature and philosophy. By having this person be devout to their political beliefs, it draws on questions of ethics and how these political ideologies affect her life choices and her writing (i.e. fleeing to safety versus standing to sight against the Nazi …show more content…

It is paradoxical in nature, given that one cannot fundamentally subsist in the literary world without the other. Bess cannot get work published without Bertolt’s name as a cover, but he cannot publish work without her ingenuity and organization. Although this is troubling, it’s ironic that in their living years Bertolt Brecht saw the benefit of his name on the very same work that Elisabeth Hauptmann slaved over; post modem on the other hand, the emergence of scholarly dissertations suggesting that the true authorship and rightful praise belongs to Elisabeth Hauptmann and a number of other women, provides to her memory a fame that while not experienced directly, is recognition

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