06 Wizisla 32-39

Editorial Principles in the Berlin and Frankfurt Edition of Bertolt Brecht’s Works Erdmut Wizisla In the concluding sentence of a letter to Wieland Herzfelde, the publisher of his Gesammelte Werke [collected works] put out by Malik-Verlag, Brecht wrote in December : “By the way, there is still a misprint in the cata- logue: Kuratier [kuratii] instead of Kuriatier [kuriatii]. Surely that’s been cor- rected in the book? Otherwise we’ll have the philologists on our backs” (BFA :). Ironic remarks such as these show that Brecht had no real conception of the advantages of academic text and editorial work. At the same time his interest in the developing process that formed his own works led to a lifetime archive, which actually laid the foundation for literary investigations. Few au- thors of this century have been granted the same level of philological atten- tion. By that of course is not meant “letter-sniffling” [Buchstabenschnüffelei], to use Elias Canetti’s word, but pure research, that is, the kind of preparation and presentation of texts, which are the basis of every academic textual work and often go unnoticed. To come straight to the outcome: Brecht did have the philologists on his back, and that was a lucky break for his work and its reception. Of course, they could occasionally have moved even closer. With the imminent completion of the Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, the involved editorial history of Brecht’s works comes to a happy, albeit temporary, end. The achievement of the editors, volume compilers, and readers cannot be overestimated. All who have dealt closely with Brecht know that print history and the handling of literary remains at times resembled chaos. To his later publisher Peter Suhrkamp, Brecht wrote in Oc- tober : “Everything needs alterations” (BFA :). And as much as he had on that morning appreciated the fair copy, prepared by the helpful hands of others from the previous evening’s revisions, he was unable to leave a clean copy untouched. That the attempted bibliography of Brecht’s unpublished writing was interrupted can also be attributed to the sheer unwieldiness of the condition of the material. Each reprint was a temptation for Brecht’s proofing pencil, the way the stage is a challenge and stimulation for adapting a script. Hardly a text that appeared a second or third time during Brecht’s lifetime resembled the first printing; not to mention the difference between individual unpublished versions or the problem of texts that the writer hadn’t prepared The Drama Review , (T), Winter . Copyright © New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263480 by guest on 27 September 2021 Erdmut Wizisla for press. To make matters worse, in the process of revising, Brecht in no way took the “latest” version to be the final one, so that successive stages and structural sequences often could barely be detected. The existing editions up to the mid-s appeared not to have risen to the challenge of this complex body of material. One must keep in mind that the most successful edition up to that point, the -volume collection from Suhrkamp (Brecht ), was riddled with shortcomings. Many versions printed in that edition were chosen by the editor Elisabeth Hauptmann, without having been agreed upon by text authenticators. Texts that Brecht hadn’t prepared for an edition were afterwards put together in a sequence that seemed logical to the publisher. It also happened that letters were edited as writing, forgoing their forms of address and salutations. In the slim textual apparatus, suppositions circulated instead of secured facts regarding the circumstances surrounding the emergence of his works. These were quickly made into certainties in the hands of researchers. In individual cases, volumes with excellently edited texts helped to offset the weaknesses of the collection but nevertheless accentuated the overall lack of clarity. The way out of the editorial crisis emerged in the mid-s. When the publishing houses Aufbau and Suhrkamp announced that they would be issu- ing an edition identical with regard to text and commentary for both East and West Germany, it was a challenge to the deadlocked German-German relationship. The following editorially lofty claims corresponded to this po- litically daring approach: For the first time, all available Brecht texts could be collected, presented as textually verified, and annotated. It is to be acknowledged as a tremendous advance in knowledge, and all those who haven’t kept up with the progress in Brecht research are recommended to study these volumes. The years over which the volumes are issued will be followed by double or triple the time for analysis and study of the research results. All texts are traced back to the literary remains of the Bertolt Brecht Archive, other archives, or to first editions. For the first time, Brecht texts are annotated with respect to their historical development and influence. The writings belong in these exciting volumes because, compared to the collection, they are reasonably more comprehensive; and, by virtue of the textual apparatus, they allow Brecht’s work to appear in the context of contemporary de- bates for the first time. The renunciation of the separation of the theoretical writings for the theatre, literature and art, politics and society is definitely to be welcomed. The synchronous arrangement of the literature provokes new insights and shows the weakness of the previous categorization, whose forc- ibly drawn dividing lines had prevented the inclusion of many works; readers would search for them anyway, frequently in the wrong volumes. Also to be pointed out are the fragments, for the most part edited for the first time, as well as the new edition of letters, which have increased the stock of available Brecht letters threefold. I have outlined the tremendous contributions of the new Brecht edition in such detail so that the following critical objections will not be misunderstood. It is not yet time for a definitive assessment; without the index volume in- cluding the editors’ report and supplements, many judgments about this edition remain provisional. The editors and volume compilers went to the limits of their abilities and of the possibilities of this kind of printing, and yet a few of the outcomes of their efforts leave an unsatisfactory impression. I want to direct the discussion, in a cursory way, toward the question of the adherence to and violation of editorial principles, because in this way the edition can be measured in terms of its own claims. But first I will briefly summarize a few other objections. Thirteen years of dealing with Brecht’s texts were not without their influence and, as such, made Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263480 by guest on 27 September 2021 Editorial Principles gains over time; ailments in the first volumes were cured in those that followed. If one looks at the material in its entirety, which is what made the edition pos- sible in the first place, suggestions for change arise, and these can be taken into account in a later paperback or CD-ROM edition: Texts should not be printed more than once in the edition, unless they are repeated as constituent parts of collections, or unless they were taken up by Brecht in different contexts. Some texts, which were excluded from the textual apparatus, definitely belong in the main body. Texts of one kind should be printed in their own section. Variants and versions are not documented uniformly, but seemingly at the discretion of the editors. Now and again, commentary deviates from the level reached elsewhere and becomes either taciturn or gossipy. For one volume, which consists of up to percent of unpublished works from the literary remains, the decision was made to disregard the signatures in the Bertolt Brecht Archive, and so, these don’t include them anymore. This has to be regarded as a declaration of capitulation. Because the editors did not note these signatures, it is now to an extent impossible to reconstruct versions. The author credits also deserved greater effort, even if it is well known that John Fuegi’s scandal-mongering accusations are on shaky ground and more- over miss the mark in terms of the circumstances surrounding the origination of the works and all who were involved—the consenting collectivity in the composing of the texts. But it is too simple when one takes Brecht’s cheeky self-confidence as one’s own, that “the art of plagiarism be classed with the craft of the writer” (BFA :). What is questionable is that the Berlin and Frankfurt edition falls short of the instructions of the professed plagiarist. If, in the first printing of The Threepenny Opera, in the third issue of Versuche, the au- thors’ names are represented equally as “Brecht. Hauptmann. Weill,” the same should go for the Berlin and Frankfurt edition. Instead, this edition names Brecht as author (on the front cover) and Hauptmann and Weill as collaborators, not coauthors (on the back of the title page of the piece). Collaboration is acknowledged only in such a way that Brecht is named unambiguously as the author, and the collaborators as collaborators. This was the case with the first typescript of Arturo Ui, in which Brecht noted on the last page: “Collabora- tion: Margarete Steffin.” The edition levels out these instances and in this way fuels the fire of unfounded speculations. The one-act play that became known as Die Kleinbürgerhochzeit [A Respectable Wedding] was called Die Hochzeit at its premiere. In the first com- plete edition it appears as Die Kleinbürgerhochzeit because a title correction handwritten by Brecht ex- pands the original; the new edition goes back to Die Hochzeit.

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