The Young Brecht

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Hanns Otto Munsterer was one among a group of early friends of Bertolt Brecht who shared in the uninhibited idyll which the rebel young writer enjoyed in his early manhood in his home town of Augsburg in Bavaria. These were the years of Brecht's first influential friendships and loves, of the 1914-18 war, and of the chaos of the abortive Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. They were also some of Brecht's most fertile years, when he wrote much of his boldest and most colourful poetry, as well as conceiving, partly living out, and writing his most intimate portrait of a total rebel, Baal. Munsterer's memoir, based on diaries kept at the time, is augmented in this first English-language edition by the accounts of other close associates of the young Brecht, including Paula Banholzer - mother of his first child - and his brother Walter. Together they provide a many-sided and often surprising portrait of Brecht at play and at work in his private and local sphere, and constitute the first detailed portrait of the young Brecht to be available in English. This brings his early work into much clearer focus; it also throws light on aspects of the major plays and particularly on much of his subsequent poetry.