BERTOLT BRECHT’S BERLIN: A Scrapbook of the...

BERTOLT BRECHT’S BERLIN: A Scrapbook of the Twenties by Wolf Von Eckhardt and Sander L. Gilman (University of Nebraska Press: $25; 170 pp.). Von Eckhardt and Gilman offer an intriguing verbal and visual portrait of a curious, often romanticized time, when social and political unrest coexisted with an extraordinary intellectual efflorescence. The staggering array of talent at work in Berlin during the ‘20s included Einstein, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Gropius, Berg, Reinhardt, Grosz and Feininger, but the authors maintain that the singular mixture of political didacticism and artistic sophistication in Bertolt Brecht’s plays--especially his collaborations with Kurt Weil--best embodies Weimar culture. This heady era ended as Nobel Prize-winning journalist Carl von Ossietzky predicted, with “a government which closes both eyes, while the streets are given over to the hooligans and murder commandos of the Storm-troopers to quash all opposition under the label of ‘communist.’ ”