Im Dickicht der Texte. Brechts Nachlass im Lichte der neuen kritischen Edition seiner Notizbücher

In the Jungle of Texts: Brecht’s Literary Estate in Light of the New Critical Editions of His Notebooks. Brecht’s extensive written legacy has so far been largely made available in the Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe. A small but important part, however, his notebooks, has been appearing for some years in a new critical edition. This article presents the new edition of Brecht’s notebooks and shows the interpretational consequences of the new text-critical findings by means of exemplary text comparisons. In light of these, it turns out that the previous edition is in such a ruinous state that it must be completely revised and can no longer serve as a reliable working basis for researching Brecht’s posthumous work.