Was Brecht a misogynist and fraudster?
Bertold Brecht is well known for his plays, poems, short stories and contributions to theatre theory and practice. His influence is also extensive in the films of Lars von Trier, Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa, Oshima, Ritwik, Ghatak and Jean Luc Godard. Yet since the publication of John Fuegi’s biography of Brecht in 1994 — Brecht and Company — a debate has raged about whether Brecht was a fraud, with perhaps as much as 80% of “his” writing being the work of others, most notably three women — Elisabeth Hauptmann, Greta Steffen and Ruth Berlau. Fuegi’s central argument is that Brecht had neither...