Brecht Kriegsfibel

Manuscript of Bertolt Brecht's poem "Die Kriegsfibel" (War primer), which consists of 71 leaves, each with a photograph and lyric text on photographic paper hand-cut and pasted onto black construction paper. The entire unbound work is contained in a cloth-lined brown buckram wrapper held in a brown buckram slipcase with brown half-leather binding, and the spine title stamped in gold. Spine title: Brecht Kriegsfibel. Pagination is penciled on the back of each leaf by the author.; Presented by the author to Lion Feuchtwanger, "S.M. [i.e. Santa Monica] 1944."; In December 1944 Brecht and his collaborator, Ruth Berlau, assembled the photoepigrams into the small-format Kriegsfibel now in the collection of the University of Southern California’s Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. The collection contains seventy-one photoepigrams mounted on hand-cut sheets of black construction paper, with page numbers written by Brecht on the verso of each sheet. Also included is a title page and dedication sheet on onionskin paper. The pencil lines for marking the paper and the ragged hand-cut edges of the photographs are still visible. It is quite likely that Berlau herself reproduced the photographs from images that Brecht found in various publications, including Life magazine and Swedish and American newspapers.; In 1944 Brecht presented this miniature copy of Kriegsfibel to Lion Feuchtwanger, his longtime friend, mentor, and collaborator and a fellow German exile living in Southern California. Brecht sent another copy to his friend Karl Korsch in February 1945; whether additional copies were created or still exist is unknown. In 1949, after Brecht returned to Germany, he and Berlau assembled the Kriegsfibel for publication; it did not appear, however, until the fall of 1955. Interestingly, the published work does not duplicate Brecht’s smaller format but instead re-creates the manuscript now located at the Brecht Archive in Berlin. Both the 1954 and 1994 versions were enlarged to two and a half times the size of the Feuchtwanger version.