This is the website for the monograph Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950 by Katherine Hollander. The book is a history of the intimate group around Bertolt Brecht which produced some of the most important works of 20th-century drama, literature, and theory while in exile from Nazi Germany. It investigates how the members of this group understood their collaborative work in the context of their commitments to fighting fascism and building socialism, and illuminates a community that coalesced first in Vienna and Berlin and intensified as it moved into exile in Denmark after 1933. Beginning not with Brecht but with the actor Helene Weigel and her mentor, the Danish feminist Karin Michaëlis, the book takes seriously the women of the group and their ideas about socialism, gender, collaboration, and art. By the time the group shifted its center to Denmark, it included dramaturg and editor Margarete Steffin and social philosopher Walter Benjamin, and saw an increase in productivity and interdependence. Through careful study of writings and correspondence, this book reveals not just how the group worked but how they understood that work as an embodiment of their evolving ideas about socialism, antifascism, and collectivity. It suggests the understudied ways that collaboration has contributed to intellectual history, dissolving the false binary around Brecht and making way for new understandings of co-creation.

Some of the analysis, especially in Chapters 4 and 5, depends on data represented visually in two sets of graphics, which can be found here. “Location Data by Year” shows where each of the five Mitarbeiter was, month by month, between 1936 and 1939—revealing how much time they spent together, in various locales, but especially on Svendborg Sound. “Collaboration on Texts by Year” takes account of the texts produced by the Mitarbeiter each year between 1933 and 1939, and represents the different working roles they (and other co-creators) played in the development of these texts. This chart is an evolving work in progress, which may change as more information emerges.