Brecht & Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama, by John Fuegi (Grove, 732 pp., $32.50)
THE GERMAN playwright Bertolt Brecht was, by all reports, an obnoxious character: a Stalinist, a womanizer, an opportunist, cold, selfish, manipulative, sardonic, and no fan of soap. Now comes John Fuegi, a University of Maryland professor and founder of the International Brecht Society, to add yet darker colors to the canvas. Mr. Fuegi claims that most of Brecht’s plays, including the most famous, were written in whole or in large part by a succession of masochistic mistress-muses.
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