Florian Vaßen: „einfach zerschmeißen“. Brecht Material: Lyrik – Prosa – Theater – Lehrstück. Mit einem Blick auf Heiner Müller, Berlin, Milow, Strasburg: Schibri- Verlag 2021 (= Lingener Beiträge zur Theaterpädagogik, Band XIX).

This is a hard book to read continuously. Florian Vaßen has been an important voice writing about Brecht for several decades, and here he collects, lightly edited, some fifty of his most important essays and reflections across a wide range of Brecht and the Brechtian, from substantial twenty-page articles to short lexicon entries. Notwithstanding the acuity and integrity of Vaßen’s insights and the elegance of his writing, the volume does not cohere as a monograph, as Vaßen acknowledges at the end of his long introduction. In fact this may even be one of the book’s strengths: as we track Vaßen’s evolving interests and register his changing angles of attack, from the mid-1980s onwards, we receive not only illuminating perceptions of Brecht, but also an impression of the wrangles of a whole generation of Germanisten, extracting themselves from the conservative attitudes and the canon of their teachers, to strike out their own more socially and ethically responsible way.