Tag Archives: Bertolt Brecht

Pledge Your Intellect to Freedom

Brecht’s poem to students of workers and peasants reminds them that they are being educated thanks to the bloody struggles of those who came before.

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History from the Workers’ Perspective

Bertolt Brecht captures the spirit of May Day in “A Worker Reads History.”

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Can Art Change Big Brother?

The Oscar-winning German film “The Lives of Others” speaks to the ability of art to change people’s lives.

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The Burning of the Books

In Ben Click’s post yesterday on the banning history of Huckleberry Finn, he tells the story of a man who remembers hearing the book read to him when he was a child in a concentration camp. Horst Kruse never forgot that reading experience and would go on to become a Twain scholar. Ben talks about […]

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Is There a Price for Doing Evil?

In a dinner conversation with academic colleagues and novelist Rachel Kranz, we grappled with the question of whether those who commit atrocities pay a price for doing so. I came to the conclusion that it is a question that novelists and poets are sometimes better at answering than academics.

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