his first literary success with a short story rather than a play. The story in question is the first in this collection and is entitled “Bargan Gives Up.” Bargan, the brilliant and ruthless leader of a marauding band of buccaneers, becomes hopelessly addicted to a fat, clubfooted fellow “who had lain on the road like an unwanted dog till Bargan drew him to his bosom.” Eventually, Bargan abandons ship, crew, and everything merely for the sake of this repulsive and devious creature. The wild buccaneer’s unseemly fate is presented as a parable of the uncertainties of “life on this planet.” This captivating pirate story already contains many characteristic elements of Brecht’s fiction: evil but fascinating villain-heroes, stark macho and antimacho actions, the exotic atmosphere of faraway places and unusual social settings, the conscious attempt to convey a message or a moral (be it ever so unconventional), and a restrained, strangely rough-hewn language, equally distant from colloquial speech as it is from poetic diction, yet deriving its effects from both. More specifically, the story belongs to Brecht’s early period of youthfully poetic nihilism best known from his playsBaal (1922; Baal, 1970) and Trommeln in der Nacht (1922; Drums in the Night, 1966). In these early works, Brecht’s language is rich in earthy colloquialisms and poetic imagery. The buccaneers, invading a town, tread “carefully as if on eggs,” whistle “like mad” for help, afraid of getting caught in “a damn rat-trap,” and start “satisfying the women,” whose “screaming filled the air like an icy mist.” In this fashion, the fictitious pirate-narrator vacillates between colloquial speech, sober description, and expressive simile. Now and then, there is a sudden poetic moment, as when the buccaneers commemorate, with a few good gulps of brandy, the “dear corpses” of their fellow pirates “which now, as one of us put it rather nicely, were swimming up from the depths under the mild light of the stars, face upwards, towards some goal or other which had been forgotten and like someone who has no home and is homesick none the less.” The image of the corpse drifting under a big sky and the motif of homesickness without a home are central to an underlying feeling of Weltschmerz in Brecht’s early works, a feeling carefully checked by occasional irony (as in the aside in the quote above) and by long stretches of matter-of-fact narration, and dialectically balanced by lusty action and sly folk wisdom. Homesickness without a definite object is, in fact, the main topic of “Story on a Ship,” which breathes the same drunken-sailor atmosphere and the important insight in “The Revelation” is that nobody cares whether you live or die, so why should you care? Nihilism, or at least a fundamental scepticism about the meaning of this world and the goodness of its people, are at the base of most of Brecht’s stories, but there is a gradual shift from an attitude of “Live it up or give it up” to one of “Look out for yourself, and for your neighbor, if you can.” On the whole, there are many more stories with a positive message than with a negative one, and, in later stages, as Brecht comes to embrace Communist doctrines, the positive stories become predominant.

One approach to such didactic stories is the parable or fairy tale, in which the author uses the simple, direct language of the Bible, the Brothers Grimm, or popular almanacs. The early stories “The Foolish Wife,” “The Blind Man,” “A Helping Hand,” and “The Answer” all start with similar phrases, such as “A man had a wife who was ...” or “In a harsh land there once lived an evil man ...”; “The Good Lord’s Package” starts with the cozy narrator saying “Draw your chairs up to the fire. ...” “The Foolish Wife” and its complementary piece “The Answer” are virtually the only stories in the collection that approach the genre of the love story, a very rare species in Brecht’s entire oeuvre; even these two stories are more concerned with marital loyalty, steadfastness, and mutual generosity than with romantic, emotional love.

The most memorable of Brecht’s fictional characters, however, are not loving but mean and evil. They may well teach us what life and people can be like and help us to be wary of danger and exploitation but they are also extremely fascinating as evil individuals. The title “A Mean Bastard,” for example, leaves no doubt about its main character—or does it? He unabashedly exploits a young widow sexually and financially, as he did others before her. They “need” him, and he uses them, at least until he becomes bored. The widow struggles valiantly to maintain her dignity but breaks down completely when she finds him in her own bed with her own maid. In “Bad Water,” a husband murders his wife and her lover in bed, not out of jealousy, but because she has failed to do her housekeeping chores. Mean characters outdo one another in “The Death of Cesare Malatesta,” when a ruthless ruler is slowly, sadistically destroyed by an even crueler enemy. Such are the faces of evil.

Nevertheless, the most evil persons are often the least obviously evil in appearance. “The Monster” is a Russian governor who has conducted horrible pogroms, but his face and manners are considered too bland when he later, anonymously, tries to play his own role in a motion picture. (The story could be seen as a perfect denunciation of ruthless Nazi leaders with petit-bourgeois faces, had it not been written years before they came to power.) In “Letter About a Mastiff,” the fine instincts of a dog are required to sense the evil in the protagonist; ironically, the more the man tries to please and appease the dog, the more he discloses his evil potential. This eerie and compulsive confrontation with a terrified—and terrifying—animal appears to be symbolic of a person’s confrontation with his conscience or his own true self—a disturbing experience reminiscent of stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka. In fact, Kafka was one of the very few contemporary writers whom Brecht respected and admired, and another story, “Gaumer and Irk,” almost reads like a special tribute to Kafka’s nightmarish parables. Gaumer has killed Irk and tries to get rid of the body, no easy task to begin with, when he suddenly realizes that the body is growing bigger, slowly but steadily. The author’s cool, detailed description of Gaumer’s increasingly desperate attempts to move the corpse highlights the grotesque, dreamlike, symbolic quality of the action.

The Tales from the Calendar, which are incorporated individually in the present volume, stand out by having the most positive, likable heroes and heroines. These tales all come from the last of Brecht’s three creative periods and were selected for publication by Brecht himself, so one can assume that they represent most closely his later creative intentions. Major characters include one philosopher, two soldiers, three scientists, and five strong women. One of the soldiers is “The Soldier of La Ciotat.” He is, in fact, the living statue of a soldier at a sideshow, who has acquired his uncanny ability to remain motionless for any desired length of time as a result of being buried alive at Verdun. Brecht sees him as a symbol of the indestructible soldier through the Millennia, “afflicted by the hideous leprosy of patience, sapped by the incurable disease of imperviousness.” This strong antiwar stance pervades all of the stories dealing with war, where the only heroism is knowing how to survive, as does Anna in the “The Augsburg Chalk Circle” (a forerunner of Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1949, 1956; The Caucasian Chalk-Circle, performed 1948, revised version published 1960); true courage is the ability to admit one’s fear, which the philosopher-turned-soldier finally does in “Socrates Wounded.” Hope for the future comes from the scientists, not because of expected technological advances (although Brecht obviously admires fast cars and airplanes), but because of science’s eager pursuit of the truth, as exemplified in the young apprentice of “The Experiment.” Most admirable, however, are the women in these stories—independent, hard-working, no-nonsense women with a sense of reality: Socrates’ wife Xantippe, the tailor’s wife in “The Heretic’s Coat,” and “The Unseemly Old Lady,” who decides to live her last years exactly as she pleases. Such women represent the permanence of life against all odds and the hope that reason will prevail over evil and insanity.

The final publication of all of Brecht’s major short stories in English is a noteworthy event. This collection will greatly help to round out the picture of Brecht as a writer and as a person and will provide some surprising new insights concerning his literary development. The volume is handsomely produced and carefully edited with an extensive introduction, an index of the German titles, and ample annotations helpful to the scholar as well as the casual reader. The translations have been done with stylistic sensitivity, accuracy, and attention to detail (except for some minor factual errors and omissions in “Life Story of the Boxer Samson-Körner”). It is impossible to render all the interesting peculiarities and stylistic allusions of Brecht’s language into English, but enough has survived the translation to make for a rich and exciting reading experience.