Rationality and the Poet is a lively account of the discussions between the young Bertolt Brecht and the Marxian Political Economist Fritz Sternberg. Set in the late Weimer Republic, these reminiscences chart the rise and fall of the friendship between the poet and the theoretician, from their initial encounters and Brecht’s induction into Marxist political economy to their increasing tensions over the Soviet Union. Sternberg charted an independent position between the Second and Third Internationals and remains a largely undiscovered theorist of the period spanning the end of the First World War to the Cold War. In this volume a number of his writings have been selected from the period of his most intensive friendship with Brecht to highlight the versatile and independent socialist cast of Sternberg’s mind.

Here published in English for the first time, Rationality and the Poet casts a new light on the development of Brecht’s politics and the relationship between society and drama that informed his art.