The plays to which he is referring are the ones by which his reputation as one of the greatest twentieth-century dramatists has come to be established. In his years of Scandinavian and American exile, he worked on The Good Person of Szechuan, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Galileo, Puntilla, Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, he wrote sections of The Messingkauf Dialogues, and a great deal of poetry.

For someone such as myself who is not a Brecht specialist this sustained meditation on exile is one of the things most powerfully conveyed by these journal entries. We read of a person who is always busy but often disconsolate, one whose cultural reputation is no longer assured during these peripatetic years. Throughout his time in California, for example, the Hollywood studios weren’t rushing to film his writings. Exasperating and demoralising as this was for Brecht, he could appreciate the reason: with its stock of alienation-effects and distancing devices his beloved epic theatre was the opposite of the classical narrative Hollywood model, a fact he records with morose irony: ‘as they get into the car...they say “he’ll never be a success, he can’t create emotions, he can’t even get identification, so he goes and makes up a theory, he is crazy and getting worse”’. His attitude towards the Hollywood studio system mode of film production is contained in a comment that would find its way into the ‘Short Organum’ piece on different modes of theatrical practice: ‘here all they are concerned about is selling an evening’s entertainment’.

At the very start of the journal, Brecht had referred to ‘the great emotions racket’ and Hollywood must have seemed the most complete intensification of that disposition: ‘almost nowhere else has my life ever been harder than here in this mausoleum of the easy-going’. Eventually he starts to wonder why people, hills and lemon trees don’t have price-tags stuck to them and notes, ‘odd, i can’t breathe in this climate. the air is totally odourless, morning and evening, in both house and garden. there are no seasons here’. Remarks of this kind link back to earlier comments on landscapes and accommodation in Finland: ‘drove with HELLA WUOLIJOKI to marlebak (kausala). she is letting us have a villa surrounded by lovely birch trees. we discuss the quietness out here. but it isn’t quiet; it’s just that the noises are so much more natural, the wind in the trees, the rustle of grass, the twittering and the sound of water’; ‘it is understandable that people here love their landscape. it is so very rich and varied on such a grand scale. the lakes with their plenitude of fish, the woods with their beautiful trees and the scent of berries and birches’. At the same time such remarks also look forward to Brecht’s eventual return to Europe: ‘my first European spring for eight years. the colours of the plant world so much fresher and less crude than in california’.

Eventually, during his Californian stay, he and his family move into a house which ‘is very beautiful. in this garden it becomes possible to read lucretius once more.’ Brecht describes his most ‘successful’ Hollywood collaboration, with Fritz Lang (the lord of the lens’) on the film Hangmen Also Die. Like almost all of his Hollywood film work, it was an unhappy experience: ‘i feel the disappointment and terror of the intellectual worker who sees the product of his labours snatched away and mutilated’. California does provide other pleasures; he enjoys ‘sprinkling the garden’, tickling his dog (‘wriggles’) under the chin, talking with other emigres (Renoir, Eisler Schonberg). He is sardonic about Horkheimer and members of the Frankfurt School, scathing about Thomas Mann: ‘for a moment even i considered how “the german people” might live down having tolerated not only the crimes of the hitler regime but also the novels of herr mann, specially when you think that the latter don’t have the support of 20-30 armoured divisions behind them’.

The journals contain entries covering five years in Denmark (1934–39), eleven months in Sweden (1939–40), fifteen months in Finland (1940–41), almost six and a half years in America (1941–47), ten months in Switzerland (1947–48) and the first seven of the last eight years of his life, in East Berlin. Throughout its 550 pages, the journal conveys a very moving sense of exile with poeticised entries ranging from the cryptic (‘to finland by ship, leaving behind furniture, books, etc,’) to more elaborate haiku-esque offerings which could stand alongside the best of Brecht’s poems: ‘the foliage is turning yellow, the cows are being driven into the sheds, it rains a lot’; ‘snow. and still sciatica’; ‘the danube is freezing. the oilwells of romania are ablaze. america is considering war loans. the balkans are closed. spain signs treaties with USA and britain. france refuses to make peace.’

Overwhelmingly, the journal records the thoughts of this artist-intellectual in exile, pondering the development of his own aesthetic as war rages through Europe. The reader is able to consider a situation in which Brecht could be working on refining iambics in Arturo Ui as war is fought, working on a play or poem while listening to radio coverage of the Battle of Britain. The progressive unavailability of certain newspapers and radio broadcasts becomes a way of measuring Hitler’s movement throughout Europe and Scandinavia. This is the era referred to by Brecht as ‘the dark times’. As you would expect there is much comment on Hitler and Nazism. Hitler is called 'the housepainter' and later, in conversations in America, Brecht insists that it is wrong to pathologise Hitler; rather he must be seen as ‘a truly national phenomenon, a “people’s leader”’, in order for the enormity of his moral–political corruption to be recognised.

There are also many comments on other famous intellectuals and writers. An entry from Denmark in 1938 records Brecht’s response to Benjamin’s now famous discussion of ‘aura’ in relation to the mechanical reproducibility of the artwork: ‘a load of mysticism although he is against mysticism’. A much later entry records his response to the news of Benjamin’s death: ‘walter benjamin has poisoned himself in some little spanish border town’. Brecht had recently read Benjamin’s ‘theses on the Philosophy of History’ and said ‘it is frightening to think how few people there are who are prepared even to misunderstand such a piece’. The response he gives here to Benjamin’s death is a very intellectual-political one (though he was to write two fine poems on the death of this friend).

This may be explained by the fact that Benjamin’s death comes relatively soon after a death that had enormous impact on Brecht, that of his collaborator, Margarete Steffin. Her death, movingly conveyed, generated sporadic depression in Brecht for more than a year: ‘and i miss grete, here especially. it is as if they had taken away my guide as soon as i entered the desert.; i know that no pain can offset this loss, that all i can do is close my eyes to it ... death is no good for anything ... there is no inscrutable wisdom to be seen in this kind of thing. nothing can make up for it; i have done nothing and will do nothing to “get over” the loss of grete. what good does it do, reconciling yourself to things that have happened? ... hitler and hunger killed her. Hitler is still alive, and hunger rules the world. my efforts to save her were defeated, and i was not able to make it easier for her. you should forget your successes, but not your failures.’

The journals are perhaps unusual in the extent to which they record the observations and work routines of an intellectual artistic worker far more than they convey the musings of a more existential-emotional kind. We get a good sense of Brecht as father to Stefan (monitoring the reading, discussing school assignments with him – although the thought of having Brecht help you with your history essays induces some nervousness) but there is little sense of Brecht as husband, certainly none of Brecht as philanderer. If this appears unusual in a generic form which often seems to exist to allow the public-confessional staging of internal psychic-sexual dramas (witness John Cheever’s Diaries) we should remember that the diary entries are being written by a person committed to an aesthetic of detachment from traditional forms of emotional identification.

One thing which seems to substitute for internal emotional declaration is a series of close, affective descriptions of the physical world and physical ways of being in the world. The book opens with a wonderful description of the beauties of woodworking and cabinetmaking, even then a form of craft perfection that was being lost as an everyday accomplishment, and later there is a lovely description of taking a sauna in Finland. As would be expected the journal entries record Brecht’s vast reading habits, in particular his developing admiration for English literature: ‘what a national literature is and hence literature as such, i have really only realised this summer in reading more english’. Brecht’s comments on Shakespeare and other literary peaks are duly recorded but so also is his liking for the crime/detective fictions with which he would read himself to sleep. One of the main privations of exile concerned the fact that ‘my two means of production, cigars and (english) detective novels, are running out and have to be rationed’. Reading detective fiction allowed Brecht a form of meditative retreat: ‘from time to time i feel a certain spiritual unease and cut myself off, go away into a kind of cave and read my crime novels.’

These journal entries comment on everything from Brecht’s eventual getting of dentures to his thoughts on ‘mao and the victory of the chinese communists’. Although he barrels on seemingly endlessly about the epic theatre and the necessity of having it become a social-theatrical reality, in 1949 he still wonders ‘when will the real, radical epic theatre come into being?’. But the journal contains so many other creative, social and political observations that he can be forgiven this obsession. Towards the very end of the journal we are given a glimpse of an erotic symmetry in this diarist’s life: ‘my present girl-friend, who may be my last, resembles my first; ‘i find i have lost my respect for her; she seems cheap to me. not without relief i note the total disappearance of love in me’.

If love has disappeared for Brecht by the end of this journal so many other things of interest and often of beauty remain across the preceding pages that the book becomes an object of multi­ faceted interest, reaching beyond the realm of Brecht scholarship to a much broader readership.