FAQ

Brecht’s bequest library (Nachlassbibliothek) is kept in his last apartment, now the Brecht-Weigel Museum. For readers registered to use the archive, the books can also be viewed. Brecht’s collection of books reflects much of his reading. However, in his years of exile, various books were also lost.
The individual titles are listed in the OPAC electronic library catalogue under the abbreviation NB bb*. The information is also available in printed form in the catalogue Die Bibliothek Bertolt Brechts. Ein kommentiertes Verzeichnis, edited by the Bertolt-Brecht-Archive, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2007.

After successful retroconversion, most of the monographs in the Archive Library of Bertolt Brecht are now available for research through the Akademie der Künste’s OPAC electronic library catalogue under the abbreviation BBA*. During the course of your research, you may find other call numbers with the abbreviations SB bb* and FB be*. These refer to documents in the branch of the Bertolt-Brecht-Archive.

These versions and drafts can be searched for in the Archives Database with the first words of the text. As a rule, the record of such a work cites the first three to five words in place of the title. If the version is missing a well-known title or deviates from the published work, the title by which the work is known is added in square brackets, and can also be found with the search function.

This was quoted by Karl Kleinschmidt in his obituary article in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper of 17 August 1956, three days after Brecht’s death.

Nowhere. The sentence was written by Carl Sandberg. Sandberg’s novel The People, Yes (1936) contains the sentence “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come”. Since the 1980s, this sentence has repeatedly been ascribed to Brecht and quoted together with his Koloman-Wallisch-Kantate.