A review by casparb
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich by Bertolt Brecht

4.0

Certainly not joyous but Brecht shines in his arrangement of these vignettes, almost parables of daily life in the mid-30s Third Reich. They tap into something adjacent to reality that appears to me like nothing else I've encountered that attempts to represent the era. Perhaps Brecht's trick is range - 24 troubling windows into so many lives flicker in and out with a thematic consistency that never struck me as if Brecht was twisting each encounter to prove a political nuance, but rather that life would play out.

I read a lot of this with regard to the Decision, in the Kierkegaardian/Derridean sense. This translation also has a slight Kafkan ring - the phrase 'before the law' conspicuously appears so I couldn't help applying a little Derrida there. So looking with the decision or the structural inability to decide. Probably the Judge scene is the most obvious example here but I was thinking largely elsewhere