“We gathered the technical materials. I myself made inquiries of several specialists as well as of the exchange in Breslau and Vienna, and at the end Brecht himself began to study political economy. He asserted that the machinations of the money market were quite impenetrable – he would have to find out how matters really stood, so far as the theories of money were concerned. Before, however, making what for him were important discoveries in that field, he recognized that the current dramatic forms were not suited to reflecting such modern processes as the world distribution of wheat or the life-story of our times – in a word, all human actions of consequence. ‘These questions’, Brecht said, ‘are not dramatic in our sense of the word, and if they are transported into literature, are no longer true, and drama is no longer drama. When we become aware that our world no longer fits into drama, then drama no longer fits into our world.’”
(Elisabeth Hauptmann, quoted in Frederic Ewen’s Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art, His Times, pp. 160-1)
