By Pamela Katz

“Katz restores the women to their proper place in the story, with levity, strong characterization, and beguiling descriptions of an interwar German milieu crackling with politics, art, and a sense of possibility.”—The New Yorker

“[Katz’s] work as a novelist and screenwriter helps her keep the pacing swift and the prose dynamic—the chapters on the creation of The Threepenny Opera are almost unbearably suspenseful. . . . She offers a real and empathetic sense of how Brecht and Weill walked and spoke and dressed.”—The New York Times

“Katz richly conjures the domestic, class, social, and political environs in which Brecht and Weill developed. . . . Through Katz’s insightful and penetrating prose, they all blaze and dazzle as they did in life.”—Booklist

This fascinating portrait of two of the most brilliant theater artists of the twentieth century—and the women who made their work possible—is set against the explosive years of the Weimar Republic.

Among the most outsized personalities of the sizzling, decadent period between the Great War and the Nazis’ rise to power were the renegade poet Bertolt Brecht and the avant-garde composer Kurt Weill. These two young geniuses and the three women vital to their work—actresses Lotte Lenya and Helene Weigel and writer Elisabeth Hauptmann—joined talents to create the theatrical masterworks The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, only to split in rancor as their culture cracked open and their differences became irreconcilable. The Partnership is the first book to tell the full story of one of the most important creative collaborations of the last century, and the first to give full credit to the women who contributed their enormous gifts. Theirs is a thrilling story of artistic daring entwined with sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic’s most fevered years, a time when art and politics and society were inextricably mixed.

Paperback
470 pages
Anchor Books, 2015
5.2 x 1.3 x 8 inches
ISBN 9780307744166
German History, Literature, Theater, Women's Studies