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    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "Man Equals Man"
    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "Man Equals Man"
    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "Man Equals Man"
    Ebook48 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "Man Equals Man"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "Man Equals Man", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateApr 19, 2019
    ISBN9780028671222
    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "Man Equals Man"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "Man Equals Man" - Gale

      19

      Man Equals Man

      Bertolt Brecht

      1926

      Introduction

      Bertolt Brecht's 1926 play Man Equals Man (Mann ist Mann in German) is an existential farce in which a humbly helpful porter is hoodwinked into helping a few soldiers solve a conundrum by exchanging his identity for another's. One of Germany's most famous literary artists, Brecht produced poetry and fiction but made his name in the theater, writing plays that conjured absurd situations and often demolished the fourth wall (the unseen divider between actors and audience) to open audiences' eyes to the reality around them. With his opposition to materialism, militarism, and the industrialization of both human society and humans themselves, Brecht has long been a favorite in theater and bohemian circles the world over.

      Although it speaks to circumstances between the world wars in Germany, Man Equals Man is set in 1925 in India under British colonial rule. The protagonist is Galy Gay, an Irish porter with the best of intentions, who has gone out to buy a fish for his wife. His plan goes awry, however, after he runs into a group of British soldiers who have just abandoned one of their friends after a botched robbery attempt. They are looking for a replacement for their missing friend, and Galy Gay fits the bill. He soon finds his life, and very identity, changed forever.

      First produced in German in 1926, the play can be found in English in the second volume of Brecht's Collected Plays, (1979), translated as Man Equals Man primarily by Gerhard Nellhaus but also using Brecht's own translation of the first scene. This version is derived from the authorized edition of Brecht's collected works published in German in 1938. The play also can be found in Seven Plays (1961), translated as A Man's a Man by Eric Bentley from the original 1926 production. This edition intersperses verses of a song reprised several times during the play, for which a musical score is also provided. Bentley's title may better suggest the colloquial sense of the phrase, but Man Equals Man—the version used for this entry—speaks to the deeper philosophical sense of the play and is taken from an earlier subtitle for the German original, Mann = Mann.

      Author Biography

      Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria—part of the German Empire—on February 10, 1898, into a bourgeois family; his father was the managing director at a paper factory. With a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, Brecht was raised in the conventionally middle-class Lutheran faith, but he gained less inspiration from the doctrine than from the Bible itself as a work of literature. In the strict educational tradition of the classically oriented German gymnasiums (secondary schools), Brecht was wayward enough to once barely escape expulsion for challenging nationalistic patriotism in the midst of World War I. He once nearly failed a year by falsifying red marks on a French test to deceive the teacher into raising his grade. In his critical biography Bertolt Brecht, Claude Hill quotes Brecht

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