The short story was not of course Brecht’s main activity as a writer and both his enormous success as a playwright and relative failure as a Hollywood screenwriter conspired to keep him too busy to write very many or revise the ones he did write. However, this is nevertheless really an excellent collection of pieces, divided into the three groups Bavarian Stories by the young Brecht written before he moved to Berlin and great success in the theatre, Berlin Stories written 1924-1933 and Exile stories written in his various lands of exile from Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 until 1948 when he returned to live in East Germany.

The Bavarian stories are already full of the bluff tough-guy stuff we know from Mahagonny or the Threepenny Opera that Brecht loved so much but they are also shot through with his startling originality in theme and language. The very first story Bargan gives up explores a favourite Brecht theme: perverse self-defeating attraction. Bargan, although a ferocious buccaneer, is betrayed by his best friend time and time again but he just can’t help letting him get away with it and eventually brings utter ruin down on himself. This unsentimental acknowledgment of the awkwardness, the perversity of human character was one of Brecht’s great strengths. There aren’t really any heroes in Brecht’s human drama because he was too aware that the heroic is not quite human.

Almost all of the thirty-seven short stories and the included biographical fragment Life story of the boxer Samson Körner show that other great strength of Brecht — the stripped-down narrative drive that helps push his plays across the stage with such force.

But there’s a lot here too that isn’t reflected in his theatre work; like the story North Sea Shrimp which is an extended and funny grouse about inane people who live in designer flats surrounded by designer objects, a grave malady in our times but already apparently a problem in 1920s Berlin; then there are ‘entertainments’ like the breathless Barbara or the Runyonesque The Good Lord’s Package set in a Chicago bar. To add to the package are some cool and thoughtful explorations of Brecht’s most admired historical figures; great rationalist thinkers of the past — Lucretius, Francis Bacon and Giordano Bruno.

As well as being enjoyable in themselves these stories also clarify themes and techniques in Brecht’s larger theatre work, by reproducing them in miniature in a less overwhelming form, thus making this altogether a very desirable book.

‘My grandmother used to say when it had rained for a long time, «Today it’s raining. Will it ever stop? I hardly think so. At the time of the flood it did not stop.» My grandmother would say, «What has happened once can happen again — and so can what hasn’t». She was seventy-four years old and totally devoid of logic.

On that occasion all the animals went into the Ark quite peacefully. That is the only time when all the creatures on earth have been peaceful. And all of them really did go in. But the icthyosaurus stayed away. He was told in a vague sort of way that he should get in, but he had no time during the days in question. Noah himself drew his attention to the fact that the flood was coming. But he said placidly, ‘I don’t believe it.’ He was generally unpopular by the time he drowned.... That particular animal was the oldest of all the beasts, and given his long experience he was fully capable of telling whether anything like a flood was possible or not.

It is quite possible that I myself might not go in in similar circumstances. I think that on that evening, as the night fell in which he perished, the icthyosaurus saw through the corruption and chicanery of providence, as well as the unspeakable stupidity of all earthly creatures, the moment he realised how necessary these things were.’ p59-60