Threepenny Novel
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Threepenny Novel (1934) is a novel by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht. It is similar in structure to his more famous The Threepenny Opera and features several of the same characters such as Macheath, together with a general anti-capitalist focus and a didactic technique that is often associated with the dramatist. It is a novel that has been the focus of much critical attention and that is often described as both a continuation and a variation of the themes and motifs of Brecht's other work that focuses on alienation and on the communication of a social message. It can be seen alternatively as a careful development of the detective novel genre and as scathing criticism of the Brecht's own social conditions and the economic practices of German businesses and banks in the middle of the 20th century.
In particular, it can be seen to have a peculiar relationship to history. According to Brecht's friend and intellectual confidant, Walter Benjamin, the novel is one that contains several different strands of history that do not directly match up. In the novel, Benjamin observes that "Brecht draws epochs together and billets his gangster type in London that has the rhythm and appearance of the age of Dickens. Private life is subject to the earlier conditions; the class struggle, to those of today. These Londoners have no telephones but their police already have tanks."
