Brecht ilmub öösel : Brecht bricht ein in der Nacht

The German writer Bertolt Brecht spent the years of Hitler's regime in exile, including the years 1940-41 in Finland as a guest of the Estonian-Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoe. Mati Undi's new novel "Brecht Appears at Night" depicts Brecht's stay with his wife Helene and his lovers Margarete and Ruth 80 kilometers from Estonia, across the Gulf of Finland, during the summer of 1940, when Estonia was occupied and incorporated into the Soviet Union. The author is interested in what happened on both sides of the gulf. Towards the end, the exhausted Brecht, worn down by exile and dialectics, completely loses his mind and becomes embroiled in mystical adventures that are only possible in the North. He is surrounded on all sides: in Europe by Hitler, in the Finnish forests by long-haired dogs and bulls, and to the east by the once-beloved, now dangerous Soviet Union. The epilogue of the novel reveals that Brecht manages to escape to America (and Hollywood) just before the outbreak of the war on a delayed ship. Although the novel is at times quite unrealistic and leans towards the fantastical, according to the author’s own statement, a lot of documentary material was used in its writing, which is at times directly cited, but mostly concealed within other text. "I realized my long-held dream," says the playwright-turned-author, "Brecht has taught me a great deal, and at the same time, I had my own debts with him. Perhaps I managed to settle some of those debts a little by freely fantasizing about a couple of Brecht’s months in Finland."