ABSTRACT
Maps, monuments, memoirs, financial accounts, interviews: the resources of the historian and the lessons one might draw from them are presented in Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's History Lessons (Geschichtsunterricht, 1972) by way of a complex investigation of textuality. In order to have lessons about history, a text, a film, is fabricated. That text in images and sounds is a reading of another text, a novel, a fragment by Bertolt Brecht, The Business Deals of Mr Julius Caesar (Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar) written during 1938–42, while Brecht was in Hollywood. Film/play/novel: different textualities collide and inform each other as Brecht's theories of cinema, theater, and literature loom in the margins, in the wings, between the frames. What kind of text have Straub and Huillet made? What does their film text make of Brecht?
