«Cinque difficoltà per chi scrive la verità» di Bertolt Brecht: un contributo alla riflessione teorica e storica su letteratura e totalitarismo

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, numerous research projects were devoted to better understanding the organization of political, social, economic and cultural life in totalitarian regimes. In the German-speaking area, the reflection has often been conducted through a more or less close comparison of the National Socialist and the East German Socialist states. In the first part of the issue I discuss the potential and limits of this juxtaposition. In the second part I propose a close reading of Bertolt Brecht’s paper “Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit” (Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth).