This fascinating portrait of two of the most brilliant theater artists of the twentieth centuryand the women who made their work possibleis set against the explosive years of the Weimar Republic.

Among the most outsized personalities of the sizzling, decadent period between the Great War and the Nazis rise to power were the renegade poet Bertolt Brecht and the avant-garde composer Kurt Weill. These two young geniuses and the three women vital to their workactresses Lotte Lenya and Helene Weigel and writer Elisabeth Hauptmannjoined talents to create the theatrical masterworks The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, only to split in rancor as their culture cracked open and their differences became irreconcilable. The Partnership is the first book to tell the full story of one of the most important creative collaborations of the last century, and the first to give full credit to the women who contributed their enormous gifts. Theirs is a thrilling story of artistic daring entwined with sexual freedom during the Weimar Republics most fevered years, a time when art and politics and society were inextricably mixed.