In a famous Brecht poem, the question is asked: 'Every ten years a great man. Who paid the bill?' (Poems, pp. 252-3). Curiously, the question is one that has never seriously been put in the case of Brecht himself. In the essay that follows, I will set forth some preliminary findings on a question that has received remarkably little attention in more than half a century of Brecht studies: who wrote what and what was the cost of that writing to others? Though a few scholars have identified various individual works as written by someone other than Brecht, no scholar has stepped back to ask, if many of the trees were planted by someone else, what of the Brecht forest remains? The question is a vast and inordinately complex one. I will limit my detailed observations to the contributions made by Elisabeth Hauptmann (1897-1973), and will only generally note the strikingly similar cases of Margarete Steffin (1908-41) and Ruth Berlau (1906-74).