In their introductory remarks, Anita Martin (Bern) and Rebecca Hirt-Meyering (Karlsruhe) highlight the particular affinity of Bertolt Brecht’s work for early modern themes, forms and genres. From scholarly dialogues and sonnets to school theatre, Brecht appropriates structures and content from the formal repertoire of the early modern period and renders them poetically fruitful. In doing so, Brecht draws on the material and motifs of these figures to reflect contemporary issues. The workshop at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology examines Brecht’s transformations across genres and their hybrid forms. After discussing which early modern forms, themes, and characters Brecht processes and transforms in his work, the workshop further examines the poetological and aesthetic functions of these themes and forms.

The workshop begins with a presentation by Zoe Zobrist (Bern), who uses Brecht’s Legende der Evlyn Roe and the Horst-Wessel-Legende to demonstrate how Brecht dismantles the legend as a genre. Ultimately, the underlying (value) framework of the legend is revealed: Whilst in the Legende der Evelyn Roe the transcendental attribution of meaning to suffering and death is rejected, the Horst-Wessel-Legende exposes the strategies of sacralization – and thereby the Nazi state’s propaganda strategy. Consequently, in Brecht’s work, the legend becomes an instrument of ideology-critical enlightenment. While it already possessed a critical potential in the early modern period (e.g. Luther’s ‘Lügenden’), Brecht utilizes the formal knowledge of the genre to employ deconstruction specifically for the purpose of visible ideological critique. In doing so, the deconstruction draws on the form, while also fundamentally undermining it by exposing the underlying value framework.

In her contribution, Pauline Solvi (Munich) examines the dramatic function of the Sententia as a pre-modern sentence form, employed by Brecht particularly in Leben des Galilei and Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. Through historicization, Solvi explores questions concerning the Sententia as a form of knowledge, its claim to truth, and as a guide to behavior and life. She examines the reception of Baroque practices concerning sentence structure in greater detail in her engagement with Walter Benjamin, who exemplifies the Sententias dramatic function in Baroque drama in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928). His conversations with Benjamin sharpened Brecht’s understanding of Baroque form. Solvi demonstrates how, in Galilei,the characters speak about and reflect on Sententiae and their claim to truth, whereby the literary sentence structure, alongside the scientific one, becomes part of the play’s content. Sententiae elevate the preceding events, interpreting them in objective and normative terms. Brecht dramatizes historical conceptual frameworks and practices surrounding the Baroque sentence structure and updates them through his historical understanding of form for his pedagogical drama program. The discussion highlights the connection between didactic Sententia and Lehrstück, which Brecht establishes by blending a practice of knowledge with a dramatic practice.

In the third presentation, René Wassmer (Tübingen) introduces his project on a genre history of the dialogue as a literary form. Central to this genre, which traces its origins back to the Platonic dialogues, is the notion of a good conversation shaping the core of a good society. The dialogue as a genre is often used to negotiate political and social conflicts in an exemplary manner. With his Flüchtlingsgespräche, Brecht, too, inscribes himself within this literary-historical tradition. Wassmer asks whether this text is dominated by conversational optimism and Brecht’s belief that human history can actively be transformed, or whether a crisis of conversation arises. Alongside continuities, the differences between the Flüchtlingsgespräche and the tradition of the dialogical form are also highlighted: Brecht’s dialogue is, partly due to an intensification of the experience of historical crisis, less convivial and insightful than its historical predecessors. As a result, the panel notes, the Flüchtlingsgespräche appear to lack in action and are therefore almost tragicomic, which makes them comparable to the early modern form of the farce.

To conclude the first day of the workshop, Rebecca Hirt-Meyering (Karlsruhe) discusses the technique of historical dislocation in texts from the collection Kalendergeschichten. With regard to Ulm 1592 and the Augsburger Kreidekreis, Hirt-Meyering demonstrates how Brecht dislocates material and real historical events from other centuries into the early modern period for his calendar stories. With the Kalendergeschichten, Brecht also draws on an early modern text type and invention. This explains the affinity of the content with early modern settings. Moreover, form and content of the calendar stories are mutually dependent. The use of verse in one calendar story and prose in the second exemplifies the blending of genre which Brecht employs for his early modern transformations. As a technique, historical dislocation also suggests a connection to Brecht’s alienation effect through the historical distance it creates: A recourse to the 16th or 17th century through historical dislocation appears as a particular form of alienation created by historical distance. Nevertheless, due to sociohistorical parallels between the early modern period and the 20th century, these do not appear artificial.

Lara Tarbuk (Dresden) explores Brecht’s fascination with fairground panoramas, in particular a panel titled Flucht Karl des Kühnen nach der Schlacht von Murten. She examines the influence of fairground and show booth depictions on Brecht’s relationship to the early modern period and his literary work. The painter Gorge is at the center of the prose text Das Porträt des Beschauers. He, with the intention of ‘practicing history’, depicts a triptych of Karl der Kühne’s flight after the lost battle. In the description of the triptych in the making, Brecht draws on the painter’s views on aesthetic effect: He aims to reflect the viewer’s silhouette in the historical subject represented in his work. According to Tarbuk, the painter Gorge seeks not only to evoke the viewer’s awe, but also to create a space for other needs and enable the viewer to take a critical stance towards the depicted. Thus, this fairground panorama contains a ‘primitive’ precursor to the alienation effect. Already in this early prose text, Brecht exemplifies and realizes what he would later theorize in his writings.

In the final contribution, Anita Martin (Bern) examines the ‘play within a play’ in Brecht’s plays. Folk tradition serves as the connecting element between early modern theatre practices and Brecht’s conception of ‘new drama’. Drawing on Brecht’s scattered and minor writings on theatre technique, Martin demonstrates the extent to which the reforms of epic theatre can be traced back to manifestations of popular applied art and folk tradition in the early modern period. Alongside choral speech, rhapsodic framing, and synesthetic plurimediality, the transition from dramatic action to reality is central. This is facilitated by intradramatic spectators, mediating narrators and the audience’s active participation. As an example of this transition, Martin demonstrates how the fourth wall partially dissolves in Brecht’s work –– just like in older plays ––, so that performance and reality connect and the audience temporarily becomes part of the intradramatic level. The audience’s role as an active and co-determining force is therefore less ‘revolutionary’ than ‘folkloric’ and can also be contextualized within the reappropriation and reactivation of the concept of folklore following the Nazi era. Like older folk theatre, it politically mobilizes the audience through active participation.

This workshop has made clear that Brecht’s work is closely linked to early modern themes, forms, and characters. This also includes the alienation effect, which, as noted in several contributions, is already present in the early modern archive and connected to folk applied art. Brecht also draws on early modern themes, figures, and forms to reflect his own turbulent present as a period of upheaval. The turbulent era of the early modern period seems predestined to serve as a blueprint for this. For Brecht’s method of historical and spatial dislocation, which has been discussed in several contributions, the early modern period forms a recurring central point of reference in his work. When examining the transformation from the early modern period in Bertolt Brecht’s work, adopting a cross-genre approach and focusing on folk culture and formal tradition proves particularly productive.

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Mara Lehmann
University of Bern
Institute of German Studies
German Literature
Länggassstrasse 49
CH-3012 Bern
mara.lehmann@students.unibe.ch