Issue 2023:1

125 JAHRE BRECHT / BRECHT AT 125:

Brechts Gespenst: Zur Veröffentlichung der gesammelten Interviews von Bertolt Brecht an seinem 125. Geburtstag (Noah Willumsen)

„Ändere die Welt, sie braucht es“ Brecht heute in Berlin– nach 125 Jahren (Florian Vaßen)

Introduction to The Threepenny Opera (Steve Giles)

Brechts Gespenst: Zur Veröffentlichung der gesammelten Interviews von Bertolt Brecht an seinem 125. Geburtstag

Noah Willumsen

Am 9. Februar 2023 wurde Brechts 125. Geburtstag in der Akademie der Künste feierlich begangen. Nach einer Begrüßung von Akademie-Vizepräsidentin Kathrin Röggla und der Festrede von Kulturministerin Claudia Roth wurden von Dr. Fabian Leber, dem Sprecher des Finanzministers Christian Lindner, ein neues Postwertzeichen und eine 20-Euro-Sammler-Münze präsentiert. Briefmarke und Geldstück ziert nicht nur Brechts Porträt, sondern auch ein denkwürdiges Brecht-Wort: „Ändere die Welt, sie braucht es.“

In der hier nachgedruckten Rede, die Noah Willumsen im Anschluss hielt, stellt er den von ihm herausgegebenen Band Bertolt Brecht: „Unsere Hoffnung heute ist die Krise.“ Interviews 1926–1956, vor und reflektiert über die politischen und medialen Bedingungen, unter denen wir Brecht 2023 gedenken. Auszüge aus den Interviews wurden danach von zwei Schauspielern des Berliner Ensembles, Maximilian Diehle und Paul Herwig, vorgelesen.

Am 16. Mai 1955 sah sich die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung zu folgender Richtigstellung gezwungen:

Die Aeußerungen des Intendanten Heinz Hilpert […] in Göttingen sind durch Hör- und Druckfehler leider entstellt wiedergegeben worden. So hat Hilpert Bert Brecht nicht als „Toren,“ sondern als „Autoren“ bezeichnet.“[1]

Auch für Schriftsteller:innen ist der Umgang mit den Medien schwer. Gezwungen, wie Brecht schreibt, „durch immer dichtere Medien zu sprechen,“ ist die Gefahr von Missverständnissen groß, Wohlwollen nicht immer vorauszusetzen. „Merkwürdig,“ konstatiert Brecht, selbst Leser der FAZ, „was man da so alles über sich erfährt.“[2] Auf diese neuen Arbeitsmittel einfach zu verzichten, hieße jedoch an der Welt, die von ihnen konstruiert wird, nicht mehr teilzunehmen.[3]

Brechts Versuche, durch Massenmedien öffentlich zu intervenieren – seine Interviews – sind aber nach seinem Tod 1956 aus dem Gedächtnis der Literatur verschwunden. Lange galt, dass der medienscheue Brecht diese Art von Publicity strikt gemieden hätte.[4] Journalist:innen habe er, in den Worten eines Freundes, „oft gründlich verulkt,“ und schon zu seinen Lebzeiten berichteten Gutgläubige, er würde alle, die ihn interviewen wollen, mit dem Ruf „Ich hasse Sie!“ hinausschmeißen.[5] Im Laufe der letzten fünf Jahre habe ich trotzdem nach solchen Gesprächen gesucht, sie gesammelt, ediert und übersetzen lassen, und kann Ihnen heute 91 Interviews mit Brecht präsentieren, fast alle bisher unbekannt und unvermutet, die in 15 Ländern und in 11 Sprachen erschienen. Bevor wir von Maximilian Diehle und Paul Herwig ein paar Auszüge hören, möchte ich erzählen, wie diese Texte nun nach 67 bzw. 97 Jahren wieder ans Licht gekommen sind, was wir Neues darin finden können, und warum Brechts Medienarbeit gerade jetzt für uns so wesentlich ist.

Manche dieser Interviews lagen in den tieferen Schichten des Brecht-Archivs, wo der durchaus imagebewusste Dichter und seine Mitarbeiter:innen sie sammelten, die meisten waren dennoch recht verstreut, in finnischen Bibliotheken, sowjetischen Datenbanken, oder brasilianischen Theaterfakultäten. Wenn in einer Ost-Berliner Gewerkschaftszeitung erwähnt wird, dass Brecht mit einer tschechischen Zeitschrift gesprochen hat, hat man oft wenig mehr als einen terminus ante quem. Aber wenn man Glück hat, merkt man beim verständnislosen Durchblättern hunderter zerfallender Zeitungsseiten die kleine Brecht-Skizze oben links.[6] Manche Wege sind recht verschlungen. In den 1980er Jahren z. B. hat Heiner Müller – der unzuverlässigste Erzähler, den man sich nur wünschen kann – behauptet, das erste, was er von Brecht gehört habe, sei ein Interview im Nordwestdeutschen Rundfunk gewesen, kurz nach Kriegsende: „Das Weitermachen schafft die Zerstörung, die Kontinuität schafft die Zerstörung.“[7] Ein schöner Satz! Aber lohnt es sich, solchen dubiosen Anekdoten nachzujagen? In der Tat. Denn dieser Spruch verharrte tatsächlich siebzig Jahre lang nicht nur im Gedächtnis Heiner Müllers, sondern fast wortgleich auf den Tonbändern des NWDR, die glücklicherweise vor ihrer Vernichtung digitalisiert wurden.[8]

Neue Technologien der Speicherung und Erschließung machen Projekte wie dieses in einem bisher ungeahnten Ausmaß möglich – und in den kommenden Jahren werden wir unsere Bilder von vielen Schriftsteller:innen sicherlich noch revidieren müssen. Wir stehen 2023 auf der Schwelle zwischen einer immer umfassenderen Digitalisierung, die auf die richtigen Fragen ganz neue Antworten zu geben verspricht, und dem reißenden Zahn der Zeit, dem Papier, Magnetband und Menschengedächtnis unausweichlich zum Opfer fallen. Drei von Brechts Gesprächspartner:innen sind seit Anfang dieses Projektes gestorben; keine konnte ich noch erreichen. Aber ein Satz wie der, den Heiner Müller mit 20 Jahren im Rundfunk hörte, der die Tragödien und Hoffnungen des vergangenen Jahrhunderts kristallisiert: Der ist haltbar. Und er kann noch heute wirken.

Brechts Interviews werden, glaube ich, auch jenseits seiner angestammten Leserschaft vielen etwas zu bieten haben. Es gibt natürlich weitere solcher schlagenden Formulierungen, wie man sie von Brecht erwartet: Der Unterschied zwischen Schriftstellern und Dieben etwa sei nur, dass Diebe zumeist wissen, wo sie ihr Zeug herhaben, oder: Wo man mit der Ästhetik, als Lehre vom Schönen, nicht weiterkomme, müsse man’s mit der Lehre vom Unschönen versuchen, nämlich der Soziologie.[9] Hier wird zum ersten Mal das epische Theater erwähnt, sowie das Theater des wissenschaftlichen Zeitalters: Überhaupt hat Brecht seine Theorien am liebsten im Gespräch getestet und geschliffen.[10] Wir finden unter seinen Interviewer:innen auch ganz neue dramatis personae: Figuren, die man mit Brecht nie in Verbindung gebracht hat, wesentliche Persönlichkeiten der Weimarer Literaturszene, die, von Hitler ermordet oder vertrieben, in Vergessenheit geraten sind, aber auch Menschen, die nie wieder auffällig wurden und nur im Bernstein dieser einzigartigen Begegnung aufgehoben sind, und deren Geschichten hier zum ersten Mal erzählt werden konnten. Der wichtigste Fund ist jedoch die Form selbst: Hier ist eine völlig neue Seite von Brechts Schaffen zu entdecken, eine, die heute unsere Aufmerksamkeit in besonderer Weise beansprucht: Seine Beschäftigung nicht nur mit Kunstmedien – wie dem Film oder dem Grammophon –, sondern mit Nachrichtenmedien, vor allem Zeitungen und Zeitschriften.

In einer komplexen Gesellschaft, wie sie im Berlin der 20er Jahre dieses und des letzten Jahrhunderts zu finden ist und war, sind alle zwangsläufig auf andere angewiesen, die ihnen die Welt außerhalb ihres begrenzten Erfahrungskreises zur Verfügung stellen.[11] Die Wahrheit ist in diesem Sinne immer ein soziales Produkt, für dessen Herstellung, wie Brecht schreibt, einige „öffentliche[] Institutionen“ zuständig sind, die Informationen validieren: die Universität, die er oft zu erwähnen vergaß, das „Gericht,“ das zum Modell seines Theaters wurde – aber vor allem die „Presse,“ die zu Brechts Lebzeiten einen kaum vorstellbaren Bedeutungszuwachs erfuhr.[12] Schon 1926 konnte er feststellen, „dass selbst Gott sich über die Welt nur mehr aus den Zeitungen orientiert.“[13] Allein in Berlin gab es 2633 davon (inkl. Zeitschriften), als Die Dreigroschenoper auf die Bühne kam.[14]

Diese massive Industrialisierung von Information wirkte aber genauso wenig aufklärerisch, wie ihre Digitalisierung einige Jahrzehnte später; der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner bisherigen Unwissenheit scheint ihn in seine Unmündigkeit nur tiefer hineingeführt zu haben.[15] Die „ungeheure Entwicklung“ der Medien, so Brecht, sei „für die Wahrheit über die Zustände, die auf der Welt herrschen, kaum ein Gewinn gewesen.“[16] Stattdessen, wie Brecht schnell erkannte, wurde durch die plötzliche Verfügbarkeit von Welt die Struktur unserer Wahrnehmung grundsätzlich verändert. Wie er sagt: „wir machen unsere Erfahrungen [nun] in katastrophaler Form,“ als „Objekte und nicht Subjekte“ der Ereignisse, die uns schon längst widerfahren sind, als wir sie zu begreifen versuchen. Diese Verspätung zur eigenen Geschichte wird durch die zunehmende Geschwindigkeit der Nachrichten nicht verringert, sie ist vielmehr ein konstitutiver Aspekt unseres Medienkonsums: „Wir fühlen schon beim Lesen der Zeitungen,“ so Brecht, „daß irgendwer irgendwas gemacht haben muß, damit diese offenbare Katastrophe eintrat.“ Unserer „Schlußfolgerungen“ müssen wir „im nachhinein, von der Katastrophe aus“ vornehmen; und so kommt es, dass „hinter den Ereignissen, die uns gemeldet werden, wir andere Geschehnisse vermuten, die uns nicht gemeldet werden.“[17] Der Nachrichtenkonsument – der Doomscroller, wenn man so will – ist also strukturell zum Paranoiker bestimmt. Die tautologische Vergewisserung, facts are facts, ist für ihn kein Trost, sondern bezeichnet, allerdings mit einiger Genauigkeit, seine Unfreiheit: Heißt das lateinische factum das Gemachte, so werden Fakten geschaffen – aber nicht von ihm.

Der Zustand der Institutionen, in deren Händen die „Produktionsmittel“ der Wahrheit konzentriert sind, ist heute wie in Brechts Tagen desolat.[18] Kein Zufall, dass Journalist:innen und Wissenschaftler:innen wieder zu den bevorzugten Angriffszielen rechter Gewalt in Deutschland zählen, dass Universitäten und Gerichte die Brennpunkte kultureller und politischer Auseinandersetzungen in den USA bilden. Dass die Zirkulation unserer immer umkämpfteren sozialen Wahrheit gewinnorientierten Plattformen obliegt, die darin in erster Linie einen Köder für unsere Aufmerksamkeit sehen, die wiederum an Werbekunden verkauft werden kann, hätte Brecht auch kaum überrascht.[19] So dystopisch ihr Geschäftsmodell erscheinen mag, haben es Facebook, Twitter und YouTube mit nur wenigen Änderungen vom allerersten Massenmedium übernehmen können, dem durchaus treffend benannten General-Anzeiger, das heißt: der Tageszeitung.[20] Hier wurde ein eigentümliches Regime der Wahrheit begründet, in dem die Zuverlässigkeit von Informationen durch Professionelle verbürgt wird, die Bereitstellung von Information jedoch durch scheinbar unbeteiligte Geschäftsleute finanziert – vor allem durch Werbung.[21] „Wahrheit“ war, so Brecht, zur „Ware“ geworden.[22] Keiner unabhängigen Plattform, ob gedruckt oder elektronisch, und vertritt sie auch die radikalste Presse- und Meinungsfreiheit, ist es seitdem gelungen, diese strukturelle Verknüpfung von Kapital und Wahrheit zu überwinden.[23]

Stattdessen hat die Digitalisierung (wie schon die Industrialisierung) dazu geführt, dass die mittelständischen Qualitätsproduzenten auf dem Informationsmarkt von konkurrenzfähigeren, rentableren Billigwarenhändlern verdrängt werden. Im Unterschied zum heutigen Kommentariat empfand Brecht für die Untergehenden allerdings weder Mitleid noch Nostalgie. Die Zeitung sei „in den Händen der Bourgeoisie zu einer furchtbaren Waffe gegen die Wahrheit geworden,“ „das riesige [M]aterial, das tagtäglich von den Druckerpressen ausgespien wird und den Charakter der Wahrheit zu haben scheint, dien[e] in Wirklichkeit nur der Verdunkelung der Tatbestände.“[24]

Brecht war jedoch kein Querdenker. In einer aufschlussreichen Keuner-Geschichte behauptet ein gewisser Herr Wirr – eine uns allen inzwischen gutbekannte Figur –, er sei „ein großer Gegner der Zeitungen,“ er wolle „keine Zeitungen.“ Worauf der schlagfertige Herr Keuner entgegnet: „Ich bin ein größerer Gegner der Zeitungen: ich will andere Zeitungen.“[25] Brecht lehnte es ab, bloß ‚Content‘ herzustellen, um die Medien, wie er schreibt, „auf der Basis der gegebenen Gesellschaftsordnung zu erneuern“; aber er trat ihnen ohne Umschweife entgegen, um sie „durch Neuerungen zur Aufgabe ihrer Basis zu bewegen.“[26]

Dabei weigerte er sich radikal zu dozieren, zu indoktrinieren oder talking points wiederzukäuen. Er verzettelte sich keineswegs in Abstraktionen, sondern versuchte, wie sich der Philosoph Georg Lukács erinnerte, mit der „Wucht“ seiner Sprache in seinem Publikum „heilsame Krisen“ zu provozieren.[27] „[D]ie einzig ertragreiche Methode“ sei, nach Brecht, „kaltblütig einige einfache Töpfe“ anzuschaffen und alles hineinzuwerfen.[28] Freunde berichten von den „sehr zugespitzte[n] Meinungen“ und „scharfe[n], angreifende[n] Sentenzen,“ die er hervorbrachte, „um die Menschen zu reizen, um sie herauszulocken, um die Situation dramatischer zu gestalten.“[29] So kategorisch er seine Aphorismen geltend zu machen pflegte, wollte Brecht die alten Fragen nicht ein für alle Mal beantworten, sondern gewohnte Frageweisen stören, „Vorgängen den Stempel des Vertrauten wegnehmen“ und damit „[d]ie großen öffentlichen Denkprozesse“ anstacheln.[30]

Interviews dienten Brecht nicht dazu, den ‚wahren Sinn‘ seiner Texte zu offenbaren. Danach gefragt, antwortete er konsequent: „Es ist besser, das bleiben zu lassen. Ich bräuchte kein Theaterstück zu schreiben, wenn ich hier sitzen und Ihnen die Bedeutung in wenigen Worten sagen könnte.“[31] Würde er das tun, müsste er auch seine Interviews zu bloßen Kommentaren entwerten, die – ohne eigene Substanz – andere Werke auslegen, erklären oder wiederholen würden: eine Angelegenheit für Abiturienten. Vielleicht als erster jedoch sah Brecht im Interview eine eigenständige Form, mit neuen Möglichkeiten, Leser- und Zuhörer:innen zu erreichen und herauszufordern, zu überraschen und zu verführen.

Auch im Politischen, so pointiert er seine Analysen zu formulieren verstand, trat er nicht mit der letztgültigen Wahrheit auf. Autoren, sagt er, seien „keine Missionare,“ er wolle weder „Orakel“ noch „Leithammel,“ „weder Spiegel noch Sprachrohr“ für irgendeine Partei sein.[32] Vielmehr erkämpfte er innerhalb der Medien, einen Raum für die Literatur als autonomes Zentrum der Wahrheitsproduktion, das sich neben Politik, Justiz oder Wissenschaft behaupten könnte:

Aus Sicht der Gesellschaft [so Brecht] ist ein Schriftsteller, der keine persönlichen Ansichten hat, wertlos. Um nützlich zu sein, muss er Neues beitragen. Ein Theatermann muss nicht beim Staat in die Lehre gehen. Der Staat hingegen kann vom Dramatiker lernen; es gibt tatsächlich immer Probleme, mit denen eine Gesellschaft nicht fertig wird: Auf diesem Gebiet arbeitet der Schriftsteller; seine Imagination kann hilfreich sein, um diese Aufgaben zu erfüllen; er kann sogar neue aufdecken.[33]

Ein Interview ist eine Flaschenpost auf dem Meer der Massenmedien, als ephemere Form von einer Dialektik von Geschichtlichkeit und Vergänglichkeit gezeichnet. Morgen taucht es vielleicht unter, in hundert Jahren kann es allerdings wieder angespült werden und uns so direkt ansprechen, als hätte es allein auf diesen einzigen Adressaten gewartet. Man hört darin eine Stimme wieder, die nicht mehr spricht, aber kein Begräbnis zum Schweigen bringen konnte. Eine Stimme, die aufgenommen werden will, von Stiften und Tonbändern, aber auch, verehrtes Publikum, von Ihnen. Wir Gedenkenden, die verspäteten Leser:innen von Brechts Interviews, haben es also mit „der Zu-kunft und der Wiederkunft eines Gespenstes“ zu tun, das in Europa offenbar noch zirkuliert.[34] In Interviews werden, um ein altes Wort zu gebrauchen, Gespenster zitiert. Um den Teufel auszutreiben, werde bekanntlich Beelzebub zitiert: Wen treiben wir aus, wenn wir Brecht zitieren?

Das Brecht-Zitat, unter dem wir heute Abend versammelt sind, lautet nicht, wie der Spruch von Hamlets Vater auf den Mauern von Helsingör: „Gedenke mein,“ geschweige denn: „räch [m]einen schnöden, unerhörten Mord!“[35] „Ändere die Welt“ bleibt dennoch ein schauriger Auftrag[36], der uns aus der Vergangenheit erreicht, um uns an uneingelöste Hoffnungen, begangenes Unrecht und drohende Gefahr zu erinnern, eine geschichtliche Hypothek, die mit ganz anderer Münze abbezahlt werden will. Die Worte sind Brechts tour de force, Die Maßnahme, entnommen:

Welche Niedrigkeit begingest du nicht, um
Die Niedrigkeit auszutilgen?
Könntest du die Welt endlich verändern, wofür
Wärest du dir zu gut?
Versinke in Schmutz
Umarme den Schlächter, aber
Ändere die Welt: sie braucht es![37]

Sicherlich gehört es zu den Ironien der deutschen Brecht-Rezeption, dass dieser Schrei nach einem gewalttätigen Umsturz des Kapitalismus uns heute auf einem Geldstück begegnet. Aber damit ist auch genau die Stelle markiert, an der Brecht glaubte, dass wir die Welt ändern müssen, wenn sie bewohnbar bleiben – oder dies erst werden soll.

Ich bedanke mich.

[1] Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17. Mai 1955, S. 5.

[2] Zit. nach Erwin Strittmatter, „Besuch bei Brecht heute,“ in Wochenpost, 13. April 1957, S. 40.

[3] Vgl. Warum haben Sie keinen Fernseher, Herr Luhmann? Letzte Gespräche mit Niklas Luhmann, hg. v. Wolfgang Hagen (Berlin: Kadmos, 2005), S. 85, sowie Der Dreigroschenprozess, BFA 21, S. 446.

[4] Vgl. Chetana Nagavajara, Brecht and France (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), S. 50.

[5] Hanns Otto Münsterer, Bert Brecht. Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1917–1922 (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau, 1966), S. 5; Bertolt Brecht, „Unsere Hoffnung heute ist die Krise“: Interviews 1926–1956, hg. v. Noah Willumsen (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2023), S. 562.

[6] Vgl. Brecht 2023, S. 354–59.

[7] Heiner Müller, Gespräche 1. 1965–1987, Werke 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), S. 288; vgl. S. 692. Erdmut Wizisla hat Müller 1994 über die Quelle von diesem Spruch befragt, vgl. Heiner Müller, Gespräche 3. 1991–1995, Werke 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), S. 503f.

[8] Vgl. Brecht 2023, S. 367–71; dort heißt es: „Die Kontinuität, sagt er paradox, macht die Zerstörung. […] Das Weitermachen, das macht die Zerstörung.“

[9] Vgl. Brecht 2023, S. 639, 84.

[10] Brecht 2023, S. 32, bzw. 46; S. 89f.

[11] Vgl. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1994), S. XXVf.

[12] Der Dreigroschenprozess, BFA 21, S. 448. Luhmann würde hier nicht von ‚Wahrheit‘ sondern von ‚Wissen‘ als einem „sozial validierte[n] Verhältnis von Organismus bzw. psychischem System und Umwelt“ sprechen: Das Erziehungssystem der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), S. 98.

[13] „Über die Zeitungen an Karl Kraus,“ BFA 21, S 153.

[14]Alfred Joachim Fischer, In der Nähe der Ereignisse. Als jüdischer Journalist in diesem Jahrhundert (Berlin: Transit, 1991), S. 27; Fischer interviewte Brecht 1930, vgl. Brecht 2023, S. 113–19.

[15] Vgl. Marcel Broersma and Chris Peters, „Rethinking journalism: the structural transformation of a public good,“ Rethinking Journalism. Trust and Participation in a Transformed News Landscape, hg. v. dens. (New York: Routledge, 2012), S. 1–12.

[16] „[Zum zehnjährigen Bestehen der ‚A-I-Z‘],“ BFA 21, S. 515.

[17] „Über die Popularität des Kriminalromans,“ BFA 22.1, S. 509f.

[18] „[Nutzen der Wahrheit],“ BFA 21, S. 580.

[19] Zu den Dynamiken von „advertising platforms,“ siehe Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017), insb. S. 50–60. Werbeeinnahmen beliefen sich auf 97,5% der Gesamteinnahmen von Meta im letzten Kalenderjahr (https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q4/Earnings-Presentation-Q4-2022.pdf); im gleichen Zeitraum machte Werbung 90% der Einnahmen von Twitter aus (https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/).

[20] Zeitungen sind „canonical two-sided market[s]“ (Marc Rysman, „The Economics of Two-Sided Markets,“ Journal of Economic Perspectives 23:3 [2009], S. 125–143: 128). Wie Online-Plattformen konkurrieren sie um „advertisers as well as ‚eyeballs.‘“ Obwohl sie seltener zum Nullpreis angeboten werden, ist der Zeitungsmarkt ebenfalls von asymmetrischen Preisstrukturen, d. h. von einer weitgehenden Subventionierung der einen Seite (Leserschaft/User) durch die andere (Werbekunden), charakterisiert (Jean-Charles Rochet und Jean Tirole: „Two-Sided Markets. A Progress Report,“ RAND Journal of Economics 37:3 [2006], S. 645–67: 645, 659).

[21] Vgl. Marco D’Eramo, „Rise and Fall of the Daily Paper,“ New Left Review 111 (2018), S. 113–27.

[22] „[Nutzen der Wahrheit],“ BFA 21, S. 580.

[23] Srnicek identifiziert drei Gegenmodelle: „cooperative platforms,“ die sich durch gnadenlose Selbstausbeutung (und Spenden) über Wasser halten; staatliche Regulierung bis zur Verstaatlichung, deren Ergebnisse Brecht in der Weimarer Republik, bzw. DDR, kennen und wenig schätzen lernen konnte; und schließlich Vergesellschaftung, infolgedessen man „public platforms […] owned and controlled by the people“ als Träger der öffentlichen (Informations-)Versorgung operieren würde (Srnicek 2017, S. 127f.). Letztere kommt Brechts Vorschlag, aus dem Rundfunk z. B. „eine wirklich demokratische Sache zu machen,“ am nächsten („Vorschläge für den Intendanten des Rundfunks,“ BFA 21, S. 215).

[24] „[Zum zehnjährigen Bestehen der ‚A-I-Z‘],“ BFA 21, S. 515.

[25] „[Herr Keuner begegnete Herrn Wirr],“ BFA 18, S. 30.

[26] „Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat,“ BFA 21, S. 557.

[27] Georg Lukács, „Mitten im Aufstieg verließ er uns. Gedenkansprache auf der Trauerfeier im Haus des Berliner Ensembles,“ Neues Deutschland, 21. August 1956, S. 4.

[28] „Captatiae. Traktat über ein episches Theater,“ BFA 21, S. 682f.

[29] Fritz Sternberg, Der Dichter und die Ratio. Erinnerungen an Bertolt Brecht (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), S. 36.

[30] Kleines Organon für das Theater, BFA 23, S. 81; „Kommune Notate,“ BBA 1081/044.

[31] Brecht 2023, S. 175.

[32] Brecht 2023, S. 583, 397, 584.

[33] Brecht 2023, S. 584.

[34] Jacques Derrida, Marx’ Gespenster. Der Staat der Schuld, die Trauerarbeit und die neue Internationale (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), S. 67.

[35] William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Prinz vom Dänemark, über. August Wilhelm Schlegel, I.v.

[36] „Bei aller polaren Gegensätzlichkeit zu Rilke“, so Georg Lukács, „ist also dessen: ‚Du mußt dein Leben ändern‘ auch das Axiom für das künstlerische Wollen Brechts,“ Eigenart des Ästhetischen I. Werke, Bd. 11, hg. von F. Benseler (Neuwied am Rhein: Luchterhand, 1963), S. 825.

[37] Die Maßnahme (1930), BFA 3, S. 89.

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„Ändere die Welt, sie braucht es“ Brecht heute in Berlin– nach 125 Jahren

Florian Vaßen

Vor 125 wurde Bertolt Brecht in Augsburg geboren, Grund genug ihn deutschlandweit in vielfältigen Formen zu feiern und zu ehren, vor allem auch in Berlin, Brechts Wohnsitz in der Weimarer Republik und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg und zugleich Ort seines weltberühmten Erfolgs mit der Dreigroschenoper und später mit dem Berliner Ensemble.

Die Akademie der Künste: Unsere Hoffnung heute ist die Krise

Die Akademie der Künste feierte Bertolt Brecht mit einer Buchpräsentation und der Vorstellung einer 85-Cent-Briefmarke und einer 20-Euro-Münze. Nach der Begrüßung durch Kathrin Röggla, der Vizepräsidentin der Akademie, und einem Grußwort von Claudia Roth, Staatsministerin für Kultur und Medien, übergab das von der FDP geführte, nicht unbedingt Brecht-nahe Wirtschaftsministerium eine eckige Briefmarke und eine runde Münze zu diesem nicht ganz so runden Geburtstag.

In der DDR gab es schon viele Brecht-Briefmarken, die erste 1957, in der BRD dagegen keine einzige, 1998 dann eine erste gesamtdeutsche. Auf der neuen Briefmarke ist neben dem Namen, den Jahreszahlen und einem Foto von Brecht aus dem Jahr 1954 – ein ästhetisch störender QR Code war wohl auch notwendig – ein Sprachrohr zu sehen, aus dem der Satz „Ändere die Welt: Sie braucht es!“ agitatorisch herausschallt. So isoliert stehend, können vermutlich sehr viele Menschen ganz unterschiedlicher politischer Ausrichtung diesem Satz zustimmen, in dem Kontext, in dem Brecht ihn in Die Maßnahme (BFA 3, 116) gebraucht, bekommt er dagegen eine erhebliche politische Brisanz, die sicherlich nicht im Sinne der FDP ist. Die Münze zeigt stattdessen einen nachdenklichen Brecht mit gerunzelter Stirn, den Daumen am Kinn und eine Zigarre in der Hand, und der Satz „Ändere die Welt: Sie braucht es!“ steht unter dem Porträt.

Im Folgenden präsentierte Noah Willumsen mit einer differenzierten Einführung die von ihm herausgegebene Publikation Unsere Hoffnung heute ist die Krise. Interviews 1926–1956 (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2023), in der 91 in deutscher Sprache unveröffentlichte Interviews mit Brecht versammelt sind, die sicherlich neue Akzente in unserem Brecht-Bild setzen werden. Nach der Einspielung von zwei originalen Tondokumenten von Brecht trugen zwei Schauspieler Auszüge aus einigen Interviews vor.

Akademie der Künste, Berlin: Zwei Schauspieler (Maximilian Diehle und Paul Herwig, links) und Noah Willumsen (rechts) stellen *Unsere Hoffnung heute ist die Krise. Interviews 1926–1956* vor.

Das Berliner Ensemble: Ändere die Welt, sie braucht es

Das Berliner Ensemble veranstaltete vom 10. bis 12. Februar zu Brechts 125. Geburtstag ein Brecht-Wochenende mit drei Brecht-Inszenierungen aus dem Repertoire (Christina Tscharyiskis Brechts Die Mutter. Anleitung für eine Revolution aus einer feministischen Perspektive mit einer Live-Band, Oliver Kraushaars Solo Der Lebenslauf des Boxers Samson-Körner in der Regie von Dennis Krauß und Suse Wächters Puppenspiel Brechts Gespenster) sowie mit dem inszenierten Audioworkshop Brecht to go, in dem die Teilnehmer*innen, ausgehend von Brechts berühmter Straßenszene, sich aktiv mit seinem Theaterverständnis auseinandersetzen konnten. Unter dem Titel Ändere die Welt, sie braucht es fand am 12. Februar zudem ein Thementag mit drei Podiumsdiskussionen zu Bertolt Brechts Aktualität statt, auf denen, ausgehend vom Denken Brechts, Expert*innen aus verschiedenen Bereichen, u.a. die Sozialwissenschaftlerin Bafta Sarbo, der Soziologe Klaus Dörre und die Regisseurin Christina Tscharyiski, über die Widersprüche unserer Zeit diskutierten. Dabei ging es vor allem um „die Frage der Legitimität von institutioneller und individueller Gewalt, um die Möglichkeit von sozialer Gerechtigkeit und Gemeinwohl vor dem Hintergrund einer sich immer weiter ausdifferenzierenden Gesellschaft und schließlich um die Rolle der Kunst in der Gesellschaft.“ (https://www.berliner-ensemble) Schauspieler*innen des Berliner Ensembles lasen dazu jeweils passende Passagen aus Brechts Werken.

Bertolt Brechts Papierkrieg

Aus gegebenem Anlass präsentierten Grischa Meyer und Holger Teschke im Foyer der Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Buch vom 20. Januar bis zum 3. März die Ausstellung Bertolt Brechts Papierkrieg. Zeitungslesen im Exil Amerika 1941–1947 (zuvor im Goethe Institut in New York unter dem Titel Bertolt Brecht’s Paper War. Zeitungslesen im Exil Amerika 1941–1947), in der Brechts Arbeitsweise an der Kriegsfibel, inklusive zusätzliches, bisher nicht bekanntes Material, gezeigt wird.

Bertolt Brecht's Paper War / Brechts — Bertolt Brechts Papierkrieg. Zeitungslesen im Exil Amerika 1941–1947

Bertolt Brechts Kriegsfibel. Ihr aber lernet, wie man sieht statt stiert

Die wichtigste Veranstaltung zu Brechts Geburtstag waren aber auch in diesem Jahr die Brecht-Tage vom 6.–10. Februar im Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus. Unter dem Titel Brechts „Kriegsfibel“. Ihr aber lernet, wie man sieht statt stiert fanden an fünf Tagen Vorträge, Diskussionen und performative Präsentationen über das spezifische Verhältnis von Bild und Text statt, ergänzt um den Bereich der Musik, und mit einer besonderen Akzentuierung auf die Gegenwart, den Krieg heute und die Fortsetzung bzw. Weiterentwicklung der Brecht’schen Methode.

Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus: Brecht-Tage 2023

So präsentierten gleich am ersten Tag Armin Smailovic und Dirk Gieselmann ihren Atlas der Angst, mit Bildern und Texten von einer Fahrt durch Deutschland, in denen nicht nur die Stimmung in der Bevölkerung dokumentiert wurde, sondern auch die unterschiedlichen Dimensionen und Bedeutungen von Krieg thematisiert wurden. Es folgten am zweiten Tag Zeichnungen von Johannes Weilandt, der mit seiner Bleistift-Stricheltechnik Luftaufnahmen von sog. smart bombs u.a. im Irakkrieg verfremdete. Beides scheinen mir interessante Arbeiten, die für mich jedoch nicht die Intensität der Brecht’schen Kriegsfibel erreichen. Volker Brauns Lesung mit dem Titel KriegsErklärung, die vermutlich besonders produktiv gewesen wäre, musste wegen eines Unfalls des Autors leider verschoben werden.

In dem ersten Vortrag der Brecht-Tage analysierte Ulrike Haß in einer Art Stratigraphie unter dem Titel Erdbebenzone Eurasien die Schichten, Verwerfungen und Risse der europäischen Ost-West-Verhältnisse. Ausgangspunkte sind, laut Haß, vor allem die Zerstörung Trojas durch die Griechen, die spätere reduzierte Kopie Griechenlands durch Rom, die Trennung in eine ost- und eine weströmische Kirche und der Gegensatz von Nomaden und Sesshaften, Konstellationen, die sie auch an Euripides‘ Troerinnen und Heiner Müllers Philoktet konkretisierte.

Der dritte Tag der Brecht-Tage stand im Zeichen der Musik: Während Johannes Gall sehr präzise Hanns Eislers Vertonung Bilder aus der ’Kriegsfibel‘ analysierte und an eingespielten Beispielen Eislers Nähe zu Brecht erläuterte, bildeten die neu übersetzten poetischen Verse vom unbekannten Soldaten von Ossip Mandelstam einen intensiven und eindringlichen Kontrast zu Brechts Antikriegstexten. Die Vertonung von Mandelstams Lyrik und deren musikalische Präsentation in russischer Sprache durch das Ensemble lesabendio haben mich dagegen nicht angesprochen, sie blieben mir sehr fremd, ja sie verstärkten meines Erachtens das Klischee von der „russischen Seele“.

Alexander Kluge: Montieren gegen den Krieg

Im Zentrum der Brecht-Tage stand zweifelsohne der Donnerstagabend mit Alexander Kluge, der unter dem Titel Montieren gegen den Krieg mit short cuts aus seinen Filmen und im Gespräch per Zoom mit Erik Zielke sowohl die Wechselseitigkeit von Wort und Bild in einer Art ‚Bild-Rede‘ darlegte als auch eine vielfältige Analyse des Krieges gab. Kluge betonte mit der Stafette der Jahre 1898, 1914, 1918 und 1929 die Entwicklung des jungen Brecht. Wichtig sei vor allem das Jahr 1929, u.a. mit dem sogenannten Blutmai, dem ersten Treffen von Brecht und Benjamin und mit Aby Warburgs Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, einer der letzten Zeitpunkte, um den Nationalsozialismus möglicherweise noch zu verhindern. Bereits 1934 „röhrt und tobt der Faschismus in ganz Europa“, wie Kluge formulierte, während Brecht und Benjamin sich in Dänemark als zwei „Robinsone“ schon über den drohenden Krieg, das Zurückgehen zum Anfang, zum Einfachen, aber auch zum Verlorenen, über Mut und „messianische Kraft“ neben der realen politischen Kraft durchaus auch kontrovers unterhalten. Die Brecht-Benjamin-Beziehung versinnbildlicht Kluge in den beiden sehr unterschiedlichen Figurationen Engel der Geschichte und Stachel der Clown von Paul Klee, letztere vor allem nach Art von Rabelais und Bachtin als Ausdruck des Lachens und des Zwerchfells gegen das „Versteinerte in uns“. Neben dieser geschichtsphilosophisch-ästhetischen Personen-Konstellation betont Kluge mit Brecht und Eisenstein, die sich auch 1929 in Berlin trafen (und Dziga Wertow als dessen dokumentarischem Kontrast), zweitens den montagehaften filmischen Aspekt, insbesondere Eisensteins „kugelförmige Dramaturgie“ der nicht linearen „Triptychon-Montage“. Schließlich spricht Kluge die soziologisch-politische Verbindung von Brecht und Karl Korsch an, dem Brecht die ersten Tafeln der Kriegsfibel geschickt hat. Insbesondere betont Kluge Korschs Überlegungen zum „Blitzkrieg“ als „Flucht nach vorn“ sowie zum Rückzug als „wandernder Kessel“ und „Blitzkrieg nach rückwärts“ der Proletarier in Uniform, wie es Rosa Luxemburg nennt. Kluge thematisiert weiterhin die Illusion der Sicherheit durch Panzerung, Panzer seien eher „glühende Särge“ (Heiner Müller), und ist besorgt, dass der Ukrainekrieg heute wie der Erste Weltkrieg 1914 „ansteckend“ sein könne. Es sei ein weiter und gefährlicher Weg von Gorbatschow bis Putin. Mit Brechts „Fatzer“, der bekanntlich ja desertiert, betont Kluge, dass viel Mut notwendig ist, um einen Krieg zu beenden, und dass Erfahrungen wichtiger seien als überschwängliche Moral.

Kluge geht es vor allem um „Weltzusammenhang“ und „Welterfahrung“, um Koinzidenzen, wie er sie am Beispiel des 30. April 1945 aufzeigt, ein Montag, an dem Hitler Selbstmord begeht, in San Francisco die Vereinten Nationen gegründet werden und sich in Oakland Arbeiterorganisationen aus aller Welt treffen; Brecht arbeitet zur gleichen Zeit an der Hexameter-Versifizierung des Kommunistischen Manifests.

Abschließend fragt sich Kluge, wie Krieg darstellbar ist und gibt selbst filmische Beispiele: Das Schmelzen von Bleisoldaten im knisternden Feuer war z.B. ein außergewöhnlich intensives Bild von Tod und Zerstörung im Krieg, oder die irritierende Montage von „staunenden“ Tierfiguren aus dem Bilderbuch für Kinder, einem mehrbändigen Sach- und Lehrbuch von Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747–1822), Benjamins Lieblingslektüre, mit Bildern des menschlichen Krieges. Auch Kluge präsentierte keine „Lösung“, zumal das einfache Abbilden nur die „Lebenswelt“, nicht aber die „Systemwelt“ zeige. Deshalb müsse etwas Neues konstellativ hergestellt werden durch Mehrperspektivität von Wort, Bild, Foto, Film etc. Es gehe um die Kooperation der Archive (etwa von Brecht, Walter Benjamin und Heinrich Heine) und um dialektische Bilder. Brecht und Benjamin sind nach Kluge nicht tot, sie erwarten sozusagen, dass wir ihre Arbeit fortführen.

Den Krieg madig machen

Es ist schon Tradition bei den Brecht-Tagen, dass im Gegensatz zu den vorhergehenden Abendveranstaltungen während des gesamten Freitags mehrere Kurzvorträge aufeinander folgen. Die Thematik Den Krieg madig machen, wie das Motto lautete, war jedoch bedauerlicherweise keineswegs in allen Vorträgen der Bezugspunkt. Während Christoph Hesse sich auf die Aspekte Montage und Demontage, Film- und Bild-Montage konzentrierte, thematisierte Sabine Kebir Brechts Auseinandersetzung mit dem globalen Krieg – in der Kriegsfibel sind auch viele Bezüge zum asiatischen Raum – sowie die grundlegenden und höchst problematischen Veränderungen, die seit dem Vietnamkrieg über die Kriege im Nahen Osten bis zu den heutigen Stellvertreterkriegen in Bezug auf das Bildmaterial und dessen Veröffentlichung in den Medien festzustellen sind.

Die Gräber von Bertolt Brecht und Helene Weigel (Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof Berlin)

Bolschewistische Kurkapelle Schwarz-Rot auf dem Dorotheenstädtischen Friedhof

Nach einer kleinen Feier am Grab auf dem Dorotheenstädtischen Friedhof und im Hof des Brecht-Hauses, kurzen, klugen und unterhaltsamen Reden und der Musik der „Bolschewistischen Kurkapelle Schwarz-Rot“ sprach Gerd Koch am Nachmittag in seinem „Feature“ von einem „Dreier-Verbund“ von Brecht und den beiden Bildenden Künstlern Hans Tombrock und Pieter Breughel dem Älteren. Dabei ging es – ganz im Sinne des Mottos des Tages – um Mutter Courages Ausspruch „Der Krieg soll verflucht sein“, ein „kleiner Satz“, der allerdings in ein notwendiges „Beiwerk“ eingebettet werden muss, wie Brecht es mit Blick auf Breughel formuliert. Analog zur Kriegsfibel spricht Brecht mit Tombrock im schwedischen Exil von „Tafelwerken“ als „freie Assoziation“ von Bild und Gedicht. Die Verbindung des „geschriebenen“ und des „gemalten Gedankens“ als zwei „Standpunkte“, präsentiert im öffentlichen Raum, würden – laut Brecht und Tombrock – die Diskussion intensivieren und damit auch den Kunstgenuss. Den Abschluss bildeten zwei Vorträge von Anna Melnikova und von Luise Meier, deren Bezug zum Thema Den Krieg madig machen ich nicht erkennen konnte. Die Körper-Reflexionen bzw. die Lehrstück-bezogene Selbstreflexivität und Selbstadressierung bildeten einen eigenartigen, aber vielleicht auch verständlichen ratlosen Abschluss.

Brechts Friedensfibel gegen „finstere Zeiten“?

Mein Eindruck der diesjährigen Brecht-Tage ist zwar insgesamt positiv, aber doch auch zwiespältig: Bei den ästhetischen ‚Zugriffen‘ fehlte mir vor allem die ästhetisch-politische Intensität und Radikalität, die in der Kriegsfibel immer noch zu finden ist und die ebenfalls bei Alexander Kluge vorhanden ist[1]. Auch die theoretischen Überlegungen einerseits zum Krieg und dessen Begrifflichkeit sowie andererseits zur Wort-Bild-Kombination und zur Montage hätten wohl grundsätzlicher ausfallen können; auch hier ist Kluge wieder die große Ausnahme. Meine Hauptkritik gilt aber der Tatsache, dass sich die Vorträge und Präsentationen doch sehr unterschiedlich auf das zentrale Thema bezogen und ein Weiterdenken und -arbeiten auch im Sinne von Brechts Projekt einer Friedensfibel kaum sichtbar war. Heterogenität ist gut, aber das gemeinsame Thema sollte doch im Zentrum der Reflexionen und künstlerischen Arbeiten stehen. Wir leben in „finsteren Zeiten“, wie Brecht formuliert, gerade deshalb sollten aber unser Blick durchdringend, unser Denken entschieden und unsere Haltung widerständig sein.

[1] Alexander Kluges gesamter Zoom-Auftritt lässt sich in der Mediathek des Literaturforums im Brecht-Haus nachverfolgen; siehe https://lfbrecht.de/mediathek/brecht-tage-2023-montieren-gegen-den-krieg/

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Introduction to The Threepenny Opera

Steve Giles

The years from 1926 to 1932 constitute one of the most productive and problematic phases in Brecht’s career. He wrote several major plays and numerous theoretical essays, and made significant progress in developing the practice of epic theatre. He was also involved in collaborative ventures with several avant-garde composers, among them Hindemith, Eisler, and of course Weill. The Threepenny Opera, the first major product of his work with Weill, was written and premiered in 1928. It occupies a central position in this phase in Brecht’s career, a phase of particular importance in Brecht’s shift to Marxism. Accordingly, The Threepenny Opera has tended to be seen as a transitional work, not only in terms of Brecht’s politics, but also as regards his developing theory and practice of epic theatre. It is also a transitional work in the more fundamental sense that it was itself a work in transition, which Brecht rewrote in 1931, and it is this later version of the text that forms the basis for the ‘standard’ edition reprinted in the standard, English-language Methuen edition. In this discussion I shall concentrate on the three aspects just outlined (a) the problematic status of the text, (b) the theatrical significance of The Threepenny Opera, (c) the politics of The Threepenny Opera. I don’t intend to comment in any detail on the work’s musicological significance, as this is beyond my area of competence: may I simply recommend Stephen Hinton’s excellent Cambridge Opera Handbook.

TEXT:

(a) The 1928 version: this version of the text is a collaborative reworking and adaptation of Elisabeth Hauptmann’s translation of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. Indeed, so many hands were involved in the final stages of the production of the text and theatrical premiere that this version of the text certainly cannot be construed as a play ‘by Brecht’. In 1931, however, Brecht revised the 1928 version of the text in quite crucial ways; I shall first briefly outline the main directions which these changes move in, and then give some key examples.

(b) The 1931 version has generally been seen as an attempt to give a Marxist gloss to a work whose original politics where rather more vague. While there is some truth in this view, the changes made in 1931 are more complex and modify the text in four main ways:

1. Peachum and Macheath are endowed with a higher level ideological self-awareness, rendering more explicit the text’s critique of capitalist society.

2. The development of Macheath’s calculating and entrepreneurial tendencies is paralleled in Polly’s enhanced independence, self-control and economic pragmatism.

3. Sexuality is presented as a potentially autonomous motivating force.

4. The relationship between self, role and discourse becomes much more complex. I shall comment on 3 and 4 when I discuss the text’s theatrical and political dimensions later on: what I shall do now is look briefly at the changes to Macheath and Polly (though as we shall see, these changes also have implications for 3 and 4). The revisions to Macheath’s part mainly concern his status as criminal or bourgeois and his social image, and the most striking 1931 addition to the text underlines his bourgeois attributes, indicated in particular through his new career as a banker [see Macheath’s final speech, scene 9, p.76]. As far as Polly is concerned, in 1931 she is presented as far more autonomous and self confident in her dealings with Macheath, who had been much more dominating and domineering in the 1928 version. Polly’s increased autonomy and self-control is also bound up with the new emphasis on her economic rationality, indicated in her business-like exchanges with Macheath in scene 9 [pp.72-3]. At the same time, the fact that she breaks down at the end of this encounter illustrates a further key element in the 1931 conception of her role, namely the conflict between her affective and rational tendencies. As well as being more internally conflictual, though, her role also becomes more complex – her capacity for playacting and deception, and her highly self-conscious control of discursive levels in her encounters with Lucy, are particularly important here [scene 8].

THEATRE:

The comments I’ve just made on role play, on discursive levels, on role conflict, bring us to the theatrical dimension of The Threepenny Opera. It clearly isn’t possible for me to give a detailed account of the theory and practice of epic theatre at this point, and so what I shall do is 1) give an impression of the direction in which Brecht’s views on theatre were moving 1928–31, 2) comment on aspects of the ‘standard’ 1931 version of The Threepenny Opera in terms of epic theatre.

As far as Brecht’s views on theatre are concerned, there are four main tendencies in his thinking from the mid 1920s onwards, and the general trend between 1928 and 1931 is that his views become more explicitly Marxist.

1. Brecht constantly attacks the dominant institution of the theatre, which he wishes to see replaced by a more experimental and politicized form of theatre that pays detailed attention to the economic structures of capitalist society and to class struggle.

2. He advocates a radical shift in the role and response of the audience, which must become more critical and questioning.

3. He is acutely aware of the need for a new type of writing for the theatre, which must deal with the complexities of capitalist society.

4. He tends increasingly to use a Marxist base/superstructure model in his accounts of cultural and social phenomena.

I shall deal with politics of theatre in the final section of this discussion and concentrate now on the means by which Brecht wishes to provoke the audience into a more critical and questioning response, in particular through his use of self-conscious theatricality.

Brecht was particularly concerned that the audience should not be deluded into thinking that what they saw on stage was a slice of real life, and so one of his techniques is to expose and undermine traditional dramatic devices. In structural terms, The Threepenny Opera is a classic piece of epic composition. It constantly undermines the evolutionary dynamic of dramatic writing in that there is no causal or organic link between one scene and the next, and linear flow within scenes is disrupted because they are organized in terms of montage. Moreover, the spectator’s awareness of the text’s epic structure is reinforced by its estrangement of traditional dramatic devices.

The Threepenny Opera consists of three acts, each of which has three scenes and culminates in a ‘Threepenny Finale’, but this symmetry is broken by the addition of a Prologue and an Interlude played in front of the curtain. Similarly, the text self-consciously plays with the temporal conventions associated with the neo-classical unities [note the references to clock time in scene 9]. These self-reflexive tendencies also underlie Peachum’s concession to the audience that the ending has been changed so that, in the opera at least, we will see justice tempered by mercy. The Threepenny Opera’s most provocative example of estrangement is, however, Polly’s thematisation of epic theatre as a demonstration or replay when she introduces the ‘Pirate Jenny’ song [scene 2, pp.19-20]. Her interpolation of epic theatre within epic theatre is particularly important in drawing the spectator’s attention to the link between the text’s estrangement of dramatic discourse and its presentation of role play.

The opening scene of The Threepenny Opera, with its sardonic presentation of the rhetoric of woe, is built around the notion that acting involves a distanced display of behavioural attitudes, so that we are invited from the beginning to consider the relationship between figures in the work and their roles. Are they no more than the passive products of the roles they play, do they suffer from role conflict, do they actively play their roles with distance? In Polly’s case, these questions are particularly difficult to resolve, presumably in order to frustrate any attempts at identification on the part of the spectator. While, on some occasions, she appears to be a rather adolescent and incorrigible romantic, on others she comes across as a hard-boiled business woman, lurching from role to role and even breaking down if the conflict between them becomes too acute. At the same time, we are made aware from the ‘Pirate Jenny’ song onwards of an element of duplicity and deceit in her behavior that compels us to ask ourselves constantly whether or not she is playing a particular role with distance.

Role distance is also crucial in the presentation of Macheath. He appears to be able to compartmentalize his roles when they threaten to come into conflict, and this leads to the abrupt discontinuities in his behavior instanced in his shifting attitudes first towards Polly and then towards his men in scene 4. Nevertheless, even Macheath is not entirely in control of his behaviour, and this is because he is a character in transition. Although he aspires to exchange the status of criminal for that of banker, his incomplete adoption of bourgeois role attributes is signalled by the discrepancies in and between his verbal and physical behavior in the wedding scene, ironically counterpointed by Mathias’s repetitions of his high-falutin diction [scene 2, p.17].

The Threepenny Opera’s highlighting of the link between role and discourse, graphically exemplified in Polly’s ability to find the mot juste when she takes on the leadership of the gang [scene 4, p.38], is fundamental to its unmasking of ideology. The text is characterized by frequent collisions of discursive level, notably in the course of Polly’s and Jenny’s altercation after the ‘Jealousy Duet’. Although in this latter case the text focuses on the figures’ skill in manipulating discourse, it also exposes the inseparability of language and ideology and their saturation of interpersonal behavior. This applies particularly to its demystification of the rhetoric of romantic love, which is inaugurated by Mrs. Peachum’s attack on the ‘Can’t-you-feel-my-heartbeat’ text (subsequently taken up in the love duet at the end of scene 2), and reaches a harrowing climax in Brown’s fond farewell to Macheath in scene 9. Indeed, The Threepenny Opera’s estrangement of discourse informs not just its presentation of love, but its investigation of all ‘natural’ human sentiments from friendship to filiality. The tone is set in the opening scene, where Peachum laments the threadbare nature of texts which are intended to provoke pity and generosity, but which have become debilitated through over-use. The juxtaposition of the registers of sentiment and economics, both here and in Polly’s comparison of the moon of love to a worn-down penny at the end of scene 4, also invites us to consider the materialist dimension to The Threepenny Opera’s account of social relations, so I shall now to go on to consider the work’s politics.

POLITICS:

Even since its premiere in 1928, The Threepenny Opera’s Marxist credentials have been a matter of controversy. The Threepenny Opera was subjected to a devastating attack in the communist daily The Red Flag, according to which it contained not a trace of political satire and reflected its authors’ inability to depict the revolutionary working class. As we’ve already seen, the 1931 version can be construed as an attempt to make amends in this respect, but it does so in a rather ambivalent manner. I shall try to bring out this ambivalence by looking at the work’s account of economic and sexual relationships, and I’ll finish by considering the work’s ‘revolutionary’ potential.

The exploitative nature of the capitalist economy is grotesquely demonstrated through the nature of Peachum’s business, as his employees exchange a proportion of their labour power for begging licenses. Although Peachum’s firm is a pre-industrial enterprise and the text does not address itself specifically to commodity production, it does emphasize the commercialization of all interpersonal relationships under capitalism, especially bourgeois marriage and prostitution. At the same time, it is precisely in the sphere of sexual relationships that the apparent primacy of economics is obscured. The ‘Ballad of Sexual Slavery’ [added in 1931] implies that Macheath’s behaviour is determined by his sexual appetites, and despite Brecht’s claim to the contrary (‘Texts by Brecht’, Methuen edition, pp. 92-3), Macheath’s virtual satyriasis is amply confirmed by the variety and frequency of his sexual encounters. Just as Peachum’s relationship to his employees denotes the economic organization of capitalism, so Macheath’s relationships to women and his implicitly homoerotic friendship with Brown indicate its sexual organization. The Threepenny Opera demonstrates that in bourgeois society, all forms of sexuality are defined in relation to the norm of masculinity. Thus, the sexual identity of women in particular, whether as wives, lovers or prostitutes, is presented as deriving from dependency on men, even though the precise nature of this dependency is mediated in socio-economic terms.

The text’s detailed attention to human sexuality is complemented by its recognition of other biologically based material needs, most starkly in the ‘Second Finale’: ‘Food is the first thing. Morals follow on’ (scene 6, pp. 55-6) At first sight, these words appear to lend credence to the view that Brecht’s position in The Threepenny Opera is ultimately no different from Freud’s in Civilisation and its Discontents, emphasising the primacy of biological needs and human viciousness, and implying that the conditions condemned in the ‘First Finale’ are natural and unchangeable rather than historical and political. However, this would be to overlook the fact that the immediate context of ‘Food is the first thing’ refers to the differential socio-economic distribution of the means to satisfy basic human requirements. There is a strong case for arguing that the text’s overall presentation of social relationships is consistent with Brecht’s thesis that the physicality of human beings must be construed in terms of socio-economic processes in which it is set. While this involves a crucial modification of Brecht’s more orthodox Marxist contention that the human essence is no more than an ensemble of societal relationships, it also means that The Threepenny Opera’s approach to material needs involves a descriptive and explanatory model, which avoids the pitfalls of both economic and biological reductionism.

The absurd deus ex machina which rounds off The Threepenny Opera, and underlines the absence of mercy and justice for all in the non-operatic world of capitalism, is put into perspective by Peachum’s reminder that the King’s messengers appear only infrequently and that the down-trodden will kick back. The Threepenny Opera’s materialist account of the ideological and social relations of capitalism thus seems to be complemented by a confident assurance of revolutionary praxis; nevertheless, the models of resistance encountered in the work are problematic. Typically, whether in Macheath’s ‘Forgiveness’ ballad in scene 9, the ‘Pirate Jenny’ song in scene 2, or the First Finale, ‘kicking back’ simply involves recourse to physical violence generated by resentment or frustration of material needs: it may well be that this is why Brecht stated in 1945 that, in the absence of a revolutionary movement, the work’s message was pure anarchism. There is certainly no attempt to present a revolutionary movement within The Threepenny Opera, but the work’s failure to engage with the problem of generating collective political action ultimately derives from its analysis of capitalism. While The Threepenny Opera provides a compelling account of ideology and commodification, from a Marxist point of view it is far less adequate in its consideration of social class. While the lower orders of capitalist society are presented exclusively as members of the Lumpenproletartiat, state power is embodied in the pathetic figure of Brown. Consequently, there is no real sense of class conflict in the work, nor of its grounding in the conflict between forces and relations of production. Although the final stanza of the ‘Third Finale’ ironically invites us to embark on a deconstruction of legal and religious superstructures, it seems to be oblivious of the fact that for Marx, the distorted conceptions of ideology can only be overcome practically, by changing the contradictory societal relations that generate ideology. The Threepenny Opera presents a fascinating interpretation of the world: but from a Marxist point of view, the point is to change it.

References and further reading

Brecht, Bertolt, The Threepenny Opera (London, Methuen, 1979) Collected Plays, Volume 2 Part 2, translated by Ralph Manheim and John Willett.

Giles, Steve, ‘From Althusser to Brecht: Formalism, Materialism and the Threepenny Opera’, in Richard Sheppard (ed) New Ways in Germanistik (Berg, 1990), 261-77.

Giles, Steve, ‘Rewriting Brecht: Die Dreigroschenoper 1928–1931’, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, 30 (1989), 249-79.

Hinton, Stephen, Kurt Weill – The Threepenny Opera (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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A Lehrstück on the Stage of the Berliner Ensemble? Alexander Eisenach’s Die Vielleichtsager (2022–2023)

Francesco Sani

Two things occupy my mind as I sit down in the auditorium of the Berliner Ensemble’s Neues Haus to watch Die Vielleichtsager, written and directed by Alexander Eisenach.[1] The first is the stage where a square platform is placed. A structure of poles sustains some curtains that depict two panels of a triptych by Edo Japan Woodblock-print artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi. I have seen this print before, but I need to resort to Google to remember the title. The triptych is titled “Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre” and shows a scene from legend where a sorceress summons a demon in the form of a giant skeleton to kill a warrior named Mitsukuni.[2] The panel where the sorceress is depicted does not appear, and the scene now seems to show a man hunted by an animated skeleton: what in the Western artistic tradition would correspond to a memento mori. The other thing is the conversation between playwright and director Alexander Eisenach and theatre scholar Patrick Primavesi that I have just read in the evening’s programme. Primavesi’s first lengthy contribution to the conversation provides some context on the Lehrstück, what Brecht meant by the term, and in what historical conditions he operated. Primavesi seems to focus quite a lot on the fact that Brecht worked on the Learning Plays as an experimentation and, as he states, without a solid aesthetic and political theorisation behind his work: “Ende der 1920er Jahre hat er an diversen Projekten gleichzeitig gearbeitet, dafür aber noch keine systematische Theorie und auch noch keine gefestigte politische Haltung. So wurde er in der Weimarer Republik mit seinen Stücken und Aufführungsversuchen auch von kommunistischer Kritik missverstanden.”[3] Primavesi also clarifies that the Lehrstück is about conducting an intellectual process through performance: “Es ging nicht um fertige Produkte, sondern um Prozesse, um experimentelle Versuche.”[4] Eisenach’s interventions reveal his interest in Brecht’s secularisation of ritual and his belief that the “Lehrstücke für uns heute vielleicht einen Wert haben, weil wir in einer stark ideologisierten, aber gleichzeitig entideologisierten Zeit leben.”[5]

I have expectations now: the performance programme promises a work in dialogue with Brecht’s original experiments and with the intention of tackling the subtle nature of ideological consensus in neoliberalism (Primavesi uses the term in the programme).[6] The scenography seems to hint at a central element of Brecht and Weill’s the Jasager, which is a rewriting of the Nō play Taniko: the use of elements drawn from Japanese culture but decontextualised and reinvented in a different (Western) aesthetic paradigm. As the platform starts rotating, it is possible to see that the pole structure divides it in four spaces, one of which is reserved for musicians Sven Michelson and Niklas Kraft, who perform on stage throughout the show. Malick Bauer starts singing the prologue of Brecht’s Jasager/Neinsager. The music is not Kurt Weill’s: Bauer sings while employing a voice synthesiser on a simple arrangement performed on percussions and guitar that feels like a pop song. The estranging experience of hearing Brecht’s speculative but straightforward lines on a catchy, modern musical base is followed by a change of scene that strongly echoes the Jasager: a scholar, performed by Peter Moltzen, is to go to the mountains to conduct research in hydrothermal energy to save Germany from an energy crisis during the cold winter of 2022. He informs his two students, Malick Bauer and Lili Epply, of the necessity to undertake this dangerous journey and eventually accepts to bring them along, insofar as they understand the responsibilities and risks that come with the endeavour. All three of them wear long white tunics, which resemble those in which ancient Chinese philosophers are traditionally depicted. The acting is a mixture of naturalistic mimesis interspersed with comical gags and stylised elements that seem to bear a ritualistic meaning, like the steady walk the two pupils perform at the start of the conversation with their teacher. Successively, one of the students, Lili Epply, starts narrating the beginning of the expedition and the passage from civilisation into the wilderness. This is followed by another dramatic scene in which one of the pupils, Malick Bauer, who sang the prologue, feels sick, and the teacher and the other student decide to leave him behind and kill him, this time with his consent. The scholar states that he brought a gun, and many in the audience around me laugh when he states so in a tone that hints at the fact that he is surprised at finding the weapon in his sleeve. Before shooting the student, he tears off one of the curtains. Once again, this appears as an almost ritualistic action, which however is not given a context of reference or purpose.

This took around half-an-hour, probably less. Now Lili Epply sings the Jasager’s prologue again. This time it sounds like a different genre of popular music: a melodical ballad in a style that, at first impression, makes me think of pop singer Adele. This time the role of the master/scholar is taken by Malick Bauer, who is to leave earth in the year 2122 on a mission to colonise Mars. Epply and Moltzen are not his students but his colleagues, whom he decides to bring along after they insist both on account of their scientific interest and the promise of a better life. Moltzen narrates the beginning of the expedition as Epply did before. Subsequently Epply asks to go back when she sees the earth from above: she is the one who cannot respect the duty undertaken by consenting to be part of the expedition. After a debate on the legitimacy of abandoning planet earth in a state of environmental destruction instead of trying to save it, Bauer and Moltzen reluctantly decide to kill Epply. A revolver appears in Bauer’s sleeve, and the two tear down the rest of the curtains wearing them like belts (another ritualised but uncontextualized action). However, Epply refuses to consent to her own killing and convinces them to go back to earth (she is, so to speak, a Neinsager who enables change in the collective). In the third and conclusive part of the performance, Moltzen sings the Jasager’s prologue as a punk rock tune. Epply is the scholar guiding the expedition, which in this case is a submarine journey to make contact with some intellectually advanced octopi that will prove to be a vital partner for humanity in the year 2222. Bauer narrates the first part of the journey. And Moltzen is the one to be killed because the molluscs species ask for a human sacrifice. Also, his colleagues find out that he purchases squid meat on the black market and accuse him of discriminating against the undersea species. He, however, answers with a “Vielleicht” when asked to give consent to his execution. The three performers take off their vests and remain in black tights. Now they question the very premises of the choice offered: the fact that maybe the human sacrifice was not requested but was a miscommunication with the octopi; that maybe it is not right to kill someone even when they are despicable individuals; or that maybe individual sacrifice is not always good for the collective or necessary.

When the lights are turned on in the auditorium and the audience starts applauding, I am aware that there is a message to process from the play. The message is a rather clearly outlined one and one I was made aware of when I first saw the production advertised on the Berliner Ensemble’s website: “Ist ein “Vielleicht” wirklich haltungslos? Oder kann es, anstatt an einem blinden Fortschrittsglauben festzuhalten, gerade einen Perspektivwechsel ermöglichen?”[7] To say maybe equals to establish a critical attitude, to open possibilities for discussion and change. The play I have just watched is a repetition of the same scenario subjected to variables. Brecht’s Jasager/Neinsager are clearly the model, providing both a parable-like narrative and the concept of subjecting the same scenario to variations. Eisenach’s Die Vielleichtsager, however, adds an element of resolution to the process of repetition and exploration of variables. The third scenario is presented as the one where the learning process is complete: the three characters learn to say maybe and ponder the variable of a situation of social conflict. They can get rid of the ritualistic garments and conclude the role-play. The previous scenarios, where consent to social violence was either given or refused, were functional to inform the final variation.

There are two narrative evolutions that can be distinguished in the play. The first is a circular one where each third of the performance is an alternative scenario. The other is linear and outlines a dialectical process in the Hegelian/Marxist sense: Thesis (Scenario 1, saying YES to the social norm); Antithesis (Scenario 2, saying NO to the social norm); Synthesis (Scenario 3, saying MAYBE to the social norm). Elements in the performance underline these two simultaneous processes. Each time a different performer sings the prologue of the Jasager, a different emotional landscape frames the uttering of Brecht’s lines, and a different embodied presence presents and filters the dilemma of consent and disagreement with social rules. The three musical performances are put at the same level in the sense that they are simply different interpretations of the same material. They establish a non-linear progression between the three scenarios by explicating circumstantial differences. Comical gags serve a similar function as they seem to emerge from circumstantial elements of each scenario. Finding the gun, which is always introduced by a percussion beat, is a good example. In the first and third scenario, it offers a reason for comical relief: in the first because Moltzen seems not to be aware and almost scared of having it in his possession, although his lines suggest that he is conscious of bearing a weapon; in the last because Epply appears to be happy to have a weapon with which to threaten Moltzen. On the other hand, a sense of linear continuation is given by the scene’s transformation, with the gradual removal of the curtains in association with the story’s repetition. As each section of the piece is concluded, the bare structure of the stage is easier to see, and the man hunted by the giant skeleton becomes a less prominent element. During the third repetition, the image from Kuniyoshi’s woodblock print is not visible at all. In the end, the performers give up their costumes in the act of saying maybe: the parable can be concluded on the third attempt when there is an act of sublation, of learning from variations and possibilities and of development of a new consciousness. The anarchy of subjective, casual, and circumstantial differences among scenarios is brought back to a clear and precise message in the act of saying maybe as an attitude towards participation in the collective.

Die Vielleichtsager is, arguably, not a Lehrstück. The process of exploration of social reality was at no point meant to actively involve all the people present in the auditorium, and a clear division between spectators as meaning-receivers and performers as meaning-makers was established. Whereas it has been argued that a Learning Play does not necessarily have to be a participatory performance,[8] the engagement with the dialectical process was kept on the level of something that spectators have no active role in processing but are simply shown. To put it in simpler terms, Brecht wrote the Jasager and eventually the Neinsager not to enforce a dichotomy but to allow for the exploration of options: not to point to a new form of subjectivity but to point at how a new subjectivity can be constituted. It should be clarified that the production was advertised as a piece inspired by Brecht’s Jasager/Neinsager, not as an attempt to develop a new Lehrstück. Furthermore, the very idea of the Lehrstück is arguably not fixed, and so it can be subjected to interpretation to a considerable extent. However, a certain degree of emphasis was applied in relating the piece to Brecht’s original work – testified to by the explicit references to Brecht’s Learning Plays both in the advertisement material and in the performance programme. Given the institutional identity of the Berliner Ensemble as both a mainstream cultural venue and as Bertolt Brecht’s theatre, it is worth raising a few points about the way a piece hosted and produced by this venue was inspired by the Brechtian concept of Große Pädagogik and how this concept was presented to the lay public.

It is my belief that a Lehrstück took place during the making of Die Vielleichtsager, although not on the stage for the audience to experience. What I mean is that Alexander Eisenach’s process of reading, appreciating, rewriting, and remaking on the stage Brecht’s material was the real Lehrstück. Eisenach’s play shows a deep engagement with Brecht’s Jasager, from the quoting of lines and narrative elements to the employment of a certain aesthetic orientalism to create an estranging effect. Of the three variations written by Eisenach, the first is meant to map the Jasager onto a contemporary narrative. The conflict between collective and individual good is transported in a realistic scenario where a scholar and his students can replace the teacher and the young pupils, and a scientific expedition can replace the journey to fetch medicine. Social participation is tied to the question of science, research practice, and its role in modern society. The other two variations are placed in contexts that we could frame as scientific fiction: the colonisation of Mars and the discovery of other species with the same cognitive and intellectual capacities as humans.[9] In both cases, the contention relies on the way scientific knowledge implies ties with social responsibility and of what the collective requires from those who are “nicht einverständen mit dem Falschen.” In the second scenario, the refusal of collective rule implies the refusal of the decision to abandon planet earth, which the group had agreed upon, instead of trying to mend human-induced damage. In the other, the refusal concerns, at least in the beginning, a self-preservation instinct: one of the crew members is afraid of the octopi. Eisenach’s text is interesting in the way he maps onto the Jasager elements of contemporary discussions on science and societal development, as well as tropes from scientific fiction and pop culture that feed into the ethical debate on science. Die Vielleichtsager, on a dramaturgical level, also provides an interesting juxtaposition between the individual body and collective norm. The challenge to collective expectation always comes from an uncontrolled function of the body. This could be illness, an emotional bewilderment triggered by seeing earth from space, or fear. In this sense, the making of the play could be a Lehrstück-process understood as a process of confrontation and experimentation with ideas in connection to an individual experience such as considering the function of science in modern society. The development of the musical score and of the scenography may be part of this process as well, at least at the level of pondering and reworking some aesthetic elements from the original Jasager (music as a way of establishing attitudes towards action; orientalism).[10]

However, the performance event in which I took part as a spectator was not a Lehrstück. At least in the way Brecht conceived of them, the Jasager does not invite us to say Yes, and the Neinsager does not invite us to say No. But the Vielleichtsager does invite us to say Maybe. The purpose of Brecht’s original experiments (regardless of how successful they may have been) was to stimulate critical thought on how to develop attitudes in response to conflictual aspects of social participation and to socially normalised violence. The Lehrstücke were an exercise in dialectical thought insofar as they helped to interiorise the process of dialectical thought itself, not to make people reach given conclusions.[11] What I saw on the Neues Haus stage was a parable-piece: a dialectical parable but a parable. The performance itself was engaging, and the ideas proposed would correspond to what I would call a critical perspective. But the social function of a production like this still falls within the terms of traditional dramatic theatre. It is a piece aimed at providing a message, which it delivers quiet effectively. However, the engagement with the nature of ideology in neoliberalism – a point rather emphasised in the presentation of the piece – can be questioned to an extent. Can market ideology[12] be questioned by providing a message about the necessity to be critical thinkers? This may be effective for some, maybe many. But at the same time, one has to reckon that even the act of partaking in cultural initiatives is in itself a field of human experience where the market dynamic of return-on-investment can be applied. Is it possible that the act of spending free time watching a piece of theatre is a form of adherence to ideology? Is it possible that saying maybe is a luxury not everyone can afford given the forms of social conflicts experienced by different groups and individuals? This is a contentious statement. As Alexander Eisenach proposes, we could answer with a maybe and we would probably be right in doing so. However, the way this production was realised and sponsored by an institution that has a strong historical association to Brecht’s legacy may highlight some relevant points to discuss in regard to any endeavour to work with and through the concept of Lehrstück.

The Berliner Ensemble has sponsored a production that revisits the concept of Lehrstück without considering many of the most challenging and potentially progressive elements of the practice: the training in a transformative model of thinking instead of the presentation of behavioural models; the opening of theatre to communities that do not access institutionalised culture (an opening move that in principle can be enacted by institutions as well); the exploration of processes of collective critical thinking and creative making. As I stated above, a Lehrstück took place. And it was functional to the development process of a theatre production. That the Learning Play can be understood as a dispositive is not a new opinion.[13] And a dispositive is, by definition, subjected to modalities of application. The Lehrstück can be a tool for theatre making available to artists who operate within the terms of traditional theatre. These artists may operate within the terms of ideological consensus or employ traditional theatre as a site of experimentation and activism (This depends on individual cases). At the same time, it is a dispositive for those who wish to take on the challenge of constituting a new social function for theatre as Brecht envisaged it. The Learning Play is a tool for the embodiment of dialectical thought. Like all tools, its employment depends as much on what it is capable of doing as well as what it is used for.

[1] The production premiered on October 28, 2022, and is to remain in the Berliner Ensemble’s repertoire for 2022–2023 season.

[2] Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Triptych of Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre, Woodblock print, c. 1844, Honolulu Museum of Arts.

[3] Alexander Eisenach and Patrick Primavesi, ‘„Nein, Jetzt brechen wir mit dem Brauch,“’ in Die Vielleichtsager von Alexander Eisenach – Spielplan, 6.

[4] Ibid., 7.

[5] Ibid., 10-11.

[6] Ibid., 11.

[7] Quote from the Berliner Emseble’s website: “Die Vielleichtsager von Alexander Eisenach,” https://www.berliner-ensemble.de/inszenierung/die-vielleichtsager (Last accessed 22.11.2022).

[8] See for instance: Hans-Thies Lehmann and Helene Varopoulou, “Zukunft des Lehrstücks (d.h. Lernstück),“ in Brecht Gebrauchen. Theater und Lehrstück – Texte und Methoden, eds. Milena Massalongo, Florian Vaßen, and Bernd Ruping (Berlin, Milow, Strasburg: Schribi-Verlag, 2016), 410-411; Micheal Wood, “A Future for the Lehrstück? Andres Veiel and Gesina Schmidt’s Der Kick and the Recycling of Form” in The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 42, eds. Tom Kuhn and David Barnett, 171-186.

[9] It should be noticed that neither scenario is something we consider entirely impossible. Efforts for the colonisation of Mars have been undertaken by billionaire Elon Musk among others; there is no evidence denying altogether the possibility of human-like intelligence in other species even if there is also no record of it (although bees and ants show very advanced capacities in this regard).

[10] I unfortunately did not have a chance to ask either the director or the performers about the production process, so this last statement should be considered as a hypothesis.

[11] See for instance: Florian Vaßen, ‘einfach zerschmeißen’: Brecht Material: Lyrik – Prosa – Theater – Lehrstück: mit einem Blick auf Heiner Müller (Berlin, Milow, Strasburg: Schibri-Verlag, 2021), 403-4.

[12] In the programme, the term “market ideology” in relation to neoliberalism is not employed. However, neoliberalism can be understood as the process of adapting any form of social interaction and any cultural activity or creative endeavour to models of market interaction, i.e., a market ideology. See: Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Palgrave, 2014). Hence, I use the terms as synonyms in this context. I also appreciate that the opinions expressed by both Alexander Eisenach and Patrick Primavesi in the performance programme do not necessarily refer to the production of Die Vielleichtsager or bear direct connection to it. What should be kept in mind is that these statements were associated with the performance as part of the production realised at the Berliner Ensemble.

[13] See: Hans-Thies Lehmann and Helmut Lethen, “Ein Vorschlag zur Güte [doppelte Polariät des Lehrstücks],” in Auf Anregung Bertolt Brechts: Lehrstück Mit Schülern, Arbeitern, Theaterleuten, ed. Reiner Steinweg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 302-317.

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**Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, Anna Seghers, and Sigmar Polke**

Caroline Rupprecht

The question of “hope” in the utopian philosophy of Ernst Bloch hinges on taking a risk. Prompted by Theodor W. Adorno to furnish “an explanation of what hope actually is”, Bloch responded: “Hope is the opposite of security. It is the opposite of naïve optimism. The category of danger is always within it” (15). It is what connects Bloch’s philosophy to the writings of Anna Seghers: having escaped the Nazis and spent 14 years in exile, Seghers returned to East Germany in the belief that, under communism, things could get better. This separates her from the younger-generation pop artist Sigmar Polke, whose family fled East Germany in 1954, and whose work in the West eventually culminated in what I identify in this essay as a form of nihilism or hopelessness.

Assuming that counter-culture in the West was informed by utopian impulses during the Sixties, I ask to what extent Bloch’s “utopian content” can still be seen in Polke’s paintings from the 1980s, whose Zeitgeist was shaped by the slogan “no future.” I begin by outlining Bloch’s process-oriented philosophy in relation to a short text by Seghers and in the second half of my essay treat a selection of Polke’s paintings. The theme of realism concerns me here in terms of how each of them uses historical referents, i.e., the degrees to which their fiction and visual art remain grounded in – or, conversely, depart from – the historical realities from which they emerged.

Bloch, in Vol.1, Part II of The Principle of Hope, in a section titled “Aporias of Realization,” describes the work of art as a “correlate” to reality:

the course of the world is still undecided, unclosed, and so also is the depth in all aesthetic information: this utopian factor is the paradox in aesthetic immanence…Without [it], aesthetic imagination would […] ultimately have no correlate. For the world itself, just as it is in a mess [das Arge], is also in a state of unfinishedness and in an experimental process out of that mess. (221)

One could not perceive the world as “unfinished”, were it not for this “correlate” of aesthetic information based on an imaginary world. Paradoxically, it represents something that does not (or: not yet) exist. Hence for Bloch the objet d’art (work of art) is the manifestation of a future and/or parallel world imagined by humans who – by virtue of this additional dimension – perceive reality as limited. This is what separates Bloch from Georg Lukács, who believed that the artistic imagination had to be restrained in order to avoid subjectivism and escapism, i.e., he believed in strictly mimetic forms of representation. I have published elsewhere (2006) on their 1937–38 debate over Expressionism, in which Seghers also took part, as she was defending a viewpoint similar to Bloch’s.

Bloch emphasized the importance of art, dreams, and fairy tales as ways to imagine alternative “realities.” Such visions constitute the basis of his defense of utopian desire – which requires an open-ended view of historical processes, including gaps and aporias: “as long as reality has not become a completely determined one, as long as it possesses still unclosed possibilities, in the shape of new shoots and new spaces for development, then no absolute objection to utopia can be raised” (197). Bloch critiques those who “treat history as a series of fixed moments or closed totalities [because] images that mediate the anticipations [of the future] take place in the process of reality itself; and they move forward in the concrete dream so that these unanticipated elements are part of reality” (144, my emphases).

Bloch’s expanded definition of “reality” as containing a utopian dimension works with the writings of Seghers, because she moved from real-life events to their representation in literature – hence continued the “survival” of reality through fiction. Like Bertolt Brecht, whose Verfremdungseffekt included real and imaginary dimensions simultaneously – e.g., in The Good Person of Szechwan, when Wang the Water Seller reads from an imaginary book and Shen Teh addresses an imaginary child – Seghers used fantasy and storytelling to critique reality. And, like their contemporary Walter Benjamin, she conceived of historical reality vis-à-vis a future, anticipated reality. As Richard Wolin explains, Benjamin conceived of “historical [humans as] condemned to dwell in the profane, godless continuum of history” but also believed that if “one acts radically, from one’s own innermost convictions, there is still the distant, infinitesimal hope that one is somehow hastening the advent of [a different future]” (117).

Let me give you an example: After Seghers, in 1946, had returned to East Berlin, she wrote a letter to a friend in Mexico (Kurt Stavenhagen), in which she described visiting a school in one of the Displaced Person camps that were administered by the United Nations and, between 1945 and 1952, sheltered more than 250,000 Jewish survivors of the Shoah. As stated by the Washington, D.C. Holocaust Museum, conditions in these camps were quite bleak, yet: “Schools were soon established and teachers came from Israel and the United States to teach the children.” Seghers was impressed by one of the DP pupils’ essays, shown to her by one of the teachers. She restated its content in her letter, thus conveying the child survivor’s traumatic historical experiences, as captured in writing:

Eine kleine Schülerin stand mit ihrer Familie auf dem Marktplatz eines polnischen Städtchens. Bombardement. Sie rennen auseinander. Sie sehen sich nie mehr im Leben wieder. Das Kind rennt tief in den Wald, es wird Nacht, ein Wolf kommt. Es weint, auf den Tod gefasst. Der Wolf sieht es an und tut ihm nichts. Es glaubt, weil es so stark weinte und gar so schmutzig und zerfetzt war, so dass der Wolf es auch für ein Tier hielt.

We do not have the pupil’s original essay, but in Seghers’s rendering, the antagonist is a “wolf,” which prompted Helène Roussel to interpret the story as a Little Red Riding Hood tale in reverse (309). Indeed, due to her “raggedy” appearance, the child is able to escape unharmed. However, this is only the first (or: “second,” counting the pupil’s) version of the original text. Seghers published it, with slight alterations, as part of her 1948 article, “Passagiere der Luftbrücke” in the East German journal Aufbau, which details the plight of the Jewish DPs in postwar Berlin. Here it reads as follows:

[In einem] Aufsatz in einem der Schulhefte [schrieb eine Schülerin:] ‚Ich stand mit meiner Mutter und meinen Geschwistern auf unserem Marktplatz. Wir sahen nach den Fliegern. Wir wussten gar nicht, warum auf einmal so viele kamen. Da begann das deutsche Bombardement. Wir rannten auseinander. Ich habe meine Mutter und meine Geschwister nie im Leben mehr wiedergesehen. Ich rannte und rannte tief in den Wald. Es wurde dunkel. Ich fand mich nicht mehr zurecht. Ich weinte und hatte Angst. Auf einmal kommt ein grosses und böses Tier. Es hatte glühende Augen. Ich dachte, jetzt ist es aus mit mir. Das Tier sah mich an, es ging aber weiter. Ich glaube, es hat mir nichts getan, weil ich so zerrissen und schmutzig war, dass es glaubte, ich sei auch ein Tier.‘

Seghers’s intent was to muster sympathy among German readers, who perceived the “raggedy-looking” refugees in the DP camps as a nuisance. After they had survived concentration camps in the East, they were now awaiting transportation to further camps in Bavaria, via the Luftbrücke (air lift). Hence, when Seghers published the article in Aufbau, the child’s story not only furnished documentary evidence for the historical experience of those who survived the Shoah, it also illustrated how it felt to be “hunted” by German soldiers. In this version, the “bombs” were identified as “German”; and the wolf called a generic “Tier…gross und böse … mit glühenden Augen” – evoking searchlights in the chase after fugitives in the dark.

To Seghers’s chagrin, as Klaus Schulte has documented, the article was altered by Aufbau. It was edited to sound as if she ascribed the very stereotypes to Jewish DPs that she was, in actuality, seeking to dismantle. The West German press – absurdly, given that Seghers herself was Jewish – attacked her article as, supposedly, “antisemitic.” Seghers became caught up in the politics of the two ideologically opposed postwar German sectors. The American sector’s efforts to re-educate Germans, by making them look at antisemitism clashed with the SED’s pretense of having defeated antisemitism by virtue of being a new, communist Germany. Seghers, now subjected to this new regime, was not supposed to make a case on behalf of “her” (i.e., the Jewish) people – this was considered to be no longer necessary (on the effects of antisemitism on GDR authors, see for example Agnes Mueller).

Seghers seems to have expressed her own predicament, however, when she created a third (or: “fourth”) version of the story – this time published as “fiction” – in 1953. Between 1949-52, many returning Jews had left for Israel or the U.S. due to another wave of antisemitism, but Seghers decided to stay in the GDR. Maintaining her own Hoffnung for a better future, she allowed the voice of the Jewish DP child to survive and be heard:

Schulaufsatz

Wir gingen einmal auf den Markt in Sielcek, meine Mutter und ich. Wir kauften zum Einmachen Pflaumen. Es war warm. Auf einmal kamen sehr viele Flugzeuge. Wir glaubten, es seien unsere. Wir guckten alle hinauf. Da fielen die Bomben vom Himmel herunter. Die ganze Stadt brannte. Wir rannten nach allen Richtungen fort. Ich fand meine Mutter nicht mehr. Ich sah sie auch nie mehr im Leben wieder. Ich lief immer weiter vor Entsetzen. Ich lief in den Wald. Es wurde dunkel. Ich weinte. Auf einmal kam ein ganz grosses Tier. Es sah mich mit glühenden Augen an, als ob es mich fressen wollte. Dann lief es weg. Es hat nicht gemerkt, dass ich ein Kind war. So zottig, so wild sah ich aus, dass es mich auch für ein Tier hielt.

In this further fictionalized, final version of the story, Seghers omits the first-person narrator’s insertion “ich glaubte.” Thereby the child’s perception – in the universe of the story – becomes more realistic: it is not she who is in doubt about her own human identity as an effect of her ragged appearance, but the “animal”. Its inability to perceive the human underneath the supposed “Tier” makes it – not the child – appear foolish. If the animal were, metaphorically speaking, the Nazis who had tried to hunt the girl down, their power now seems dismantled by what becomes an effective camouflage. The girl’s story also functions, I believe, as a political allegory about a “sheep in wolf’s clothing”: in order to survive, the child tricks her pursuers by looking “zottig” and “wild,” like an animal, but underneath, knows that she is human.

One might find echoes here of Seghers’s own situation, as she has been criticized for supposed complicity with the GDR regime: to survive under this new communist government, the author had to “disguise” herself by seeming complicit; yet as I’ve tried to demonstrate, she did not actually renounce her own critical point of view. Fiction became Seghers’s vehicle to express the horrors of the child survivor’s experience that was, ultimately, retained, because Seghers published and re-published her story.

I now juxtapose this to Sigmar Polke who, at a later point in German history, used a similar method of presenting audiences with different versions (or a series) of the same “tale” or motif. What links Polke to Seghers in biographical terms is that he grew up in the GDR until age 13. Born in Silesia in 1941, his family were expellees (Vertriebene), who fled to East Germany in 1945. Polke experienced his formative years as socialized under communism. Before that, Polke’s father had worked under the Nazis as a supervisor at the Linke-Hofmann-Werke in Breslau-Hundsfeld, an “Aussenlager,” of the KZ Gross-Rosen; and in January 1945, its approximately 700–1,000 Zwangsarbeiter were deported to the extermination camp Buchenwald – this part of Polke’s early childhood was something his father never talked about.

Around the time Polke turned 13, the family fled further West, to Düsseldorf, where he completed an apprenticeship in Glasmalerei (glass painting), then studied at the Art Academy. The affluence to which he was exposed upon his arrival in the Wirtschaftswunder clashed with his experience of extreme poverty and deprivation in the GDR. Stunned by the sudden availability of food and consumer goods, Polke engaged with commercial culture during the early 1960s in what can be described as German pop art. In 1963, he and his friend Gerhard Richter, another GDR-émigré, founded “Capitalist Realism” as a pun on Socialist Realism.

Polke painted socks, cookies, and sausages and turned to experimenting with different backgrounds, media, and materials. He worked on, as Godfre Leung points out, “a heterogeneity of surfaces […] All manners of materials are painted on, from canvas to quilted fabric to patterned fabric to bubble wrap.” As the Polke MoMA site states, he was “extracting dye from boiled snails, and using materials as varied as gold leaf, meteorite powder […] potatoes, and soot.” And, he became known for working with highly poisonous substances – such as uranium and cobalt nitrate – to create paintings that changed over time. An example mentioned by Marcella Polednik is his “hygroscopic wall painting for the 1986 Venice Biennale, for which [he used] paint sensitive to humidity. The subtle washes of pigment continually changed hue from blue to magenta, depending on the moisture of the Venetian climate and the body heat exuded by the pavilion’s visitors” (226). As noted on the website of his daughter Anna’s foundation, Polke make “paintings that changed, depending on the angle one looked at them, and on the current temperature”; and as Leung elaborates, he applied chemical agents “as if they were coats of paint, [which then] produces the illusion that the picture plane is unfixed and could yet develop further” (my emphasis).

This sense of change and heightened temporality brings Polke’s work into the vicinity of Bloch, who conceived of “depth” in the work of art as emerging from a process of “disintegration”: “[The] beautiful breaks into life when the varnish cracks. When the surface pales or darkens, as in the evening when the light falls obliquely and the mountains emerge. The shattering of the surface, and furthermore of the merely cultural-ideological context in which the works have stood, exposes depth wherever it exists” (219, my emphases). Bloch points away from the “cultural-ideological context” to introduce “depth” as an opening, a new perspective. What remains to be seen, in Polke’s work, is to what extent historical referents are included or, conversely, occluded or obfuscated in favor of disavowing historical reality.

At first, in the 1960s, Polke referred to the history of National Socialism by putting its images and symbols, such as the swastika, on display. In the context of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past) he and his fellow German artists, like Richter, engaged critically and through irony with Germany’s denial of the Shoah. Examples of this are Polke’s “Erscheinung der Swastika” (1963) and “Spuk mit Hakenkreuz” (1965).[1] The artist wanted Germans to “not look away” from their Nazi past and therefore shocked his audience with gestures such as using a Hitler greeting at one of his art openings in 1976,[2] as well as building a model of the Auschwitz-gate and inscribing it with: “Kunst macht frei.”[3]

New York art critic Benjamin Buchloh looked back at these in 2013 and described them as legitimate responses to a culture of repression during a time when Germans “piously” thought they had begun to atone for Nazi crimes: “there was a false piety and Polke is undermining it by doodling swastikas.” Buchloh further suggested that, for Polke, it was the “undermining and sabotage of mythical forms of experience […] that were key motivations.”

However, interestingly, Buchloh distinguishes his views of Polke’s work depending on their time period: “As far as the specific references to Nazism were concerned, one has to differentiate Polke’s work of the 1980s from those of the 1960s” (200). For instance, in 1982, Polke painted Lager[4]about which Buchloh remarked: ”It is hard to know what to think of paintings like [this, it] could be seen as totally opportunistic” (200). At that time, Germany had begun to internationally export artists like Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, to show the world that it was overcoming its ugly past – so Polke might have wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Still, Lager is offensive in that it aestheticizes the KZ’s barbed wire fence and surveillance lamps, as if they were decorative motifs: he depicts them harmoniously, in warm brown and yellow colors, painted with soft brushstrokes. Buchloh speculated: “It could [have been] an underhanded commentary on the celebratory reception of Anselm Kiefer in the United States [in that it] failed to provide the false cathartic impact that Kiefer’s work later provided” (202). This would make sense in that postmodern artists tended to refer to other postmodern artists, yet that only further trivializes the horrors of genocide.

In fact, Buchloh seemed at a loss as to what to make of this painting and concluded only that “it’s complicated.” Let me therefore mention some other, more complex paintings by Polke from the 1980 that also appear in a series of different variations over time. They raise the question of realism in terms of how their historical referent is featured and then disappears. The series of 5-7 paintings called Hochsitz (Watchtower) from 1984–1988 depict a surveillance tower that could refer to a lookout tower for hunting in the forest, a KZ watchtower, or a watchtower from the Berlin Wall – or all of the above.

The 1984 Hochsitz at MoMA[5]displays a mimetic rendering of the wooden structure, whose intersecting angles seem, looked at up-close, starkly dominating. The geometrical, architectural beams are set against a background of two different stretches of cheap, patterned fabric: the one on the left indicating what might be the glittering strobe lights of a “disco”; the other depicting a rather unappealing flower design, as in petty-bourgeois, GDR-style wallpaper. The MoMA label states that the two types of wallpaper might refer to Polke’s inability to inhabit either East or West, since both seem “ugly”.

The central structure is the tower, and it is punctuated by white areas as if backlit, or surrounded by searchlights (suggesting a similar eerie feeling of being “hunted” as in the story by Seghers). This makes it seem as if the viewer were also caught under surveillance. Yet, there is no clear, overall source of light, adding to the general sense of chaos in this painting. There is a spiraling white line to/from the bottom of the canvas, which might function as an emblem for a “death spiral” and/or the Todesstreifen of the Berlin Wall. This painting makes its historical referent – the tower – discernible but changes in its subsequent incarnation: Hochsitz II.[6]

In the first Hochsitz, we can still see the tower. In its later, chemically self-destructing version, again Hochsitz II, the tower has nearly disappeared. The historical referent is obscured. If the referent is German history, the tower was initially invested with mythological significance, i.e., the German forest, deer hunting, etc. – but then all of that disappears. With the darkened Hochsitz II (1984–85) according to Kathy Halbreich, Polke “created a painting that would continue to blacken over time with exposure to light. Its material fluctuations mirrored the unstable meaning of the subject, a structure used variously to survey the habitat of hunted animals […], and to guard the concentration camp, [thus] suggesting how an ideology of vision dependent on willful blindness once functioned in the everyday lives of Germans” (my emphasis). Halbreich relates the themes of surveillance and obscurity to “blindness” and extracts historical significance. However, if the painting changes so much, collapsing into darkness with the disappearance of its central subject (the tower), how can the viewer know it is supposed to be a specifically German “blindness” to which it refers? Could it not be just “blindness” or “darkness” in general? Can one not also conclude that Polke simply obfuscated the historical referent to make its specificity conveniently disappear?

Whereas Bloch’s philosophy suggested the possibility of imagining more than one world, Polke’s painting implies a reduction, a flattening or leveling (to one-dimensionality) of potential historical consciousness. There is no longer any reference to the historical reality of the German past or to utopian dreams of a better future. Instead of looking back to learn from the past or forward in hope of a better future, this painting undoes the “depth” of which Bloch speaks.

In the spirit of a 1980s “no future,” at the height of the Cold War, things were dark indeed. Polke’s painting, to his credit, illustrates this. However, in what strikes me as a polar opposite to Seghers, he stages a descent into apocalyptic time. He refers to “temporality” in its most heightened form – yet seems to reach an impasse by virtue of what seems to be an inherent contradiction: a historical consciousness that nonetheless ends up refusing to engage with either past or future.

Disconcertingly, Polke’s Hochsitz II doesn’t depict the kind of darkness that would be comforting (as in the forest where one could hide from predatory animals, as in the child survivor’s story by Seghers). This darkness is not benign, it’s when chaos takes over and, in fairy tale terms, the monsters are free to reign. As I have tried to demonstrate, the painting reenacts a reverse temporality that is devoid now of the kind of utopian content in which Bloch and Seghers had been invested at a previous historical moment.

When punk arrived, in the late 1970s, the Zeitgeist was nihilistic, the slogan “no future” emblematic of what can now be identified, looking back at Polke’s work, as a loss of utopian content. One might say that, in this counter-utopian apocalyptic vision, darkness, literally and metaphorically, began to take over. The 1980s brought about the election of Ronald Reagan, AIDs, and many other changes that may connect to some of the problems we currently experience, such as the rise of a global alt right and a recurrence of antisemitism in heightened form (none of these hope-inspiring).

Perhaps, in retrospect, the Hochsitz series anticipated current retrogressive, reactionary developments insofar as it makes one wonder what happened to its actual historical referent, i.e., the “reality” to which it initially referred: why has this subject matter (the tower) been made to disappear from the scene of the paintings? Perversely, the viewer is prompted by Polke’s self-destructive and performative objet d’art to wish for this surveillance tower to return, as it was its central, most discernible image. Its traces are nearly gone, but one seems prompted, in spite or because of this explicitly changing nature of the painting’s material condition, to “hang on” to the memory of the tower’s structure, to want even to arrest the progression of time. This occurs in absentia of any vision for the future – which would have been the “correlate” of which Bloch wrote in The Principle of Hope. For that, one would have needed another image. Hence, one is prompted, when looking at this final, darkened image, to hang on to the visual memory of a structure used only for hunting, surveillance, and genocide. This begs the question as to why would one want to return to this? Polke plays with these ideas and perceptions, but leaves it unclear as to how this perpetually changing, eventually disappearing, refers to Germany’s history of actual darkness. In that sense, the painting leaves the viewer with nothing but hopelessness.

REFERENCES

Adorno, Th. W. and Ernst Bloch. Discussion moderated by Horst Krüger, in: Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art.

Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vol. 2. Trans. The Principle of Hope.

Bloch, Ernst. Brief, Erbschaft unserer Zeit. Trans. Heritage of our Time.

Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Person of Szechwan. Trans. John Willet. NY: Arcade.

Halbreich, Kathy. „Alibis: An Introduction.“ Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010, eds. Halbreich, Godfrey, Tattersall, and Schaefer. New York: MoMA, 2014. 66-93.

Halbreich, Kathy. “c. 1976: An Interview with Benjamin Buchloh (2013)” Alibis. 196-205.

Leung, Godfre. “Leaving Düsseldorf.” Artjournal (Winter 2015): 64-69.

Mueller, Agnes C. „Jüdische Dissidentin mit Maske: Barbara Honigmanns Auswanderung aus der DDR,“ in Kahane, Annetta and Martin Jander, eds. Juden in der DDR. Leipzig, 2021. 191-201.

Polodnik, Marcelle. “Making History: Watchtower II and Photography.” Alibis. 218-227.

Roussel, Helène. „Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben des Friedens: Zu drei vergessenen Kurzgeschichten ‚Kinder des zweiten Weltkriegs.‘“ Argonautenschiff 13, 2004. 294-309.

Schulte, Klaus. ‚Ich wollte eine widerwärtige Erscheinung verständlich machen: ‘Editorische Anmerkungen zu Anna Seghers’ ‚Passagiere der Luftbrücke‘ und zu ihrem Protest gegen redaktionelle Eingriffe in den Text bei seinem Abdruck in der Zeitschrift Aufbau.“ Argonautenschiff 8, 1999. 96-102.

Seghers, Anna. „An Kurt Stavenhagen.“ Briefe 1924–1952, ed. Christiane Zehl-Romero. Berlin: Aufbau, 2008. 220.

Seghers, Anna. „Passagiere der Luftbrücke (Abschied von der UNRRA)“ Argonautenschiff . 89-92.

Seghers, Anna. „Schulaufsatz,“ in: Frieden der Welt: Ansprachen und Aufsätze 1947–1953. Berlin, 1953.

Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

[1] Both drawings are owned by Michael Werner Gallery. They are reprinted as, respectively, Figure 1 on p. 253 and Figure 40 on p. 259 of the 2014 MoMA catalogue to the exhibition, Alibis, edited by Kathy Halbreich.

[2] A photo is reprinted in Halbreich, ed., Alibis, p. 42, as part of the introductory chronology by Kathrin Rottmann.

[3] A photo is reprinted in Halbreich, ed., Alibis, p. 82, as part of Halbreich’s introductory essay to this catalogue.

[4] The painting Buchloh refers to is in a private collection, but can be found on the internet.

[5] The painting hangs at MoMA in New York. See the MoMA website, under artist “Sigmar Polke” for a photo. It is also reprinted in the Alibis catalogue, ed., Halbreich, on p. 220, identified there as a “fractional and promised gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder.”

[6] The painting is at Carnegie in Pittsburgh and reproduced in Alibis, p. 219, for Marcelle Polednik’s essay. It is labeled as part of the “William R. Scott, Jr. Fund.”

[Back to Table of Contents]

Twin Branches of the Epic Tree: Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator and Interventionist Aesthetics in the Post-War Germanies

Mark W. Clark

Anglophone scholars Minou Arjomand and Drew Lichtenberg have recently reexamined the career trajectories of Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator in tandem and have reaffirmed not only their historical significance to the development of Epic Theater in the 1920s, but also the ongoing centrality of their aesthetic projects to German, to broader Western, and to global culture.[1] More recently still, Laura Bradley has claimed that both men “saw history not as a separate realm, but as something to be explored for its relevance to, and difference from the present.” Building upon their work, I argue that Brecht’s and Piscator’s interventionist aesthetics in the very different post-war historical contexts of East and West Germany provided critical engagement with the recent past and a spur to historical consciousness.[2] In their theoretical and expository writing of the period, and in their theater practice, they also engaged with the German cultural patrimony in ways that offered their contemporaries – and us in the hypernormalized post-truth epoch – strategies for understanding and changing the present.

During interregnum between the Weimar Republic and divided Germany, Brecht and Piscator both significantly modified their views in response to the radically changing political and cultural context. By the late 1940s, Brecht described his own approach as dialectical, and Piscator called for a Bekenntnis Theater or “Theater of Confession.” Yet even in their post-1945 reflections, they saw their different strategies as natural outgrowths of an earlier, revolutionary moment and a common enterprise. Both, for example, understood that the Great War and its aftermath had created massive political and cultural ferment and a corresponding opportunity for a new, more progressive order to emerge. For Piscator, looking back from the post-1945 period, the concept of the Epic had developed almost organically out of “the very agile, very powerful, very revolutionary working class” of the period. He came to see that he had to reckon with “political, economic, and societal oppression [and] struggle” and that the theater needed to make the “complexity, the totality of our fundamental problems of life…visible.”[3] Brecht affirmed almost precisely that sentiment in 1936: theater, he wrote, should be “a place for philosophers, and for such philosophers as not only wish to explain the world but wish to change it.” Theater should create “a powerful movement in society which is interested to see vital questions freely aired with a view to their solution.”[4] The lessons Brecht and Piscator first learned in the 1920s led them to adopt an interventionist aesthetic and a cultural approach that was anti-naturalistic and anti-illusionist, that helped to dethrone both scenic realism and the traditional requirements of characterization, but also one that encouraged audiences to think critically about the way things had come to be, and how they might be different.

If Bekenntnis Theater and Dialectical Theater had their origins in the context that gave rise to the Epic theater, they evolved along distinct lines out of the experience of exile. Despite several aborted attempts, Brecht and Piscator never successfully worked together after Weimar.[5] Nor was there any discernible cross-pollination of ideas and practices, even if they each recognized the importance of the other. Piscator went first to the Soviet Union just as the shift from the cultural egalitarianism of the first five-year period toward a much more restrictive socialist realism was occurring. Although his experience of Stalinism did not lead to his total disillusionment with Communism – as it would for Ignazio Silone and many another Western European intellectual – it did place him on a trajectory away from his earlier revolutionary idealism. After a short sojourn in France, Piscator moved to the United States, where he took up a position as the director of the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research.[6] This period ushered in an important transitional moment in the development of Piscator’s approach, in which the first hints of the Bekenntnis Theater that was to come flickered amid the older modes and methods of Epic theater.

Piscator did not publish extended works after The Political Theater – and nothing at all between 1929 and 1942 – thus scholars have had to rely on speeches, short essays, and program notes, as well as his unpublished diaries, to see the progression of his political and aesthetic thought. John Willett convincingly argues that there was never a dramatic shift in Piscator’s political thinking, but that he did moderate his extremism. Unlike Brecht, Piscator also never engaged in a deep philosophical investigation of Marxism, and it became clear over time that he was not as intellectually wedded to the ideology. His public utterances after 1942 indicate that his political views were at least consonant with the social democratic-humanistic political outlook of Alvin Johnson, the New School’s director.[7] Piscator continued to promote the “political theater,” and remained committed to a material approach to reality, but he also came to see it as “an incomparable instrument for the expression of all human experience and thought.”[8] As Thea Kirfel-Lenk has written, he was interested not just in “the struggle against aggression, oppression and tyranny,” but also “the realization of democracy and the recognition of human rights.”[9] If Piscator turned away from his earlier revolutionary idealism, he continued to believe that dramatic art could promote change by helping to bring about the values of a new societal order. Theater, he argued, should strive toward the humanistic ideal because the future “which so darkly threatens our world can be productive for art if it is ready in this decisive moment to accept its own responsibility to serve humanism.”[10] It was also at the Dramatic Workshop that Piscator began to stage history in plays such as The Burning Bush, wherein audiences were directed to utilize the past to recognize contemporary forms of oppression and injustice and to fight against them.

In contradistinction to Piscator, Brecht began what became a sustained study of Marxist theory during the Weimar Republic, when, according to Anthony Squiers, he embraced dialectical materialism as “an analytical framework for understanding the social world” that also offered “a purpose for his artistic expression.”[11] Focusing on his early plays, Astrid Oesmann argues that Brecht had already begun to present historical materialism on stage before 1927, but his subsequent study of Marx and Lenin taught him that history moves predictably, as successions of contradictions. Theater had to reflect this reality. Indeed, Brecht wrote that “Plays, especially with…historical content cannot be written intelligently in any other framework.”[12] Oesmann has further argued that “Brecht’s experiments with theater and politics created a genuinely theatrical concept of historical materialism.”[13] Theater should also prepare the way for the coming new order by helping audiences to understand what produced the current reality that had been taken as given and thus disrupting the old cultural hegemony. So, dialectical materialism became the basis for Brecht’s understanding of history, as well as for societal and cultural critique.[14]

Brecht’s theoretical work in exile culminated in Short Organon for the Theater, published in Sinn und Form shortly after his arrival in East Berlin, in which he again pointed to the need for theater “to make use in its representations of…dialectical materialism.” This method uncovered “society’s laws of motion” by treating “social situations as processes.” It regarded nothing as existing “except insofar as it changes,” including “human feelings, opinions, and attitudes through which at any time the form of men’s life together finds its expression.” The theater should not merely “release the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place,” but should also employ and encourage “those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself,” which “had to be defined in historically relative terms.” Theater practitioners and playwrights needed to stop stripping the “social structures of the past of everything that makes them different,” so that they seemed timeless. Instead, they should “leave them their distinguishing marks and keep their impermanence always before our eyes, so that our own period can be seen to be impermanent too.” Even works that dealt with contemporary issues should be played “as though they were historical,” so that “the circumstances under which [the spectator] acts will strike him as equally odd; and this is where the critical attitude begins.” Finally, historical conditions had to be seen as “created and maintained by men (and will in due course be altered by them).”[15]

When Brecht resumed his life in Germany shortly before the GDR was officially established – and four years before Piscator’s return – he found Germans still struggling to emerge from the moral and material devastation of the Second World War. A deeply committed Marxist-Leninist, he believed that the GDR represented the best chance for the progressive Germany he had long envisioned, and he sought to recruit former collaborators and prominent theater practitioners, including Piscator, for the task ahead.[16] As Marc Silberman has shown, Brecht was not a “naïve believer in the inevitability of progress and human emancipation.”[17] He certainly understood that Marxism had not been established through working class revolution, but was being constructed. As he responded to the new reality, he adopted what Anthony Tatlow has described as Lenin’s approach in “On Ascending the High Mountain,” according to which a mountain climber develops a theory about how to advance, but then changes his approach as he climbs, depending upon the material realities that confront him.[18]

Among the challenges was a long-delayed reckoning with the German cultural tradition, including its complicity in the twelve-year Third Reich, a particularly fraught undertaking because the GDR had drawn a thick line between itself, as the heir of anti-fascism, and the brown-shirted past.[19] Moreover, as it attempted to reclaim the “progressive” elements of the old high culture, the regime proscribed criticism of figures such as Goethe and Schiller. But Brecht resisted the East German regime’s attempt to rehabilitate the cultural patrimony uncritically.[20] From his point of view, Germans had not dealt sufficiently with the materialist explanations for the fascist period, and even in East Germany, where Marxism-Leninism was the official ideology, history had not been understood dialectically.

According to Stephen Brockmann, Brecht had already “developed a sustained and thoroughgoing critique of German history and cultural traditions” before his return to Germany,[21] as can be seen in his plays Mother Courage – his first major post-war success – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. Even more critical were his adaptations of The Tutor, which pointed up “the ‘failure’ of German classicism,” his treatment of Urfaust, and his own Turandot, which served both as a critique of the German and broader Western intellectual traditions and of the policies and actions of the East German cultural elite in the events surrounding June 1953.[22] Beginning in the Weimar republic, Brecht had developed a pronounced skepticism about grand historical narratives, and he sought to destroy, though his plays, traditional notions of history and subjectivity. Instead, he sought, as Astrid Oesmann has argued, to “release [history and ideology] into disturbing theatrical investigation.”[23] But Brecht insisted that theater should help audiences understand the structures of the present reality and how they came to be, over time through the dialectic, which required them to take a critical stance toward the vaunted cultural traditions of the German nation.[24] Only then could they properly orient progressive action.

Returning to West, rather than East, Germany, Piscator found himself “between the blocks,” as Wolf Gerhard Schmidt claims, “a critic [both] of the normative cultural order of state socialism” and of “the market-oriented system of the Federal Republic.”[25] His dramaturgy at the time, Lichtenberg argues, was “broadly in keeping with the mainstream of the moderate, social-democratic humanism of the postwar Federal Republic, bearing chastened witness to the realities of a post-Nazi, post-Holocaust, post-nuclear epoch.”[26] Germans, Piscator found, had breathed the unhealthy air of “restoration and conformism,” and needed to be “brought down to earth, [shown] reality so forcefully that they cannot evade the decisions that will determine their future.”[27] Piscator thus attempted to convince Germans to face up to their immediate past through the plays he directed, because a nation that “attempts to cut itself off from its past…will become…a nation without a history.”^[28] The theater needed to play a critical role by “revealing to the spectator his own history, the history of society, political history.”[29] Piscator remained hopeful that theatrical art could “build a hopeful way into the future”[30] by bringing “society and the individual into dialectical confrontation,” and by promoting knowledge and reflection.[31]

Piscator was more sanguine about the usefulness of the German classical tradition than Brecht; if adapted to meet the challenges of the post-war period, this tradition offered a way to reground German culture. But the classical repertoire could not be staged on a purely historical basis. Especially in times of cultural crisis “new interpretations of the classics” had to be developed.^[32] Works such as Schiller’s The Robbers could to be called upon to show a cultural ideal – a humanistic tradition of values unspoiled by fascism. They could bring forward the healthier aspects of the tradition and make the “classical patrimony useful.”^[33] While The Robbers was a useful political play that focused on the more general problems of freedom,^[34] Lessing’s Nathan the Wise offered a plea for tolerance and solidarity.^[35] Piscator’s first post-war German production of the play – a popular and critical success – took place at a theater just forty meters from the site of the Marburg synagogue, which had been destroyed during Kristallnacht. “Never,” Piscator wrote, “did the Nathan experience touch my soul as here, in the [city] in which I grew up and which was known as strongly anti-Semitic.”^[36] In staging Nathan in Marburg in 1952, he was attempting to convince West Germans to face up not only to their past but also to the ongoing problem of racism so that they could embrace toleration and promote solidarity in the present. He used the technical means of Epic Theater – projections on the ceilings of the hall, for example – in order to “dissolve the dividing wall between the auditorium and the stage” and to place the play in direct relationship to the political events during National socialism.^[37]

The reformulated classics offered values such as freedom, tolerance, and solidarity, but new documentary plays were even more important, Piscator believed, in helping Germans intentionally to integrate “the past, with all its consequences…into the present.”[38] He thus focused on playwrights Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss, and Heinar Kipphardt, who were intensely interested in “political events and questions of the recent past and the present,” and who thus helped to restore “the importance of the theater as a moral institution” in the Schillerian sense. Once again able to tackle the “fundamental questions of politics,” Piscator wrote, theater, the “most ephemeral art,” could offer “unmediated candor for the currents of the time.”[39] And works like Hochhuth’s The Deputy, confronted German audiences with the truth that they had not exercised their freedom to act morally and humanely. Only when they recognized and admitted that each person possessed this freedom, even during the Nazi regime, could they “master the past.”[40] Peter Weiss’s The Investigation forced spectators “despite all of the chatter about orders from above,” to “come to terms with their actions, the facticity of which they deny; to feel their lack of remorse and turn away from the tendency to think of their crimes as something imposed upon them.” The spectator could then “freely decide his own moral responsibility,” could “make himself into the witness or the defendant,” could “become the jury, who wants to come to his own verdict.” Because The Investigation supplied no delivery of judgment or the grounds for it, but only evidence, it also required the spectator “to decide the sentence.”[41]

The experiences of Nazism and exile, as well as the dramatic challenges of cultural and political reconstruction after 1945 tempered Brecht’s and Piscator’s expectations and changed their approach as theater practitioners in ways that I have not had time to do full justice to in this essay on the ‘historical’ in aesthetics. Never able to find a way to work together either in exile or in the post-war Germanies, or even fruitfully to build upon each other’s approach, they nevertheless both increasingly recognized the limits of theater’s ability to impel mass societal change and fully to represent historical reality on stage. They both also rued post-war Germans’ unwillingness to think through and with history. But they remained convinced of theater’s power to promote reflection and discernment which would lead theater goers to act so as to bring about change, to make history. They also helped reorient German culture in important ways. Piscator and the documentarists, along with a host of historians who followed in their wake, helped to create a consensus on the bare narrative of what had happened and the enormity of the injustice done, albeit in the teeth of resistance by many West Germans. That consensus was always, like every historical account at any moment, provisional, but it was also powerful. Brecht made the dialectical understanding of history and the capacity of active participation to shape the present reality a political and aesthetic priority for East German theatergoers, even as the self-serving SED regime often undermined that effort – especially if it involved criticism of the German classical heritage. He also provided the East German public with tools for discerning a more stable truth beneath the surface of appearances. Both Piscator and Brecht drew attention to the interpretive nature of aesthetic and historical truth – an insight amplified by contemporary documentarists such as Hans-Werner Koesinger, who has further moved away from the positivist idea that pure ‘objective’ truth can be recovered from the folds of history. But they also provided safeguards against the tendency to see all historical truth as merely relative.[42] Indeed, as Weiss, who learned from Brecht and worked with Piscator, wrote, dramatists and theater practitioners in the documentary tradition should guard against “historical deceptions,” “falsifications of reality,” “the elimination of historical facts,” and a “deliberate distortion of trenchant and significant events” – necessary guardrails both for post-war Germans and for us.[43]

^[1]Minou Arjomand, Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment (New York: Columbia, 2018); Drew Lichtenberg, The Piscatorbühne Century: Politics and Aesthetics in the Modern Theater after 1927 (New York: Routledge, 2021).

^[2]Laura Bradley, “Brecht and Political Theater,” in Stephen Brockmann (ed.), Bertolt Brecht in Context (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 59-60.

^[3]Erwin Piscator, Schriften 2: Aufsätze, Reden, Gespräche (Berin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1968), 227, 229, 304.

^[4]Bertolt Brecht, “Theater for Pleasure or Theater for Instruction,” in Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964), 80.

^[5]Indeed, Piscator noted that “our ideas on epic theater are so different that I preferred to leave [Brecht] alone.” Cited in John Willett, The Theater of Erwin Piscator: Half a Century of Politics (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 162.

^[6]Lynn Mally, “Erwin Piscator and Soviet Cultural Politics,” in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, volume 51, no. 2 (2003), 236.

^[7]Peter Rutkoff, The New School: A History of the New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986), 173.

^[8]Tomorrow, 1.14 (1942): 1-6, cited in John Willett, The Theater of Erwin Piscator (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 152-3.

^[9]Thea Kirfel-Lenk, Erwin Piscator im Exil in den USA, 1939–1951: Eine Darstellung seiner antifascistische Theaterarbeit am Dramatic Workshop der New School for Social Research (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1984), 122

^[10]Erwin Piscator, Zeittheater: “Das Politische Theater” und weitere Schriften von 1915 bis 1966, ed. by Manfred Brauneck and Peter Stertz (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rohwolt Taschenbuch, 1986), 296.

^[11]Anthony Squiers, “Brecht in the Weimar Republic,” in Bertolt Brecht in Context, 125

^[12]Hugh Rorrison and John Willett (eds.), Bertolt Brecht Journals (New York: Routledge, 1996), 372.

[13]Astrid Oesmann, Staging History: Brecht’s Social Concepts of Ideology (New York: State University of New York, 2005), 1.

^[14]Squiers, “Brecht in the Weimar Republic,” 125.

^[15]Brecht, Brecht on Theater, 193, 190; see also David Barnett, Brecht in Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 74-79.

^[16]Bertolt Brecht, Letters 1913-1956, trans. Ralph Mannheim, ed. John Willett (New York: Routledge, 1981) 466.

^[17]Silberman, “The Work of the Theater,” Bertolt Brecht in Context, 118.

^[18]Anthony Tatlow (ed.), Bertolt Brecht’s Me-Ti: Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things (London: Methuen Drama, 2016), 101, 104, 47.

^[19]Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 162-200.

^[20]Mark Clark, “Brecht and the German Democratic Republic,” in Bertolt Brecht in Context, 98.

^[21]Stephen Brockmann, “Brecht and Germany,” in Bertolt Brecht in Context, 67.

^[22]Mark Clark, “Hero or Villain?: Bertolt Brecht and the Crisis Surrounding June 1953,” in The Journal of Contemporary History, 41.3 (2006): 451-475; Stephen Brockmann, The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1949–1959 (Rochester: Camden House, 2015), 79-80.

^[23]Oesmann, Staging History,2.

^[24]Brockmann, The Writers’ State, 69; Clark, “Hero or Villain?” 473 .

^[25]Wolf Gerhard Schmidt, Zwischen Antimoderne und Postmoderne: Das deutsche Drama und Theater der Nachkriegszeit im internationalen Kontext (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 2009), 157.

^[26]Lichtenberg, Piscatorbühne, 182.

^[27]Piscator, Aufsätze, 221, 174.

^[28]Piscator, Aufsätze, 335.

^[29]Piscator, Aufsätze, 205.

^[30]Piscator, Aufsätze, 248.

^[31]Piscator, Aufsätze, 174, 333.

^[32]Piscator, Aufsätze, 64

^[33]Piscator, Aufsätze, 206, 255.

^[34]Piscator, Aufsätze, 222.

^[35]The play had become “a central source of inspiration and argument for the Jewish emancipation movement” as well as a “component of the bourgeois Bildungs canon.” Sebastian Thoma, “Nathan der Weise,” in Handbuch des Antisemitimus: Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart 7, Literature, Film, Theater, Kunst (Munich: Saur, 2015), 335-6.

^[36]Erwin Piscator, “Gegen konservative Vorurteile,” in Zeittheater, 374.

^[37]Piscator, Aufsätze, 232

^[38]Piscator, Aufsätze, 335.

^[39]Piscator, Aufsätze, 334.

[40]Piscator, Aufsätze, 301, 323.

[41]Piscator, Aufsätze, 323

[42]Thomas Irmer, “A Search for New Realities: Documentary Theatre in Germany,” The Drama Review, 50.3 (Fall 2006): 16-28.

^[43]Peter Weiss, “Notes on the Contemporary Theater,” in Margaret Herzfeld-Sander (ed.), Essays on German Theater: Lessing, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and Others (New York: Continuum, 1985), 294.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Herr Keuner and the Foundations of Incorruptible Democracy

Luke Beller

[Author’s note: This is the revised version of a paper presented in the session “Brecht and Democracy” sponsored by the International Brecht Society at the convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco on Jan. 6, 2023].

In 1930, it came as a general surprise when the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei burst upon the national political stage by winning 108 seats in the Reichstag.[1] All too aware of the danger posed by the rise of violent, far-right extremism, Bertolt Brecht was highly critical of parliamentary democracy in that he considered it incapable of defending the social and political order. In this same year, he wrote a short sentence critiquing parliamentary democracy’s undemocratic nature while the impending fascist assumption of power loomed: “Demokratie ist, wenn das Volk gefragt wird, ob es einverstanden ist mit dem, was aus ihm gemacht wird.”[2] Brecht’s notion of democracy involves dialogue between the governing body and the people; what he experienced in the 1930s, however, was the alienation of the people from the source of political power. Combined with an economic model that further alienates and exploits the constituency, the democracy of 1930s Germany served as mediation for the exploiters. What Brecht implicitly asks is how the people (das Volk) could come to disagree with what is to be made of them. For the people to first understand that something is to be made of them, an understanding of the confluence of issues underpinning sociopolitical circumstances is required. However, the people of 1930s Germany did not appear to understand their own situation, thus submitting to hierarchical decision-making, which implies some form of exploitation of the people. Brecht therefore proposes a different, class conscious understanding of popular sovereignty, alternatively referred to as “Volksherrschaft” (the rule of the people) by Kalle in Flüchtlingsgespräche,[3] or, according to Herr Keuner in reference to a dictatorship of the proletariat as a “Polizeistaat d[er] anständigen Menschen” (police state of upright human beings).[4]

Indeed, a main goal of Brecht’s productive work was to engender knowledge of the underlying conditions of oppressive, hierarchical government institutions via class consciousness, or a revolutionary worldview. In this respect, Brecht can be counted as a democratic Marxist according to Kenneth Megill’s definition; that is, one who “emphasizes the necessity for revolutionary action” and thus accords “loyalty to the movement, not loyalty to any particular doctrine.”[5] The movement, as Brecht envisioned it, entails a fundamental restructuring of the economic and sociopolitical spheres that aims at the emancipation of the working classes by eliminating exploitation at the hands of various ruling classes. His critique of democracy, specifically parliamentary democracy, is that it functions in conjunction with capitalism as another tool with which the many are potentially subjugated by the ruling few. Brecht makes this apparent in a pointed critique of elections, which is often portrayed as a cornerstone of parliamentary democratic processes:

Es ist der älteste Trick der Bourgeoisie, den Wähler frei seine Unfreiheit wählen zu lassen, indem man ihm das Wissen um seine Lage vorenthält. Das, was jemand braucht, um seinen Weg wählen zu können, ist Wissen.

[It is the oldest trick of the bourgeoisie to let the voter freely choose their unfreedom while withholding the knowledge of their situation. What one requires to be able to choose their path is knowledge.][6]

Through critical depiction of systems of exploitation in his art, Brecht attempts to bring about the kind of knowledge that not only reveals the ruling classes as incapable of justifying themselves, but also produces a capacity for the freedom to choose the conditions under which one lives.

1930 was also the year of the first publication of a collection of short, fragmentary stories, Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner (The Stories of Mr. Keuner; subsequently referred to as Keunergeschichten), in the first collection of Brecht’s Versuche. In many respects, the Keunergeschichten are attempts at critiquing the capitalist economic system in coordination with a representative democracy while encouraging an understanding of a more comprehensive democratic organization of the sociopolitical and economic spheres. Brecht’s stories are conducive to discussions of different forms of social reorganization in that they attempt to represent the rawest form of intersubjective social existence by means of “quotable”[7] Gestus (gesture) and Haltung (stance/attitude).[8] The demonstration of the complex of gestures and attitudes also enables the revelation and intervention of (often contradictory) worldviews. The Keunergeschichten can be regarded as provocative elaborations of Brecht’s assessment of political participation and praxis. In conjunction with his view of parliamentary democracy, several Keunergeschichten will be interpreted to explicate a Brechtian understanding of the potential functioning, worker democracy. Throughout the stories, Herr Keuner demonstrates that notions of incorruptibility, anti-ethnocentric nationalism, anti-authoritarianism, productive communication and collaboration, and critique of the idea of justice are necessary for any positive, sociopolitical restructuring. This examination of the Keunergeschichten regarding democratization of the polity and socio-economic sphere is an attempt to further explicate Brecht’s development as a dialectical, political thinker as well as to highlight the strengths of his prose.

Written in a thirty-year period beginning from 1926 until his death in 1956, Brecht’s Keunergeschichten encompass over one hundred short stories concerned with various disconnected anecdotes of the life of the titular character, Herr Keuner (Mr. Keuner; often referred to as Herr K., H. K., or G. K.). Opposed to theorization and utopian system-building about the classless, moneyless, and stateless society of communism, Herr Keuner, “der Denkende” (the thinking one), prefers to work through the contradictions of capitalist, social-democratic society, thus paradigmatically embodying the praxis of “eingreifendes Denken” (interventionist thinking). Indeed, Brecht wrote of interventionist thinking again in 1930 as a type of dialectical thought process that posits “umwälzende[] Widersprüche” (revolutionary contradictions) in order to create the conditions for change in the world.[9] He places communism as the revolutionary contradiction within capitalism, which makes Herr Keuner’s goal of intervention in capitalist society possible. In the same vein, Walter Benjamin points out that contradiction is inherent to the Keuner figure, remarking how the phonetic play of “Keuner” in Brecht’s Augsburg dialect has the ambivalent meanings of both the standard German “Keiner” (nobody), and the Ancient Greek adjective “koinós” (public, common, mutual).[10] Herr Keuner’s name thus denotes a unity of opposites within the sociopolitical sphere. The existence of both negation and the negation thereof signifies a connection between a potentially utopian ideal of a democratic, communist society and its materialist foundations in a total reorganization of the ownership of the means of production. The relation between thought (theory) and action (praxis) is emphasized throughout the stories as Herr Keuner navigates through various sociopolitical and economic situations, revolutionarily intervening to create imagined, emancipatory spaces and ideas.

A recurring theme of critique in the Keunergeschichten focuses on institutional corruption as exemplified in this story written in 1929 and published posthumously:

Als Herr Keuner in einer Gesellschaft seiner Zeit von der reinen Erkenntnis sprach und erwähnte, daß sie nur durch Bekämpfung der Bestechlichkeit angestrebt werden könne, fragten ihn etliche beiläufig, was alles zu Bestechlichkeit gehöre. Geld, sagte Herr Keuner schnell. Da entstand ein großes Ah und Oh der Verwunderung in der Gesellschaft und sogar ein Kopfschütteln der Entrüstung. Dies zeigt, daß man etwas Feineres erwartet hatte. 

[Once, at a social gathering of the time, when Mr. Keuner talked about pure knowledge and mentioned that it can only be aspired to by overcoming corruptibility, there were some who asked him in passing, just what corruptibility involved. “Money,” said Mr. Keuner quickly. At that there arose a great oh and ah of surprise at the gathering and heads were even shaken in indignation. This shows that something more refined had been expected.][11]

For Herr Keuner, one of the main catalysts of societal, political, and judicial corruption is money. Herr Keuner presents the material ground of epistemological corruption, although the interlocutors were convinced of its idealist roots, hence their indignant headshaking. The same problem is represented in the story “Unbestechlichkeit” (“Incorruptibility”), in which Herr Keuner explains that the way to educate someone toward incorruptibility is by making sure they are not hungry (“daß man ihn satt macht”).[12] In both cases, Herr Keuner defends the general idea that societal corruption is strongly linked to insufficient material conditions. Capital, according to Herr Keuner, has been proven inseparable from inequality and hierarchical class structure, and any truly democratic society would eliminate the conditions that enable corruptibility in an attempt to maintain the stability of cultural, social, and scientific institutions as well as the equal distribution of political decision-making power.

Similar to Frank Wagner’s statement “Brecht und Nationalismus gehen nicht zusammen” (“Brecht and nationalism don’t go together”), Herr Keuner embodies anti-nationalism in a manner that critiques and undermines any basis for ethno-nationalism or nationalist sentiments that preclude emancipatory movements.[13] Herr Keuner subverts nationalism by explaining his experience of it in the story “Vaterlandsliebe, der Haß gegen Vaterländer” (Love of the Fatherland, the Hatred of Fatherlands, 1930):

Herr Keuner hielt es nicht für nötig, in einem bestimmten Lande zu leben. Er sagte: “Ich kann überall hungern.” Eines Tages aber ging er durch eine Stadt, die vom Feind des Landes besetzt war, in dem er lebte. Da kam ihm entgegen ein Offizier dieses Feindes und zwang ihn, vom Bürgersteig herunterzugehen. Herr Keuner ging herunter und nahm an sich wahr, daß er gegen diesen Mann empört war, und zwar nicht nur gegen diesen Mann, sondern besonders gegen das Land, dem der Mann angehörte, also daß er wünschte, es möchte vom Erdboden vertilgt werden. “Wodurch”, fragte Herr Keuner, “bin ich für diese Minute ein Nationalist geworden? Dadurch, daß ich einem Nationalisten begegnete. Aber darum muß man die Dummheit ja ausrotten, weil sie dumm macht, die ihr begegnen.”

[Mr. K. did not think it necessary to live in any particular country. He said: “I can go hungry anywhere.” One day, however, he was walking through a city that was occupied by the enemy of the country in which he was living. An officer of this enemy came toward him and forced him to step down from the pavement. Mr. K. stepped down and realized that he felt outraged at this man, and not only at this man, but especially at the country to which the man belonged, that is, he wanted it to be wiped from the face of the earth. “What made me,” asked Mr. K., “become a nationalist for this one minute? It was because I encountered a nationalist. But that is precisely why this stupidity has to be rooted out, because it makes whoever encounters it stupid.”][14]

Herr Keuner contrasts the positive freedom of occupying a geographical space in a country with the negative freedom from basic physiological needs. Taking Herr Keuner’s example to its logical conclusion, any positive freedom of residency will be nullified if fundamental human needs are left unfulfilled. With the occupation of a country, these already endangered physiological needs are further jeopardized as the occupiers drain the occupied land of its resources. The convergence of issues together with the political state’s oppressive nature reinforces vicious attitudes in the individual, causing Herr Keuner to conclude that any form of love to one’s homeland entailing forms of hostility toward an Other will only serve to perpetuate violence and stupidity. Similarly, Brecht was keen to point out that nationalism, authoritarianism, and fascism must be critiqued ideologically by “emphasizing democracy” but also the lack of will to lend the economic basis to support said democracy, which, in part, enables the slippery slope to the ugliness of nationalism.[15]

Unlike negative anti-nationalism, Herr Keuner highlights positive, productive communication and collaboration. In the story “Lehren” (Teaching, ca. 1948), a reciprocally beneficial relationship between the educator and student is emphasized: “Der nicht versteht, muß erst das Gefühl haben, daß er verstanden wird. Der hören soll, muß erst das Gefühl haben, daß er gehört wird.” [“One who doesn’t understand must first have the feeling that they are being understood. One who should listen must first have the feeling that they are being heard.”][16] Implied by the use of the passive voice, the role of an educator is anything but the mere relaying of information. This Keunergeschichte infers a relatively Socratic approach to teaching and learning, namely one that deemphasizes the assumed, uneven power dynamic between teacher and student. In essence, effective education and learning function hand in hand with mutual respect and reciprocal communication. Those being educated, namely those who are to understand and listen, must also influence those educating, which not only begins to balance the hierarchical structure of the teacher-student relationship, but also prevents the ossification of the teaching, allowing exchange and variability, exemplary of the stories’ pedagogical element generally. The Keunergeschichte “Zwei Städte” (Two Cities, 1949) portrays a similar phenomenon:

Herr K. zog die Stadt B. der Stadt A. vor. “In der Stadt A.,” sagte er, “liebt man mich; aber in der Stadt B. war man zu mir freundlich. In der Stadt A. machte man sich mir nützlich; aber in der Stadt B. brauchte man mich. In der Stadt A. bat man mich an den Tisch; aber in der Stadt B. bat man mich in die Küche.”

[Mr. K. preferred city B to city A. “In city A,” he said, “they love me, but in city B they were friendly to me. In city A they made themselves useful to me, but in city B they needed me. In city A they invited me to join them at table, but in city B they invited me into the kitchen.”][17]

Herr Keuner’s attitude shows that one’s connection to where one lives need not be associated with adoration or familiarity. The residents of city A appear to be well-acquainted with Herr Keuner. In city B., on the other hand, Herr Keuner is needed and put to work, which is, in turn, fulfilling for him. The relationships he holds with those in city B. are collaborative and not hierarchical, which serves to emphasize the ideological split between the ends of the capitalist and socialist economic models. While the former fosters idolatry, the latter gives rise to cooperation and mutual respect. This notion relates to Brecht’s statement in Kleines Organon für das Theater (Short Organon for the Theater): “die kleinste gesellschaftliche Einheit ist nicht der Mensch, sondern zwei Menschen. Auch im Leben bauen wir uns gegenseitig auf” [“the smallest social unit is not ‘the’ human being, but two people. In life too we develop one another reciprocally”].[18] Shared growth between individuals through collaboration – not exploitation – has the potential to prevent the hierarchies that lead to sociopolitical injustice.

A final theme in the Keunergeschichten worth addressing in the context of Brecht’s democratic thinking is that of justice. Herr Keuner is particularly critical of the justice system within a society in which the basic needs of the people are not being met and static legal abstractions function as symbols of equality. This criticism plays the central role in the story “Eine gute Antwort” (A Good Answer, 1949)

Ein Arbeiter wurde vor Gericht gefragt, ob er die weltliche oder die kirchliche Form des Eides benutzen wolle. Er antwortete: “Ich bin arbeitslos.” “Dies war nicht nur Zertreutheit,” sagte Herr K. “Durch diese Antwort gab er zu erkennen, daß er sich in einer Lage befand, wo solche Fragen, ja vielleicht das ganze Gerichtsverfahren als solches keinen Sinn mehr haben.”

[In court a worker was asked whether he wanted to take the lay oath or swear on the Bible. He answered: “I'm unemployed.” “This was not simply absentmindedness,” said Mr. K. “By this answer he showed that he found himself in a situation where such questions, indeed perhaps the whole court procedure as such, has become meaningless.][19]

Herr Keuner makes the pointed remark that the need for law appears to exist in order to oppress the already oppressed. The justice system, even laws and morality, which are often critiqued as instruments to protect the ruling class or capital owners, are absurd in the face of people who are barred from the means of basic, physiological survival. Herr Keuner maintains a similar attitude in the story, “Hungern” (To Go Hungry, 1930), in which he states: “es ist wichtig, daß ich dagegen bin, daß Hunger herrscht” [“it is important that I am against hunger being the rule”].[20] Herr Keuner makes clear that without securing the means of human survival, any progress toward functioning worker democracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is mere contingency. Thus, the material conditions that enable a shift toward such a worker democracy hold primacy. Justice, for him, has its ground in the fulfillment of basic human needs without human exploitation, not in abstract law divorced from the suffering of the people. For this reason, Herr Keuner wants his interlocutors to see the root of their problems.

In highlighting the material ground of justice, Herr Keuner’s notion of the “Polizeistaat [der Verbrecher]” (police state of criminals) in the Keunergeschichte, “Herr K. und die deutsche Politik” (Mr. K. and German Politics) demonstrates a critical attitude regarding a capitalist state which perpetuates itself to the detriment of its constituents:

“Die deutschen Kapitalisten, die immer Kriege machen, welche übrigens immer wieder verloren werden, meiden die Entschuldigung, sie müßten es machen, wie die Pest. Warum? Weil das hieße, der Kapitalismus kann nicht existieren ohne Krieg. Was die Wahrheit ist, und der Grund dafür, daß man ihn abschaffen muß.” “Das heißt, sich das Argumentieren leicht machen,” sagte ein Hörer. “Das ist meine Absicht,” sagte Herr K. “Ich bin für den Polizeistaat,” sagte Herr K. “Was,” rief ein Hörer, „haben wir nicht zwölf Jahre einen Polizeistaat gehabt?” Herr K. antwortete: „Zwölf Jahre lang haben Verbrecher als Polizei gegen die anständigen Menschen gestanden. Sie sind abgesetzt, aber nicht verschwunden. Wenn sich jetzt die anständigen Menschen weigern, als Polizei gegen diese Verbrecher Dienst zu tun, was werden diese tun?“ “Aber wo bleibt die Freiheit?” sagte der Hörer. “Das ist sie,” sagte Herr K.

[“The German capitalists, who are always making war, which are, by the way, always being lost, avoid the apology, that they have to do it, like the plague. Because that would mean: Capitalism cannot exist without war. Which is the truth, and the reason why it must be abolished.” “That means to make the argument easy for oneself,” a listener said.” That is my intention,” Mr. K. said. “I am in favor of a police state,” Mr. K. said. “What!” a listener exclaimed. “Have we not had a police state for twelve years?” Mr. K. replied: “For twelve years, criminals have stood as police against respectable human beings. They have been ousted but haven’t disappeared. If respectable human beings now refuse to do their duty as police against these criminals, what will they do?” “But where is the freedom?” the listener said. “That is freedom,” said Mr. K.][21]

Written between 1945 and 1948, Herr Keuner makes a lightly veiled condemnation of the Nazi regime which was upheld by “nobility and the upper classes” by means of oppression of “all other classes.” He enables intervention by establishing the dialectical extremes of political power in the hands of criminals in contrast to respectable people – by which he means the proletariat. Indeed, socialism – democratization of the economy and polity – has historically been nearly impossible to establish without the proletariat’s assertion of political power over those classes oppressing them, be they fascist politicians or capitalists; for Herr Keuner, it hardly makes a difference because it is unjust, criminal even, to oppress anyone by means of war for the maintenance of an economic system. Justice, in fact freedom, comes from creating a “police state” of respectable human beings – this might be elaborated as an incorruptible worker democracy as the contradiction to the police state of criminals. Indeed, radically putting an end to the capacity for war and, thus, human exploitation establishes the condition for justice in egalitarianism and lack of hierarchy.

In reality, Herr Keuner’s core notions of incorruptibility, productive collaborative endeavors, and justice as critiques of capitalist parliamentary democracy are purposefully entangled with one another. He posits them as integral to the interventionist shift of the dialectic toward a transformation of the means of production into collective ownership. When Brecht asked the extreme question: “sollen die Menschen unter eine neue Diktatur kommen?” (Should the people come under a new dictatorship?), his response indicated that by seizing the means of production, by creating the dictatorship of the proletariat, the working class can create its own freedom to dictate the conditions of its existence. He writes:

Die Freiheit ist eine Produktion und eine Sache der Produktion. Die Menschen müssen die Produktion befreien, ihre Fesseln abstreifen, dann sind sie frei. Nur bei einer Produktion aller Menschen für alle Menschen sind alle Menschen frei.

[Freedom is a production and a thing of production. Human beings must liberate production, shed its fetters; then they will be free. Only with a production of all human beings for all human beings will all human beings be free.][22]

Thus, to return to Brecht’s early statement on democracy being the circumstance in which the people are in agreement with what is to be made out of them, it might be said that Herr Keuner would intervene in a way that asks the people if they truly want something to be made of them, or if they desire the freedom to make of themselves what they will, therefore aiming to reformulate notions of the foundations of democratic structures, be they political or economic. From this perspective, it would be helpful to view Herr Keuner’s “Polizeistaat der anständigen Menschen” as a revolutionary contradiction opposite a police state of criminals or a state where the monopoly of violence is alienated from the people themselves. The upright human beings are those who have attained understanding of the sociopolitical and economic conditions that underlie oppression and subjugation – class consciousness. By seizing the means of production, the proletariat (or the upright human beings) also gain control of the means of political violence and, according to Herr Keuner, thereby sublimate it by engendering “Freiheit” for all. This freedom entails the condition for the possibility for change in the world. As Herr Keuner notes to this end: “Denken heißt verändern” (“To think means to change”),[23] and where mutability and the possibility for change of material conditions exist, there is hope for a more just, free, and democratic world.

[1] Eve Rosenhaft, “Brecht’s Germany” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, 2^nd Edition, eds. Peter Thomson and Gelndyr Sacks (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 108.

[2] Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, eds. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, Klaus-Detlef Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 21, 402. Subsequent citations as BFA, Vol., pg.; “Democracy is when the people are asked whether they agree with what is to be made out of them.” Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.

[3] BFA, 18, 280.

[4] Bertolt Brecht, “Herr K. und die deutsche Politik,” in Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2012), 144. Subsequent citations as Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner, pg.

[5] Kenneth Megill, The New Democratic Theory (New York: Free Press, 1970), 45.

[6] BFA, 23, 272.

[7] Brecht wrote in the publication of Versuche (Heft 1) that the Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner “stellen einen Versuch dar, Gesten zitierbar zu machen.” BFA, 18, 462.

[8] See David Barnett, Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 94–98 for an in-depth explanation of Gestus as exemplary of the relation between the individual and society writ large, and of Haltungen constituting a figure for Brecht.

[9] BFA, 21, 421–422.

[10] Walter Benjamin, “Bert Brecht,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 524.

[11] BFA 18, 32. The translation of Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner cited here is: Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner, trans. Martin Chalmers (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998). Subsequent citations as: (Chalmers, pg.)

[12] BFA, 18, 38.

[13] Frank Wagner, Mythos der Nation. Brecht und Bronnen (Würzburg: Königshaus und Neumann, 2015), 139.

[14] BFA, 18, 15. (Chalmers, 9 [trans. modified—L.B.]).

[15] BFA, 21, 421. “Betonung der Demokratie, aber Unfähigkeit und Fehlen jedes Willens, ihr die ökonomische Basis zu verleihen.”

[16] Brecht, Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner, 136.

[17] BFA, 18, 27; (Chalmers, 35).

[18] BFA, 23, 88; Bertolt Brecht, Short Organon for the Theater, in Brecht on Theatre, 3rd. edition, eds. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 247.

[19] BFA, 18, 26; (Chalmers, 33).

[20] BFA, 18, 17; (Chalmers, 11).

[21] Brecht, Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner, 144.

[22] BFA, 22, 298–299.

[23] Brecht, Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner, 91.

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Brecht and Democracy

Marc Silberman

[Author’s note: This paper was presented in the session “Brecht and Democracy” sponsored by the International Brecht Society at the convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco on Jan. 6, 2023].

Democracy is not one of the political concepts to which Brecht paid a lot of attention, compared, say, to his thoughts on fascism, barbarism, the bourgeoisie, capitalism, imperialism, or nationalism. When he did focus on democracy, Brecht took aim at parliamentary democracy, which he experienced in the 1920s as the system of elected representational governance founded on the bedrock capitalism. This understanding of democracy in capitalism – what we might call capitalist democracy – dominated his thinking and artistic practice from the 1920s through the 1940s. As witness to the weakness of Weimar Germany’s parliamentary democracy that passively tolerated and even promoted fascism, Brecht recognized how ideological confusion undermined the ability to perceive contradictions and to organize resistance. The apparently non-violent, bloodless acts of oppression and suppression by the ruling class through ownership, money, and political influence made capitalist democracy seem for many to be less violent than either communism or fascism. As a result, the image of social and political behavior we see in early texts such as the 1928 Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera] and the 1930 Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny [Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny] show how bourgeois courts and the entire legal system are corrupt and controlled by no less than gangsters pursuing investments and expansion of their mafia-like cartels.

After the National Socialists assumed power (and let’s not forget: this occurred through democratic means), the play Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui [The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui], written in 1941, explores Hitler’s ascent with a full range of comic and parodic effects to demonstrate the horrible consequences of missed opportunities that might have prevented the fascist takeover by the gangster boss Ui. In the memorable scene 6, for example, where Ui seeks professional guidance from an actor, he learns how to use grand theatrics to impress the common people: grandiose walking, sitting, and public speaking. When the fascist gangsters begin to use theatrical means to dupe the people and to transform them into a unified mass of spectators through heightened emotionality, the human capacity of criticism fails and the theater as “bourgeois narcotics trade” (bürgerlicher Rauschgifthandel) with its trance-like effects takes over.[1] This is Brecht’s basic view of democracy, honed during the Weimar Republic, which he identified with “formal democracy” that only offers illusory freedoms to the working class. This is the view he turned into a sharp weapon in texts such as the fragmentary novel Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Cäsar of 1938/39 [The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar] or the 1940 play Der gute Mensch von Sezuan [The Good Person of Szechwan] in both of which the protagonists realize that generosity and altruism get you nowhere in a world dominated by the cut-throat business relations of capitalist democracy.

From a quick review of Brecht’s major writings, I surmise there are only two texts that actually have the word “democracy” in the title. In the Flüchtingsgespräche [Refugee Conversations] it is a section titled “Über Demokratie” (“On Democracy,” written in 1940) in which the refugee named Ziffel defines democracy as Volksherrschaft, referring to the literal Greek meaning as “rule by the people.”[2] The second Brecht text with the word democracy in the title is a long poem from early 1947, a ballad titled “Freiheit und Democracy“ [“Freedom and Democracy”], where the English word democracy in the German title already signals its satirical thrust.[3] This adaptation of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1820 allegorical poem “The Masque of Anarchy” about passive resistance to political violence, is a caustic mockery aimed at the recidivist Nazis and complicit fellow travelers in what would become West Germany as it was folded into the juggernaut of Cold War American capitalism. In short, both of these texts extend Brecht’s critique of Weimar democracy as serving only the interests of the ruling class.

I want to argue that after Brecht returned to Europe, settling first in Switzerland in late 1947 and then in East Berlin over a year later where he was offered his own theater by the ruling party in the Soviet Occupied Zone, it is possible to identify a shift in his understanding of democracy. After landing in Switzerland, Brecht’s first theatrical intervention took place at the Stadttheater Chur in February 1948 with the production of Die Antigone des Sophocles [The Antigone of Sophocles] under his direction. While the class nature of the demos (the people) in Athenian democracy is maintained in his adaptation, he does point to the citizen collective in Argos that fights against the Theban tyrant Creon. Through their collective unity and desire for justice and autonomy, they represent (off stage) the counter force to the negative example of the Theban citizens, represented by the Chorus of Elders on stage, who are complicit with and enablers of Creon’s tyranny. In fact, Brecht attempts to decrease audience identification and sympathy with Antigone – still functioning in the original drama – by emphasizing her role as daughter of Creon and thus a member of the corrupt ruling class. Having returned to Europe and facing the reality of an audience who witnessed twelve years of National-Socialist propaganda, Brecht at least alludes now to the possibility of solidarity and of resistance to the challenges he foresees (even if only vaguely present in the off-stage citizens of Argos).[4]

Later, between 1951 and 1953, Brecht worked on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus for the Berliner Ensemble, turning the so-called Elizabethan tragedy of pride, in which the leader Coriolanus believes in his indispensability, into a tragedy of the people of Rome, of the plebeians or collective citizens. In a completely new final scene, Brecht introduces an optimistic turn in the plot, making clear that Coriolanus is dispensable. The “tragedy of the people” is in fact averted by their autonomous intervention in the war against the enemy; the contradiction, that is, the class struggle between the patricians and plebeians in Rome shifts when a new contradiction emerges, the “national” war against the Volscians who are attacking Rome. Self-empowered, the Roman citizens forge their swords to defeat Coriolanus and to save their homeland. In contrast, say, to Pelagea Vlassova in Brecht’s 1933 play Die Mutter [The Mother], whom we – the audience – watch coming to consciousness as an individual in support of the striking workers, Brecht now asserts the freedom of the collective, not the individual, and he endorses an interventionist act of resistance that will lead to building a new community on the ruins of the old order. For Brecht in 1953, the lower classes, not the leaders, are the site of real political transformation, once they become aware of their power.

For those interested in how Brecht was positioning himself vis-à-vis a future democratic society in the crucial year of 1953 during the first major crisis in June 1953 in the German Democratic Republic, I point to his fictitious dialogue published under the title “Studium des ersten Auftritts in Shakespeares Coriolanus” (“Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus”).[5] Written probably in November 1953, after the GDR leadership had retreated from its heavy-handed economic and cultural policies, this text reveals how the analysis of Shakespeare’s play becomes Brecht’s opportunity to articulate the new level of contradiction – the antithesis of the negation – that he observed during the crisis months in Summer 1953: “To the masses, revolt is the unnatural rather than the natural thing, and however bad the situation from which only revolt can free them, they find the idea of it as exhausting as the scientist finds a new view of the universe.”[6] Equally interesting are Brecht’s notes on his adaptation of Erwin Strittmatter’s play Katzgraben. The play models class struggle in a fictitious rural, East German village called Katzgraben in the grips of land reform, for Brecht a unique attempt to treat problems in a contemporary play about the achievements of socialism. In rehearsal from February through May 1953, Brecht had assistants write protocols of the discussions that he then edited into the Katzgraben Notate [Katzgraben Notes], a kind of Modellbuch that highlights the social contradictions characteristic for the ongoing class struggle during the transition to socialism in the GDR, a position that did not endear him to the political leaders.[7] Finally, let me conclude these comments on what I see as a shift in Brecht’s understanding of democratic possibilities with his well-known, ironic poem about democracy called “Die Lösung” [“The solution”], written in Summer 1953:

Die Lösung
Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?[8]

The solution
After the uprising of 17 June
On the orders of the Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Leaflets were distributed in the Stalinallee
Which read: that the people
Had forfeited the government’s trust
And only by working twice as hard
Could they win it back. But would it not
Be simpler if the government
Dissolved the people and
Elected another one?

(Trans. by David Constantine)[9]

[1] “Kleines Organon,” BFA 23: 65, Brecht on Theatre, ed. by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, 3rd. edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 229; “Über die Theatralik des Faschismus,” BFA 22: 561-69, Brecht on Art and Politics, ed. by Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles (London: Methuen, 2003), 193-201.

[2] “Über Demokratie,” in Flüchtlingsgespräche, BFA 18: 278-282 (here 280); “On Democracy,” in Refugee Conversations, trans. by Romy Fursland (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 74-77 (here 75).

[3] “Freiheit und Democracy,” BFA 15: 183-188, “Freedom and Democracy,” trans. by David Constantine, in Brecht, The Collected Poems (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 935-940.

[4] The Swiss audience reaction to Brecht’s adaptation was relatively subdued. The issue of collective guilt was not on the agenda of a country that tried to maintain its neutrality throughout the Second World War.

[5] “Studium des ersten Auftritts in Shakespeares Coriolanus,” BFA 23: 386-402; “Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,” Brecht on Theatre, 285-97.

[6] Brecht on Theatre, 286.

[8] “Die Lösung,” BFA 12: 310.

[7] Katzgraben Notate, BFA 25: 401–90; Katzgraben Notes, excerpts in Brecht on Performance, ed. by Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles, and Marc Silberman (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 249-275

[9] “The solution,” in Brecht, The Collected Poems, 1013.

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Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle at St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI: (November 4–6, 2022; November 10–12, 2022)

Ellen C. Kirkendall

The department of Theatre Studies at St. Norbert College (SNC) brought Brecht’s signature epic style to the greater Green Bay area with their fall production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle (performed in English translation by Alistair Beaton), which ran for two consecutive weekends in November 2022. Noah Simon, director of the production and Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the college, guided audiences to consider the epic style (even if not by name) in his director’s notes. He addressed the audience directly: “This is a theater. You are the audience. The people walking on the stage and amongst you in the house are the actors.” Simon reminded the audience that not only were they watching a play, but that they should remain detached from the action, as Brecht intended. To this end, Simon expounded further: “the actors” would not be “transporting” the audience “with theatrical magic” to the Caucasus Mountain range from which the play takes its name, but instead, this production would task the audience to “think.” Simon’s language directly mirrors Brecht’s own position on audience response. Brecht wrote in his argument against the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk “[s]olche Magie ist natürlich zu bekämpfen” (“Zu: “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny,”” BFA 24, 79), arguing against the kind of “theatrical magic” described by Simon (program, The CCC). Thus, Simon’s goals were very much in alignment with Brecht’s goals for “alienation” and the “alienation effect” [V-Effekt]. Rather than having his audiences immersed in the magic of the theater, Brecht wished for his audiences to dissect the drama and think critically about the questions presented by the play about society.

Starting with the “prologue,” St. Norbert College’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle established its commitment to the epic style. The “Expert” character, played by Jacqueline Stumpf, delivered her lines to the actors playing the “villagers,” who were spread throughout the audience, house center, house left, house right, in front rows and in back rows (Brecht, trans. Beaton 3). This seating diverted the audience’s attention. The “villagers” interacted with the “expert” from their seats, rising only to speak their lines. As part of the audience, this was the first moment of many in which I experienced the alienation effect, as my eyes bounced around the house to discern who seated amongst us was, in fact, an actor.

In addition to alienation [Verfremdung], this production also very cleverly used Brecht’s concept of gesture [Gestus] in its costuming. To delineate between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the bourgeois characters wore masks in the style of commedia dell’arte. These characters included the “Doctors,” the “Governor,” the “Governor’s Wife,” in Act One (Brecht, trans. Beaton 10), and the “Older Lady” and the “Younger Lady” referred to as “the Ladies,” who do not wish to share a carriage with Grusha in the opening scene of Act Two (34-35). Unmasked characters included Grusha, her brother, Lavrenti, and his wife, Aniko, and Simon Chachava. The use of Commedia masks was an excellent use of social gesture in the epic style as they typically delineate different classes of characters in this Italian theater tradition. Therefore, used in a Brechtian work, the gesture of either wearing or not wearing a mask served to indicate the attitudes and social classes of the characters in the play.

The Doctors bow to the Governor and the Governor’s wife

With regard to acting, two young actors were standouts in the roles of Grusha and Azdak in their Brechtian delivery. Sophomore Natalie Elfner, who played Grusha, brilliantly conveyed the epic style in her performance. Her acting in some of Grusha’s most painful moments was matter of fact and to the point; she did not give an emotional and passionate delivery of the lines, which would have caused the audience to empathize with her character, but instead allowed the “Singer” and the “Musicians” to carry that emotional burden for her in their commentary on her actions. For instance, in the second act, Grusha tries to say goodbye and leave the baby Michael with the farmer and his wife because she is being pursued by the sergeant. We would not know that she is “sad” (Brecht, trans. Beaton 39), if the singer and musicians did not tell us first.

Meanwhile, fellow sophomore Fiona Laffey was hilarious as Azdak, and did a wonderful job of inviting the audience to question the role of justice, both on- and off-stage, in her comedic portrayal of the drunk judge who at times speaks the truth. Laffey’s delivery of the line, “Stop shaking, it’s only a policeman” as the character of the “Old Man” cowered beneath her (Brecht, trans. Beaton, 70), was another time I felt the alienation effect. I had a jolt of recognition as I recognized our real-world society’s current problems reflected in this fictional society, particularly regarding police brutality and race relations today. I not only recognized this moment, but I realized why this man would shake out of fear. In this moment of alienation, Simon’s Brechtian goals for his audience were successful: for me, as an audience member, the illusion of the magic of the theater was broken. I realized that the event I had just witnessed in this bizarre fictional society was not so bizarre after all.

Thus, from the directing, to the costume design, to the acting, the production demonstrated a clear understanding and execution of the epic style. It was evident that this play was selected to both challenge and educate its student-actors and its audience. In both regards, SNC’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle was certainly a success.

Works Cited:

Brecht, Bertolt. The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Translated by Alistair Beaton. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2010.

Brecht, Bertolt: “Zu: “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny,” Schriften 4: Texte zu Stücken. In: Werke: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. by Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, Klaus-Detlef Müller, vol. 24, Berlin: Aufbau, 1991, p. 74-87.

Simon, Noah. “Director’s Notes.” Program for Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. Webb Theatre, St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI, 2022.

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Interviews with Carl Weber: Working with Brecht

Branislav Jakovljević

Over the course of the 2011–2012 academic year, a group of Stanford University faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from departments of Theater and Performance Studies, German Studies, and the Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM, now defunct) conducted a series of interviews with theater director and emeritus Stanford University Professor of Drama Carl Weber (1925–2016). Weber’s career spanned over six decades and two continents: he started as an actor and director in post-WWII East Germany, served as an assistant to Bertolt Brecht in the Berliner Ensemble, developed a successful career as a theater director first in Western Europe and then in the United States, where he became one of the premier translators of Heiner Müller’s dramas and an accomplished theater pedagogue. While aware that his rich career could fill several volumes, we focused in these interviews on his work in the Berliner Ensemble during Brecht’s final years. The participants in the workshop were: Branislav Jakovljević (convener, faculty at the Department of Theater and Performance Studies or TAPS), Leslie Hill (video documentation, faculty at TAPS), Lindsey Mantoan (graduate student, TAPS), Michael Hunter (postdoc IHUM), Ciara Murphy (graduate student, TAPS), Jens Pohlmann (graduate student, German Studies), Giulia Vittori (graduate student, TAPS), Ryan Tacata (graduate student, TAPS), and Keara Harman (graduate student, German Studies). After completing the initial round of interviews, they were joined by Ljubiša Matić (PhD, TAPS) and Jamie Lyons (PhD, TAPS). We started the interviews with an interest in exploring the relationship between documents and memory in theater, but soon realized that what we were actually getting was an important, first-person account of one of the most momentous periods of German and European post-WWII theater.

In preparation for each interview, a different group of workshop participants investigated documentation left behind from one of the productions at the Berliner Ensemble in which Carl was directly involved as an assistant director, actor, dramaturg, or in some other capacity. Using these materials, they led group conversations with him that lasted between 1.5 to 3 hours per each production. In the workshop, we revisited the following Berliner Ensemble productions: Werner Hecht’s Katzgraben, Carl Weber and Peter Palitzsch’s The Day of a Great Scholar Wu, and a series of Brecht’s plays: Caucasian Chalk Circle, Mother Courage, Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, and Trumpets and Drums, which he wrote in collaboration with Elizabeth Hauptmann. In each interview session, we used different documents from the productions, some of which Carl revisited for the first time decades after he had worked on them. There are a variety of documents left behind from each of these productions. For example, Katzgraben was recorded on film, and Mother Courage was minutely documented in Brecht’s “Modellbuch.” We also used documents from the Brecht Archive (Academy of Arts, Berlin), such as production stills from Caucasian Chalk Circle and other plays discussed in the workshop, as well as written correspondence between Carl Weber and Bertolt Brecht. For some productions, such as The Day of a Great Scholar Wu, there are hardly any production traces left other than the script and the theater program in the shape of a Chinese fan. All of these visual and textual materials were of great help in our preparations for interviews. In the final session, Ciara Murphy and Michael Hunter presented scenes from Trumpets and Drums, which Carl then revised, while explaining how this play was staged at the Berliner Ensemble.

Note: The interviews and TDR transcript of excerpts from the interviews include some information and comments which are not entirely accurate. The unrehearsed and unedited interviews are digressive and rambling. In fact, in several of the interviews Weber was “revisiting” events for the first time in many decades.

The workshop was supported by the Stanford Humanities Center’s Theodore and Frances Geballe Research Workshops. The Geballe grant provided administrative support and financial resources for gathering documents necessary for the workshop. The interviews were conducted at the Stanford Humanities Center and at the Department of Theater and Performance Studies from January to June 2012.

Introduction to Carl Weber: “The Voice from the 10th Row” (13 minutes, 1.3 GB) Includes excerpts from longer, complete interviews below.

“The Voice from the 10th Row: Carl Weber and the Berliner Ensemble”

TDR: The Drama Review 62:3 (T239) Fall 2018, pp. 55-107

weber-interviews-tdr-images-redacted Download

Interview Sessions

1. Caucasian Chalk Circle (1954)

Interviewers: Branislav Jakovljević, Ljubiša Matić

Weber 1a Chalk Circle 1 of 2.mov, 11.5 GB

Weber 1b Chalk Circle 2 of 2.mov, 10.1 GB

2. Mother Courage and Her Children (1949)

Interviewers: Giulia Vittori, Ryan Tacata

Weber 2 Mother Courage 1 of 1.mov, 267.7 MB