Brecht with his emblematic cigar, a means of taking a moment to think: "For the attitude that these people adopt in the
opera is unworthy of them. Is there any possibility that they may
change it? Can we persuade them to get out their cigars?" (
1930)
Bertolt Brecht? (born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht?; February 10, 1898 – August 14,
1956) was a German poet,
playwright, and theatre director. A seminal
theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht's achievement is equally
significant in dramaturgy and in theatrical production, the latter particularly through the
seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble—the post-war theatre
company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene
Weigel—with its internationally acclaimed productions.
From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the
combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the
experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to
explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical
aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of
the 'epic form' of the drama (which constitutes that medium's rendering of
'autonomization' or the 'non-organic work of art'—related in kind to the strategy of
divergent chapters in Joyce's novel Ulysses,
to Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and to Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual
arts).[1] In contrast to many other
avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution;
rather, he hoped to 're-function' the apparatus of theatrical production to a new social
use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era—particularly over the 'high art / popular culture' dichotomy—vying with the likes of
Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin. Brechtian
theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in
sharp contrast both to its psychological and socialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since
Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger insists that he is
"the most important materialist writer of our time." [2]
As Jameson among others has stressed, "Brecht is also ‘Brecht’"—collective and
collaborative working methods were inherent to his approach. This 'Brecht' was a
collective subject that "certainly seemed to have a distinctive style (the one we now call 'Brechtian') but was no longer
personal in the bourgeois or individualistic sense."
During the course of his career, Brecht sustained many long-lasting creative relationships with other writers, composers,
scenographers, directors, dramaturgs and actors; the list includes: Elisabeth
Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau,
Slatan Dudow, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Caspar
Neher, Teo Otto, Karl von Appen, Ernst Busch, Lotte Lenya, Therese
Giehse, Angelika Hurwicz, and Helene Weigel
herself. This is "theatre as collective experiment [...] as something radically different from theatre as expression or as
experience."[3]
There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices;
dramatists and directors in whom one may trace a clear Brechtian legacy include: Dario Fo,
Augusto Boal, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, Peter Weiss, Heiner
Müller, Pina Bausch, Tony Kushner and
Caryl Churchill. In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have
exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice; Brecht's influence may be detected in the
films of Jean-Luc Godard, Lindsay Anderson,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima,
Ritwik Ghatak, Lars von Trier, Jan Bucquoy [4] and Hal Hartley.
Life and career
Bavaria (1898-1924)
Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria (about forty miles
west of Munich) to a conventionally-devout Protestant
mother and a Catholic father (who had been persuaded to a Protestant wedding). His
father worked for a paper mill, becoming its managing director in 1914.[5] Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew his Bible, a
familiarity that would impact on his writing in years to come. From her, too, came the "dangerous image of the self-denying
woman" that recurs in his drama.[6] Brecht's
home life was comfortably middle class, despite what his occasional attempt to claim peasant origins implied.[7] From 1904-1908, Brecht attended Volksschule for
elementary school and from 1908-1917, Königlich-Bayerisches Realgymnasium. At school in Augsburg he met Caspar Neher, with whom he formed a life-long creative partnership, Neher designing many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helping to forge the distinctive visual
iconography of their epic theatre. At sixteen, the
first World War broke out; initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing
his classmates "swallowed by the army".[5] On his
father's recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for an additional medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917.[8] There he studied drama with
Artur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic
dramatist and cabaret-star Wedekind.[9]
From July 1916, Brecht's newspaper articles began appearing under the new name "Bert Brecht"
(his first theatre criticism for the Augsburger Volkswille appeared in October 1919).[10] Brecht was finally drafted into military service in the autumn of
1918, only to be posted back to Augsburg as a medical orderly in a military VD clinic; the war ended a month later.[5]
Brecht's first significant play—Baal (written 1918)—arose in response to an
argument in one of Kutscher's drama seminars, initiating a trend that persisted throughout his career of creative activity that
was generated by a desire to counter another work (both others' and his own, as his many adaptations and re-writes attest).
"Anyone can be creative," he quipped, "it's rewriting other people that's a challenge."[11]
Brecht completed his second major play—later to be renamed Drums in the
Night—in February 1919,[12] about the same time that he took a small part in the political cabaret of the Munich comedian Karl
Valentin.[13] Writing in his
Messingkauf Dialogues years later, Brecht identified Valentin, along with
Wedekind and Büchner, as his "chief influences" at that time:
- "But the man he [Brecht writes of himself in the third person] learnt most from was the
clown Valentin, who performed in a beer-hall. He did short sketches in which he played refractory employees, orchestral
musicians or photographers, who hated their employer and made him look ridiculous. The employer was played by his partner, a
popular woman comedian who used to pad herself out and speak in a deep bass voice."[14]
In July 1919, Brecht and Paula Banholzer (who had begun a relationship in 1917) had a son,
Frank. In 1920 Brecht's mother died.[15]
In 1922 while still living in Munich, Brecht came to the attention of an influential
Berlin critic, Herbert Ihering: "At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has
changed Germany's literary complexion overnight"—he enthused in his review of Brecht's first play to be produced,
Drums in the Night—"[he] has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new
vision. [...] It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column."[16] In November it was announced that Brecht had
been awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize (intended for unestablished writers and probably
Germany's most significant literary award, until it was abolished in 1932) for his first three
plays (Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle,
although at that point only Drums had been produced).[17] The citation for the award insisted that:
- "[Brecht's] language is vivid without being deliberately poetic, symbolical without being over literary. Brecht is a
dramatist because his language is felt physically and in the round."[18]
That year he married the Viennese opera-singer Marianne
Zoff. Their daughter—Hanne Hiob (born in 1923)—is a successful German actress.[5]
In 1924 Brecht worked with the novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger (who he
had met in 1919) on an adaptation of Edward II that proved to be
a milestone in Brecht's early theatrical and dramaturgical development.[19] It was his first attempt at collaborative writing, and was the first of many classic texts he
was to adapt; the production was his solo directorial début and in it he located the
germ of his conception of 'epic theatre'.[20] That September, a job as assistant dramaturg at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater—at the time one of the leading three or four theatres in the world—brought him to
Berlin.[21]
In 1924 Brecht's marriage to Zoff began to break down (though they did not divorce until 1926). Brecht had become involved with
both Elisabeth Hauptmann and Helene
Weigel.[22] Brecht and Weigel's son,
Stefan, was born in October of that year.
In his role as dramaturg, Brecht had much to stimulate him but little work of his own.[23] Reinhardt staged Shaw's
Saint Joan, Goldoni's
Servant of Two Masters (with the improvisational approach of the
commedia dell'arte in which the actors chatted with the prompter about their
roles), and Pirandello's Six
Characters in Search of an Author in his group of Berlin theatres.[24] A new version of Brecht's third play, now entitled Jungle: Decline of a Family, opened at the Deutsches Theater in October 1924, but was not a
success.[25]
| In the asphalt city I'm at home. From the very start |
| Provided with every last sacrament: |
| With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy |
| To the end mistrustful, lazy and content. |
| Bertolt Brecht, "Of Poor BB". |
At this time Brecht revised his important 'transitional poem' "Of Poor BB".[26] In 1925, his publishers provided him with Elisabeth Hauptmann as an assistant for the completion of his collection of poems, Devotions for the Home (Hauspostille, eventually published in January 1927). She continued to work with him after the publisher's commission ran out.[27]
In 1925 in Mannheim the artistic exhibition Neue
Sachlichkeit ('new sobriety' or 'new objectivity') had given its name to the new post-Expressionist movement in the German arts. With little to do at the Deutsches Theater, Brecht began to
develop his Man Equals Man project, which was to become the first product of "the
'Brecht collective' — that shifting group of friends and collaborators on whom he henceforward depended."[28] This collaborative approach to artistic production, together with aspects
of Brecht's writing and style of theatrical production, mark Brecht's work from this period as part of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement.[29] The collective's work "mirrored the artistic climate of the middle 1920s," Willett and Manheim
argue:
with their attitude of 'Neue Sachlichkeit' (or New Matter-of-Factness), their
stressing of the collectivity and downplaying of the individual, and their new cult of Anglo-Saxon imagery and sport. Together
the 'collective' would go to fights, not only absorbing their terminology and ethos (which permeates Man Equals Man) but
also drawing those conclusions for the theatre as a whole which Brecht set down in his theoretical essay 'Emphasis on Sport' and
tried to realise by means of the harsh lighting, the boxing-ring stage and other anti-illusionistic devices that henceforward
appeared in his own productions.[30]
In 1925, Brecht also saw two films that had a significant influence on him: Chaplin's
The Gold Rush and Eisenstein's
Battleship Potemkin.[31] Brecht had compared Valentin to Chaplin, and the two of them
provided models for Galy Gay in Man Equals Man.[32] Brecht later wrote that Chaplin "would in many ways come closer to the
epic than to the dramatic theatre's requirements."[33] They met several times during Brecht's time in the United States, and discussed
Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux project, which it is possible Brecht
influenced.[34]
In 1926 a series of short stories was published under Brecht's name, though Hauptmann was
closely associated with writing them.[35] Following the
production of Man Equals Man in Darmstadt that
year, Brecht began studying Marxism and socialism in earnest,
under the supervision of Hauptmann.[36]
"When I read Marx's Capital", a note by Brecht
reveals, "I understood my plays." Marx was, it continues, "the only spectator for my plays I'd ever come across."[37]
| For us, man portrayed on the stage is significant as a social function. It is not his
relationship to himself, nor his relationship to God, but his relationship to society which is central. Whenever he appears, his
class or social stratum appears with him. His moral, spiritual or sexual conflicts are conflicts with society. |
| Erwin Piscator, 1929.[38] |
In 1927 Brecht became part of the 'dramaturgical collective'
of Erwin Piscator's first company, which was designed to tackle the problem of finding
new plays for its "epic, political, confrontational, documentary theatre".[39] Brecht collaborated with Piscator during the period of the latter's landmark productions,
Hoppla, We're Alive! by Toller, Rasputin, The Adventures of the Good Soldier
Schweik, and Konjunktur by Lania.[40] Brecht's most significant contribution was to the adaptation
of the unfinished episodic comic novel Schweik, which he later described as a "montage from the novel".[41] The Piscator productions influenced Brecht's ideas about
staging and design, and alerted him to the radical potentials offered to the 'epic' playwright by the development of stage technology (particularly projections).[42] What Brecht took from Piscator "is fairly plain, and he
acknowledged it" Willett suggests:
The emphasis on Reason and didacticism, the sense that the new subject matter demanded a new dramatic form, the use of songs to interrupt and comment: all these are found in his notes and essays of the 1920s, and he
bolstered them by citing such Piscatorial examples as the step-by-step narrative technique of Schweik and the oil
interests handled in Konjunktur ('Petroleum resists the five-act form').[43]
Brecht was struggling at the time with the question of how to dramatize the complex economic relationships of modern
capitalism in his unfinished project Joe P. Fleischhacker (which Piscator's theatre announced in its programme for the
1927-28 season). It wasn't until his Saint Joan of the Stockyards
(written between 1929-1931) that Brecht solved it.[44] In
1928 he discussed with Piscator plans to stage Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Brecht's own Drums in the
Night, but the productions did not materialize.[45]
1927 also saw the first collaboration between Brecht and the young composer Kurt
Weill.[46] Together they began to develop Brecht's
Mahagonny project, along thematic lines of the biblical
Cities of the Plain but rendered in terms of the Neue Sachlichkeit's Amerikanismus, which had informed
Brecht's previous work.[47] They produced
The Little Mahagonny for a music festival in July, as what Weill called a
"stylistic exercise" in preparation for the large-scale piece. From that point on Caspar
Neher became an integral part of the collaborative effort, with words, music and visuals conceived in relation to one
another from the start.[48] The model for their mutual
articulation lay in Brecht's newly-formulated principle of the 'separation of the
elements', which he first outlined in "The Modern Theatre is the
Epic Theatre" (1930). The principle, a variety of montage, proposed
by-passing the "great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production" as Brecht put it, by showing each as
self-contained, independent works of art that adopt attitudes towards one another.[49]
In 1930 Brecht married Weigel; their daughter Barbara Brecht-Schall was born soon after the wedding. She also became an
actress and currently holds the copyrights to all of Brecht's work.
Die Dreigroschenoper, original German poster from Berlin, 1928.
Brecht formed a writing collective which became prolific and very influential. Elisabeth
Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Emil Burri, Ruth Berlau and others worked with
Brecht and produced the multiple teaching
plays, which attempted to create a new dramaturgy for participants rather than passive
audiences. These addressed themselves to the massive worker arts organisation that existed in Germany and Austria in the 1920s. So did Brecht's first great play,
Saint Joan of the Stockyards, which attempted to portray the drama
in financial transactions.
This collective adapted John Gay's The Beggar's
Opera, with Brecht's songs set to music by Kurt Weill. Retitled
The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) it was the biggest hit in
Berlin of the 1920s and a renewing influence on the musical worldwide. One of its most
famous lines underscored the hypocrisy of conventional morality imposed by the Church, working in conjunction with the
established order, in the face of working-class hunger and deprivation:
- Erst kommt das Fressen
- Dann kommt die Moral.
|
- First the grub (lit. "eating like animals, gorging")
- Then the morality.
|
The success of The Threepenny Opera was followed by the quickly thrown
together Happy End. It was a personal and a commercial failure. At the time the book was purported to be by the mysterious
Dorothy Lane (now known to be Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's secretary and close
collaborator). Brecht only claimed authorship of the song texts. Brecht would later use elements of Happy End as the germ
for his Saint Joan of the Stockyards, a play that would never see the stage in Brecht's lifetime. Happy End's most
redeeming quality was its inspired score by Weill, producing many Brecht/Weill hits like "Der Bilbao-Song" and
"Surabaya-Jonny".
The masterpiece of the Brecht/Weill collaborations, Rise and Fall
of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), caused an uproar when it premiered in 1930 in
Leipzig, with Nazis in the audience protesting. The Mahagonny opera would premier later in Berlin in 1931 as a triumphant
sensation.
Brecht spent his last years in the Weimar-era Berlin (1930-1933) working with his ‘collective’ on the Lehrstücke. These
were a group of plays driven by morals, music and Brecht's budding Epic Theatre. The
Lehrstücke often aimed at educating workers on Socialist issues. The Measures Taken (Die Massnahme) was
scored by Hanns Eisler. In addition, Brecht worked on a script for a semi-documentary
feature film about the human impact of mass unemployment, Kuhle Wampe (1932), which
was directed by Slatan Dudow. This striking film is notable for its subversive humour,
outstanding cinematography by Günther Krampf, and Hanns Eisler's dynamic musical contribution. It still provides a vivid insight into Berlin during the last years of the Weimar Republic.
By February 1933, Brecht’s work was eclipsed by the rise of Nazi rule in Germany. (Brecht
would also have his work challenged again in later life by the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which believed he was under the
influence of communism.[50][51])
Nazi Germany and World War II (1933-1945)
As a Marxist socialist, Brecht decided to leave Germany in February 1933, when
Hitler took power. He went to Denmark, but when war seemed
imminent in 1939, he moved to Stockholm, Sweden. He stayed
there for one year. Then Hitler invaded Norway and Denmark, and Brecht felt the need to leave
Sweden for Finland where he waited for his visa for the
United States until May 3, 1941.
During the war years, Brecht expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most famous
plays: Galileo, Mother
Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Sezuan,
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and many others.
Brecht also wrote poetry which continues to attract attention and respect. Though he derived no real success or pleasure in
this, he worked on a few screenplays for Hollywood, including
Hangmen Also Die.
Cold War and final years in East Germany (1945-1956)
In the years of the Cold War and "red scare", the
House Un-American Activities Committee called Brecht to account
for his communist allegiances, and he was soon blacklisted by movie studio bosses.
Brecht, along with about 41 other Hollywood writers, directors, actors and producers, was subpoenaed to appear before the HUAC in
September 1947.
Initially, Brecht was one of 19 witnesses who declared that they would refuse to testify about their political affiliations.
Eleven members of this group were actually questioned on this point but, as Brecht later explained, he did not want to delay a
planned trip to Europe, so he followed the advice of attorneys and broke with his earlier avowal. On October 30, 1947, he appeared before the committee and testified that he had
never actually held party membership.[51]
During his appearance before the committee, Brecht wore overalls and smoked an acrid cigar that made some of the committee
members feel slightly ill. He made wry jokes throughout the proceedings, punctuating his inability to speak English well with
continuous references to the translators present, who transformed his German statements into English ones unintelligible to
himself.
It may be that Brecht never joined the Communist Party because he was unsure that the party would follow through with its
proposals, though he was in agreement with fundamental principles of communism. Thus, his answer to the HUAC may have been
sincere. It did, however, generate a good deal of subsequent criticism, including accusations of betrayal. The remaining
witnesses, the so called Hollywood Ten, refused to testify and were cited for
contempt. HUAC Vice Chairman Karl Mundt thanked Brecht for cooperating. The day after
his testimony, Brecht flew to Europe.[52]
In Switzerland, Brecht composed an adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone, which was performed at Chur. It was
based on the translation by Hölderlin, but was considerably modified. It was published under the title Antigonemodell 1948,
accompanied by an essay on the importance of creating a 'non-Aristotelian' form of theatre. He was subsequently invited to return
to Berlin by the Communist regime in East Germany. Horrified at the reinstatement of former
Nazis into West Germany's government, Brecht accepted the offer and made East Berlin his home in 1949. He was enticed by the offer of his own theatre (completed in 1954) and theatre
company (the Berliner Ensemble). He retained his Austrian nationality, however, and
overseas bank accounts from which he received valuable hard currency remittances. The copyrights on his writings were held by a
Swiss company. He used to drive around East Berlin in a pre-war DKW car — a rare luxury in the
austere divided capital.
While Brecht's communist sympathies were a bane in the United States, East German officials sought to make him their hero.
Though he had not been a member of the communist party, he had been deeply schooled in Marxism
by the dissident communist Karl Korsch, and his communist allegiances were sincere. He
claimed communism appeared to be the only reliable antidote to militarist fascism and spoke out against the remilitarization of the West and the division of Germany. Brecht used Korsch's version of the Marxist dialectic in both his
aesthetic theory and practice in a central way when presenting his plays.
Grave of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel.
Brecht wrote very few plays in his last years in East Berlin, none of them as famous as his previous works. Some of his most
famous poems, however, including the "Buckower Elegies", came from this era. One of the poems in the "Buckower Elegies," Die
Lösung (The Solution) was Brecht's later commentary on the uprising of 17
June 1953 in East Germany:
- After the uprising of the 17th of June
- The Secretary of the Writers Union
- Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
- Stating that the people
- Had forfeited the confidence of the government
- And could win it back only
- By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
- In that case for the government
- To dissolve the people
- And elect another?
Brecht had previously supported the measures taken by the East German government to crush the uprising, including the use of
Soviet military force; he even wrote a letter on the day of the uprising (17 June) to
SED First Secretary Walter
Ulbricht stating as such, although in that letter he also urged the SED leadership to have a "grand dialogue with the
masses" concerning the political and economic conditions in the country.
Death
Brecht died on 14 August 1956 of a heart attack at the age of 58.
In his will he provided instructions that a stiletto be
placed in his heart and that he be buried in a steel coffin so that his corpse could not be eaten by worms[citation needed]. He is buried in the
Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof on Chausseestraße in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin.
Impact
Brecht left the Berliner Ensemble to his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, which she ran until her death in 1971. Perhaps the most famous German touring theater of
the postwar era, it was primarily devoted to performing Brecht plays.
His son, Stefan Brecht, became a poet and theatre critic interested in New York's
avant-garde theatre.
Brecht's influence can be seen in the cinema. Such filmmakers as Lars Von Trier,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima,
Ritwik Ghatak and Jean-Luc Godard were influenced
by Brecht and his theory of the Verfremdungseffekt. Often mis-translated as the
'Alienation effect', it is a process of emotionally distancing the audience from the on-stage action.[citation needed] Ghatak first translated Brecht into
Bengali, before then making use of some of his key theories in the later films
Cloud-Capped Star and Subarna-Rekha.
Dramatic works
