Die Antigone des Sophokles

Antigone des Sophokles, Die, the stage adaptation with prologue and Vorspiel, but with no division into acts, by B. Brecht of Hölderlin's translation of Antigone. It was first performed at Chur in Switzerland in 1948 without the Vorspiel, which Brecht revised in 1951.

It is set during the last days of the fighting in Berlin in April 1945. Two sisters return home from an air-raid shelter and discover that their soldier brother has been there during their absence. They discover, too, that the SS have been quick to hang him as a deserter. Brecht uses the contrasting reactions of the two girls, whose own lives are suddenly at stake should their identity as the sisters of a deserter be established, as the moral crux of the play. The one is too frightened to seek out the body and denies to the SS man the identity of the hanged man. But the other goes out to cut her brother down from the butcher's hook not only in the faint hope that she may revive him, but also because she loves him. The prologue invites the audience to look for further parallels to the action in their own age.

Small touches promote the understanding of the political message. Thus Kreon is not addressed as ‘King’, but as ‘Mein Führer’. Basically Brecht pursues the same aim as Hölderlin, who had adapted the Theban tragedy for a patriotic end: the ancient setting was to promote the spectator's detachment and to recognize ‘den Geist der Zeit’ in the way formulated by Hölderlin in his Anmerkungen zur Antigone. Brecht retains long stretches of Hölderlin's verse and does not allow his alterations to disrupt the rhythmic form. His Antigonemodell of 1948 comments further on the production. Brecht's Antigone-Legende represents a variant in epic form, using ‘Brückenverse’ in flexible hexameters.