
"Brecht today"
sounds like a wake-up call or a polemical assertion,
reassuring us that indeed Brecht’s works are still relevant
today. Yet, one might just as well imagine the rising
intonation of a question - “Brecht today?” - expressing
doubt as to whether Brecht’s writings can still generate
interest beyond their historical value. Who or what is
Brecht today? Thinking in a Brechtian way, we would have to
consider first what is meant by “Brecht” as well as by
“today,” who is asking the question and for what reason. Do
we specify Brecht the playwright, the theater theoretician
and stage practitioner, the poet, the prose writer, or the
intellectual critic and modernist thinker? Are we referring
to the Brecht read and received in Germany (East vs. West),
with the ups-and-downs of his popularity there, or to the
Brecht translated into other languages and known in
different socio-cultural contexts? Are we pointing to Brecht
the person or to the collective practices and collaborative
productivity, which he coordinated throughout his life?
These are not idle questions but indicators of an ongoing
interrogation into the nature and limitations of
understanding Brecht's creative work. The following
comments will be divided into three sections that expand the
title into Brecht yesterday, today, and tomorrow.[i]
Part I traces the contours of Brecht’s reception over the
past 50 years. Part II outlines the major contributions
identified with Brecht’s enormous intellectual output.
Finally, Part III speculates about the ongoing relevance of
Brecht’s work or a Brechtian approach. In other words, I
will focus less on specific texts than on our work as
readers, asking where or whether Brecht fits in the current
intellectual context with its shifts and adjustments.
Brecht Yesterday
Has Brecht become boring, antiquated, and
anachronistic? In 1964 the prominent Swiss
author Max Frisch expressed probably for the
first time the frustrated accusation of “Brecht
exhaustion” when he spoke of the “striking
ineffectivity of a literary classic.”[ii]
Frisch was not referring to Brecht’s own works
but to the dull reception of his plays among
theater critics and to the resistance among
theaters to his dramaturgical innovations. In
other words, he was summarizing the attitude of
those who treated Brecht as if he were a
classic writer, thereby robbing him of his
effect. If in 1964 Frisch had perceived Brecht
exhaustion, by 1994 Brecht was declared by a
German critic to be “dead as a doornail” and
mummified, while his status as a literary
classic advanced to a point where the
controversial Brecht biographer John Fuegi could
be criticized in turn as a “defiler of
monuments.”[iii]
Naturally there was no lack of confidence in
1996 (the fortieth anniversary of his death) and
again in 1998 (the centenary of his birth) that
Brecht had definitively become a classic (i.e.,
meaningless), just as the defiled monument had
finally fallen from its base. The compulsive
repetition of these judgments suggests the
extent to which this person still occupies us as
intellectuals, and here I mean not the real
person but rather Brecht as the sum of a
contradictory life’s work and its reception.
Today Brecht may indeed strike us as a classic
in the traditional sense as far as his
popularity is concerned. For over thirty years
his plays have dominated the statistics as the
most produced in Germany, and outside Germany he
is counted together with the classical Greek
tragedians, Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, and
Chekhov among the most frequently staged
dramatists. These are remarkable statistics,
since Brecht’s kind of theater is an
intellectually ambitious one that aims at
undermining the relationship between a
complacent audience and a dramatic tradition
based on entertainment. Brechtian techniques of
distanciation, the rupturing of realist
illusions, and the notion of gestus based
on the constructed relation between performer,
spectator, and author have become familiar
elements not only in the theater but also for
the aesthetics of the cinema, television, and
even advertising, albeit without his political
aim of interventionist thinking, of “changing
the world because it needs it.”[iv]
Who, then, was this Brecht? There is no
essential Brecht to be distilled out of his
critical writings or to be carved out of his
oeuvre, which was in any case a work in
progress.[v]
One answer to this question emerges from a
consideration of the ways in which Brecht has
been instrumentalized for various agendas.
Brecht scholarship and Brechtian theater
practice have a history in the postwar period
with identifiable ideological commitments,
shifts, and revisions both in the East and the
West. In the divided Germany this reception
followed fairly clear but countervailing
patterns. His return to East Berlin in 1948 and
the establishment of the Berliner Ensemble were
celebrated by the East German government as a
major public relations coup, since he
represented a strong line of cultural continuity
with left intellectuals of the Weimar Republic.
Nonetheless, in the course of the fifties until
he died in 1956, Brecht's politics and
aesthetics were treated by the government's
cultural functionaries with suspicion because
his "formalism" did not fit the orthodox image
of Socialist Realism. After his death and with
the international success of the Ensemble’s
tours to Paris (1954) and London (1956) Brecht’s
work became acceptable as a model of political
theater when applied to the fascist past and to
western capitalism, but not to real existing
socialism. Here, then, are the seeds of
separating the political person Brecht from his
artistic texts and playing the two off each
other. Much of the subsequent reception in both
East and West suffered precisely from this
dogmatic definition of “the political” which
sustains narrow and polemical positions either
for or against the playwright's politics. Such
positions tend to close off the innovative,
experimental energy of Brecht's project before
it even begins to develop.
Meanwhile, in a world sundered by the Cold War the
development necessarily took a different course in
the West. Esteemed or even venerated by a select
few in the fifties - and this actually more often in
Western European countries like Italy, France, and
England than in the former Federal Republic -
Brecht's choice for the "other," socialist Germany
led to a virtual boycott at all publicly subsidized
theaters in West Germany until his death. By the
mid-sixties Brecht had become petrified in the East
as an official icon of Socialist Realism, while in
the West he was on the verge of being discovered by
the young generation of politically motivated
students as an alternative to the stuffy and
dominant heritage of middlebrow humanism. For some
he became the springboard to an alternative,
critical form of thinking, for others, a weapon in
the left's factional battles. During the seventies
a renewal took place: a generation of younger
writers in East Germany schooled in Brecht's
dialectical thinking and language extended his
legacy into the present (e.g., Heiner Müller and
Volker Braun); in West Germany the initial
enthusiasm for the classical Brecht of the Berliner
Ensemble had paled and the early Brecht and his
learning plays - largely ignored in the East -
dominated the attention of progressive theaters and
scholars. By the eighties Brecht had become in both
Germanies part of the respective, but different
canons. His work had become professionalized,
institutionalized, and specialized, ironically now
part of a system of ideological authorization and
legitimation in the universities and subsidized
theaters. His stories, poems, and plays were
anthologized in school readers. Literary scholars
and theater historians focused attention on their
object of interest, comparable to other privileged
writers who had achieved the status of “poets and
thinkers” in the German pantheon. A new 30-volume
edition of Brecht’s complete works, the first such
East-West German collaboration, was launched in
1988.[vi]
No wonder, then, that a full-blown case of Brecht
weariness set in. Embedded in a context of
competing and contradictory discourses, a Siamese
image of Brecht flourished among the East-West
tensions. A sometimes aggressive rhetoric of
accusations and self-righteousness marked the
opponents: on the one side the political Brecht, on
the other the poet Brecht; here the rebel Brecht,
there the Stalinist Brecht; here the antiquated
Brecht in the museum, there the totalizing critique
of the status quo.
The stagnation of global as well as German-German
political relations in the eighties did not simply
consign such an eminently political artist to the
dustbin of history. Translations into all the major
languages and the magnetism of a non-dogmatic
thinker made Brecht into a favored object to be
deconstructed from a critical distance by scholars
and directors from other countries. In Central and
South America, Asia, and Africa Brecht's work has
played and continues to play a vital role for
articulating the emancipatory political process of
national transformation. Similarly underground,
fringe, and avant-garde theaters "read" Brecht
against the grain through various filters: feminism,
performance theory, the body, humor, etc.[vii]
After the end of the Cold War, interest in new
Brecht images revived, even while it once again
brought forth falsifying assessments: Brecht the
chauvinist, who bought text for sex, the
totalitarian Brecht, Brecht the anti-Semite. It is
unnecessary to stress that this has nothing to do
with the person Brecht, but rather he has become a
projection screen. Brecht passed away long ago and
does not need to be protected like a relic in a
shrine. An ongoing interest in Brecht cannot be
motivated by nostalgia for the apparently clear
lines of distinction in the past nor is it simply a
matter of turning the canonized Brecht back on his
feet as an iconoclast. The pre-Classic Brecht, the
student movement’s Brecht, the Brecht
"against-the-grain" were historically mediated and
now obsolete responses to present challenges, while
the widely acknowledged Brecht "exhaustion" or the
museum-quality Brecht simply refers to the half-life
of much intellectual reasoning.
Brecht Today
What is Brecht’s relevance today? The ever
expanding forces of global capitalism, the hegemony
of commodity market mechanisms, the growth of
communications technologies, the tendency to move
from class-based to identity and life-style
politics, all these factors demand new conceptual
and analytical tools if we are to understand where
and how the cultural terrain is today being
contested. Meanwhile traditional conceptual
categories such as enlightenment, pedagogy,
progress, reason, and historical agency - all
fundamental tenets in Brecht's vision of
transforming society - have been called into
question by postmodernist theories as being
universalist and therefore oppressive master
narratives in the service of dominant elites. On
the one hand, this relegates Brecht's oeuvre to a
historically superseded period of modernism while on
the other it echoes the crisis in representation
that grounds Brecht's entire aesthetics. The
historical illusions of modernism have become in the
postmodern age a problem of positioning oneself as
subject in radically discontinuous realities. The
momentous changes in the map of Europe over the last
decade of the past century suggest that this problem
of positioning is one of practical politics as well,
for the intersecting demands raised by local,
national, and international entities are becoming
visible as functions of the increasingly complex
multinational space we inhabit. Meanwhile the
substitutes for the disintegrated utopias of
modernism (nationalism, regionalism, ecology, a
renewed awareness of tradition, etc.) must still
prove themselves as more than apologies for a new
hierarchy of authoritarian or totalitarian relations
between the particular and the plural. With our
distance to the person Brecht and to his political
reference system, it ought to be possible to read
his texts without his ideological blinders in
order to discover how he used and transformed the
material out of which he constructed representations
of reality.
To answer the question whether Brecht is relevant is
to consider whether political art is (still)
possible. For this it is helpful to explain what
Brecht meant by interventionist thinking (“eingreifendes
Denken”), a central category in his own conviction
about the need to change the world.[viii]
Not surprisingly, it is no simple task because, like
so much in the thinking of this pragmatist, his
suggestions were oriented toward concrete historical
conditions and situations. Interventionist thinking
- a concept that arose in the early thirties during
what perhaps was Brecht’s most productive work phase
- was realized in various forms and with differing
goals in the time of exile and after his return to
East Germany. First, it is important to establish
the oxymoronic connection between “intervention” and
“thinking.” Thinking describes a contemplative
relation to an object, to an event, or to the world;
it marks above all a distancing process between the
subject and object. Thinking about something
triggers analysis and logic, which deconstruct and
then reconstitute this “something.” In the long
tradition of Enlightenment philosophy, cogito
(“I know”) is the point of departure and essence of
the subject. Brecht, who directly experienced the
vicissitudes of the “dialectic of the
Enlightenment,”[ix]
found this definition of human existence too
limiting. Intervention is the opposite of thinking,
since it describes an act. From the perspective of
the subject, intervention refers to changing the
object, the course of an event, or the condition of
the world. In short, interventionist thinking is
typical for Brecht’s antagonistic world view. His
creativity lived off crises and found its most
productive inspiration from the intensification of
contradictions. For this he devised ever new,
dynamic poetic and aesthetic forms. The concept of
interventionist thinking abstracts from such a
dynamic; it signifies an attitude which demands not
only contemplation and cognition but also
application and effect. Interventionist thinking
is, then, a result of specific aesthetic forms that
set in motion the addressee (e.g., the reader, the
audience, the participant) by means of an
analytical, distancing process.
Based on this definition I maintain that political
art and interventionist thinking in Brecht’s sense
is still imaginable. Many or even all of his plays
are directly political, that is, they address
specific political themes (e.g., The Rifles of
Senora Carrar, 1937, is set during the Spanish
Civil War, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui,
1941, takes up Hitler’s ascent to power, The Days
of the Commune, 1949, treats the Paris Commune
of 1871), but this is a very narrow idea of the
political. Brecht’s political interest did not
exhaust itself in the specifics of a historical
juncture, rather he used topical events to generate
a political attitude on the part of his readers and
audience: the desire to change things. Moreover, in
a broader sense politics in the theater was for
Brecht the opposite of boredom and lethargy. All
his plays and theoretical writings are aimed against
the institutions of art, which he considered to be
essentially conservative. His practical work
consisted in producing contradictions, revising
texts, and breaking through the passivity of
audience consumerism. As an abstraction, then, the
concept of interventionist thinking is still viable,
but it becomes problematic when we attempt to define
its content. Which aesthetic forms are today still
usable? Is there a set of “Brechtian techniques” or
stylistic elements devised by Brecht in the
thirties, forties, or fifties for specific social
situations and institutions that are today still
valid? Such questions can not be answered
abstractly and universally, that is, interventionist
thinking will be engaged differently in Germany than
in the United States, for it is not a formula but an
attitude toward experience and imagination.
Can Brecht still be relevant if he failed in his
project? For he certainly did fail, at least in
Walter Benjamin's sense of history, which moves
forward by means of failure rather than triumphs.[x]
Brecht was a radical partisan of change, and the way
he envisioned and represented change relates to the
constraints of his experiments in imagining
something different from the historical reality in
which he lived. Here we must consider Brecht's
utopianism, since this is where the very capacity to
imagine change reveals its own absences, its
historical limits and systemic repressions.[xi]
With its utopias modernism sought to rehabilitate
the subject in its anomie and alienation by
imagining a non place outside of space in which the
ideal of unity reigned between work and life, the
individual and the collective, art and politics,
economy and morality. In the twenties German
novelists like Alfred Döblin and Hermann Broch
developed exemplary techniques for creating a
timeless space in their prose by running together
mythic and contemporary time and by dissolving
specificities of place into allegorical, universal
space. Brecht too is on one level indifferent to
time and place, shifting from a mythic Chicago to
the Caucasus or to China and playing with
anachronism in Mother Courage, 1939, St
Joan of the Stockyards, 1932, or in his
adaptations. Yet, he insists precisely on
difference in order to produce new insights into
structural relations and between historically
mediated specificities. Distanciation (e.g., the
alienation effect, Epic theater, gestus) is
Brecht's primary means of historicizing perception,
of demonstrating that the past was different than
the present and that, because the past has changed,
the present is changeable. Undoubtedly this is
related to a deep empathy for the struggle to
survive, one that he faced existentially as an exile
during the Third Reich. But it is also an
imaginative space shared by modernists in their
response to modernization and industrialization,
whose effects of alienation became the trope of
utopian thinking. Brecht's plays, especially the
mature parable plays, construct situations that show
the transition from historically outmoded time and
the contradictions between still functional old
behavior and new situations. This disjuncture
between historical time and the time of the subject
is mediated by utopia with the intent not to reform
an oppressive system but to transform it, to empower
people so that they understand their present in
order to change it. This, then, is Brecht's
dialectic, his effort to imagine something that is
not yet possible but already inevitable. Its
negative moment is the critique of bourgeois forms
and their reactionary consequences, and its
positive, most problematic moment is utopianism.
The absence of the ideal condition produces utopian
energy in the modernist project. Yet here the other
side of utopianism becomes visible. Modernist art
and literature is characterized by negativity, by
the fundamental gesture of representing the
unrepresentable ("ou" + "topos" = no place, absence
of place). Shock, revolution, and the "new man"
describe aesthetic strategies for this impossible
function. Modernist utopias were motivated by the
idea of harmonizing or bringing together art and
life. In this equation art was considered to be the
paradigm of non-alienated labor in which individual
self-determination and control are most fully
realized. Committed to the political avant-garde,
Brecht aimed at a different kind of utopia, which
would integrate art and social praxis. Of course,
this vision emerged from a particular social
situation and was subject to important shifts in
emphasis over time. Witness to the collapse of the
old order and to the problematic constitution of an
increasingly unacceptable new one during the
twenties in Germany, Brecht was attracted to the
idea of redemption through the negation of self.
The excess and isolation of the asocial antiheroes
of the early plays (Baal, Garga, Kragler, Fatzer)
express his critique of the bourgeois subject
without slipping into the modernist solution of
escaping the masses through hyper individualism. In
the late twenties and in particular with the
experimental learning plays (Lehrstücke) of
the early thirties Brecht sought to formulate an
alternative to this subjectivist, antibourgeois
stance. It takes the form of a collectivity that
derives from the consciousness of individual
subjects transformed into a class identity through
the dynamics of mass struggle. The earlier social
chaos and individual rootlessness give way to a
consensus model of obedience to the collective (Einverständnis)
and to a new individual who is defined not in
opposition to but through the masses.
This collectivity had not only aesthetic but also
biographical consequences in Brecht’s practice of
collaborative authorship. One of the distinctive
features of the modernist crisis in Germany during
the Weimar Republic was a rapid shift in the
conditions of cultural production. The increasing
commercialization of leisure-time activity with the
rise of popular entertainment (cinema, sports, dance
revues, jazz, etc.) and the commodification of
cultural relations that accompanied it marked the
social crisis in the function of traditional
cultural institutions. The educated, bourgeois
audience was dissolving, and taking its place was a
much broader audience of consumers with new demands
for imaginative and recreational activity. This
tendency toward cultural democratization also
affected the role and the self-identity of the
writer. On the one hand, the avant-gardists as well
as the traditionalists sought new, distinctive ways
of asserting their elitism; on the other, writers
like Brecht embraced modernity's tendency toward
social disintegration and massification as
liberatory. The constraints of bourgeois
individualism were falling away. Working with Lion
Feuchtwanger on the adaptation of Marlowe's Life
of Edward the Second (1924) and with Elizabeth
Hauptmann on Man Equals Man (1926), Brecht
began to develop a habit of production that
submerged the author's subjectivity within a
collective. The very notion of aesthetic activity
as "production" (rather than creation), theorized by
Brecht in his book-length essay The Threepenny
Lawsuit (1932) indicates this fundamental
shift. Indeed, Man Equals Man thematizes a
sociological model of identity constitution based on
exchange value and collective need. The
demystification of the bourgeois notion of the
individual is equally pertinent for the
demystification of the bourgeois notion of the
author.
This collaborative practice has led to accusations
that Brecht suppressed the autonomy of his
collaborators, in particular of his female
collaborators. Such critics misapprehend the
fundamental response to and intervention in the
modernist crisis as well as the fact that he worked
closely with male collaborators. At the same time,
the issue of gender oppression - the “price” that
Brecht's female collaborators paid to be used by him
- needs to be historicized. History has not made it
easy for women to develop their artistic creativity,
and many women have found it productive to be
connected to a literary environment controlled by
male writers. Brecht certainly no longer fit the
traditional model of the poet and his (female)
muse. That he could bind women to himself on the
condition that their love too was to be socialized
in the context of creative productivity was an
innovation within the context of German society in
the first half of the twentieth century.
Historically, then, the scale was weighted in
Brecht's favor; his women worked on his material and
were his material. In a very real sense they served
at times as the medium of his productivity. Yet it
is foolish to assert that women's creativity could
or did exist outside of the history of patriarchy.
Thus, to understand the role of Brecht's female
collaborators and to identify who was responsible
for what, is part of the process of historically
defining the constraints and the possibilities of
women's creativity.
Brecht's vision of a more humane society altered
with the threat of new forms of domination during
the thirties, specifically with the rise of
fascism. It became more and more abstract. He
tried and failed for the most part to represent
convincingly the alternative order that could
confront contemporary fascism. The denial of the
part for the whole, the elimination of the
individual for the sake of the collective in the
learning plays, reverted in Fear and Misery of
the Third Reich (1938), in the historical novel
fragment The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius
Caesar (1938/39), and in the fragments in the
Book of Changes (1935-42, also known as Me-ti)
to a contemptuous analysis of the collapsing old
order. Forced into exile and faced with the horrors
of National Socialism, Brecht focused on new
possibilities of representation rather than on
constructing a new order. On the one hand the
formal reductionism of the parable plays from this
period seems to function as a kind of protective
shield against the impossible contradictions of
reality, but on the other the shift in subject and
technique to more deliberate forms of distancing
decenters the text-audience relation by transferring
the utopian imagination into the spectators
themselves. The prologue to The Caucasian Chalk
Circle (written in 1944, first published in
1949) suggests succinctly the political and poetic
utopia Brecht envisioned in his mature plays. The
members of the collective farm represent an
anticipated collective destiny in which art and
labor have both become equally valuable forms of
production for them as free subjects. Not among the
pleasures rationed in wartime, the narration of a
story (like work) is a necessity despite the
existential threat they face. Representation,
aesthetics, and the work of imagination become
political acts with a use value comparable to labor.
In his theoretical writings of the forties Brecht
characterized this collectivity as living together
(“Zusammenleben”), and after the war his endeavors
at the Berliner Ensemble comprised the practical
model in the theater for such a collective, at least
in a rough, imperfect form.[xii]
Brecht studied and then became a Marxist in the late
twenties. Like the early Marx, his critique of
capitalism was not anti-capitalist but rather
posited it as a material force, as a motor that
leads to ever more complex relations of production.
Yet there is an idealist continuity in Marxist
utopian thought that adheres to Brecht's as well.
It presumes that everyone shares the imagined
collective's interests because of a fundamental
class identity, whereas the highly differentiated
interactions in such a social constellation suggest
a much more complex intersecting of needs, demands,
fears, and desires. Brecht, too, insisted on a
political and sociological definition of class as
the primary or hegemonic articulation of subject
identity, although he was not oblivious to the
complexity of the subject in other ways. His entire
poetic model, for example, undermines the strong
tradition in Marxist understanding of the dialectic
as a movement towards the resolution of
contradictions (“Aufhebung”). The definition in the
thirties of the Epic Theater - with its separation
of elements and stress on the positive quality of
the fragment owing to its openness to the audience -
as well as the later revision in the fifties of the
"cofabulating" audience in the Dialectical Theater
are examples of his view of contradiction as a
productive moment rather than one of closure.
Moreover, Brecht's reformulation of the collective
as the intersubjective "living together" of a
community stresses the positionality of the subjects
who are constantly producing themselves as
subjects through conflict and contradiction with one
another. Clearly he understood the idea of the
subject as construction, something he demonstrated
in the transformation of dramatic characters like
Jeraiah Jip in Man Equals Man, Fatzer, and
the Pope in Life of Galilei (written in
1938/39, revised in 1955/56) and something he tried
to conceptualize as the gestus, which
problematizes the relation between the self and
history.
Brecht was no rosy-eyed utopian but an intellectual
who developed his critical faculties through the
experience of personal gains and losses, of
political reversals and historical ruptures. The
collapse of the Soviet Union and the ossified
socialism identified with it is a powerful
indictment of traditional left utopianism. But
Brecht’s project of a more just, egalitarian society
never sought to provide answers on how to make the
world better, rather his writings are scripts for
how to ask questions, how to formulate the right
questions for a given situation that is untenable
and therefore must be changed. While he believed in
the power of reason that enables people to recognize
the problems around them and to solve them, he was
neither a narrow-minded rationalist nor a naive
believer in the inevitability of progress and human
emancipation. Thus, his critique of emotions, which
is frequently misunderstood or implemented as a
dramaturgy of “coldness,” was not directed against
feeling or spontaneity as such but rather against
the function of emotions in traditional
theater. Like interventionist thinking, Brecht’s
belief in reason is a functional concept that
enables individuals to determine this interest and
to act on its behalf, in other words, a principle of
reasoned action excluding neither passion nor
emotion.
Brecht Tomorrow
Our image of Brecht is a mediated one, constructed
from biographical and historical facts, from
interpretive readings and polemical speculations,
from instrumentalized needs and utopian desires.
This Brecht-in-process, whose image is never finally
established, contributes precisely to its quality
that can still provoke us. Yes, Brecht is a classic
today, recognized as a canonical thinker and artist
in the modernist, Enlightenment tradition who
reflected on and wrote about some of the major
catastrophes in the past century. In a world
governed by media and technologized communication,
the voice of Brecht sounds strangely old-fashioned,
while simultaneously Brechtian practices - like
vandalizing world literature, mixing poetry and
kitsch, using mass culture positively, and "complex
seeing" in the presentation and reception of art -
have not only been coopted by the market economy but
have been integrated into its very functioning
strategies. In the age of television flow, virtual
internet identities, and Benneton advertisements
featuring aids victims even the alienation effect
can be used to sell commodities more efficiently.
Yet, this nihilism validates a part for the whole in
a system that raises media images to the definitive
experiences in advanced capitalism. For those still
committed to Brecht's critical project, seeking
forms of pedagogy and communication that encourage
thinking and undermine merely contemplative
attitudes is the goal.
Brecht was a cunning master of throwing “sand in the
gears” of institutional hierarchies. In this
respect he is a particularly relevant example for
the public intellectual today. He lived at a time
when the self-image of the artist and thinker as a
socially and politically engaged person corresponded
to the expectations of the public; today, however,
the autonomy and self-preservation of artists and
thinkers seems more important. In a historical
situation that threatens critical thinkers and
devalues strategies of critique, we need models of
oppositional voices, lest we forget the necessity of
protest. Brecht is such a model. Partisan without
being bound to a party, independent of official
institutions yet experienced at surviving within
institutions, again and again prepared to entertain
risks and undertake unconventional attempts: this
was how Brecht accommodated a world which he
envisioned as changeable. In our times, when media
consciousness shapes the values of public opinion,
attempts and strategies to throw “sand in the gears”
become quite useful, even if the global media
culture has already long since forgotten the plays
and poems of a Brecht. In a world of simulations,
where everything is communicated through codes, and
where social life is characterized by dispersion and
stress, tools are useful that can strengthen
insight, render visible human relations, and
destabilize habits of seeing. For we are witnesses
to how new technologies displace familiar securities
and identities. Here aporias and new feelings of
insecurity emerge, which in turn necessitate new
strategies of distanciation, that is, methods of
un-learning in order to learn anew. To maintain
this attitude, even when stagnation, paralysis,
reaction, and regression are the order of the day,
is no small feat.
Brecht’s main contribution, then, is to be found in
the innovative ways he devised for examining history
and making the processes of history visible as
changeable ones. While his means may themselves no
longer be usable, the search for ways of
historically anchoring meanings - even the multiple
meanings of a postmodern age - is modeled for us in
Brecht’s work. Inscribed with the collisions and
ruptures of the century in which he lived, his
significance as a writer and thinker will become
relevant whenever his sort of vision becomes
necessary, whenever a situation conducive to
ideological unpredictability allows for ideas to be
criticized, radically, without worrying about
re-establishing certainties. In short, Brecht’s
impact is not to be found in any recipes he may have
provided but rather in the possibility of his
writings to enable our own creativity in thinking
about historical truths and processes.
Notes
[i]
This essay is an expanded and updated
version of ideas I developed in two earlier
essays:
"A
Postmodernized Brecht?" Theatre Journal
45:1 (March 1993), 1-19, and
“Brecht-Ehrungen: Eine Übung zur Vorschau
auf einen Rückblick,” in Thomas Jung, Hrsg.,
Zweifel - Fragen - Vorschläge: Bertolt
Brecht anläßlich des Einhundertsten
(Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1999), 13-29.
[ii]
Frisch made this comment in a speech he gave
at a theater conference in Frankfurt am Main
in 1964.
[iii]
See Willi Winkler in Die Zeit, 12.
August 1994 and the
review of the English-language edition of
John Fuegi’s The Life and Lies of Bertolt
Brecht (London: Harper Collins) in
Der Spiegel 38 (1994).
[iv]
See the song by this title in Scene 5 of
The Decision (1930, also known as The
Measures Taken).
[v]
Typical for this misunderstanding is the
status of model books ("Modellbücher") with
photographic sequences and explanations for
some of Brecht's most important and
successful productions at the Berliner
Ensemble. They have led to the unfortunate
misconception among some directors that
Brecht intended these as authoritative
paradigms which should be reproduced. In
fact, they offer a fascinating documentation
of the work process Brecht engaged as
a director rather than a prescription or
recipe.
[vi]
The "Grosse kommentierte Berliner und
Frankfurter Ausgabe" of Brecht’s Werke,
published together by the West German
Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main) and the
then East German Aufbau Verlag (Berlin and
Weimar), was originally expected to be
completed in 1993, whereas in fact the final
index volume appeared only in May 2000.
[vii]
See Brecht in Asia and Africa,
Brecht Yearbook 14, eds. John Fuegi et
al. (Hong Kong: International Brecht
Society, 1989) and Brecht then and now /
damals und heute, Brecht Yearbook
20, eds. John Willett et al. (Waterloo, CA:
International Brecht Society, 1995). The
International Brecht Society (IBS) was
founded in 1969 in the United States and
publishes the Brecht Yearbook as well
as the journal Communications. See
the IBS website at: www.brechtsociety.org.
For a guide to English language
translations, see “Brecht’s Works in English
- A Bibliography”: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/BrechtGuide/
[viii]
The concept of interventionist thinking
comes up repeatedly in Brecht’s writings of
1930-33. See, for example, “Eingreifendes
Denken” (1931), in Brecht, Werke
(Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Aufbau and
Suhrkamp, 1988ff), 21:524f, and “Anmerkungen
zu Die Mutter” (1933, published first
in 1938), 24:188.
[ix]
”The Dialectic of the Enlightenment” is the
title of a series of essays authored by Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno while in
exile in the United States and first
published in German in Amsterdam in 1947.
Their thesis traces the sources of fascist
violence to the processes of rationalization
and alienation set in motion by the
Enlightenment.
[x]
See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the
Philosophy of History,” especially Thesis
XIII, in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed.
by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken, 1969), 253-264.
[xi]
On Brecht’s utopianism, see Klaus-Detlef
Müller, “Utopische Intention und Kritik der
Utopien bei Brecht,” in Gert Ueding, ed.,
Literatur ist Utopie (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1978), 335-66, Friedrich
Dieckmann's incisive "Brechts Utopia. Exkurs
über das Saturnische," in Sinn und Form
5/1987, as well as Barbara Buhl's longer
investigation concentrating mainly on the
early and middle works, Bilder der
Zukunft: Traum und Plan. Utopie im Werk
Bertolt Brechts (Bielefeld: Aisthesis,
1988).
[xii]
On “living together,” see Brecht, The
Messingkauf Dialogues, ed. and trans. by
John Willett (London: Methuen, 1965), where
the notion is introduced by the "The
Philosopher" as the very material of
theatrical representation, as well as the
last entry (No. 77) in A Short Organum
for the Theatre, in Brecht on Theatre,
ed. and trans. by John Willett (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1964), 205.
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