Brecht Today: Classic or ChallengeAuthor(s): Klaus VolkerSource: Theatre Journal, Vol. 39, No. 4, Distancing Brecht (Dec., 1987), pp. 425-433Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3208245Accessed: 02/07/2009 06:49

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Brecht Today: Classic or Challenge

Klaus Volker

I escaped the sharks Slew the tigers

And was eaten up By the bugs.

- Brecht, Collected Poems

In 1946, Brecht wrote this four-line poem entitled "Epitaph for M" in memory of the Soviet writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide following political at- tacks on his two comedies The Bug and The Steam Bath. These plays provide a bitter and ironic critique of the assimilation of the revolution by the middle class and serve as a warning against a facile belief in progress. Mayakovsky, like Brecht, was a com- munist without a party card. Although both writers could write only "on commission from the party," their precarious status did not hinder them from criticizing the policies of the party as well as praising its goals. Their critiques were never simply blunt attacks, but were handled lightly with wit and satire. However, the party of- ficials did not appreciate their critical irony, but preferred instead the sympathetic tracts of bourgeois authors. Thus, the grotesque historical situation developed in which Brecht and Mayakovsky were criticized by the party for pointing out its mistakes and discussing its social contradictions, while their middle-class colleagues were rewarded for passively bowing to its dictates.

In 1930, Mayakovsky gave in to the bugs. He could no longer cope with the wearisome petty struggle against a "world wracked by the rabble." After his death, when Stalin declared him an "exemplary" writer, creating a one-sided exploitation of his works, Mayakovsky became the victim of such bugs for many years to come. It was only much later that the complexity and variety of his work was recognized. Brecht suffered a similar fate. In 1933, he barely managed to dodge the "sharks." His period in exile was a fight against material want, persecution, betrayal, and political disappointment. Yet, he came through the "toils of the mountains." The last years of his life, which he spent in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), were full of the "toils of the plains." He chose the GDR because he wanted "another Germany," one

Klaus Volker is a dramaturg and author living in West Berlin. His works include Brecht-Chronik and Brecht- Kommentar zum dramatischen Werk, with monographs on Wedekind, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey. His

forthcoming book is on Fritz Kortner. Mr. Volker also teaches at the Freie Universitdt, Berlin.

425

426 / TJ, December 1987

based on the principles of peace and socialism. There, he was able to preserve his in- dependence and artistic integrity. He welcomed the politicization of art while vigorously defending his work against any state ideology. His theatre, the Berliner Ensemble, was opposed to the official GDR doctrine on art (Socialist Realism), to the remaining traces of National Socialist theatre (State theatre, the Speer design, and German "inwardness" or Innerlichkeit), and to the German Stanislavski tradition (naturalism). On principle, he rejected the use of art and theatre to conform to state requirements of taste. Defiance, contradiction, and doubt were among the most im- portant elements of his artistic production.

As long as he lived, Brecht was a difficult author. It was only after his death that the "bugs" moved in on a massive scale. He was discovered in the East and the West by the simplifiers and opportunists. Sublimely sure of themselves, they declared Brecht to be the oracle of dramatic theory and practice. Brecht became a modern classic. His art began to please. Few of his plays now give the audience the productive pain he desired. How did Brecht become assimilated into dominant theatre practice? What, if any, strategies remain for producing Brecht with political effectiveness? Perhaps a short history of his reception can provide a perspective on the construction of the classical Brecht.

From Political Theatre to Classic

After World War II, Brecht's name was relatively unknown in Germany. At best, he was remembered as the author of The Threepenny Opera. When he returned from his American exile, he began his work in Europe with an adaptation of Antigone in Chiir and Puntila in Zurich in 1948. Then, following the successful premiere of Mother Courage in Berlin, Germany became a divided state. Brecht's vote for the GDR made it difficult to perform his plays in West Germany. During the 1950s, a rather unanimous Brecht boycott took place in the West. West Germans feared the political effect of plays written by a communist poet, who lived in this "other" Ger- many which should not exist and which for many years was referred to as the "so called GDR"- the enemy in the "cold war." Consequently, in spite of Brecht's notori- ety, West Germany enjoyed only a few productions of his plays. Even when some theatres began to produce Brecht, they were forced to renew the boycott because of

political events: the GDR workers' strike in 1953, the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The Frankfort Schauspielhaus, under the direction of Harry Buckwitz was the only theatre that did not comply with the de- mand for a boycott. From 1952 to the end of his engagement at the theatre, Buckwitz produced at least one Brecht play each season. In the 1950s, the problem in West Ger- many was simply to produce Brecht. The question of how to produce him was a luxury.

In contrast, the 1960s brought a golden age for Brecht. A new interest in his plays and in how to produce them began to appear along with a new generation of direc- tors. Gradually, the Berliner Ensemble became a site for a kind of aesthetic pilgrimage by young directors in the West to observe a model theatre practice. There, they had a kind of theatrical epiphany - it seemed to them as if "the scales fell from their eyes." At

427 / BRECHT TODAY

the same time, the West inherited some of Brecht's directing students. For example, Peter Palitzsch and Carl Weber remained in the West after the building of the Wall. Soon, many Western companies began rapidly producing Brecht's plays to make up for lost time. This thoughtless mode of reproduction resulted in elevating Brecht to the status of a classic. Brecht's plays became art not politics. Most of the productions omitted the agitational sting of the plays. Two young dramatists matured and became well-known through works that set themselves against the Brechtian tradition, achiev- ing fame and success for their authors: Max Frisch and Friedrich Durrenmatt. In 1964, Max Frisch coined the phrase that soon became a slogan, asserting that Brecht had at- tained "the penetrating ineffectiveness of a classic." Frisch characterized the political ef- fect of Brecht's theatre in this way: "Audiences running into the millions have seen Brecht and will see him again and again. I venture to doubt that any one of them has as a result changed his political thinking or even seriously examined it. I remember a time, not so long ago, when literary historians who now write about Brecht, regarded it as showing a total lack of insight to consider such a political activist an artist: today he is a genius .. ."After a while, audiences became satiated by numerous Brecht pro- ductions, resulting in a loss of appetite. Soon the lamentation of critics, directors, and actors arose: no more Brecht. The slogan from this period became "Brecht fatigue" (Brecht-Miidigkeit).

Meanwhile, Brecht has also become a classic in the GDR. The experimental, inven- tive period of the Berliner Ensemble ended with their production of Coriolanus in 1964. After that, Brecht was used as the official poet against the younger, rebellious authors. He became an authority against all ideas that were not opportune. Ruth Berghaus was the only director to break through the sterile tradition, trying something new. She began to question the official Brecht and to adapt his works to contem- porary circumstances. This brought her into immediate conflict with Brecht's heirs who administrated his theatrical estate, and she was fired.

The Alternative Tradition

In the second half of the 1960s, a new breed of directors arose in West Germany, working outside of the traditional state theatres. These directors are: Peter Zadek, Hans Hollman, Peter Stein, Hans Neuenfels, Claus Peymann, and Jiirgen Flimm. Most of these directors learned their craft in transition from and in relation to Brecht- ian theatre practice, rather than the plays. They wanted to change the structural organization of the theatre. The politicization of West German theatre depended less on plays and themes or issues than on the working methods between director and ac- tor, the structural organization of the theatre, and particularly on the notion of co- determination in theatre practice. In other words, the legacy of Brecht for the new radical directors of the 1970s was not as a playwright, but as one who invented a new method for producing theatre and a new sense of its organization.

In 1970, Peter Stein founded the Schaubiihne in West Berlin, perhaps the most im- portant theatre in the West and second only in importance to the Berliner ensemble in the two Germanies. Before establishing the Schaubiihne, Stein had begun his work as a director with a production of In the Jungle of Cities in Munich in 1968. He adapted this early play by creating a montage of Brecht songs and quotations from the other

428 / TI, December 1987

works, particularly Mahagonny and Happy End. This production was exciting and poetic, though politically short-sighted. Stein later distanced himself from this work. Stein opened the Schaubiihne with a production of The Mother. The choice of this play served less as a manifesto on the external political situation than a statement about the internal relations of the ensemble. The Schaubiihne would abandon tradi- tional hierarchical structures for an experiment in co-determination. The Mother signalled the new style of the Schaubiihne by creating a production that would offer the acting of Therese Giehse (a friend of Brecht and one of his most exemplary actors) as its starting point. In a sense, this theatre began with a kind of tender farewell to Brecht. The artistic development of Peter Stein and his ensemble quickly deserted the Brechtian tradition. Stein, like other contemporary directors, found Brecht's plays to be too rationalistic - too firmly based in social determinism. The Schaubiihne produc- tions of Ibsen's Peer Gynt through Kleist's Prince of Homburg to Gorki's Summer- guests stage the confluence of personal and historical situations.

When contemporary, non-traditional practitioners do turn to Brecht's plays, they seek the texts which remain "open" and in which his materialist beliefs do not dominate. Thus, they turn more often to his early plays. Yet the culmination of this search for the "open" text may be found in the reconstruction of his Fatzer Fragment by Heiner Miiller in 1978. Miiller compiled materials Brecht produced from 1926 to 1930 for a play concluding a series of plays centering on the subject of "man's entry into major cities." The form of this fragment re-energized Brecht's legacy to theatre in the 1970s. Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff co-directed Fatzer in Hamburg as the second part of an anti-prussian elegy that began with Kleist's Prince of Homburg. The fragment radiated a kind of nervous tension, moving not by linear plot develop- ment, but by agitation and combustion. The internal contradictions were not re- solved; instead, they were exploited to produce the fear and terror that composes the center of the play (Furchtzentrum).

Referring to Fatzer, Brecht wrote, "The whole play is impossible. Smash it as an ex-

periment: without reality! for self knowledge." The main character is a composite of the asocial Baal and Young Comrade in The Measures Taken. The play describes the alienation of women and men in a society dominated entirely by capital. Brecht con- ceived the egoist Fatzer as a stereotype of the little man who tries to get rich by cun- ningly adapting himself to the ways of the rich and by buying his promotion into their ranks at the expense of members of his own class. Fatzer is another deserter like Baal, but unlike Baal, he is unable to enjoy the rewards of his asocial behavior. At the end of the play, the contradictions in his behavior and his social relations are not resolved - even in his suicide attempt and his eventual murder.

The Fatzer Fragment introduces another Brecht, or a side of Brecht that is not generally "read" in his texts. The familiar Brecht is the quotable one: everyone knows a

quotation or a song by Brecht. Yet no one is interested in rescuing the Brecht that is ironic, catastrophic, fragmented, and grandiose. The Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann articulated this contradiction in Brecht's reception by suggesting that Brecht's "ineffectuality" is caused by his talent for writing great words at the right mo- ment. "His words and great gestures are either not enough like popular culture or they are too sublime. So they cannot touch the public; they are not taken to heart. I guess

429 / BRECHT TODAY

Brecht is without a public. He is as strange and unfamiliar as Holderlin. His pathos, which I admire so much , his high style, is also not understood." Fatzer presents Brecht's poetic language in itself, without the attempt to rationalize it. Bachmann con- cludes, "We possess Brecht's language as a poetic fragment, concretized in a line or in a scene, and therein we understand ourselves, with a sigh or relief, having arrived at language itself." However, audiences do not appreciate such a visionary art. They prefer the Brecht of parables, quotable sayings, simple formulas, and epigrams of superficial insight. They applaud works like The Good Person of Setzuan - a brilliant soap opera.

One of the problems with the quotable Brecht may be found in the outdated assumptions upon which many of his familiar homilies rest. His simple socialist solu- tion to problems of production and consumption no longer works in today's complex political and economic climate. In fact, his solutions sometimes conceal greater prob- lems-particularly the traditional materialist apprehension of nature, which today has been modified by notions of ecology. For example, take the nice slogan at the end of Caucasian Chalk Circle which suggests a rustic idyll with dancing folk: "Things should belong to those who do well by them / children to motherly women that they may thrive / wagons to good drivers that they may be well driven / and the valley to those who water it that it may bear fruit." Nobody can reject these demands as long as they are not more precisely formulated. Today, "Wagons to good drivers" is nonsense, since anyone can become a good driver and in industrial nations nearly everyone has a car, making driving itself a danger to the environment. This sentence reads like a Volkswagen slogan, written by a poet in 1940 who could not foresee the realities of the 1980s. Also, examine the notion of the children to the maternal: what if the mother is politically blind and bent on bettering herself at the expense of others? Brecht's old-fashioned slogans also resound in The Good Person of Setzuan. The mother Shen Te imagines her child as a pilot: "This is my son, the well-known pilot, say welcome / to the conqueror of unknown mountains and unreachable regions / who brings us our mail across the impassable deserts." Today, when we hear this ode to a pilot, we also think of those who flew over Hiroshima or Dresden. We remember the intolerable noise of airports that terrorizes people living in the area. We are aware that many mail-pilot positions are reserved for pilots who have retired from military service. I think the quotable Brecht is admired by today's public because his works no longer produce a productive pain. Instead, they serve only to confirm the public's inclination to suppress that kind of pain beneath the superficial optimism of what can now be seen as Brecht's pseudoprogressive sayings.

Brecht Today

The times are not favorable for Brecht, and our well-known directors avoid produc- ing his plays. However, the exception confirms the rule: there are productions of Brecht plays that have an experimental character, or in any case, a living energy. A number of exceptional productions took place in Bochum, when Claus Peymann was the manager and leading artistic director there (some months ago he moved to Vienna and is now the chief manager of the famous Burgtheater). Peymann and his Bochumer Ensemble were interested in producing Brecht in relation to contemporary issues and

430 / TI, December 1987

conditions. One such production was Saint Joan of the Stockyards, directed by Alfred Kirchner in 1979. It played in the large hall of a former factory. The spectators moved to various playing areas, actually becoming part of the scenes. For example, they became caught up in the mob action when the police entered to break the strike. The hall monitors unexpectedly turned into policemen, using their clubs to restore order among the stockbrokers and speculators. There was mayhem on the floor. Finally, the police carried off the sharks of the stock exchange in their armchairs. High over the heads of the audience, the moneymakers continued to battle as they were taken from the room. The convincing element in the performance was not Brecht's parable; rather, it was the contemporary relevance the audience could find in certain situations in the play. For the West German audience, these issues included the steel crisis in the Ruhr, student and labor demonstrations, the problem of rising unemployment, etc. In fact, St. Joan herself was portrayed as a idealistic student terrorist whose strength was derived from the force of her arguments and the depth of her commitment.

In 1981, Alfred Kirchner, levelled a critique against media control with his produc- tion of Mother Courage. The playing area was filled with TVs and video cameras. Ap- pearing on one TV screen was a program featuring atomic bomb explosions, animal experimentation, and a panel discussion on military rearmament. The viewer slowly began to realize that this was a depiction of the present at the eve of World War III. A Master of Ceremonies, wearing a death mask and a costume of a clown, ran the

episodes. Kirsten Dene played a young Mother Courage. She was neither old, poor, defaced, nor wise. Rather than taking her money from Courage's familiar leather

purse, Dene got her cash from a check-out stand at a supermarket. She did not pull her

wagon, but pushed it in front of her, screaming her song with desperate courage. Technology also broke into Kattrin's drumming scene. As she drummed, a military jet swooped down overhead drowning out her warning. The pilot brutally strafed Kattrin to the tune of John Lennon's "Imagine." In this production, Brecht's chronicle of the

thirty years war was reduced to something like a quotation or a visual aid.

Kirchner's production was in the tradition of Erwin Piscator. In the 1920s, Piscator used his productions to document the political events of his time. He brought fragments of history onto the stage. Though Piscator and Brecht sometimes associated with one another in the theatre, their differing political viewpoints resulted in differing theatrical practices. For this reason, Piscator never directed a play by Brecht while Brecht was alive. Piscator wanted to dramatize the daily struggle, while Brecht wanted to produce "translations" of reality. Brecht wanted to keep his dramas "open" to changing conditions. Thus, he created a distance from contemporary events

through parables, translations, and epic transcriptions. Brecht did not want "actual- izations"; he wanted "historicizations." Like Piscator, Kirchner produced a kind of

political cabaret, using Brecht's play as raw material for the acts. Unlike Brecht, Kirchner actualized political issues rather than analyzed them.

Jiirgen Flimm is another contemporary director who stages Brecht's plays in Piscator's tradition of actualizing a present-day context. Flimm alters the context of the play, its "climate," but not the text itself. Flimm's production of Baal provides a

good example of this technique. Here, the egotistical Baal seems to be someone with

431 / BRECHT TODAY

whom young people of today can identify. In his role as outcast, Baal embodies their

protest against the inability of a saturated, neurotic society to afford pleasure or hap- piness. Flimm sets Baal in a modem city with no trees or rivers - only cement. Baal is a drop-out and his friend Ekart is a typical urban bum. They share a joint at a subway station. The woodcutters are men in helmets laying underground cables. In contrast to Brecht's ending when Baal reaches his final desperation in the woods, this Baal is discovered in a large red crate. The rear side opens to reveal not nature, but the ce- ment steps of a pedestrian underpass. On one hand, Flimm's interpretation captures the lifestyle and feelings of the "no-future generation" that embraces David Bowie's one-day hero: "Though nothing will / Drive them away / We can beat them / Just for one day / We can be heroes / Just for one day." On the other hand, Flimm in- sinuates a fragile longing for the natural landscape that has been replaced by cement and for the human passion that has been replaced by indifference.

Other than these examples of a tradition that produces Brecht's plays as actualiza- tions of contemporary issues, the majority of Brecht productions today are either well-meaning pedagogical gestures or pure entertainment. There have been many pro- ductions of Puntila and his Man Matti, A Man is a Man, and The Threepenny Opera that serve Brecht up like the culinary theatre he despised. In this tradition Brecht becomes the author of comedies and musicals - the creator of box-office hits. These plays ratify a remark by Alfred Kerr, one of Brecht's opponents in the 1920s as he described A Man is a Man: "Be honest, the elephant presented on stage by two actors with cloth bound round their legs, this circus clowning by actors - was the high point of the performance." In Frankfort this play has become one long joke about beer. As Jeriah Jip says, "For this we need beer." Likewise, Puntila has become a comedy about drinking.

While Brecht played both the clown and the teacher, he never intended those two functions to become discrete in his theatrical tradition. Moreover, neither the comic elements, the didactic technique, nor his sense of spectacle was designed to please the public. Brecht preferred to use these formal elements to promote judgment through an opening up of the senses. It is evident that the contemporary tradition in West Ger- many of playing Brecht as entertainment violates his intentions in several ways. The Bochum tradition of bringing Brecht's plays up to date in order to sharpen the political critique results in rendering the original Brechtian text as dated. This contradiction arises from the attempt to relate the text to the contemporary political reality without locating it within. Brecht's overall Marxist critique. For Brecht, critical studies of the teachings of the communist classics by Marx, Engels, and Lenin were neither second- ary considerations, psychological aberrations, "a longing for meaningless authority," nor "a matter of faith." Without a comprehension of what in The Measures Taken is called "the ABCs of Communism" the allusions to problems of rearmament or the rela- tionship between money and war in contemporary productions of Mother Courage shrink from critique to stage dressing. Brecht's commitment to dialectical thinking separated his work from Piscator's tradition of political theatre. The absence of dialec- tical materialism in Piscator's work provided a breeding ground for idealist solutions and conclusions. In the apolitical productions of Brecht this same absence produces an emphasis on the generally human.

432 / TJ, December 1987

However, these shortcomings are not entirely the fault of the productions. We can- not expect from the theatre what we no longer expect from politics. Revolutions can- not be made on the stage. The theatre cannot create political change; it can only repre- sent it. Brecht hoped that his audiences would critically consider their attitudes toward political realities. The change in attitudes that his dramas would prompt could then motivate audience members to join movements for political change. Without such movements on the outside of the theatre, there could be no radicalization coming from the inside. This notion of political theatre presumes an interested audience rather than what is known as a general audience. As Walter Benjamin asserted in "What is Epic Theatre?," "Epic theatre is directed toward interested parties who do not think unless they have reason to do so."

Yet Brecht wanted to combine this political intention with an aesthetic one. Piscator's singular focus on political theatre placed him in the German tradition of theatre as a moral institution. In contrast, Brecht placed the political in combination with the aesthetic and the enjoyable. Nevertheless, he also rejected the singular focus on aesthetics represented by the German Stanislavski tradition: "Aesthetic pleasure must not be too emancipated from enjoyment; in a materially-minded society this already has a high enough position. And if the actor becomes too good how could he raise the dark supplies of vitality (not yet socialized vitality) which lie in the asocial?" In other words, the lively contradictions between politics, art, and entertainment are maintained in the Brechtian text. This commitment to these contradictions prompted Brecht to spend the last years of his life in developing a new theatre practice in the GDR. The artistic result was the formation of the Berliner Ensemble. Only within this society committed to the co-production of politics and aesthetics could he invent his new dramaturgy. Today, theatre in the GDR still lives off the heritage of Brecht's work. The reason that this heritage has no productive use is not because of any flaw in Brecht's approach but is primarily related to the stagnation of socialist development. The cooperation between the state and Brecht's heirs permits no interpretation of his work contrary to official policy. Thus, while Brecht has been reduced to pure enter- tainment in the West, his theatre has become a party organ in the East.

After reviewing the petrification of the Brechtian tradition into classicism, or its

perversion into either idealism or culinary theatre, we might ask along with Mac in The Threepenny Opera, "What keeps a man alive?" The decisive factors are no longer how many plays by Brecht are produced in the repertory of a theatre or how perfectly one might imitate his model of performance. Rather, like the Schaubiihne in West Berlin, a focus on the sociological function of theatre in line with Brecht's developments, or more importantly, in contradiction to them, keeps the Brechtian tradition alive. Brecht himself knew that art should never be revered: "How often she has been invited as a goddess and treated as a strumpet. Her masters slept with her by night and bound her to the plow by day."

What elements in Brecht, then, could propel his tradition into the work of contem-

porary or future playwrights? Examine the places in which he remains "dark" or

"strange" to most people like the works or Holderlin or Trakl. "Dark" or "strange" elements open the work beyond any classic frame. Regard his plays or poems that

yield no definite truth, offer no definite solution. Center on his subjective energy - his

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fears and doubts are more useful than his certainties, for if communism, on whose triumph he was relying, still has a chance, it is not on the basis of the victory of collec- tive reason. Hans Henny Jahnn, a German poet, whom Brecht especially admired, said as early as 1927, when people (and naturally the communists) were only ready to misunderstand him: "I believe in the triumph of communism. I believe that its decline or its transformation will come through personal emotion."

Using these criteria in searching for a living Brechtian tradition leads the critic to the works of the most important follower and opponent of Brecht: Heiner Muller. We must alter Brecht as he altered others if we can alter Brecht. Miiller is one of those who can. He opposes Brecht without betraying him. As Muller once said, "To use Brecht without criticizing him is to betray him." Muller is a clever author, but his cleverness is not only a device he uses to sell his plays. His cleverness springs from pure curiosity: he wants to know how malleable a play might be. He asks how he can influence his play with other materials, other ideas, and other perspectives without losing its central critique. When he collaborates with Robert Wilson, he both mines the text for its in- ternal possibilities and uses Wilson's dramaturgy to explore how far the text may be distanced from its production. Muller incorporates Brecht's blend of the political, the personal, and the aesthetic. His communism combines with postmodern aesthetics and psychoanalytic subtexts for his persona. Both Brecht and Miller seek to create a theatre of the future, as Muller noted: "Brecht - an author without a present, a work between past and future. I hesitate to propose this as a criticism: the present is the age of industrial nations and our future I hope won't be formed by these nations. If it is I fear that it will depend on their politics." This statement implies that perhaps, outside of Germany, the new Brecht will appear somewhere in the Third World.

Although, as a rule, TJ does not publish public addresses, I have made an exception in this case. Since I felt that any special issue on Brecht would not be complete without a review of Brecht reception in West Germany by an authority in the field, I compiled this article (with the aid of my assistant) from two separate lectures and some writings, in German, by the author. - SEC