Brecht

Das Denken gehört zu den größten Vergnügungen der menschlichen Rasse.

Thinking is one of the greatest pleasures of the human race.

- Leben des Galilei; Life of Galileo, Scene 3

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

Brecht is arguably the most important playwright of the 20th century, unless you prefer Samuel Beckett. (Brecht and Beckett have points in common: both mistrusted psychology, both used stylisation in their plays and both were great admirers of the comedians Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Karl Valentin).

Most of Brecht’s plays from 1924 onwards were written in collaboration with others including Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau, Emil Burri, Slatan Dudow and Brecht’s wife Helene Weigel, and in collaboration with composers such as Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau.

Brecht’s co-authors contributed willingly to the informal ‘Brecht collective’ because they believed in collective action as a political principle. This is based on the idea that working in a collective is liberating and can be more fruitful than individual work. Collective artistic labour also disrupts individualistic notions of intellectual property.

Brecht’s early work could be described as Expressionist; only in the mid 1920s did Brecht become a socialist. Around this time his style changed radically. From the mid-1920s onwards Brecht began to develop a form of theatre called ‘epic theatre’ which was intended to change the world by helping audiences to become more critically aware. Brecht criticised traditional theatre which for him was based on the Aristotelian principle of catharsis. Brecht saw this as a form of passive consumption; he claimed that he did not want to entertain people, but to make them think. In fact he did both.

Around 1937 Brecht listed some common misconceptions about epic theatre, including the claim that it combats emotion. Brecht denies this: he states that epic theatre does explore emotions, but it also goes beyond emotions. Epic theatre should bring more reason into theatre practice (on this point see Brecht, Werke, Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 22:1, pp. 315-16). Brecht’s plays are often profoundly emotional. For example, there is plenty of pathos in Der kaukasische Kreidekreis; The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Brecht’s epic theatre breaks with traditional dramatic notions of character, showing human beings to be constantly changing and contradictory. As Jan Knopf puts it, Brecht was always more interested in attitudes (Haltungen) and forms of social behaviour than he was in characters (Knopf (2000), p. 72). Epic theatre is a theatre of conflicting interests in which social contradictions are unpacked, whilst his shorter ‘learning plays’ (Lehrstücke) practice new dialectical ways of thinking. Brecht thought that literature should be judged in terms of its practical use value for the present day.

Brecht’s famous Verfremdungseffekt is very hard to translate. It could be translated as ‘estrangement effect’, or ‘distancing effect’, or ‘defamiliarising effect’ because ‘Verfremdung’ means the process of making something appear strange or foreign, as if it came from a long way away. It bears comparison with the concept of ostranenie (‘making strange’) developed by the Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky. However as Jan Knopf points out (see below, Knopf (2000), pp. 79-80), Verfremdung is intended to promote critical insight, and it is therefore different from ostranenie, which is intended to promote unprejudiced sensory perception. Translating Verfremdung as ‘alienation’ risks confusion with Marx’s term Entfremdung (‘alienation’). This is a completely different term which describes how workers become alienated from their own being when they no longer gain profit from their own labour.

Brecht was born in Augsburg in Bavaria. In 1917 he trained as a medical student in Munich and immediately after the end of the war he worked as a medical orderly in Augsburg. In 1919 he participated in Karl Valentin’s cabaret in Munich. He left university in 1921 and married Marianne Zoff, an opera singer, in 1922. In 1924 Brecht moved to Berlin where he lived with Helene Weigel. He divorced Zoff in 1927 and married Weigel in 1929. When Hitler came to power in 1933 Brecht moved to Paris and then to Denmark, moving to Sweden in 1939, to Finland in 1940, and to Los Angeles in 1941. During his period of European exile in the thirties Brecht was in close contact with the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin. In 1947-48 Brecht spent a year in Switzerland and in October 1948 Brecht returned to Berlin where he founded the Berliner Ensemble in 1949. Brecht also had a fictional alter ego called Mr. Keuner.

Brecht’s work draws on a number of influences including Luther’s Bible, the comic novels of Grimmelshausen and Jaroslav Hašek, as well as a tradition of radical German drama that includes J.M.R. Lenz, Georg Büchner, Frank Wedekind and the folk plays of Marieluise Fleißer. Brecht’s most famous successor was the East German dramatist Heiner Müller.