Brecht Bertolt - Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht

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Peter B. Lewis Susan Sontag Jerome Boyd Maunsell Gertrude Stein Lucy Daniel
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Edward Kanterian Frank Lloyd Wright Robert McCarter

Philip Glahn

REAKTION BOOKS

To Nell

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

33 Great Sutton Street

London EC1V 0DX, UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2014

Copyright Philip Glahn 2014

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9781780233017

Contents

Brecht in Berlin, 1927.

Introduction

Throughout his life and work, Bertolt Brecht demanded that all artistic action, especially his own, be useful: not only practical and applicable for the people who make up its public, but also relevant to them in their respective times. Brechts own ongoing actuality and usefulness lie in his continuing struggle with history as an evolving, emancipatory immersion in the processes of producing narratives and experiences, images and fantasies. This book is an account of Brechts work and life pursued from the core of his belief that theory and practice, the ideal and the real, art and life, need to be understood in their interdependent relationality, a position of tension and movement from which to see and act, learn and teach. Brecht historian Hans Mayer observed, One still writes about the epic theatre without having studied its dialectics.that sought to shed light on and at the same time intervene in the ongoing crisis of modern life shaped by capitalist economics, nationalist visions and social utopias.

Brecht is mainly known for his experimental, modernist Epic Theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt, the alienation effect or strategy of estrangement. He wrote in 1927 that the essential point of the Epic Theater is perhaps that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectators reason. Instead of sharing an experience, the spectator must come to grips with things. At its core, Brechts approach constitutes an attempt to show the viewer the relations of power and the mechanisms of reality, to lay bare the device. His method aims to situate both artist and viewer within and in conscious relation to the historical present in order to illuminate a position of active, critical involvement in the knowing and making of the world. Exposing social norms and truths as historically determined and culturally produced shows them to be malleable and thus sheds an emancipatory light on the viewers own agency.

As Jan Knopf and other historians have pointed out, Brecht was far from the staunch Communist or doctrinaire Marxist that much post-war scholarship made him out to be. Rather, he struggled mightily with his role, and with the analytic and productive tools he sought to apply and distribute. He was concerned with access to the various ways and arenas in which common sense and ideas, attitudes and perspectives are made and communicated. Thus his work included songs and poems, essays and letters, speeches and editorials, short stories and novels, radio broadcasts and films. Rather than tell his audience what to think, he asked them to sing and speak and act along with and against the conventions of making histories and identities. For Brecht, the public sphere, that hallowed ground of bourgeois society, was a space of class contestation, a site where instead of preserving social values and communal ideals, coalitions were to be formed. Brecht took pleasure in finding ways to intervene in, turn around and use as weapons the images, languages and gestures of philosophers and beggars, bureaucrats and thieves, priests and workers, to cleverly pit expectations and customs against one another in order to show the limits of communicative and experiential structure and to subsequently articulate the possibilities of their transformation. The results are scenes, chapters, declarations, rhymes and questions that are at once funny and tragic, technical and moving, popular and complex, always sharp, accessible and full of pleasure for the contradictions of being an active part in the very production of history.

Although most Brecht scholarship is limited to theatre studies, his widespread influence and, often, the misinterpretation of his methods can be traced in Europe and the U.S. through art and theatre to film and social theory. In the late 1930s, the seminal U.S. critic Clement Greenberg praised Brechts poetry and politics for its formal innovation, despite its authors ideological leanings. In the 1950s, Brechts Berliner Ensemble troupe took post-war Paris by storm with productions of Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Under Roland Barthes tutelage, the journal Thtre Populaire devoted its entire JanuaryFebruary 1955 issue to The Brechtian Revolution. Barthes was himself very much influenced by the German playwrights work, and went on to pen multiple essays on him and credit him as a decisive element in his own intellectual formation and the birth of semiology.a great impact on American artists like Yvonne Rainer. Griselda Pollock and Sylvia Harvey have assessed Brechts considerable influence on the making and study of 1970s British film in general and feminist practice in particular.