Contents:
According to Volker Klotz: Brecht himself can at times appear to be adopting a dissenting stance. In the theoretical writings themselves, praxis often clarifies points of principle. Praxis in this sense legitimizes the theory that illuminates it. Alles andere ist unmarxistisch GBA, He then attempts a two-pronged rebuttal. Brecht may not have mounted an adequate defense against the attacks in the late s from various intellectuals associated with the Moscow periodical Das Wort, but he does effectively bring out the dual relationship between theory and praxis: Theorie und Praxis lassen sich [.
The solution to the present impasse is arguably to proceed via an interim series of more modest steps. In the history of Marxism both positions have been adopted. Just what such a conception of activist-interventionist drama implies has been the subject of much debate and we shall be returning to this contentious issue in a number of the chapters that follow.
Marxismus und Philosophie; Kautsky: Beabsichtigt sind nur Abbilder, welche die Welt einem nicht nur betrachtenden, sondern auch praktischen Menschen abbilden, d. Nur als Mitglied der Gesellschaft wird er instand gesetzt zu praktizieren. Over items appear here in print for the first time.
The GBA edition is, nevertheless, invaluable for more than the wealth of newly published theoretical writings and drafts it brings together. The present study attempts to continue in that tradition of exegetical close reading, a practice more prevalent in the case of theoretical works from earlier centuries, yet one that later ones also require.
And second, the material in these texts, especially in Kleines Organon and Der Messingkauf, will be approached by taking further detailed sampling probes, thus enabling focused close readings of chosen passages and arguments while passing over areas where Brecht is once more merely presenting well established points to new readerships.
It also enables us to subject his theoretical ideas to critical scrutiny in the light of later thinking, rather than continuing the longstanding practice of simply saying what Brecht was trying to say. In the process of exploring these works, I shall inevitably have recourse to a large number of related essays, journal entries, letters, interviews and notes.
In his main dramaturgical works, Brecht tended to engage more with other writers and theater practitioners like Stanislavsky and Piscator than with entrenched ideological opponents and Kulturpolitiker. These ambiguous and for many unhelpful terms have led to more confusion than explanatory concepts have the right to do. In Wirklichkeit habe ich nicht den geringsten Grund, von einer der beiden Diderotschen die Kunst beherrschenden Konstituanten [sic] Unter2 haltung und Belehrung abzugehen.
Nur ist, was z. Brecht must have been reminded of his own part in such confusions while recently seeing an edition of his work through the press for the Malik Verlag. Added to which, he was probably still smarting from earlier attacks from a number of largely predictable quarters on the Left. Given his desire to set the record straight, one might wonder why the Mahagonny notes had ever been allowed to appear in a form liable to give rise to so many misinterpretations.
Or did some unforeseen conflict between manifesto rhetoric and rational exposition account for misunderstandings on the part of foes 4 and sympathizers alike? Had Brecht perhaps misjudged his readership?
Buy Körperhaltungen analysieren und verbessern: look@yourself - work@ yourself (German Edition): Read Kindle Store Reviews - www.farmersmarketmusic.com Buy Körperhaltungen analysieren und verbessern: Look@yourself - work@ yourself by Claudia Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions ); Language: German; ISBN ; ISBN ; ASIN:
Such questions remained as pertinent to his reception during the Cold War and beyond as they had been in the Weimar Republic. In some contexts, claiming to have been misunderstood and wanting to set the record straight became a favorite rhetorical strategy in order to present a reinvented self. The Mahagonny notes appear not to be an example of this ploy.
Another rare feature is the fact that the Versuche 2 version had Peter Suhrkamp as co-author. Few of his theoretical works can have sailed under so many different colors.
They had first been published in late summer , in the recently inaugurated journal Musik und Gesellschaft. He moved to Berlin in Suhrkamp was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in April In all probability it was his collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann who added it to posthumous reprintings. For generations this had been the most accessible one — available in the Versuche series, as well as various postwar editions. For particularly in the case of the table of contrasts, it has led to the freezing in time of a progressively evolving conception. The mistake is repeated in Hecht , 52 and in the relevant secondary literature of the time.
By contrast, GW gives precedence to final versions. The editorial principles underlying the new edition are set out in the GBA Registerband — Yet more unfortunate than the problems caused by assuming such imprecise referentiality has been the general reluctance to engage with the notes in their entirety, to subject their arguments to scrutiny 13 or take account of the strategies Brecht uses to put his ideas across. Thanks to the new edition and the impetus provided by BHB, vol. Any putative rhetoric of self-effacement would seem 15 to be little in evidence in these instances.
This is as totalizing in its ideological scope as one of the key works on which it depended for its methodology: As has been pointed out BHB, 4: Der Niedergang des Dramas. Nicht wegen ihrer Intelligenz, sondern wegen der seinigen. As planned, Sternberg is allowed in the radio discussion to reiterate the substance of his original letter, with Brecht replying in kind, this time with conclusive support from Ihering. But there is one important difference between the two clashes of minds. Brecht now pegs what had previously been a rather abstract defense of the sociological value of his work on the best of all possible arguments: He could just as well have cited Mann ist Mann and Die Dreigroschenoper, because the existence and social critical power of these works meant that liquidation would have to be rejected as an option, as far as Brecht was concerned.
Such a context makes it clear why Brecht felt obliged first to question and then defend his own artistic legitimacy, as well as that of his theories intended to legitimize Epic Theater. The exchange, as strong echoes of it in the Cologne radio discussion suggest, retained its importance for both participants.
In a move calculated to accentuate the incompatibility of their views but evidently intended to persuade Brecht to abandon his position and return to the purely sociological fold , Sternberg had concluded his open letter with the specific charge already intimated in his title: Sternberg 63 and Sternberg Brecht was not prepared to accept what Sternberg presented as the next logical step and decamp from drama and aesthetics and pitch his tent on the territory of critical sociology proper.
The positions expressed here by Sternberg and Brecht supply an important subtext to the Mahagonny notes.
For Voigts,25 the fundamental difference between the two is that between cultural analyst and practising artist , While he may well have put his finger on the problem,26 Sternberg has failed to appreciate that Epic Theater has the panacea. The collaboration is documented in Claas By the time of Mahagonny, Brecht is shown to have progressed to a dialectical materialist position. Only in piecemeal fashion does the connection between the aesthetic question and the underlying sociopolitical conditions responsible for the current crisis in late capitalism emerge.
Die Gesellschaft nimmt durch den Apparat auf, was sie braucht, um sich selbst zu reproduzieren. This triad of interrelated headings is obviously intended to foreground the historical dialectic that has given rise to epic forms of theater and opera. Just what innovations Brecht has in mind are only gradually revealed. In any case, to propose keeping something that can only be preserved after a radical change in character and function is a question-begging stance to adopt.
Seit einiger Zeit ist man auf eine Erneuerung der Oper aus. As the first paragraph implies, the issue was very much in the air at the time. In such a climate of profound selfquestioning, it was inevitable that certain figures on the contemporary musical scene would be perceived as part of a concerted project of renewal. What follows, however, disabuses us of any such assumption.
At the time, the musical scene might well have been awash with modishly avant-garde works, its cultural organs and the feuilleton press buzzing with controversies and debates about the critical state of opera and theater, but for Brecht any such sense of progress remained illusory. But even this is only part of the unfolding picture. For a fuller picture of the musical context, see BHB, 4: The first declares that the means of production are not yet in the right hands GBA, In the German original, the other reads: Yet as Brecht puts it more explicitly elsewhere: In democratizing the theater as an institution, that work also prefigured a new form of egalitarian society see Steinweg , Brecht is now explicitly availing himself of a more dialectical interpretive model.
Its gradual establishment is the principal purpose of the first part of the Mahagonny notes. If genuine innovations attack the base, then the representatives of the avant-garde associated with the fashionable experiments of the time must be seen as little more than part of a pseudo-radical cultural epiphenomenon. Having dissociated himself from such an avant-garde as categorically as he is about to hive off Epic Theater from its dramatic predecessors and contemporary rivals, Brecht effectively prepares the ground for interventionist innovation: First, we are tricked by a caption into a misguided assumption, only to be forced to abandon such a naive misreading in the light of textual counter-evidence.
To help anchor the main argument, various terms of contrast are introduced. Those who are deluded enough to think they possess the apparatus are in turn shown to be possessed by it. Culinary imagery plays a major role in the unfolding argument. But this is no more than polemical sarcasm, for the implication is that society itself has not been saved. If deployed in isolation, such an image would give rise to a series of banal associations concerning pleasure and consumer-values.
Hence, while the metaphor might be unobjectionable, it would remain tired and lacking in subtlety. As a consequence, the attack becomes less purely aesthetic art as gratification than sociopolitical gratification as commodity. It also throws light on why Brecht later turned his attention to another middleman in the complicated chain of commercialized artistic supply and demand: Kerr had in fact been one of the participants in the Cologne radio discussion, although he was allowed to play little more than the role of whipping boy.
Yet the ease with which Brecht moves from the idea of culinary opera and culinary drama to 32 E. Wo das Denken nicht ganz eingestellt wurde, wurde es immer kulinarischer. Audiences of the bourgeois theater of entertainment receive a similar broadside: The culinary metaphor of the waiter for whom it is all the same which customer he waits on, as long as he gets paid for performing his job, is satirically focused on the superficial, avant-garde innovators who come in for a further drubbing in the final section, not the more obvious targets — the purveyors of sentimental dramas, kitsch operettas or Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerke, about whose irrelevance both Brecht and his readers are assumed to be in agreement.
For this reason, the notion of giving the people new rights, but no chance to exercise them, leaves opera on one side in order to launch an attack on the base. And it tends to work via a cumulative process of satirical reduction and thus becomes, in this respect, interventionist rather than merely analytical. Denn wenn nicht jeder am Fressen stirbt, der zu fressen hat, so gibt es doch viele, die am Hunger sterben, weil er am Fressen stirbt.
But as Knopf points out, such sloppy associations fail to do justice to the fact that Mahagonny was founded as a reaction against capitalism and the great cities Knopf , Yet even at plot-level, such indulgence has its dark side, as the image of the man dying of over-consumption shows. The main significance of this episode for the Mahagonny notes exceeds mere plot-function. But much more even than the fictive town, Mahagonny at the same time forces people to reflect on their behavior both in and outside the theater: Under such circumstances, audiences are forced to bring the real world into the picture, not exclude it as the notes claim most opera does.
Brecht does admittedly provide an explicit rationale for this last thematic shift, even if it hardly helps distract our attention from the fact that the new section differs radically from the preceding argument. To give substance to this declaration, Brecht explains just what kind of technical standard is meant.
The section headings employed in the Mahagonny notes are not scholarly headings, with the task of structuring a complex argument. They primarily represent challenges to the reader; and in doing so they create space for critical reflection. The Mahagonny notes were written almost two years later.
In the new edition GBA, Methods of distancing that work in the theater can be equally effective in theoretical texts. Immediately preceding his two-column table contrasting Dramatic and Epic Forms of Theater, Brecht inserts the most important footnote he ever wrote: Der Messingkauf, more than fifteen times longer, has only five footnotes, Kleines Organon only one. Without exception, these all serve the conventional function of indicating a source. Which is what the editors of the new edition had to do before they could report that Brecht was quoting in abbreviated form from the Vienna edition of the work [GBA, Although it has the appearance of a late caveat added to subsequent reprintings to fend off certain forms of misinterpretation, it was in fact already there in the Musik und Gesellschaft version.
So we are left with a conundrum: But this is to miss the point. At issue in this case is not the need to keep emotion at bay feelings hardly represent a danger to someone consulting a table of contrasts in some notes on an opera. Complex seeing, even if it is not yet necessarily synonymous with a dialectical response, is far removed from unthinkingly approaching theatrical developments in terms of simple antitheses. Like Epic Theater itself, the theorizing of Epic Theater evidently required new techniques of discursive presentation to facilitate the right kind of response.
Reproduced, that is, but seldom subjected to detailed exegesis, the honorable exceptions being Hultberg and Hecht Hultberg , Hultberg concludes: Because of the seriousness of the points raised here, I should like to examine them in detail. First, there is the damaging assertion that certain items are superfluous: In the case of at least one pair of contrasts, syntax clearly forces us to read from the left-hand column across to the directly opposite equivalent on the right-hand side: The subsequent statement is equally misleading: Even the footnote denying absolute antitheses is predicated on the same linear paradigm.
An alternative would be to treat it as part of an argument deliberately constructed according to a less discursive principle. On this phenomenon, see also Kobel Compare this feature with two remarks Brecht made elsewhere about Epic Theater: One salient characteristic is a visual rhythm whereby juxtaposed phrases of varying length are repeatedly punctuated in the two columns by single pairs of antithetical characteristics: The terms in the right-hand column identifying characteristics of Brechtian Epic Theater have been especially susceptible to divergent readings and in some instances possess a more specific connotation than might at first appear to be the case.
Some are also more elevated or more technical in register than the English equivalents usually offered for them. Thespians of the old school, he complains, achieve their effects: Sie versetzen sich selber und das Publikum in Trance. Sie versetzen sich in Abschiedsstimmung. The Mahagonny notes go on to declare: Other nouns in the German original possess different nuances or are in a different register to their standard English translations. Its primary association in German is with mechanical engineering rather than the dizzy heights of Dada and Surrealism.
Elsewhere Brecht speaks of the music and song being montage components. In fact, Brecht makes repeated references to the correspondence during , the year of his work on both Kleines Organon and the Antigonemodell. A note in GBA, However, the journal entry for 8 January GBA, Das wird durch die verfremdende Spielweise abgestellt. In doing so it picks up the traces of an idea that had already been present in the passage in the Mahagonny notes about the man gorging himself to death in scene Of course, there is no reason why it has to focus exclusively on just the one or the other.
It was not until the late s that Brecht returned to his earlier points about epic characteristics, now providing an account of them with reference to the Goethe-Schiller correspondence. In a journal entry for 3 January , he notes: Conceivably, Brecht was already moving towards his later stated position that a concern with epic structure was too formalist GBA, Although often translated into English by the nearest available nouns — cf.
But it is not at the grammatical level that the principal difficulty lies. It may be self-evident that 51 See Salm for a survey of the genesis and implications of this botanical metaphor. Fundamental objections to the uncritical way in which Staiger derives abstract qualititative nouns e. The gerundival form has been chosen to create such intertwined associations.
In Epic Theater, it is not only characters who tell each other stories: More important, this narrative function is also fulfilled by 54 Midgley , And in any case, according to recent work, the covert quotation from Marx is less vulgarly de55 terminist than Hultberg would have his reader believe. One of the clearest 55 See Avineri , 75—77, on the misreadings of this passage and for an account of what Marx really meant. Die determinierenden Faktoren, wie soziales Milieu, spezielle Ereignisse usw. Thus, selective stress on one element in the table can lead to diametrically opposite conclusions: The true Brecht, it might therefore be argued, is not to be located in either 11 or For over a quarter of a century, he repeatedly found himself having to define — and refine — his position, legislating which kinds of emotion Epic Theater rejected and which were permissible.
But no amount of clarification seems to have helped. Even empathy will eventually be re-admitted to the domain of Epic Theater, provided it is framed in such a way as to make the emotional experience productive. Or that it would make a sufficient splash. Regrettably, the discussion hurries quickly on at this point from an explanation of Epic Theater to a consideration of Epic Opera, formulated in such a way as to do little more than prepare for the discussion of music in the next section. See also Zutshi When the table was revised in exile for insertion into a new context, the strength of such a reference risked becoming obscure.
Hence, the allusion is removed. The deficit is not substantial, however, even on the right-hand side of the table. It now forms part of a different debate, signaled in the title, and no longer relates to Mahagonny. Nor is it primarily concerned with the differences between Dramatic and Epic Theater. Nevertheless, few editions make this clear. In Willett, for example, the section does not appear as such. Since only the new edition includes the section in its proper form, I quote the passage in full: Der Zuschauer des dramatischen Theaters sagt: Der Zuschauer des epischen Theaters sagt: If so, the fact that it reappeared in the Malik edition 1: Brecht may have simply wished to document the fact that his original statement had worked with an explicitly Marxist component, one representing a vital bridge leading from the revised scheme back to the sociological and political analysis of theater as institution of the period leading up to the Mahagonny notes.
If the above-noted revisions had been made with this in mind, then any inclusion of such a contentious passage from Marx might well, after his mixed treatment at the hands of the Third International, have looked imprudent by this time. Here, he appears to be trying to do something similar in the case of epic discontinuity.
Each represents a complex synthesizing of what Brecht by now held to be a false dichotomy. The relationship between the one and its counterpart has beeen transposed onto a dialectical plane, inasmuch as the behavior being displayed onstage is designed first to elicit an antithetical response from the ideal audience of Epic Theater; but then, the ideal audience response will be to transcend such a simple antithesis.
As his letter to Comrade M. His interest is now more decidedly in highlighting the enjoyment that comes with learning. For details see Kebir Nevertheless, the charge of barbarism does not have to represent an unequivocally hostile gesture towards all that Stanislavsky represents. For the one is mainly confined to structural features, while the other is concerned with performance concepts. That crucial effect is lost in all but the GBA edition.
Nevertheless, it behaves as though it ought to be one. Obviously, Epic Theater could not have remained a parallel, rather than contrastive, point of reference at this late phase of the argument if over-specific illustrations from opera had been included. By remaining at the level of principles Brecht can still maintain the dominant comparison in the notes between Epic Theater and Epic Opera.
Similarly, it links the function of gesture and stage-props and the way in which the singer and the music draw attention to anti-illusionistic aspects of performance and adopt a stance to what is being displayed. By the end of the section, however, it almost looks as if the converse is happening. A token reactionary or otherwise unacceptable view is expressed or mimicked so as to allow the main voice to elaborate the correct position.
Here, the idea that audiences used to traditional opera might feel that it is in jeopardy becomes a pretext, not so much for a direct response as for a cameo caricature of demeaning audience behavior. That is to say: Kann man sie veranlassen, ihre Zigarren herauszuziehen? Whatever members of the above kind of audience do or whatever they expect from opera, they must be replaced.
In order to show, once more ex negativo, what is the wrong way to conjure up the new audience, the notes launch into a final barbed attack on formal and thematic innovation for its own sake a diatribe substantially expanded for Versuche 2, no doubt because it was now less counterproductive to imply specific targets than it might have been in Musik und Gesellschaft.
The flurry of avant-garde experiments evoked at the beginning of the notes is now seen as merely marking time. The Mahagonny notes conclude by looking in both directions at once. The final stated goal of developing the means of pleasure into an object of instruction GBA, This is coupled with an optimistic picture of an embryonic Marxist theater designed to attack the base. As Kobel has pointed out, Brecht argues as if the audience of Aristotelian theater took no political views to the theater with them Kobel , But the real problem in the early s was that a large portion of potential theater audiences was of the radical political right.
His situation in exile from [. Other factors played a part in this radical change of orientation. If the impressive corpus of theoretical writings from the Scandinavian period is circumspect about political assumptions and long-term goals, and might at times appear to be laying Brecht open to the charge of showing more concern for artistic than political radicalism, there was one further key reason for this shift of emphasis: And while he usually refused to comply, the shadow of such an injunction nevertheless exercized a distorting effect on his theoretical writings during the Scandinavian years and in US exile.
The assertion has by no means been laid to rest. Hier zeigte sich klar und berechnet Brechts Unterscheidung zwischen Wesentlichem und Unwesentlichem. As a consequence, he preferred to concentrate his polemics closer to home: In New York, however, he suddenly found himself on the receiving end of a salutary lesson, experiencing at first hand the hold the drama of manipulated empathy continued to exercise on large sections of the contemporary theater world. The bulk of the rest attempt 5 to pinpoint the lessons to be learnt from the Theatre Union adaptation. Things started to go wrong almost from the outset.
Dennoch reagierte der Apparat durchaus als ein Apparat zur Herstellung von Rauschwirkungen. A campaign of self-promotion had also been set in motion. Ground was eventually yielded on both sides, but the result was a hybrid that satisfied no one. As part of a — by then typical — learning-from-defeat strategy, Brecht subjected these reviews to a critique. Legally preto have the Theatre Union stage his work should have been warning enough.
See Wolf , — He placed an expanded version in the Left Review 10 While engaged in a massive theoretical rethink, Brecht at least had the advantage of knowing that Die Mutter had recently been performed according to rigorous epic principles back in Denmark. The Danish amateurs, Berlau records, had no difficulty in depicting working-class characters; and the esprit de corps engendered by collective work on the play was so contagious that some of the cast went off to fight in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
Brecht was nevertheless unable to take comfort from the knowledge that the New York failure was compensated for by a Danish production. What the Theatre Union fiasco had brought to his attention demanded a more thorough-going response than any faithful production could ever offer. His eyes had been been opened to the fact that he would need to clarify his theoretical position and perhaps even compromise if he was to make an impact in America.
That could be either the cause or merely a side-effect of more fundamental factors. But Stanislavsky and his fellow-artists at MAT were obviously increasing their hold on contemporary drama. He was quick to deduce that this new wave offered the twin attractions of methodically systematized rehearsal and performance techniques and a political rationale for the exploitation of feeling in left-wing theater: Das System Stanislawskis ist ein Fortschritt schon deswegen, weil es ein System ist.
If the exercise was also to be of practical value, Brecht realized, Epic Theater would need to learn from an analysis of what the Stanislavskians regarded as distractions from total identification GBA, What they wished to avoid was what Epic Theater needed to exploit for distancing purposes. Although fundamentally opposed to the ideas and techniques that Stanislavsky and his followers promoted, Brecht clearly admired the way the Stanislavsky method was documented in a series of authoritative publications, thus identifying itself as a coherent and meticulously explained performance theory.
It also had heuristic value for his own theoretical self-understanding. Nor does Brecht engage with the fact that Aristotelian catharsis is less central to the Stanislavskian conception of dramatic effect than is being implied. At the same time that he was studying Stanislavsky, Brecht embarked on a substantial reformulation of Epic Theater. Die bekannte Forderung der drei Einheiten betrachten wir nicht als diesen Hauptpunkt, sie wird vom Aristoteles auch gar nicht erhoben, wie die neuere Forschung festgestellt hat.
A subsequent note on catharsis among the fragments of Der Messingkauf spells this out: It was little more than a Pyrrhic victory for Brecht to have to introduce himself to a sophisticated Theatre Workshop readership with, of all things, thoughts about Die Dreigroschenoper. And it could only have been something of an indignity to find himself figuring in New Theatres for Old alongside such a galaxy of competing forms of twentieth-century theater in a compendious work whose author was by all accounts largely sympathetic towards the theater of identification.
As Brecht was later to remark, this was not the only bone of contention: Das Theater eines wissenschaftlichen Zeitalters wird zum wissenschaftlichen Theater. Sometimes key terms e. But because the discursive setting of these reconceptualizations of Brechtian theater is of some significance, I propose to look first at the three major essays written during the second half of the s: As such a compromise implies, Brecht was trying to launch a fresh series of unfamiliar and sometimes unhelpfully neologistic terms within a relatively short period. The majority of these pieces date from Reiches, for the same journal.
From —33, when Desmond MacCarthy had been the editor of what was then simply entitled Life and Letters, the London monthly retained a strong interest in contemporary drama. Brecht begins with a more succinct statement of purpose than can be found in any of the theoretical writings hitherto: Im nachfolgenden soll kurz auf die Anwendung des Verfremdungseffekts in der alten chinesischen Schauspielkunst hingewiesen werden. Such moving back and forth between Asiatic acting conventions and contemporary Western theater involves more than rapid shifts in perspective.
The very choice of concepts an even more complicated feature in the English translation where there is no Brechtian German precedent to build on creates a clash between oriental practices and Western descriptive vocabulary. At this point the translation inserts: Die Diderot-Gesellschaft setzt sich die Aufgabe, [. Yet that is precisely what the essay appears to suggest. There may well have been an element of organized chance to the Moscow encounter with Mei Lan-fang. In connection with this, Antony Tatlow notes: It is worth bearing in mind that an earlier draft dating from GBA, Note also the telling remark, when Brecht is describing the effect of Chinese acting on a Westerner: Darunter ist folgendes zu verstehen: Diese Auffassung mag die Existenz einer Geschichte zugeben, aber es ist dennoch eine geschichtslose Auffassung.
Yet it looks suspiciously as if Brecht had taken deliberate liberties with the material. Esta merely elopes, only to be abandoned on becoming pregnant, while Clyde leaves when suspected of being an accomplice to a road accident. And he may have had good reasons for doing so. Ist es dazu imstande? Was es hier, als Familienmitglied, gelernt hat, wird ihm das helfen, den Unterhalt zu verdienen? Sind sie eine Last geworden oder geblieben?
Ist das so bei allen Familien? War das immer so? Ist das der Lauf der Welt, der nicht zu beeinflussende? Gilt hier dieser Satz? Taten sie es zu allen Zeiten?
Wenn ja, wenn es etwas Biologisches ist, geschieht es immer in der gleichen Weise, aus demselben Grunde, mit den gleichen Folgen? Wenn die Mutter unter Ermahnungen und moralischen Forderungen der Tochter den Koffer packt, der sehr klein ist — wie zeigt man das: Das kann nur erreicht werden, wenn der V-Effekt hervorgebracht wird.
The tone is guardedly reformist rather than stridently revolutionary. And there are often times when his need to measure himself against the Stanislavsky of My Life in Art had a distorting effect on the scope of the dramaturgical writings. This was hardly the case, however, with his second major theoretical work of the late s. Encouraged by the response, Brecht repeated it the following year before a student audience in Helsinki.
This time he was less impressed: That is, it was a bridge between the two innovative accounts of acting: Although the general impression is of a broad survey of contemporary drama, Brecht strikes a defensive note when it comes to Epic Theater: One finds a clearer sense of teleology in the Stockholm lecture than in the essay on Chinese acting. When Brecht concludes by asking: While not being a matter of the difference between a scientific experiment and a literary one, this does suggest that Brecht is using the experiment metaphor to minimize the distinction between a seemingly objective process and an ideologically driven one.
The Theater of the Scientific Age, as conceived by Brecht, is in part characterized by the fact that it turned to different academic disciplines from those favored by the Naturalists. Given the two contexts of the lecture Sweden was studiously neutral and Finland feared the Soviet Union more than Nazi Germany , Brecht is obliged to signal his political premises obliquely.
The crisis of contemporary theater Brecht posits was one of which he had considerable experience, as it involved the problematic relationship between entertainment and didacticism, empathy and critical distance. The case presented against empathy rests on three charges: Wenn man auf die Hypnose verzichtete, an was konnte man appellieren? Die Haltung des Lear wird verfremdet, d. That principle he sums up in the following way: Although addressing audiences of amateur actors, it makes little of acting; indeed, in places it seems more fascinated by the potential of stage machinery. Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden Bern, , Too much of the Stockholm lecture had been taken up with surveying modern European drama in general, leaving comparatively little space for Epic Theater.
Both serve a similar function: Im folgenden soll der Versuch gemacht werden, eine Technik der Schauspielkunst zu beschreiben, die auf einigen Theatern angewandt wurde [. Brecht had always been fascinated by relationships of proportionality. Das Mitsprechen von Spielanweisungen und Kommentaren. One particular aspect of preparation stands out because it is evidence of a dialectical conception of acting a part.
It concerns the creation of an antithetical response on the part of the audience: Er sagt zum Beispiel: Er geht nach links vorn und nicht nach rechts hinten. Fixieren des Nicht — Sondern. Even in , Brecht can still be found using a plural: On the contrary, the alternatives represent models of audience reaction. Den meisten gemeinsam war jedenfalls das vielseitig brauchbare grammatische Modell des Ja-aber: Two common examples are initially flagged: But the main emphasis is on the street, not the theater: In support of this contention, the appendix cites a number of examples: Hast du dir schon einmal deine Uhr genau angesehen?
Die Frage hat ihn verfremdet, und das sollte sie. Eine Verfremdung des Autos tritt ein, wenn wir schon lange einen modernen Wagen gefahren haben, nun eines der alten T-Modelle H. Der Motor ist ein Explosionsmotor. Again, circumstances may have obliged him to make estrangement seem less a matter of ideology than it really was, possibly because he would be more likely to gain acceptance in America if he came across as a man of the theater without extreme political views.
Theater models and models from our everyday world can be juxtaposed to suggest their potential for reciprocal illumination. We are not expected to react by saying simply: It is not by chance that the sections of the appendix devoted to more sociopolitical ideas 16—19 are substantially longer than those explaining dramatic principles. Estrangement is presented by reference to what it is intended to combat, rather than how it works or in the context of its politically constructive function. But the terms of the discussion are not really antithetical.
It is an end. Despite earlier problems with the schematic expression of different kinds of theater by means of oppositional pairings, Brecht once more operates with a dominant contrast. The plural in this case probably means in general, in all the plays seen, but one cannot be sure whether identification with collectives is again being suggested. If a number of people are in the same predicament, it is theoretically feasible to identify with them as a collective. But the other possibility — that the audience can identify with a situation — means little more than that some scenes in a play stimulate heightened emotional involvement of an illfocused kind.
What follows involves an example which would have been read very differently by Brecht: Suppose a man, who believes that he has cause to be jealous about his wife, witnesses a performance of Othello. He will the more perfectly appreciate the situation, conduct and character of Othello, the more exactly the feelings and experiences of Othello coincide with his own — at least he ought to on the principle of concordance.
In point of fact, he will probably do anything but appreciate the play. In reality, the concordance will merely render him acutely conscious of his own jealousy; by a sudden reversal of perspective he will no longer see Othello apparently betrayed by Desdemona, but himself in an analogous situation with his own wife. This reversal of perspective is the consequence of the loss of Distance. But there is no obvious opposite phenomenon in his scheme. To do this, it is suggested, he will have to adopt an antagonistic attitude to the part he is playing, that is, one of critical distance.
But without making anything of his crucial point, Brecht adds in parenthesis: In the final version, Brecht adopts a more circumspect standpoint: That is to say, Brecht is really only concerned with the political implications of distancing in a certain kind of theater. He argues that there is no necessary connection between the two, although Brecht seems to assume that the one is a prerequisite of the other.
Unter sozialem Gestus ist der mimische und gestische Ausdruck der gesellschaftlichen Beziehungen zu verstehen, in denen die Menschen einer bestimmten Epoche zueinander stehen. Note the seemingly non-interventionist or apolitical, cognitive nature of the following definitions: Das 37 See Schaefer , Grimm , Knopf , 15—60, and a, —, Fankhauser , 23—29, and Fischer , — Der Messingkauf, it could be argued, merely makes explicit what exile contexts at times obliged Brecht to treat with discretion.
Brecht hat die Verfremdung nicht erfunden. Usually the debate is conducted in a more circumscribed arena and revolves around certain very specific debts: Likewise, the fact that a writer sporadically used a term prior to the time when he could have encountered it when used by a particular putative influence need not necessarily invalidate the possibility of his interest in the phenomenon being intensified by an idea that was received later. The major exception has been at the level of genre: After all, Brecht had written the script, and thus there was no real need to subject details to microscopic analysis to get across his general theoretical position.
Der Schauspieler nun hat diesen Abstand zu den Ereignissen und Verhaltungsweisen, den der Historiker nimmt, zu den Ereignissen und Verhaltungsweisen der Jetztzeit zu nehmen. Unseres Erachtens und unserer Absicht nach waren die Praxis des epischen Theaters und sein ganzer Begriff keineswegs undialektisch, noch wird ein dialektisches Theater ohne das epische Element auskommen.
This new, more explicit emphasis on milieu gives a clearer focus to the device, since social and historical milieus demonstrably interact dialectically with the individual. Es steckt viel in ihm, was da entfaltet wurde und entfaltbar ist. The discussion proper gets underway when the actor says: Indem man zeigt, was damals anders war als heute, und den Grund andeutet.
Also ist der Zuschauer ein Gesellschaftshistoriker? Although Scandinavian and US exile restricted the range of available outlets, Brecht remained adept at placing flagship pieces in opinion-forming publications. In the Weimar years it might seem as if Brecht had merely used channels of communication open to any author in a modern, technologically advanced society.
Yet he did so shrewdly and often with panache. Whenever his contributions appeared in feuilleton surveys on topics of the moment, it was alongside the great names of the time. While still in Weimar Germany, Brecht was in the thick of things. That would not happen again until his final years in the GDR.
Exile, as far as his theoretical writings were concerned, was to some extent a period of consolidation and preparation for better times. The works looked at so far show how deceptive categorization on the basis of conventional genres can be. It would be difficult to find a satisfactory generic label for such a work. By the s Taylorism or the Taylor System had become a byword for rationalized industrial efficiency in both the Western world and the Soviet Union. See Midgley , —17 on some of the cultural influences of Taylorism.
This enables him to transform an apparent eyewitness account into an elaborate, distanciating outline of the cultural and historical context for his own experiments. Even in such a seemingly simple instance, Brecht comes across as a master of the art of subverting pre-existing discourse formats. One often finds Brecht over-scripting or in other ways orchestrating things to highlight his own position.
In the case of the Cologne radio talk with Sternberg and Ihering, we saw the former having his lines mapped out for him on the basis of an already-published open letter, but now being assigned the task of presenting it as a thesis to which Brecht constructed a carefully formulated counter-position. The comment in the GBA notes on such a manipulative procedure merely states: One wonders how the other participants saw things!
Even in the s, Brecht had tended to manipulate the other available discourse opportunities in unpredictable ways. Verlangen diese Stoffe eine neue Form des Dramas und des Spiels? Although in the case of some writings the fictiveness is obvious, there are many others where it is not possible to make binding distinctions between authentic material real interviews subsequently transcribed, published answers to actual journalistic questionnaires, and bona fide open letters to specific newspapers and creative variations on the same sub-genres.
Yet even when real exchanges had taken place, they were often planned down to the last detail. One might think that if a genuine dialogue between specific, identified people had occurred on a particular occasion, it would be remarkable to find such extensive drafts for it. No one is named: The equally important need to distinguish between real sent or unsent letters and fictive missives, not to mention the Briefgedicht, or to differentiate between real public addresses and the Anrede poem raises a series of further problems of categorization, especially in the case of putative addressees.
Yet it is possible that the actor who participates in the discussion never existed. The relevant GBA note displays caution: What is revealing here is the ambivalence: Yet despite this token referentiality, the participants come across as invented. The participants are simply referred to as Kalle and Ziffel, names which sound as invented as the Mies and Meck in an earlier draft, Kries and Mies of another fragment from the same period GBA, Early drafts give no names at all, and even in later ones, some speeches are still not yet allocated to either speaker.
Commenting on his method, Brecht cited his models: Brecht, of course, had other models for his use of the fictive letter as a vehicle for bringing theory to life. It seems unlikely that Brecht sent a German letter poem to the American even though Odets was at the time married to the Austrian actress Luise Rainer. Jerome written in English, but published in a German translation: Der unsichtbare Feind des kleinen Kapitalisten: This popular sub-genre of Neue Sachlichkeit poetry had strong connections with the chanson and the cabaret Rollengedicht, genres where the convention was recognized as involving a fiction.
In any case, the nominal addressees shared little or no common language with the author, and in one instance it was a collective. As this suggests, the primary audience or readership was not the ostensible addressee. Instead, the two poems were part of a one-sided dialogue between a playwright and the theater-world at large. In , Brecht reportedly declared: Admittedly, some of the poems associated with the Messingkauf complex were more private reminiscences or tributes7 than dramaturgically focused pieces. But this was not the only problem. Sometimes genre gives some clue to status. Nor does it appear to have been pinned on some backstage notice board or passed on to Ruth Berlau to communicate its substance in Danish to the addressees in question.
The sole record of any such use comes in a journal entry four years later: The note to this entry reads: The Brecht Archive holds many letters either never sent or in some instances with no indication of an addressee. Brecht may have on occasion thought twice about sending a particularly aggressive missive. On the other hand, the letter format was also one of his favorite methods of setting out embryonic ideas: Some served the function of offering Brecht a safety valve, but beyond any use of the fictive letter as a private way of letting off steam or dealing with theoretical problems of the moment, one finds the more important function of rhetorical vehicle.
The contrast between poetic diction and prose register in such cases signifies an ability to function as Olympian commentator on the immediate situation. A theoretical statement made in a poem is not axiomatically more significant than one in prose. If some individual poems express points with particular clarity, lapidariness, or sophistication, this remains a matter of local accomplishment, not generic privileging.
Nevertheless, one striking feature of the dramaturgical poems is their undoubted ability to apply fresh bold images to familiar abstract ideas. Ich sehe da nach vorn kommen Erdbeben. Die Erdbeben haben Geld in der Brusttasche. Some of the poems we shall be considering have been recognized as dramaturgical milestones: But most remain neglected.
Few appeared in print during his lifetime, and their publishing fortunes since have been chequered. A full inventory of the works in question can be found in Willett and Manheim —5 with each title annotated to indicate which had first appeared in Theaterarbeit and Versuche 14 and which not.
To this I would merely add that some of the poems in d are also of considerable dramaturgical significance. These are offered both in an appendix to the Messingkauf complex GBA, According to the editorial principles set out in the notes to both volumes, the seven Versuche poems have the distinction of being authorized as Messingkauf poems by Brecht himself.
Poems that only appeared under that title in Theaterarbeit are accorded a different status, since strictly speaking, even if Brecht must have had a hand in this collective enterprise, the sole editors named on the title page are the Berliner Ensemble and Helene Weigel. Apart from such demarcation problems, one is also left with the paradox that none of the seven poems in the small Versuche 14 and GBA corpus is mentioned anywhere in the Messingkauf plans.
As GBA puts it: The work exists in various versions incorporating numerous revisions, which suggests its importance for Brecht. The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message. Please verify that you are not a robot. Would you also like to submit a review for this item? You already recently rated this item. Your rating has been recorded. Write a review Rate this item: Preview this item Preview this item.
Druck View all editions and formats Rating: More like this Similar Items. Find a copy online Links to this item deposit. Allow this favorite library to be seen by others Keep this favorite library private. Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item Ratgeber Bildband Material Type: Internet resource Document Type: Christian Larsen Find more information about: Reviews User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Similar Items Related Subjects: Linked Data More info about Linked Data.
Home About Help Search. Privacy Policy Terms and Conditions. Remember me on this computer. Cancel Forgot your password?