The impulse for this essay comes from a particular curiosity of 2020 and the COVID era: the many comparisons made in the US news media between the social and economic effects of the pandemic and those of World War II. The comparison, at least when not made with the proper caveats, is irresponsible. However, it can serve as an occasion for revisiting a period in Brecht's career, the late 1940s, as a postwar moment, and testing how the concepts and realities the playwright was grappling with relate to our own time. One of the parallels between Brecht in that period and the context of 2020 is the issue of revolutionary resistance and rebellion. The late 1940s in Germany were decidedly not a revolutionary period, if by revolution we mean broad-based, effective popular rebellion against oppressive systems. Yet Brecht, at least in his letters, wanted to view the late 1940s as potentially revolutionary. Scholars, it should be said, have not generally interpreted this period in Brecht's career as one in which his concept of revolutionary practice was a central issue. Mark W. Clark, focusing mostly on the cultural policies of the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ: “Sowjetische Besatzungszone”) and the early German Democratic Republic (GDR), has demonstrated that Brecht's focus during this period—especially through his 1949 Berlin production of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children)—was on his own value as a cultural commodity and the status of his own agency as an intellectual. Stephen Brockmann has shown how Brecht embraced Cold War cultural politics only reluctantly: The playwright had always been suspicious of the way notions of culture acted as a smokescreen for the concrete struggles of politics and economics. Brecht worked in 1948 and 1949, in the face of the Soviet-led antiformalism campaign, to reach as wide an audience as possible and, more pragmatically, to get his plays staged at the most important venues possible, a goal he reached with the Mother Courage production of 1949. Martin Revermann has seen the 1948–49 period as key for the “recalibration” of Brecht's notion of the tragic and its relationship to German idealism and experimental theater, if not to the nuts and bolts of revolutionary practice.

Yet, Brecht's adaptations of the period—not usually treated as a coherent group—are surprisingly unified in their treatment of problems of revolutionary resistance.