Celebrated on 10 February 1998, the centenary of Bertolt Brecht’s birth anticipated the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, which appeared in late February 1848. The coincidence of Brecht’s centenary and the anniversary of the Manifesto provided a timely opportunity to re-evaluate not only Brecht’s legacy in the Berlin Republic and beyond but also his debt to Marx in his critique of capitalism. Most explicitly, the Berliner Ensemble (BE) revived the rarely performed Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken, 1930) and printed an annotated Communist Manifesto in the program in lieu of the play. Even where Marx was not mentioned, his ghost haunted revivals from Brecht’s most anticapitalist period, from the Wall Street crash of 1929 to Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, as well as earlier versions of plays that matured in this period. They included Der Brotladen (Breadshop, 1929–30) at the Volksbühne and archival fragments such as Jae Fleischhacker in Chikago (Jae Meat Chopper in Chicago, 1926), a preliminary treatment of anticapitalist themes, at the BE. The fiftieth anniversary of Brecht’s death in 2006 saw revivals that highlighted the conflicts of capitalist modernity, from Frank Castorf’s version of Im Dickicht der Städte (In the Jungle of Cities, 1922) at the Volksbühne to the BE’s Mutter Courage (Mother Courage, 1939), directed by Claus Peymann, who had already directed Die Mutter (The Mother, 1932) and Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (Saint Joan of the Stockyards, 1932) in 2003.

The revival of Brecht’s anticapitalist plays not only acknowledges the history of Brecht productions in East and West Germany but also registers unease with the present and future of an unevenly united country. The division between East and West has not disappeared with unification but has become a shifting boundary between haves and havenots, a boundary marked less by national treaties than by the fluctuating investments of transnational capital. In the twenty-first century, it is no longer the ghost of communism that haunts Europe but the specter of capitalism, profiting from speculation to the detriment of the common good. Despite this malaise, the crisis also presents an opportunity. The demise of the GDR ended the official sponsorship of Brecht and Marx but it also highlighted anew not only Brecht’s anticapitalist drama but also Marx’s critique of elite profiteering at the expense of the working majority.