Olivier Neveux focuses on overtly political, often militant performance. Using as an impetus, the German director, playwright and theoretician Bertolt Brecht’s theories of epic theatre and Marxist dialectics, which have been by turns foundational and marginal in France, Neveux traces the relationship between theatre and politics over a period of more than half a century. Brecht and Brechtianism have offered opportunities to politicize theatre in France. However, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the radical left lost its influence in the social field, and neoliberalism appeared to have won out. While Brecht’s star might seem to have waned, examining the ways in which political theatre has transformed, evolved and modified in relation to, or in opposition to his ideas, affords the possibility, as Neveux suggests, to appreciate how protest performance might evolve in the future.

Małgorzata Leyko’s study of German theatre in Polish lands offers a transnational panorama that resists ‘methodological nationalism’. She interprets this history in various modes from coexistence and expansion to domination or inspiration. At different historical moments, theatre was the site of exclusion or the space of Polish–German exchange. German theatre cultures offered new models and artistic strategies, while during the Nazi occupation and the Second World War theatre was often a site of ideological indoctrination and complicity, or a refuge for those trapped and persecuted in ghettos and camps. Aleksandra Sakowska then demonstrates that Shakespeare has not been passively received by Polish culture. She argues that the process of translating Shakespeare into Polish has complicated and enriched plays like Hamlet and made them generative of new meanings, both within Polish territories and abroad. The multiple forms of translation and adaptation of Shakespeare over the centuries are not positioned as a purely ‘foreign influence’ or ‘cultural sociability’.

From the later 1920s, Brecht developed a Marxist critique of the theater apparatus and began to experiment on the margins of, and outside, commercial theater. It was not until after World War II, when he founded the Berliner Ensemble, that he finally had the opportunity to control the means of theatrical production. The Berliner Ensemble’s entire approach was underpinned by a holistic understanding of political theater. This extended from actor training to outreach activities with audiences, going far beyond the argument or subject matter of any individual play.

This article examines the relevance of Brecht’s ideas about theater and pedagogy for the contemporary university, suggesting that a Brechtian approach has the potential to liberate the way that we think about university education and the role of teachers, students, and administrators.Rather than accepting the world as static and given, a Brechtian approach to pedagogy can encourage and develop an active, student-centered approach.It can help to encourage students to create and take charge of their own meaning-making activities.Just as Brechtian theater insists on revolutionary change and invites audience participation, so, too, a Brechtian approach to pedagogy invites student participation and activity, turning over much of the responsibility for meaning-making to those who are seeking an education.This would constitute a revolutionary new way of looking at university education.

Comparative cross-disciplinary study shows how East Asian thought, theater, and poetry, while situating cultural analogies, helpedshape Brecht’s work. The narrative clarity anddistancing techniques of Japanese theater undercut superficial naturalism, and comparison with sophisticated, graceful Chinese theater later relativized his own. In Chinese philosophy he encountered witty discrimination, an estranging critique of virtues, dialectical social interrelations, a stimulating flow of things, focus on practical engagement, warnings (apropos Confucius) of accommodation with power and, in his crucial Me-ti, what he intimated to Korsch as an “anti-systematic … epic science” realized through individual productivity, not by a top-down imposed social order. East Asian imagination stimulated an unconventional aesthetics. In ethics, the social paradox of self-love would avoid turning people into “the servants of priests.” Even another global politics once briefly seemed conceivable, when China appeared to confront European Stalinism, but in the end that revolution disappointed as well.

Gestus remains an important but elusive concept in the scholarship on Brecht’s writings and continues to inform contemporary theater practices as well as new theories of performance and performativity. This article provides a brief overview of Brecht’s evolving definitions of Gestus, including in, and through, key plays and productions, followed by an assessment of the larger literary, political, and theoretical debates associated with Weimar theater, communist agitprop, and Marxist theory. Throughout, the productivity of Gestus as a concept and practice is reconstructed through its dialogic qualities, heuristic functions, and intertextual effects.

Heiner Müller is considered to be not only the most important playwright to emerge from the German Democratic Republic but also the East German playwright most heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht.Müller “began where Brecht left off,” pushing further along the path of Brecht’s theatrical projects and theories and even taking up projects that had been left unfinished by Brecht himself.In the 1970s, with his “farewell to the learning play,” Müller seemed for a time to be distancing himself from his mentor.And yet the accusation of “literary patricide” sometimes made against him runs counter to the fact that Müller continued his interest in Brecht right up until his death in 1995.Since then, avant-garde theater artists have continued to honor the legacy of both playwrights.

This article argues that Brecht’s unique musicality as a poet led to a rich and rarely paralleled collaboration with musical composers. While the young Brecht sketched out his own music for his early poetry and songs, he soon turned to professional composers as partners. The article focuses on Brecht’s three major musical collaborators, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. In addition to the innovative works that Brecht created with these composers, they also stimulated important theoretical writings that led to new forms of opera, as in Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, or a revolutionary aesthetics of film music, as in Eisler/Adorno’s Composing for the Films, which is strongly influenced by Brecht.

This chapter examines Brecht’s approach to film not as a mimetic means of reproducing reality but as an indexical means of producing reality. It considers key passages of “The Threepenny Trial” and several interwar fragments in order to elucidate Brecht’s distinction between actual and functional reality and to elaborate the concept of the cognitively capable masses, whose collective perception made recognition of actual reality possible. It then offers brief analyses of the key films Brecht worked on, Kuhle Wampe and Hangmen Also Die!, which provide examples of the strategies Brecht employed to bend film to his aims of modeling mass-based cognition and reality production. These attempts opposed industrial norms, cultural convention, and the regulatory force of the state. They succeeded infrequently if at all, as Brecht himself acutely realized. Assessing the success and failure of these experiments allows greater insight into the potential of the medium of film in the second quarter of the twentieth century and creates potentially useful points of comparison to the complex relationship between representational media and the networked production of reality in our own times.

This essay provides an overview of Brecht’s engagement with photography. His early fascination with the medium developed, in the context of the burgeoning illustrated media landscape and the German “New Photography,” into theoretical reflections in dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. He also began to use photography, especially press photography, in his own work: as a source for the analysis of social behavior and a way of fixing Gestus. In due course he became more and more sensitive to the politics of representation and employed photography directly and innovatively in his own works, the Journal and the “photoepigrams” of War Primer.

This article develops Brecht’s anti-metaphysical and materialist ethics through a close reading of “The Great Method,” a short text from his Me-ti that, in just three sentences, articulates a code of conduct for the revolutionary struggle. This article tries to show that even though “The Great Method” is based on the dialectics of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin, it also reflects Brecht’s interest in classical Chinese thought, in particular the Taoist notion of a subject’s full immersion in the situation requiring an ethical decision (Zhuangzi) and the assumption of an “efficacy that stems from disposition” (François Jullien), which, for example, underpins Brecht’s insistence on linguistic precision and use of modelbooks. This article also emphasizes the central role of production for Brecht’s ethics: “The Great Method” aims to unleash the human potential for productivity in all its forms, beyond capitalism, but is less interested in the production of things than in the production of change in things.

This essay outlines the semantic breadth and formal contours of Brecht’s early poetic experiments. For his Hauspostille (Domestic Breviary) collection (1927) Brecht pulled together those poems that he wrote between 1913 and 1925 as sharp protest against social tensions and frictions in the Weimar period. The title of his collection refers to Martin Luther’s “Postille” writings and their ritualized religious instructions. Brecht secularizes Luther’s religious agenda and poetic agitation when he categorizes his poems as Gebrauchslyrik (functional or everyday poetry). Their cynicism not only activates the reevaluation of classical literature and aesthetics, but more poignantly also the social norms, gender concepts, moral judgments and legal processes of bourgeois society. The essay argues that Brecht’s early poetic experiments model a cynical mindset that not only informs his anti-fascist satires in exile but also his later work as it set a standard for the twentieth-century modes of poetic and theatrical reflection in general.

This chapter examines Brecht’s complicated relationship with the German Democratic Republic and its leaders.In 1948, after the end of World War II, Brecht returned to Germany and ultimately settled in East Berlin in the GDR, where he became the artistic leader of the famous Berliner Ensemble, the most influential postwar theater group in the world. However, because of his revolutionary approach to drama and aesthetics, Brecht quickly ran into conflict with East German leaders and had to endure a series of criticisms and accusations against himself and his artistic collaborators. Brecht also sought to democratize and liberalize the artistic and cultural sphere of the GDR. Ultimately, Brecht’s relationship with socialist leaders in the GDR represented a push-pull and give-and-take. Each side had to compromise, and each side received something in return. Brecht received his own theater and the ability to perform plays as he wished, while the leaders of the GDR were able to bathe in the glory of Brecht’s international artistic success.

This chapter examines Bertolt Brecht’s complicated and fraught relationship with his homeland Germany. Brecht was always attracted by the adventure of foreign lands and was particularly fascinated by the cultures of the United States and East Asia. He was devastatingly critical of Germany and its cultural traditions, and during the Hitler dictatorship he was one of the fiercest intellectual opponents of Nazism, producing some of the most articulate and best-known literary and cultural attacks on Hitler’s Third Reich. Brecht also severely criticized what he, together with Friedrich Engels, referred to as “deutsche Misere” (German misery), i.e. the slavish fealty of German intellectuals to political power. However, during the Third Reich and later Brecht also insisted on the hope for a certain kind of German normality and nonjingoistic patriotism that recognized the qualities and achievements of other nations and peoples. For this reason, Brecht’s conception of a national feeling that is also open toward other cultures has the potential to be of use in today’s multicultural Germany.

This chapter is divided into three sections examining Brecht’s literary influences, his achievements as a writer of fiction, and his legacy. It considers Brecht’s admiration for prose writers including Döblin, Büchner, Grimmelshausen, Wodehouse, Kipling, and Hašek. It argues that these readings, alongside Brecht’s interest in Nietzsche and the Vienna Circle, helped to inform his understanding of language as a form of practical intervention. Brecht sees language as a rhetorical tool kit, a “handle” that can be used to change reality. The chapter also argues that Brecht’s fiction is characterized by “blunt thinking,” employed as a means of ideological critique. This is shown by a consideration of Brecht’s two masterworks of short philosophical fiction, Stories of Mr. Keuner and Refugee Conversations, and his three experimental novels, Threepenny Novel, the Tui-Novel, and The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar. The chapter concludes with some brief observations about Brecht’s enduring significance for German prose fiction from the mid-twentieth century until the present day, also noting his influence on the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

This essay places Brecht within the context of exile from Nazi Germany, follows him on his journey through Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the Soviet Union, and reviews his years in American exile where he joined the German-speaking émigré community in Los Angeles: soon an Enemy Alien. The essay captures Brecht's lived experience of exile as it enters his writing, from his journal entries and correspondence to his numerous poems – which offer sharp insights into the exilic fate, its contemporary dimensions as well as historical antecedents. Furthermore, the essay calls attention to the precarious situation of writers in exile, deprived of publication venues and severed from audiences, and surveys Brecht's own publishing network and its virtual elimination toward the late 1930s. Finally, the essay brings Brecht into contact with other exiles, such as Joseph Roth, Oskar Maria Graf, Anna Seghers, Lion Feuchtwanger, as well as Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and investigates the extent to which the exilic “we” in Brecht's exile poetry – suggesting a community of exiles conjoined in their effort to combat Nazismcorresponded to an existing sense of togetherness and shared responsibility among the exiles, Brecht included: a “people's front” in the spirit of Heinrich Mann.

This article examines the key biographies of Bertolt Brecht that have appeared since Brecht’s death in 1956, exploring the way that Cold War politics helped to determine how Brecht was seen in Germany and the English-speaking world.Whereas left-leaning and socialist biographers tended to admire and praise Brecht, anti-communist and anti-socialist biographers condemned him for his revolutionary politics and leftist commitments.The 1970s and 1980s witnessed renewed interest and admiration for Brecht even in the capitalist West; however, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990, renewed recriminations against communism and socialism led to further attacks on Brecht and his legacy, culminating in John Fuegi’s 1994 biography Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. In more recent times, however, ongoing problems with globalization and capitalism have led to a renewed appreciation for and heightened interest in Brecht, his life, and his works.

This article explores Bertolt Brecht’s significance for the most advanced forms of contemporary experimental and avant-garde theater.Brecht is one of the most popular and most-produced playwrights world-wide, and certainly in Germany; however many mainstream productions tend to deprive his work of its radical political and aesthetic edge.Nevertheless, contemporary avant-garde and experimental theaterwould be fundamentally unthinkable without Brecht, and it is particularly indebted to the most radical phase of Brecht’s career, when he and his team were working on learning plays (Lehrstücke) in the late 1920s and early 1930s during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Brecht’s conception of a separation of the elements, of putting mechanisms of power clearly on display, and of creating collective agency that, via script-based theater, tendentially removed power from the hands of writers and directors, are fundamental building blocks of contemporary experimental theater. The article explores such forms and their impact on the basis of experimental work by Robert Wilson, Wanda Golonka, and She She Pop.

This article, a personal reflection by the respected Eastern German writer Kerstin Hensel, explores Bertolt Brecht’s significance for the development of East German literature and culture. The socialist regime in East Germany sought to coopt Brecht’s legacy for its own purposes, and by the 1970s and 1980s Brecht had therefore become something of a lifeless classic throughout much of the GDR. However, his approach to theater and writing still had the potential to unsettle and inspire younger writers occasionally, and Brecht had a major influence on some of the most famous East German writers and playwrights, including Heiner Müller, Peter Hacks, and Volker Braun. Hensel shows via a close-reading the way that themes and tropes from one of Brecht’s most famous poems influenced Volker Braun in one of his poems and then Henself herself, who consciously placed herself in the tradition of both of her predecessors.

This article explores Brecht’s origins and life in Augsburg from the time he was born in 1898 until he left Augsburg for Berlin in 1924. Brecht came from a well-educated and prosperous middle-class family, and he was raised as a Lutheran by his mother, although he soon rejected any form of Christian religious belief. From an early age he demonstrated great promise and ambition as a writer and soaked up influences from all around him, including the fairs that occurred in Augsburg on a regular basis. He read widely and was influenced by what he read. Among his most important influences were Frank Wedekind, Georg Büchner, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine.In his adolescence Brecht became the center of a group of friends in Augsburg devoted to literature, music, and a nonconformist approach to life. In Augsburg Brecht experienced the Bavarian Revolution after the end of World War I.Brecht’s first plays Baal and Drums in the Night reflect some of his experiences and thoughts while living in Augsburg, and his revolutionary first book of poetry, Domestic Breviary, also emerged above all out of his life in Augsburg.