Bertolt Brecht is one of the most popular German playwrights, poet, art theorist, director. A staunch anti-fascist, Brecht used his creativity to promote his ideas, was close to the Communists and even became the winner of the Stalin Prize “For Strengthening Peace between Peoples”, although a few years before he called the secretary General in his secret diary “a deserved murderer of the people”. Nevertheless, the work of the playwright and director turned out to be something more than a reflection of a specific era. Despite the author’s assertion that there will be no future for his works without the world-historical victory of Soviet communism, plays are still staged at theater venues around the world, and the concept of “epic theater” invented by Brecht is studied at universities and used in directing. Many of his works have entered the treasury of world culture: “The Threepenny Opera”, “Mother Courage and her Children”, “The Life of Galileo”, “The Good Man from Sezuan” and others.
He was born in Augsburg, the son of a factory director, studied at a gymnasium, practiced medicine in Munich and was drafted into the army as an orderly. The songs and poems of the young orderly attracted attention with the spirit of hatred for the war, for the Prussian military, for German imperialism. In the revolutionary days of November 1918, Brecht was elected a member of the Augsburg Soldiers’ Council, which testified to the authority of a very young poet.
Already in Brecht’s earliest poems we see a combination of catchy slogans designed for instant memorization and complex imagery that evokes associations with classical German literature. These associations are not imitations, but an unexpected rethinking of old situations and techniques. Brecht seems to move them into modern life, makes them look at them in a new, “alienated” way. So already in the earliest lyrics Brecht gropes for his famous dramatic technique of “alienation”. In the poem “The Legend of the Dead Soldier”, satirical techniques resemble the techniques of romanticism: a soldier going into battle against the enemy has long been only a ghost, the people accompanying him are philistines, whom German literature has long painted in the guise of animals. And at the same time, Brecht’s poem is topical — there are intonations, pictures, and hatred of the First World War in it. Brecht also stigmatizes German militarism and war in the 1924 poem “The Ballad of a Mother and a Soldier”; the poet understands that the Weimar Republic has far from eradicated militant pan-Germanism.
During the Weimar Republic, Brecht’s poetic world expanded. Reality appears in the most acute class upheavals. But Brecht is not content with just recreating pictures of oppression. His poems are always a revolutionary appeal: such are “The Song of the United Front”, “The Faded Glory of New York, the Giant City”, “The Song about the class Enemy”. These poems clearly show how in the late 20s Brecht came to a communist worldview, how his spontaneous youthful rebelliousness grew into proletarian revolutionism.
Brecht’s lyrics are very wide in their range, the poet can capture the real picture of German life in all its historical and psychological concreteness, but he can also create a poem-reflection, where the poetic effect is achieved not by description, but by the accuracy and depth of philosophical thought, combined with an exquisite, not far-fetched allegory. Poetry for Brecht is primarily the accuracy of philosophical and civic thought. Brecht considered poetry even philosophical treatises or paragraphs of proletarian newspapers filled with civic pathos (for example, the style of the poem “Message to Comrade Dimitrov, who fought with the Fascist tribunal in Leipzig” — an attempt to bring the language of poetry and newspapers closer). But these experiments eventually convinced Brecht that art should not speak about everyday life in an everyday language. In this sense, Brecht the lyricist helped Brecht the playwright.
In the 20s, Brecht turned to the theater. In Munich, he became a director, and then a playwright of the city theater. In 1924, Brecht moved to Berlin, where he worked in the theater. He acts both as a playwright and as a theorist — reformer of the theater. Already in these years, Brecht’s aesthetics, his innovative view of the tasks of dramaturgy and theater developed in its decisive features. Brecht outlined his theoretical views on art in the 20s in separate articles and speeches, later combined into the collection “Against Theatrical Routine” and “On the Way to Modern Theater”. Later, in the 30s, Brecht systematized his theatrical theory, clarifying and developing it in treatises “On non-Aristotelian drama”, “New Principles of Acting Art”, “Small Organon for Theater”, “Buying Copper” and some others.
Brecht calls his aesthetics and dramaturgy “epic”, “non-Aristotelian” theater; by this name he emphasizes his disagreement with the most important, according to Aristotle, the principle of ancient tragedy, which was subsequently perceived to a greater or lesser extent by the entire world theatrical tradition. The playwright opposes the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis. Catharsis is an extraordinary, supreme emotional tension. Brecht recognized this side of catharsis and preserved it for his theater; we see emotional power, pathos, and an open manifestation of passions in his plays. But the purification of feelings in catharsis, according to Brecht, led to reconciliation with the tragedy, the horror of life became theatrical and therefore attractive, the viewer would not even mind experiencing something like this. Brecht constantly tried to dispel the legends about the beauty of suffering and patience. In The Life of Galileo, he writes that a hungry person has no right to suffer hunger, that “to starve” is simply not to eat, and not to show patience pleasing to heaven.” Brecht wanted the tragedy to excite thoughts about ways to prevent the tragedy. Therefore, he considered Shakespeare’s disadvantage that, in the performances of his tragedies, it is unthinkable, for example, “a discussion about the behavior of King Lear” and the impression is created that Lear’s grief is inevitable: “it has always been so, it is natural.”
Brecht’s innovation was also manifested in the fact that he managed to fuse into an indissoluble harmonic whole traditional, mediated methods of revealing aesthetic content (characters, conflicts, plot) with an abstract reflective beginning. The famous Brecht effect of “alienation” gives an amazing artistic integrity to the seemingly contradictory combination of plot and commentary.
He believed that a person retains the ability to freely choose and make responsible decisions in the most difficult circumstances. In this conviction of the playwright, faith in man was manifested, a deep conviction that bourgeois society, with all the power of its corrupting influence, cannot reshape humanity in the spirit of its principles. Brecht writes that the task of the “epic theater” is to make the audience “refuse… from the illusion that everyone in the place of the depicted hero would act the same way.” The playwright deeply comprehends the dialectics of the development of society and therefore crushingly slams the vulgar sociology associated with positivism. Brecht always chooses difficult, “imperfect” ways of exposing capitalist society. “Political primitive”, according to the playwright, is unacceptable on stage. Brecht wanted the life and actions of the characters in the plays from the life of a proprietary society to always give the impression of unnaturalness. Bertolt approved of amateur acting, because the random flatness and emptiness of her statements seemed to him an involuntary form of the alienation effect.
Classic epic theater. A scene from the play by V. Meyerhold “The Bathhouse”
For Brecht, the whole point of acting was that it should be empty in a certain sense. Alienated action follows the imagined completeness of everyday actions, deconstructing them into their social determinants and inscribing the conditions of their creation into them. The “emptiness” of alienated acting is a kind of “interval” that makes part of the stage business external to itself, slipping a gap between the actor and the action and, thus, it seems to us, destroying the ideological self–identification of our everyday social behavior.
According to Brecht, the truthful depiction of reality is not limited only to the reproduction of the social circumstances of life, that there are universal categories that social determinism cannot fully explain (the love of the heroine of the “Caucasian Chalk Circle” Grusha for a defenseless abandoned child, the irresistible impulse of Shen De for good). Their depiction is possible in the form of a myth, a symbol, in the genre of parable plays or parabola plays. But in terms of socio-psychological realism, Brecht’s dramaturgy can be put on a par with the greatest achievements of the world theater. The playwright carefully observed the basic law of realism of the X1X century . — historical specificity of social and psychological motivations.
According to Max Weber, “alienation is a sensory experience of the subjective process of losing a sense of belonging and usefulness in humanity’s own social environment when social ties weaken. As a process, it entails an identity crisis and can lead to marginalization.” Consequently, the alienation of humanity in Brecht’s “Mama Courage” is considered as one of the main psychological effects of capitalism. Erich Fromm states: “A person does not feel himself to be an active carrier of his powers, but an impoverished thing, dependent on external forces on which it projects its living substance.” This means that alienation permeates the relationship of Mother Courage to her work, to the state and to herself. She creates a way to make a profit in order to provide herself and her children with the opportunity to consume. Her cart towers over her. In a closed space where Mother Courage is engaged in business, she becomes a subject dancing to the tune of capitalists (those in power).
A shot from the film “Anna Firling’s Roads” based on the play “Mother Courage and her children”
Soldiers define a war that brings order. At the beginning of the play, the sergeant says that war is “order” and peace is based on order. In this sense, all the world’s resources are devoted to this order. In this context, the wealth of the village is seized by the rulers for their war and does not remain with its producers.
Brecht views war as a crime. He considers the participation of Courage in the war a crime. She has an incorrigible belief that she can benefit from the war. Her enthusiasm for the war becomes even more inhuman when we take into account Brecht’s opinion that her relationship with the war leads to the death of her children. This picture of Mother Courage as a criminal is reinforced by Brecht’s examples of inhumanity, which reveal her proximity to the crime in which she participates. And every inhumanity is usually somehow related to her business, which reinforces the idea that her business with war is a crime. Mother Courage is alienated because she could lose her dining room if she pays the ransom for saving Schweitzerkas. She is ultimately responsible for Schweitzerkas’ death when she hesitates to redeem him. The death of her children may seem just another example of the inhumane consequences of her participation in the war. As Brecht often tells us, the death of children is proof that little people cannot benefit, but only lose from war.
Elena Weigel as Mother Courage
Nevertheless, Brecht asserts a kind of equivalence between war and capitalism, and on his own assumption that “business” Courage ultimately refers to capitalism. He describes capitalism as a social system that both generates war and needs war. These statements show that Brecht’s depiction of the Thirty Years’ War is a depiction of capitalism.
The theory of alienation is an intellectual construct in which Marx demonstrates the destructive impact of capitalist production on people, on their physical and mental state, as well as on the social processes of which they are a part. Marx argues that one of the manifestations of alienation is that everything is under the rule of an inhuman force. This means that in a capitalist society, the power of capital reflects the power of an alien force that governs disenfranchised subjects. Thus, capitalism is an exploitative system that causes and demands war. At the same time, Mother Courage, as alienated, has no chance to compete with the authorities. Not only as an alienated subject, the mother can sell her power to the owner of capital, but also the “power of an inhuman force” threatens her existence and her children. Under capitalism, alienated subjects are dehumanized. This dehumanization refers to the transformation of the subject into a thing or, in Marxist terms, into a commodity, because everything in capitalism is calculated according to profitability. Now it seems appropriate to point out the inhuman indifference of Courage to the murdered peasants and her business interests in terms of the labor of her children and the redemption of Schweitzerkas. In the ninth scene, her decision to stay with Catherine is dictated not only by maternal love, but also by the hope of profit in the war.
A shot from the film “Anna Firling’s Roads” based on the play “Mother Courage and her children”
Author of the article: Varvara Kartushina
