Laura Bradley

Brecht and Political Theatre: 'The Mother' on Stage

Introduction 1. From Nizhni-Novgorod to Moabit: the genesis and premiere of Die Mutter, 1931-2 2. Model or museum exhibit? Die Mutter at the Berliner Ensemble, 1951-71 3. The politics of performance: Die Mutter in West and East Berlin, 1970 and 1974 4. Translation and transference since 1932 5. Die Mutter and German reunification, 1988-2003 Conclusion Glossary

A different political forum East German theatre and the construction of the Berlin Wall

Using new archive material, this article explores how East German theatre responded to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. East Berlins theatres and opera houses faced serious logistical difficulties, as they had previously relied heavily on Western practitioners. Even so, dramatists, directors and actors rallied in a strong public show of support for the Wall. Behind the scenes, most dissenters fell silent, in contrast to other professionals in East Berlin. But theatre productions were ambivalent: the political context invited spectators to read subversion into loyal stagings, and the Berliner Ensemble presented strong arguments both for and against repression in Brechts Days of the Commune. When cultural politicians refused to repay artists’ loyalty with trust, intentionally subversive productions would start to transform theatre into a more critical political forum.

Building new audiences at the Berliner Ensemble, 1949-1956

This article investigates the immense effort that the Berliner Ensemble made to mobilize working-class audiences during its early years. It uses new material from the Brecht Archive, the archives of Brecht’s collaborators Isot Kilian and Egon Monk, the Berliner Ensemble Archive, and trade union records in the Bundesarchiv to explore how the Berliner Ensemble took specially designed shows to audiences in workplaces, prisons, and trade union festivals; how it advertised its productions to workers; and how working-class spectators responded to Brecht’s epic theatre in post-show discussions, questionnaires, and reports. The irony and missed opportunity is that leading GDR theatre critics spent the early 1950s battling Brecht’s theatre, at a time when it was making a better job of delivering the government’s policy on outreach than many of its competitors.

Presenting the German Democratic Republic as a therapeutic state: Alcoholism and the law in Polizeiruf 110:

Alcoholism was a politically sensitive topic in the GDR, yet three episodes of the crime series Polizeiruf 110 tackled it on primetime television in the 1980s. Their depiction of alcoholism corresponded to the ‘disease concept’ that was developed in the USA, presenting it as an individual medical issue and thereby deflecting attention away from socio-economic factors. The episodes cast the GDR police in a humanitarian, paternalist role: they function as front-line therapeutic agents, securing alcoholics access to the medical treatment that they require. While Nicholas Kittrie argues that the growth of the ‘therapeutic state’ in the USA entailed the partial divestment of criminal law, no such divestment occurs in Polizeiruf 110: detectives function as both therapists and penalizers. Letters in the German Broadcasting Archive show how GDR viewers measured this ‘therapeutic state’ against their own experiences, and how the films allowed them to attribute contrasting political intentions to the producers.

Review of Philip Glahn, Bertolt Brecht (London: Reaktion, 2014)

modernizing Berlin on its avant-garde artists (p. 142), the significance of the Dadaists’ individual addresses within Berlin, and the ‘rich fantasy world of mobile self-creation’ that was constituted by Berlin’s café society (p. 187). But he is also a highly perceptive interpreter of Dada events, such as the various Dada evenings, the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (1920) and the ensuing Dada trial, and an equally insightful reader of Dada artefacts, both verbal and visual. White also has a very impressive understanding of those artefacts’ ‘double register’ – i.e. their combination of ‘seemingly obvious references that a general audience could read’ and ‘veiled or insider comments that speak only to the initiated’ (p. 93). Consequently, his brilliant accounts of such works as Grosz’s Kriegsverwendungsfähig (1918; pp. 16–22), An Eva, meine Freundin (1918; pp. 129–30), Belebte Straβenszene (1918; pp. 130–4) and Fern im Süd das schöne Spanien (1919; pp. 134–6), Huelsenbeck, Tzara and Janco’s L’Amiral cherche une maison à louer (1916; pp. 48–9), Huelsenbeck’s use of African names in his early poetry (1916; pp. 58–9), and Hannah Höch’s Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser (1919–20; pp. 245–7) and Dada-Puppen (c. 1920; pp. 292–6) – to name just a few examples – make this book an interpretative treasure trove. White writes in clear, entertaining and jargon-free prose and provides the reader with 130 illustrations and photographs, a good number of which were very amusing and completely unknown to me, and I was particularly interested to read of Oscar Wilde’s early, not to say proto-Dadaistical ballad in praise of the Biscuitmen (p. 114).