Tom Kuhn

Brecht reads Bruegel: Verfremdung, Gestic Realism and the Second Phase of Brechtian Theory

Brecht’s interest in Bruegel is widely testified, but no one has asked quite what the playwright and theorist saw in the pictures of the Flemish master. This article tracks Brecht’s reception, from a putative first encounter in 1936 and through his own notes on the pictures, and demonstrates how closely Brecht’s reading of Bruegel may have entwined with his contemporary reflections on Verfremdung, Gestus and “cognitive realism,” as also with the theatre projects of the later exile period. There are particularly close relationships, for example, between Bruegel’s Dulle Griet and Mutter Courage and Der kaukasische Kreidekreis. Through the gaze of the modernist dramatist, Bruegel comes across as an artist of political cunning whose works demand a complex (even dialectic) cognitive process in order to read and decipher them. He is, like Brecht, both a satirist and a realist. His paintings are full of inversions designed to unsettle the onlooker’s conventional views, full of political hints and separate little narrative episodes to tease. What Brecht discovered in Bruegel and in the detail of Bruegel’s pictures was to have far-reaching consequences, both for the formulation of his theory and for the look and practice of his theatre. (TK)

Brecht als Lyriker

Auf die Frage nach dem bedeutendsten deutschen Dichter des 20. Jh.s hatte die Mehrheit der Leserinnen und Leser lange Zeit wohl mit Rainer Maria Rilke geantwortet. Rilkes muhelose Beherrschung des ›Poetischen‹ im herkommlichen Sinn, der vollendete Umgang mit Formen und Klang und die Spiritualitat eines Suchenden, die seine Gedichte auszeichnen, entsprechen ziemlich genau dem Bild des Dichters, wie es sich seit der Romantik etabliert hat. Zumindest seit Mitte des Jh.s hatte die Literaturwissenschaft an zweiter Stelle wohl auch die expressionistischen Solipsismen Gottfried Benns gewurdigt und spater dann die hermetischen, unter dem Nachhall von Auschwitz entstandenen Fragmente Paul Celans. (Der Vergleich mit Benn, Rilke und anderen wurde neulich wieder von Knopf 1996, S.8, wie auch von Berg/Jeske, S. 142, gezogen; eine eingehendere komparative Studie der Rezeption von B.s und Benns Lyrik liefert Campanile.)

Forms of Conviction: The Problem of Belief in Anti-Fascist Plays by Bruckner, Toller and Wolf

If there is an accepted wisdom about the drama of the exile period, it is that it was formally retrograde and conservative, indeed not very interesting at all.2 This is, I think, a misconception. To some extent, under the pressure of extreme practical exigencies and of urgent political demands, theory and practice did drift apart. In some cases, however, the practices which were forced upon the exiles were perhaps more interesting than their theories. Now, for example, a theory might be found to explain why it was that, in the face of fascism, widespread confidence in the old convention of a more or less unproblematic equivalence of drama and life appeared to falter. A consideration of how these dramatic texts articulate beliefs or convictions offers us just one way into a complex of theories and of practices. At the same time it offers us another perspective on the whole question of commitment (whether political or of any other sort) and the writing of literature.