Verfremdung and Ethics in Brecht's Der Jasager / Der Neinsager

Summary

Through an examination of the ethical constellations in Bertolt Brecht's Der Jasager / Der Neinsager, this article develops an approach for teaching Brecht that engages philosophically with his core concepts of the Verfremdungseffekt and Gestus while also exploring their practical application as tools for literary analysis and as dramaturgical intentions in theater performance. To that end, the article frames the examination of the play in a broader theoretical discussion of Brecht's theater and also draws from a concrete teaching experience, the workshop production of Der Jasager / Der Neinsager on December 4 and 5, 2012, by the students in the course “Performing German Drama” offered in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. This is a unique hybrid course open to both nonspeakers and speakers of German and taught in a bilingual setting. Combining theater history and performance, it provides an experiential, collaborative learning environment in which students collectively develop a dramaturgical approach for a German play based on textual analysis and research of the relevant culture, theater, and performance history, and then stage a workshop production of the play in German. This course experience is relevant for the present study beyond the mere fact that students staged a play by Brecht. With its emphasis on the workshop process, its bilingual educational setting, and the blending of theater history with performance, the course takes both language learners and theater students out of their respective comfort zones and is to some extent methodologically modeled after the Brechtian Lehrstück, regardless of what play is staged in any given year. As a genre, the Lehrstück is positioned at the intersection of theory and practice and is designed for self-aware, critical engagement with the theater method by performative means rather than the mere application of a method for the sake of a performance. Given that in this particular instance the task was to stage a Lehrstück, this meant that the course participants needed to develop a dramaturgical approach for their production of Der Jasager / Der Neinsager that would make that performative engagement with Brecht's theater method demonstrably part of the production itself.