1 - Intersections of Politics and Aesthetics: Bertolt Brecht in the Turkish Context

Summary

IN A LETTER TO HANNS EISLER, sent from exile in Helsinki in March 1941, Bertolt Brecht wrote the following: “I did not hear anything about a new route, maybe we can travel through Turkey, but it's not at all sure.” In the end, Brecht never went to Turkey; his journey to California instead led him through Moscow, Leningrad, and Vladivostok. But Brecht could have traveled through Turkey, and engaged with Turkish intellectuals, academics, and institutions—as Leo Spitzer, Ernst Reuter, and Erich Auerbach did. For in addition to taking in refugees who had been victimized by Nazi persecution—professors, teachers, attorneys, artists deemed unreliable—Turkey was an important transit country for Jewish emigrants. While Brecht's own journey took a different path, his theatrical practices found their way into Turkish literary and political life, starting in the mid-1950s with the international success of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children, 1939) in guest productions in Paris in 1954 and London in 1956. The reception of Brecht in Africa and South America, Asia, and the Middle East has been the topic of past conferences and publications. However, despite continuous and intensive engagement with Brecht by Turkish academics, intellectuals, dramatists, and directors, almost no scholarly attention has been paid to the reception of Brecht in Turkey. This is the case within both Brecht studies and German studies. The history of Turkish theater in the twentieth century is marked by continuous exchange between Germany and Turkey— an exchange that, to be sure, extends beyond Brecht. Muhsin Ertuğrul (1892–1979), for example, considered the leading figure or ‘father’ of modern Turkish theater, regularly went to Berlin as early as 1916 (Lessing Theater and Deutsches Kunstlertheater) to “deepen his technical skills,” returning decades later to Munich and Bochum in 1966 to research “theater education methods.” At the invitation of the Turkish government, the German composer Paul Hindemith came to Turkey to establish the State Conservatory for Music and Drama in Ankara in 1936, while at the same time serving as adviser to the Turkish government on issues pertaining to culture and music.