Introduction

Summary

IN 1968 DRAMATURG KÄTHE RÜLICKE-WEILER, a former member of Bertolt Brecht's theater company, the Berliner Ensemble, remarked that “of the fifty-three countries in which Brecht was staged in the ten years following his death, more than half are not in Europe but in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” Brecht, generally regarded as the most influential playwright of the twentieth century, died in 1956, but his theoretical writings and dramaturgical practices shaped many of the debates—albeit to differing degrees—about the politics of culture in divided Germany throughout the politically tumultuous 1960s. The impact of his work went far beyond a German or even a narrowly defined Cold War context. He was, as this book will demonstrate, a key figure in Turkey, where a period of liberalization following the military coup of 1960 saw the emergence of a new generation of politically engaged intellectuals who sought to link culture to politics, art to life, and theater to revolutionary practice in the service of effecting societal change. I will, moreover, highlight this period's significance for Turkish- German literature, exemplified by authors such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Aras Oren. For decades, I will argue, Bertolt Brecht has connected two literary histories that have as a result become ever more intertwined. Studying how Brecht's thought was first interpreted by theater practitioners in Turkey, and then by Turkish writers living in Germany enhances our understanding of the intellectual interchanges that shaped the emergence of Turkish-German literature.

The Brecht-Dialog, the context for Rülicke-Weiler's remarks, was the first international Brecht conference, which was convened in East Berlin in February 1968 in honor of Brecht's seventieth birthday. With the motto “Politics at the Theater”—a phrase taken from Brecht's Katzgraben- Notate—it had been organized jointly by three prominent East German cultural institutions, the Berliner Ensemble, the Academy of Arts, and the Center of the International Theater Institute (ITI), which conceived of the conference as an “encounter of progressive theater practitioners and literary scholars from many countries” and placed the practicability of Brecht's working methods in differing social settings at the center of their agenda.