Recycling Brecht: The Contemporary Reception of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny

Summary

Introduction

My aim in this article is to analyze contemporary responses to the Leipzig premiere of Brecht and Weill's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in 1930, and reflect on them with reference to a new model of reception theory. The contemporary reception of Brecht's work during the Weimar Republic is an area of Brecht studies that has been somewhat neglected (though the same point applies to other key theatrical or operatic works from this period, such as Krenek's Jonny spielt auf!), and my discussion attempts to rectify that anomaly at least to some degree. I begin by presenting my revised variant of reception theory, in the context of a countercultural perspective on the development of modern art. In so doing, I also seek to provide a theoretical basis for investigating the process of cultural recycling as such, whether Brecht is the recycler or the recycled. Having done the methodological groundwork, I move on to Mahagonny, and begin by contextualizing the Leipzig production in relation to historical and political developments in Germany between 1929 and 1932. I then consider contemporary responses to the Leipzig production, based on analysis of twenty-five reviews in newspapers and periodicals, and round off my discussion with some hopefully provocative and contentious reflections in conclusion.

Recycling, Counterculture, and Reception Theory

There is a case for arguing that all the groundbreaking cultural developments in Germany and Central Europe from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism may be construed as countercultures—not in the perhaps trivial sense that any “new” cultural development is critical of its predecessors, but in the more drastic and fundamental sense that modern German and European culture has been characterized by a series of paradigm shifts, or even caesuras, whereby the conceptual and institutional presuppositions of the prior cultural formation have been decisively rejected. Deploying the category of counterculture as a tool of historical analysis also enables us to rethink contemporary controversies concerning, for example, the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, or the relative priority of the avant-garde—as opposed to countercultural manifestations—in initiating and defining radical artistic movements from the late nineteenth century onward.”