Ich schreibe aus Erfahrungen als Theaterpädagoge, um Bertolt Brechts Produktivität auch für Bildungszwecke zu zeigen. Theater und Pädagogik sollen nach meinem Berufsverständnis gleichgewichtet zu ihrem Recht kommen und ihre jeweiligen Leistungsfähigkeiten einbringen. Dazu biete ich diese These an: Bertolt Brecht ist (mir) ein methodisch wie thematisch multiperspektivischer, transmedialer und transkultureller sowie ein kosmobil arbeitender Autor/Akteur und Forscher und Pädagoge innerhalb eines Konzepts einer poeto science, im framing einer “epischen Wissenschaft” (diesen Begriff bildete Brecht 1948 in einem Brief an Karl Korsch). Ich frage speziell: “Was können Theaterleute?” Meine Antwort lautet: “Sie können handeln, forschen und gestalten … Theaterleute (im weiteren Sinne— also auch PädagogInnen, die sich und ihren Beruf ‘theatralisieren’) haben Methoden, um im Theater-Medium über sich und von sich zu handeln! Hier können Erkenntnisse gestaltet und ‘in Szene’ gesetzt werden. Und es können auch die Erkenntniswege, Interessen, Zwecke—und die Einsprüche anderer dagegen vorgezeigt werden—auf dem eigenen Schauplatz—dem tea tron— und sie sind nicht weit weg von Wissenschaft; denn: teatron / teatrum und theoria / teoria haben denselben Wortstamm—nämlich schauen und wahrnehmen—und das durchaus von Interesse geleitet und nicht zwecklos …” Im Hintergrund stehen zunächst pädagogische Reflexionen aus eigenem theaterpädagogischen Arbeiten, zum Beispiel mit Brechts Kaukasischem Kreidekreis. Exemplarisch wird die Beschreibung des Ablaufs eines sechsstündigen Workshops angefügt, der im September 2010 gemeinsam mit der Juristin und Friedens- und Konfliktforscherin Sinah Marx unter dem Titel Human Rights—Humans Wright. Bertolt Brechts “Kaukasischer Kreidekreis” in Istanbul durchgeführt wurde. Er zeigt, welche Anregungen zum (Um-)Schreiben gegeben werden können und wie aus Schreiben Spielen wird. Hinzukommen Dokumente, wie sie im Materialienband zum Kaukasischen Kreidekreis zu finden sind, sowie die Ausführungen von Tom Kuhn zum Bildmaterial, das Brecht für den Kaukasischen Kreidekreis zusammenstellte. Ebenfalls inspirierte mich ein Symposium während der Brecht-Tage 2010, in dessen Rahmen junge Wissenschaftlerinnen, die Brecht in nicht-deutscher Sprache, also in Über-Setzungen/Trajekten kennen lernten und neue, erweiterte Lesarten und Assoziationen freisetzen konnten (“found in translation” sozusagen). In allen Fällen wird sichtbar, wie weit ausgreifend Brecht zu seinem Gegenstand geforscht hat, bevor er zu seiner Gestaltung des Stoffes kommen konnte.

Für meine Überlegungen nutze und kommentiere ich auch deutlich Teile aus Brechts “Lied des Stückeschreibers”:

AH: Annemone Haase

MSE: Margaret Setje-Eilers

Annemone Haase ist 42 Jahre lang als Schauspielerin am Berliner Ensemble aufgetreten—1959 bis 2001—unter jedem Intendanten von Helene Weigel bis Claus Peymann. Sie spielte zum Beispiel Rollen wie die stumme Kattrin in Brechts Mutter Courage mit Weigel als Anna Fierling (Brecht) und die Köchin in Strindbergs Fräulein Julie (Tragelehn-Schleef). Wir treffen uns in ihrer Berliner Wohnung.

MSE: Meine erste Frage ergibt sich einfach aus der fast unübersehbaren Zahl der Jahre, in denen du dem Berliner Ensemble treugeblieben bist. Wie ist das möglich gewesen, so lang an einem Theater zu arbeiten? Und unter allen Intendanten, die das Theater bisher hatte.

AH: [schaut die Namen der BE-Intendanten an und liest laut] Weigel (1949–71), Berghaus (1971–77), Wekwerth (1977–91), Langhoff, Marquardt, Müller, Palitzsch, Zadek (1992–93), Marquardt, Müller, Palitzsch, Zadek (1993–94), Müller (1995), Wuttke (1996), Suschke (1997–99), Peymann (1999–). Ja, genau, so lange war ich da: 1959–2001. Warum so lange? Also, es gab nichts mehr. Wo sollte ich denn hin? Ein Schauspieler hat immer das Bestreben, an ein besseres Theater zu gehen. Ich hätte nur ans Deutsche Theater gehen können. Das war auch mal im Gespräch, aber das BE war eher. Es gab keinen Grund, von dem Theater weg zu gehen. Erstens haben sie interessantes Theater gemacht, zweitens diese—es ist Quatsch, wenn ich sage diese Methode—aber diese Art zu probieren, an ein Stück heran zu gehen, hat mich interessiert. Es gab keinen Grund. Ich hatte meine Familie, meine Kinder. Wo sollte ich denn hingehen? Die DDR war klein und ein besseres Theater gab es nicht. Dann hätte ich im Westen bleiben müssen, aber diese Absicht hatte ich nie.

MSE: Du hast die ganze Geschichte des Berliner Ensemble erlebt.

AH: Helene Weigel starb 1971. Dann kam Ruth Berghaus. Später übernahmen Manfred Wekwerth und Jochen Tenschert das Theater. Nach der Wende 1990 wurde es bunt. Wekwerth schied aus und es kamen die hier [zeigt auf die Namen Langhoff, Marquardt, Müller, Palitzsch, Zadek]. Es begann eine neue Zeit, auch spielplanmäßig. In alleiniger Verantwortung, aber in welchen Jahren, das weiß ich nicht mehr, übernahmen später Heiner Müller, Martin Wuttke und Stefan Suschke die Theaterleitung. Viele neue Kollegen wurden engagiert. Dann kam Peymann. Ich war Rentnerin. Ich war sowieso schon überfällig [lacht].

Bertolt Brecht wrote many of his works with the intention to educate. His epic theater has stimulated and provoked generations of theatergoers, and the aesthetic principles he developed to foreground educational objectives of his Lehrstücke or learning plays have inspired directors and actors as well as scholars, teachers, and their students. Consequently, Brecht's works and theoretical writings entered the teaching canon of a variety of disciplines dedicated to the study of literature, theater, performance, and cinema. His ideas continue to guide the training of drama students, and Brecht's plays are frequently performed in academic settings not only with the objective to teach acting and directing in events organized by departments of dramatic arts, but also—less frequently, but usually in the German original—in productions that feature undergraduate students enrolled in German studies programs.

Despite the ubiquity of Brecht in the curricula of a variety of disciplines across the arts and humanities at universities worldwide, scholarship on the relevance of Brecht's works and ideas in post-secondary education has remained underdeveloped and fragmented. The bulk of existing work in this area either considers Brecht's educational dimensions from entirely theoretical viewpoints, or it simply provides teaching materials intended for high-school teachers in German-speaking countries. This volume features essays by scholars from four countries with a strong background in Brecht scholarship and an engagement with undergraduate education in the humanities and dramatic arts. While increasing the theoretical understanding of Brecht as a teacher, the volume builds bridges from the theoretical grid into learning environments. Consequently, the essays collected under this focus provide eight critical snapshots into college classrooms and rehearsal spaces that expose students to works and ideas of Brecht. They document learning environments that are based on didactical principles that resonate with his theories.

This collection of essays should not be understood as a teaching manual for the academic Brecht community; instead readers of these pages are urged to consider each of the analyzed learning environments in its specific institutional context and to draw theoretical as well as practical conclusions for their own teaching and scholarship in an eclectic manner. It is our wish that some of the reflections articulated in this volume will inspire readers to rethink their teaching and thus transform their understanding of Brecht.

Most of the women who collaborated with Brecht or acted under his direction were women with whom he was not romantically involved—Asja Lacis, Elisabeth Bergner, Anna Seghers, Hella Wuolijoki, Therese Giehse, Angelika Hurwicz, Regine Lutz, to name only a few. No matter if they, too, were attracted by his creative genius, his sparkling wit, his seductive charms, they by no means sacrificed their independence by working with him. This also had to do with Brecht's own character and behavior. To those women who were older, he exhibited none of the oedipal struggles of a Hamlet. To those younger, he showed paternal guidance and interest. And toward those who were his peers, he behaved as one among equals. (That he could be selfish and unyielding, even cruel, when it came to the women he loved, notably toward his wife and his lover Ruth Berlau, is well known. But this is not our topic here.)

These attitudes that he modeled in his own life are evident in his stance as an author toward the many strong women figures he created for his plays. That he was able to do so was largely due to the talents of his wife Helene Weigel, a remarkably strong and independent woman in her own right, whose inspiration and influence allowed him to create some of his best-known women characters, which of course she herself first played: Frau Begbick, Pelagea Wlassowa, Señora Carrar, the Jewish wife, Antigone, Mother Courage. After they returned to Berlin in 1948 and created their own ensemble—Weigel as Intendantin, Brecht as artistic director— they became a tenacious collaborative team whose ingenuity made the Berliner Ensemble one of the most renowned theater companies in Europe. It was surely to a great extent because of his solid relationship with his wife and collaborator Helene Weigel that Brecht was able to build working partnerships with other emancipated women.

Asja Lacis

In 1918 the Latvian Bolshevik Asja Lacis gave up her career in Moscow's legitimate theater to work with abandoned juveniles and orphans because she believed improvisation helped children “become aware and develop.” In 1920 she set up a theater studio in Riga for lay workers and prisoners. Between 1922 and 1924 she was in Berlin and Munich where she introduced theater practitioners to the avant-garde experiments of Meyerhold and Tairov.

My first day as a temporary employee at the actuarial consulting firm Harold, Adams, McNutt & Joy, LLP, was in many respects just another day at the office, another day of precarious work in a gig economy. My workstation was familiar, though not my own: it featured a slightly outdated personal computer, a laser printer, a telephone, a lamp, and various supplies all hemmed in by grey cubicle walls, pinned with a few personal photographs and work-related charts (fig. 1). I followed instructions left by the desk's usual inhabitant, sticky notes pasted to my computer monitor directing me to open folders on the computer, listen to audio recordings, and monitor my phone. A woman's voice played from computer speakers or the phone receiver, she identified herself as Sarah Jane Tully and trained me to fill out the actuarial tables that would consume my workday. Emails arrived from coworkers, letting me know when clients had died and which tables needed updating. Entering their data into spreadsheets, I watched their mortality become obscured by the computational logic of insurers. I filled downtime between tasks by poking around Sarah Jane's computer. I hoped (mischievously) to find evidence of corporate malfeasance, but only uncovered her vacation plans; I empathized with the modesty of her middle-class beach fantasies. Occasionally the printer sprang to life, delivering love notes meant for someone else, full of lustful details. These I perused bemusedly. When I updated actuarial charts, the printer would provide brief biographies: names, images, and narratives of those who had passed on a single sheet of paper. These absorbed me totally. I read them closely and internalized the details of the images, before the digital bleating of a new email in my inbox would break the reverie and return me to the day's work.

This was my experience of the play Temping in its initial run at Dixon Place in New York City in August 2014. Directed by Michael Rau, written by Michael Yates Crowley, and designed by Asa Wember, Temping is a production of Wolf 359, a self-described “Narrative Technology Company” that has been staging original works authored and often performed by Crowley in the United States and Europe since 2007.

We Repeat the Discussion …

It is a Thursday afternoon late in the semester. A group of students is working through the final pages of Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken). Four, scripts in hand—in this session taking the parts of the Agitators—are in the center of the small studio, spaced in a gentle, irregular arc, facing another seven students seated behind a handful of trestle tables: the Control Chorus. All are wearing their street clothes: the usual student assortment of jeans, t-shirts, casual shoes. A careful, animated discussion unfolds as the group negotiates the staging of the appropriate Gestus for the scene to come. I lean against a wall to one side, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. The students are cautious, heedful of the—my own—often-repeated injunction against falling into representational formalism. They avoid obviously “geometric” choices, working against forced symmetries, trying instead to capture nuance of status and alliances, of shifting negotiations among the various characters. They have worked already to differentiate the Agitators, endowing each with a distinct attitude to the events they are restaging, as well as to the Party apparatchiks for whom they are presenting the account of the death of their Young Comrade. Similarly, the members of the Control Chorus adopt a range of attitudes, experimented with and refined over the preceding weeks as the class has rotated through the various roles. Some lean forward, engrossed; others doodle on notepads, look at their watches; in previous sessions the students have worked with a more homogenous, monolithic, sometimes quasimechanical rendering of the Chorus, and found it lacking in dynamic, too readily falling into mechanical formalism. We balance and test these details against determinations of the overarching Gestus of each scene: rehearsal as a recursive hermeneutics of part and whole.

Having decided upon a provisional staging, the students take up their places for a fumble-through. One holds a copy of the score of the final song in the text, just before the eighth and final section, allocated to the Chorus. Brecht and Hauptmann's somber, desolate rerendering of Paul's characterization of the apostles in his first letter to the Corinthians, set to Hanns Eisler's haunting score, grimly addresses “Those who help the despairing.”

Introduction

The impulse for this essay came from a great sense of dissatisfaction—a feeling of lack—that I've felt as a teacher over the past few years; a dissatisfaction with the way I've been structuring and leading critical discussions of literary and performance theory. As an early-career college theater and literature teacher, I have so far struggled to develop classroom discussion strategies that challenge students to worry less about “getting it right” and to focus on the questions rather than the answers. After all, literary and performance theory, along with Brecht studies, privilege contributions of new knowledge and possibility, rather than the acquisition and reification of old ideas. I am dissatisfied with whatever the American public educational institution is doing that teaches students to constantly seek closure and “the answer.” Perhaps students are motivated toward closure because of an ingrained anticipation of assessment that demands that they perform in very definitive ways. Presently, in my classroom discussions, I aim to make students trust that I do not want closure or an answer, but that I value risktaking and questioning.

To “make a case” for or to “establish criteria and authority” about teaching Brecht is reductive at best and at worst undermines the potential discoveries that go beyond the pedagogical possibilities of teaching Brecht's theory. I want to be careful not to make any definitive claims about what works and what doesn't based on my observations or outcomes from the classroom because my experiences are so entirely wrapped up in the whos, whens, wheres, and whys of my particular classroom environments. I aim to show, however, that in order to structure classroom discussions that privilege procedural rather than propositional knowledge, the teacher can look to Brecht's own theoretical writings, particularly Messingkauf (Buying Brass).

Einleitung

Die “dialektische Dramatik” komme, vermerkte Brecht um die Jahreswende 1930/31, “ohne Psychologie” und “ohne Individuum” aus und würde, “be tont episch, die Zustände in Prozesse auf[lösen].” Künstlerische Darstellungen, die wie die früheren Bildhauer “das ‘Wesentliche,’ ‘Ewige,’ ‘Endgültige,’ kurz, ‘die Seele’ ihrer Modelle zu gestalten” versuchen, gehören für Brecht zu den “falschen Abbildungen des gesellschaftlichen Lebens.” Für das epische Theater gilt daher das experimentelle und kritisch- prüfende Vorgehen der Naturwissenschaften als Vorbild. Auf der Bühne sollen die gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse so eingefangen werden, dass sie wie For schungsgegenstände zu erkenn- und veränderbaren Dingen werden. Der Anti-Psychologismus, wie er im eingangs Zitierten propagiert wird, er scheint dabei als folgerichtiger Schritt. Dennoch beschäftigt sich Brecht, um “eine Art wissenschaftliche Haltung” beim Zuschauer zu wecken, mit psychologischen Fragen. Dass er die Psychologie nicht vollständig zu zerlegen, sondern auch neu zu denken versucht, zeigt beispielsweise folgende Notiz in seinem Arbeitsjournal aus dem Jahr 1941: “Die Krise der Dramatik ist sehr tief. Es kommt darauf an, reiche, komplexe, sich entwickelnde Figuren zu schaffen—ohne introspektive Psychologie.” Nicht Auflösung, sondern Komplexität und ein genaueres Verständnis für Entwicklungszusammenhänge interessieren ihn. Nicht Psychologie per se, sondern introspektive Psychologie erscheint als Problem.

Überraschenderweise finden wir bei Brecht aber auch keinen Verfechter einer objektivistischen Psychologie. Noch im gleichen Zuge, wie er die psychologische Methode der Einfühlung zurückweist, kritisiert er auch den Behaviorismus. Er liest ihn als Symptom kapitalistischer Verhältnisse:

Einer Auflösung des Individuums in Prozesse redet Brecht also keineswegs das Wort. Seine psychologisch bedeutsame Problemstellung ist der Einzelne im Verhältnis zur Masse durch die Art der “Kollektivisierung” als “Depravation” und “Entindividualisierung” im Kapitalismus. Sie berührt die Prozesse der Enteignung an Gemeineigentum und die Vermassung der Menschen als Lohnabhängige.

As a faculty member in Theater Studies, I regularly teach Brecht's plays in both introductory and upper-level courses for undergraduate theater majors. This essay explores the strategies I have used for discussing Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children) in a play analysis course for first-year students, including the use of film and video, comparative study of Brecht in the context of modern drama, and proposals for Brechtian adaptations of realist plays. Ultimately Brecht's work serves as a lens for understanding multiple movements in twentieth-century theater, while providing students with tools for analyzing play texts from the perspectives of critic, dramaturg, actor, director, and designer.

Learning Objectives

Many theater programs offer an introductory play analysis course for majors. Such courses are typically distinct from literary courses in the analysis of drama in that they position the dramatic text as the impetus for theatrical performance. Methods for theatrical play analysis often begin with literary study of a play's structure, ultimately leading students to think about practical aspects of the script in production. While production history is also likely to be part of the study of dramatic texts, the most significant goal of many play analysis courses in US theater programs is to develop the student's creative capacity for understanding the artistic possibilities of a play script. In our department, this course is called Theatrical Play Analysis and focuses on how directors, designers, dramaturgs, actors, and other theater artists make choices for real and imagined productions of plays. This emphasis on practical considerations for production is emphasized in the catalogue description: “Play study in relation to theatrical production.” An online version of the course is offered as an elective for non-majors and is structured primarily to develop students’ critical capacities for analyzing production choices. Developing these critical capacities is also a goal of the face-to-face version of the course offered for majors, but the course for majors insists further on developing students’ ability to use these critical frameworks to make creative decisions about play scripts.

As part of a group of three courses intended to be taken by first-year theater majors at Michigan State University, Theatrical Play Analysis (THR 110) invites students to participate as citizens in departmental undergraduate programs. Our department is organized in three areas: Acting, Design, and Theater Studies.

The title of Florian Malzacher's engaging volume on contemporary incarnations of political theater, Not Just a Mirror, cites an apocryphal sentence: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it” (11). This sentence certainly has a nice ring of proverbial wisdom to it and it is frequently quoted as having been coined by Brecht. Yet the spirit of this quotation is perhaps less Brechtian than those who like to cite it think, for the opposition of “mirror” and “hammer” represents an all too easy dichotomy of art as reflection (reminiscent of a “Widerspiegelungstheorie” often associated with Georg Lukács, Brecht's antipode in the 1938 debate over realism and formalism) and art as an instrument of political practice. In contradistinction to such a dichotomy, Brecht's dialectical theater foregrounds the problem of representation within the act of representation, and hence serves as both critique and renewal of theatrical representation. Arguably, even a piece of activist theater, such as Brecht's Lehrstück Die Mutter, in which political agitation (i.e., political content) wins out over dramatic conflict (i.e., aesthetic form), still serves as an aesthetic mirror in which the proletarian audience can see its own hopes and struggles reflected.

In the essay that introduces and frames the volume, Malzacher argues that political theater is now only possible when it discards the forms of political theater predominant in the 1970s and 1980s, of which the Brechtian theater served as the most widely acknowledged paradigm. In the spirit of moving away from this older model, Malzacher's essay's title structurally reiterates the rhetorical negation of Not Just a Mirror: “No organum to follow.” This sounds like a political slogan and alludes, of course, to Brecht's Short Organon for the Theater. Malzacher's negation of Brecht is both descriptive and prescriptive. It is descriptive, because it states what Malzacher's volume documents as a predominant trend: “a theatre that not only focuses on pressing political issues, but also becomes a political space—a public sphere—in itself” (20). It is prescriptive, because Malzacher believes that the very logic of representation has proved to be politically and aesthetically discredited. All theater that remains within the traditional aesthetic boundary of semblance and play ultimately affirms the unjust social relations it seeks to critically reveal.

HOW CAN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE, how can we tell love stories in a contemporary situation characterized by precarity, vulnerability, and a persistent sense of crisis? A situation in which senses of the self and of its relation to its environment have become radically uncertain, fractured, and tenuous? In the past decade, “precarity” and “vulnerability” have become key concepts through which the humanities and social sciences address changing conditions of life and work in the present age, including the increase in non-permanent forms of work, casual labor, unpredictable life stories, erratic career patterns, and a lack of material and psychological welfare. While “precarity” is most often associated with economic risk and social disenfranchisement, “vulnerability” commonly describes risks resulting from environmental and climate change, although the two terms are also sometimes used interchangeably.

From a philosophical perspective, “precarity” and “vulnerability” can also express a more general sense that the position of humans in this world is tenuous, that we are not masters of the world but are vulnerable to disease and death. It is in this sense that the two terms are introduced in Judith Butler's collection of essays Precarious Life (2004), one of the earliest works of cultural theory to engage with precarity and vulnerability on a conceptual level. Originally written in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and intended as a critique of the ways in which some lives have become more precarious than others in the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Butler's essays have wide-ranging consequences for a philosophy of the subject. They propose a concept of the self that is not autonomous and self-determined but fundamentally dependent on others, not a disembodied inner sense of self but one embodied and embedded in an intersubjective web of relations.

In this chapter, I draw on Butler's subject philosophy to analyze three recent German novels which explore the narrative and aesthetic consequences of precarity and vulnerability in the context of love stories. Thomas Melle's 3000 Euro (2014), Feridun Zaimoglu's Isabel (2014), and Julia Wolf's Alles ist jetzt (Everything is Now, 2013) present us with protagonists on the social margins whose lives are coming apart, who are radically dependent on others.