Undogmatic Marxism: Brecht Rehearses at the Berliner Ensemble

The Foundation of the Berliner Ensemble (BE) on 1 September 1949 in East Berlin gave Brecht the resources he needed to develop approaches to making theater: approaches that, for the most part, it had only been possible to theorize during his fifteen years in exile. According to the contract between the Soviet occupying authorities and Brecht’s wife Helene Weigel, the BE was to receive just over one and a quarter million marks in its first year, despite the fact that the BE was a theater company that did not have its own theater building. Initially, the BE was only a guest at the Deutsches Theater (DT) and had to wait until 1954 to gain full control over its means of production when it finally moved to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. The financial security guaranteed by the state, however, gave Brecht the freedom to experiment, not only with production aesthetics but also with the very way that a theater could be organized. This essay is concerned with the ways in which Brecht realized his ideas with the BE. Some critics have been keen to suggest that Brecht’s managerial and directorial work owed nothing to his theories of theater. John Fuegi writes that for Brecht theory “had a valuable place outside the theatre but almost none in actual day-to-day staging practice.” The curious basis for this assertion is that Brecht rarely used the term Verfremdung in rehearsal, a point W. Stuart McDowell also makes. McDowell goes on to claim that “theories such as Verfremdung and Gestus become academic exercises and not effective processes to realize the text […].” At the heart of both commentators’ arguments is a determination to de-politicize Brecht the theater practitioner by suggesting that his productions tell us more about the richness of a timeless human condition than the political realities of the moment. Brecht refuted this formulation in a text published posthumously that describes the work at the BE as focused on showing human nature as both changeable and dependent on social position. On one of the last pages of Fuegi’s book, he writes with respect to the productions of Edward II in 1924 and Galileo in 1957: “from first to last, essentially Brecht had remained the same” (185). This simplistic, convenient, and ahistorical conclusion, which classes Brecht as an unchangingly great director, will be challenged in this essay.

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