Bertolt Brecht believed that theater should not only entertain its audience, but also make them think politically. To achieve this effect, the German playwright and poet believed, a play should not be polished, but shocking. Actors have to break out of character to appeal to their audiences, storylines have to be broken up and interrupted. In one memorable sentence, he described his ideal piece as one that “can be cut into individual pieces, which can still be fully brought to life.”
A new exhibition in London’s Raven Row shows just how literal the author of The Threepenny Opera was when he came up with that description. Brecht: Fragments, curated in collaboration with the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin, is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the visual material the playwright collected over the course of his career, from newspaper and magazine photographs to photocopies of medieval paintings and images from the Chinese theater.
The collage diaries in which Brecht incorporated them, most of which have never been shown before, were overlooked because of the way in which Brecht’s oeuvre was archived in socialist East Germany, where he lived from 1949 until his death in 1956 at the age of 58. age lived. for materials in a reading room at Robert-Koch-Platz in Berlin, they could only view low-quality photographs of these images, all of which were cataloged individually, not as works of art glued together.
“You had no idea they were all on the same sheet of paper,” says Tom Kuhn, emeritus fellow of St Hugh’s College Oxford. “Their context was completely destroyed.” Kuhn, who discovered the collages about a decade ago and co-curated the Raven Row exhibition, became convinced that far from being a wishy-washy scrapbook, these collected fragments constituted an important artistic project in their own right. “They are very clearly composed,” he says. “They are not just materials that are intended to contribute to something else.”
After the chaos of World War I, the Weimar Republic of Germany saw the birth of collage as an art form, developed by Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch, among others. Two of its most political practitioners, George Grosz and John Heartfield, were friends of Brecht. Although the playwright’s montages are less dynamic, the attempt to suggest meaning through juxtaposition is clear. An entry in his diary about William Wordsworth’s poem She Was a Phantom of Delight (“a Spirit still, and bright / With Something of Angelic Light”) is accompanied by a photo of soldiers in gas masks. It looks like a post-punk record cover.
In a large album known as BBA 1198, there is a page with two photographs: one of Adolf Hitler raising his fists in a shock of anger, and one of a blond schoolboy, not yet in puberty, making the same gesture. The combination is disorienting. It makes the Führer come across as a naughty child acting out, but also shows how much Nazi Germany wanted to imitate his performative outrage: the schoolboy, the panel explains, is giving a speech on current affairs. The open newspaper in front of him is a Nazi publication.
In Germany, Brecht is the most performed playwright after Shakespeare. His leading playwrights stand guard along the fourth wall that Bertolt tore down, in case anyone thinks about putting it up again. Elsewhere, the term “Brechtian” has become shorthand for virtually any theatrical maneuver designed to politicize an audience.
This show feels like a refreshing antidote to all that theory-first Brecht, revealing a rawer, more punk version of the writer. Fittingly, there will be excerpts from his experimental, unfinished plays, not the classics, shown twice a day. The Brechtian devices they contain are still rough ideas and not finished techniques.
It is clear from the photographs that Brecht collected that he was fascinated by gestures – and how they could be used and abused. We see people begging for food, soldiers hugging loved ones before leaving for the front. Hitler is also shown next to corrupt New York Mayor Jimmy Walker: both wagging their fingers in the same way, two mendacious leaders confidently assuring the audience of their sincerity.
Most of the images on Raven Row were found and collected during Brecht’s years in exile. Fearing persecution, the committed socialist left Germany on February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire. By the time the Nazis burned his books, Brecht and his family were already on a Danish island in the North Sea, from where he eventually reached the US. In California, Brecht attempted to become a Hollywood screenwriter. Although he wrote Hangmen Also Die, directed by his co-exile Fritz Lang, he struggled to break into the industry.
But even as Brecht moved further from home, his photomontages suggest that the rise of fascism was never far from his thoughts – especially how it had so infected German politics. Given Brecht’s status as an evangelizer of political theater, it is worth wondering how astute his analysis now looks.
The Threepenny Opera, his seminal play, had explored parallels between London’s grimy underworld and the respected capitalist efforts of the city’s bankers. He expanded on that analogy in 1941’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about the path to power taken by a fictional Hitler-like Chicago gangster (and cauliflower racketeer). Fascism is presented as a criminal enterprise, but also as a capitalist enterprise.
The Raven Row show includes a remarkable typescript of the play, illustrated with 24 photographs, including a photomontage that juxtaposes news footage of gangsters and mafia funerals with images of Hitler and his henchmen. The most extraordinary image from this archival find is as stark as it is simple: a typewritten page by Arturo Ui with a pasted-on cutout of Hitler who looks as if he is standing on a corner in the Five Points of lower Manhattan, his hands held loosely in his hands. trouser pockets.
The thesis of dictators as gangsters is also all over the BBA 1198 album. One page draws parallels with the media’s romanticization of Bonnie and Clyde (“Bonnie Good Girl Gone Wrong, Mother Says,” reads the headline that Brecht cut out). Another, from a Nazi publication, portrays Hitler and Goebbels as benevolent outcasts. This thesis has held up remarkably well. If Brecht were to make these scrapbooks today, you would imagine them full of the gestures Donald Trump makes with those tiny hands, with headlines quoting his sayings in mafia-don style, not to mention those menacing mugshot of the former US president after his indictment in 2023. in Atlanta. Further volumes could be filled with the power poses of Vladimir Putin, bare-chested on horseback.
But the analysis of fascism as “the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive and most treacherous form of capitalism,” as Brecht said in 1935, has blind spots. As the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt – an admirer of Brecht’s plays and poetry – wrote about his politics, to understand fascism as nothing more than a continuation of class struggle ultimately trivializes racism at its core. In such an interpretation, racial persecution becomes nothing more than a diversionary tactic to channel proletarian anger, an ‘optical illusion’.
Yet, says Kuhn, “Brecht stuck firmly to his interpretation of fascism, and we can definitely read this as a limitation of his political analysis. He wrote a lot about racism, but he underestimated the central role of anti-Semitism in National Socialism.”
When Brecht returned to East Berlin after the end of the war and founded the Berliner Ensemble theater, he clashed with the ruling Socialist Unity Party and the apparatchiks it had put in charge of cultural affairs. But his criticism of Stalinism and the Soviet Union remained largely a private matter. His most quoted poem, mocking the party’s response to the 1953 workers’ uprising, included the line: “Wouldn’t it be simpler if the government dissolved the people and elected another?” It was not published until after his death.
Precisely because Brecht managed to say so much with so little in his photomontages, one spread in BBA 1198 stands out. Here he has collected five photographs of Lenin and Stalin, but there are no juxtapositions, no clear conversations between the images. It’s as if the man who turned theater into an engaging political experience allowed himself to stop thinking for a moment.
• brecht: fragments can be seen in Raven Row, London, June 15 to August 18