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Chapter 23 - Brecht and Feminism
- from Part III - The World’s Brecht
- Edited by Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
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- Book:
- Bertolt Brecht in Context
- Published online:
- 28 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 10 June 2021, pp 201-207
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Summary
This essay focuses on Brecht’s commitment to women’s emancipation on the basis of his interest in the writings and activism of Marx, Engels, Bebel, Lenin, Clara Zetkin, and Rosa Luxemburg; his collaborative work over the years with numerous women writers and theater practitioners; and his ability as a playwright to create some of the most intriguing female characters in the history of theater. The essay goes on to examine Brecht’s reception by feminist theater critics and practitioners, to provide a summary of productions of his plays with leading women actors in the US and the UK, and to discuss two productions set in Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda) based on Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children.
Brecht’s Lorre: The Gentle Stranger
- Edited by Markus Wessendorf
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- Book:
- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 45
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 20 November 2020, pp 236-255
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Born László Löwenstein in 1904 in Rózsahegy, a small town in the Tatra Mountains in what at the time was northern Hungary, Peter Lorre possessed qualities that allowed his Hollywood film persona to embody an uncanny strangeness: a soft, unsettling voice; an unidentifiable foreign accent; a face that expressed a range of emotions from menacing shrewdness to sudden disquiet and alarm; a supple body that executed quick transitions from stealth to shrinking cowardice. Akin to his East European neighbor in Prague whose afterlife gave rise to pedestrian notions of the “Kafkaesque,” Lorre lives on in the conventional imagination as the sinister alien. His significance for Brecht, whose own theater practice was engaged in “rendering the familiar strange,” as in estrangement or Verfremdung, was entirely different. Based on his gestic speech and physical presentation, notably as Galy Gay in the 1931 production of Mann ist Mann, Lorre became Brecht's exemplar of epic acting.
Those who had known Lorre's work in the theater believed Hollywood corrupted him. His younger brother Andrew Lorre recalled that Peter “was disappointed at being typecast by the studios as the stage was his first and lasting love, but he seemed to have resigned himself towards the end.” He often resisted studio pressures but just as often gave in, as with the eight Mr. Moto films featuring a Japanese detective that made him a Hollywood favorite with movie-goers in the late 1930s. Lotte Lenya, who had shared the Berlin stage with him in three productions—Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Pioneers in Ingolstadt), Dantons Tod (Danton's Death), Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), all in 1929—said in an interview with Edwin Newman: “It's really appalling what Hollywood did to Peter Lorre, he was such a good actor. Once in New York I asked him, ‘Peter, will they ever give you anything other than Mr. Moto Goes to China’ or whatever it was he was doing. And he said, ‘No. All I do is talk a nasal voice and make faces.’”
Typical understated Lorre, and not quite true. Lorre's signature quirks were always harnessed to his deeper understanding of his craft. Film critics had quickly recognized Lorre's gifts and his potential beyond the secondary roles he often played.
8 - Socialist Writers and Intellectuals in a Divided Nation: The Early GDR Experience
- from Part 2 - Dynamics
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- By Helen Fehervary, Professor emerita and academy professor at the Ohio State University
- Edited by Evgeny Dobrenko, Natalia Jonsson-Skradol
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- Book:
- Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 10 May 2018
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2018, pp 117-128
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East Germany's post- war position within the Soviet sphere of influence stands out for several reasons. First, it was the German nation that gave rise to National Socialism and wreaked the havoc and devastation that raged across Europe, especially Eastern Europe, during World War II. Even if East German political leaders and intellectuals had struggled for 12 years underground and in exile on behalf of the ‘other’, the ‘better’ anti- fascist Germany, the burden of National Socialism weighed heavily on their efforts to eradicate vestiges of the past that still lingered in the post- war present. Secondly, the anti- fascist vision of a demilitarized, united Germany was not realized. The burgeoning Cold War quickly led to the Soviet Zone's isolation within the post- war occupation, its demonizaton in the West German media and, in 1949, the division of Germany. This new geopolitical scenario opened up yet another hostile front with which East German political leaders and intellectuals would have to contend for years to come.
A third factor was more favourable. The Soviet Union, its infrastructure ravaged by the invasions of its territories, was reluctant to commit itself to Germany's politicaleconomic recovery and, indeed, promoted the idea of a demilitarized, politically neutral Germany for another 10 years. In the meantime, its demand for war reparations and confiscation of industrial plants, equipment and resources took a toll on the fledgling East German economy. Yet the Soviet Union's initial reticence towards Germany expressed itself as a more or less tolerant attitude in the cultural sphere, as East Germans were allowed a certain autonomy in realizing their vision of an anti- fascist socialist culture. The Soviet cultural imprint in East Germany, be it the Russian language, culture or artistic conventions in literature and the other arts, was in fact far less remarkable than the introduction into West Germany of cultural trends from the Western democracies, especially Americanization in the way of abstract art, popular culture and media.
The East German version of socialist culture would be essentially German, that is to say, a reliance on plebeian traditions since the peasant wars and reformation movements of the sixteenth century, the humanistic bourgeois heritage of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, and liberal and working- class traditions since the nineteenth century.
Art Instead of Romance: Brecht's Collaborations with Women
- from New Brecht Research
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- By Helen Fehervary, professor emerita of German at the Ohio State University
- Edited by Theodore F. Rippey
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- Book:
- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 41
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 27 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2017, pp 184-197
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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.
8 - The literature of the German Democratic Republic (1945–1990)
- Edited by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of German Literature
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 09 January 1997, pp 393-439
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The return of the exiles (1945–1949)
East German literature was born out of the grief and desperate hopes of a generation of writers for whom modernism and politics were intertwined. Some of them – Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig, Friedrich Wolf, Johannes R. Becher – were children of the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie who had become internationally renowned during the Weimar Republic. Others – Eduard Claudius, Hans Marchwitza, Willi Bredel, Adam Scharrer – had come from the working class and began writing about production within the worker correspondent movements of the twenties. Still others – the poets Erich Arendt, Stephan Hermlin, Peter Huchel; the novelists Erwin Strittmatter and Stefan Heym; the playwright Alfred Matusche – first established themselves after World War II. They all devoted themselves after Hitler’s downfall to the creation of a humanistic, anti-fascist literature which would prevail in the German Democratic Republic for forty years from its official foundation in 1949.
History was not to be on their side. Their childhood years had coincided with the height of German military expansionism. With the suffering and chaos caused by World War I, which these writers experienced as young adults, many of them as soldiers, they willingly surrendered their nationalistic inheritance and became cosmopolitans. In the aftermath of the revolutions in Russia, as well as the failed German revolutions in which a number of them participated, they became committed socialists and communists. They identified with the European avant-garde movements of the time and participated in some of the most fascinating artistic and intellectual projects of the 1920s. In 1933 most of these writers were blacklisted by the National Socialists.