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Günther Heeg (Hrsg.). Recycling Brecht: Materialwert, Nachleben, Überleben
- Edited by Markus Wessendorf
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- Book:
- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 44
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 09 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 November 2019, pp 257-260
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Summary
Make sure when you ready yourself to die
That no marker stands and betrays where you lie
With an inscription that points at you
And the year of your death that convicts you
Once again:
Cover your tracks!
(That's what I was taught)
(From The Reader for City Dwellers, in The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, ed. and trans. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine [New York and London: Norton, 2018], 311.)
These are the final lines of part one of Brecht's poem “Verwisch die Spuren” (“Cover your Tracks”). They serve as a provocation, with Brecht's typically sarcastic tone, and ask his readers to wipe out their own tracks after their time has run out. Of course, this should not be understood literally but rather should be read as a plea for us to think about what we all want to leave behind and how we wish to be remembered by future generations. “Verwisch die Spuren” was also the title of an anthology published in 2008 by Rodopi on the usefulness and “use value” of Brecht and his works. Such questions and provocations have indeed been a preoccupation (and/ or perhaps even a small obsession!) in contemporary Brecht scholarship, one that doesn't seem to be subsiding any time soon. Brecht and his works are as timely as ever in our current world; he still has much to say and we still have much to learn and change. The anthology under review here, Recycling Brecht, seeks to intervene in this discussion. One can readily see Brecht's popularity by simply perusing through Theater der Zeit's own publication list in the series “Recherchen,” of which this volume is number 136: studies on various aspects connected to Brecht constitute thirteen volumes out of 137 in total, by far the greatest number of any artist in the list, with Heiner Müller (also Brecht-related!) coming in second.
Recycling Brecht offers fifteen essays by scholars and artists from Europe (Germany, Italy) and Asia (Korea, Japan) and is a very welcome and diverse contribution to current Brecht scholarship. The volume is divided into three main sections: “Wiederholungen, Trennungen/Übertragungen, Resonanzen” (“Repetitions, Separations/Transferences, Resonances”) and includes both scholarly and performative essays, production images, an interview, and a short story touching on a wide range of topics, literary works, and theories on the theme of “recycling” Brecht.
From Page to Stage and Classroom to Community: Teaching Brecht in the Twenty-First Century
- from Special Interest Section: Teaching Brecht
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- By Per Urlaub, associate dean of the Language schools and associate college professor at Middlebury College., Kristopher Imbrigotta, teaches in the Department of German Studies at the University of Puget Sound.
- 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 1-5
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Summary
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.
(Re)Building the Engaged Spectator: The Katzgraben Programmhefte of the Berliner Ensemble, 1953/1972
- from The Creative Spectator: Contributions Originating at the 2013 IBS Symposium in Porto Alegre, Brazil
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- By Kristopher Imbrigotta, University of Puget Sound
- Edited by Theodore F. Rippey
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- Book:
- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 39
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 15 March 2016, pp 90-111
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Summary
Lernt und verändert, lernt daraus aufs neue und ändert wieder!
Brecht (1953) As an artist, theater practitioner, and pragmatist, Brecht was interested in engaging the public well beyond the stage towards the goal of developing and fostering an active, involved citizenry. His work sought to provoke the public into taking a stance or position (Haltung) on the realities of the world around them by thinking through and making connections to the interactions represented on stage in the epic theater. Brecht's project not only opposed checking one's critical faculties at the door, but also targeted the spectator's interest in the material both before and after the performance. To do this, the collaborators and practitioners at the Berliner Ensemble (BE) developed the image-text package Programmheft as an integral part of the overall dramaturgical and didactic component in the theater of the scientific age.
Strittmatter's Katzgraben: Szenen aus dem Bauernleben
While I cannot explicate here the complete history and intentions behind Strittmatter's 1951 play – one which Brecht enjoyed and in which he saw great potential for the stage – I would first like to offer a brief sketch of the play's plotline and some thoughts on Brecht's interest in staging it with the BE in 1953. Set around 1947 in the farm village of Katzgraben, a place similar to Strittmatter's own milieu of the “Senftenberger Braunkohlengebiet,” the play opens with the village mayor's proclamation that all townspeople and farmers are required to attend a meeting. At this gathering, they would discuss the building of a “neue Straße,” or new road, linking Katzgraben to the city. This “new road” is a central theme around which much of the action in the play revolves. The new road to be built is an overt allusion to the “Neuer Kurs” policy as it was called by the Soviet Union in 1952/3, an important time of transition in early GDR cultural history. The “Neuer Kurs” was not an attempt at a new direction for the Communist Party line but rather a tactical reduction of the speed with which many radical social changes would be implemented.