In Our Time - Bertolt Brecht

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest European playwrights of the twentieth century. The aim of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was to make the familiar ‘strange’: with plays such as Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle he wanted his audience not to sit back but to engage, observe and discover the contradictions in life, and act on what they learnt. He developed this approach in turbulent times, from Weimar Germany to the rise of the Nazis, to exile in Scandinavia and America and then post-war life in East Berlin, and he has since inspired dramatists around the world.WithLaura Bradley Professor of German and Theatre at the University of EdinburghDavid Barnett Professor of Theatre at the University of YorkAnd Tom Kuhn Professor of Twentieth Century German Literature, Emeritus Fellow of St Hugh's College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio productionReading list: David Barnett, Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014)David Barnett, A History of the Berliner Ensemble (Cambridge University Press, 2015)Laura Bradley and Karen Leeder (eds.), Brecht and the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity (Camden House, 2015)Laura Bradley, ‘Training the Audience: Brecht and the Art of Spectatorship’ (The Modern Language Review, 111, 2016)Bertolt Brecht (ed. Marc Silberman, Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles), Brecht on Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2014)Bertolt Brecht (ed. Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman), Brecht on Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014)Bertolt Brecht (trans. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine), The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (Norton Liveright, 2018) which includes the poem ‘Spring 1938’ read by Tom Kuhn in this programmeStephen Brockmann (ed.), Bertolt Brecht in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021)Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht (Routledge, 2009)Stephen Parker, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (Bloomsbury, 2014)Ronald Speirs, Brecht’s Poetry of Political Exile (Cambridge University Press, 2000)David Zoob, Brecht: A Practical Handbook (Nick Hern Books, 2018)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, Bertolt Brecht, 1898 to 1956,

was one of the greatest European playwrights of the 20th century. His aim was to make the familiar strange. With plays such as Mother Courage and the Caucasian Chalk Circle, he wanted his audiences not to sit back, but to engage, observe, and discover the contradictions in life and act on what they learned. And he developed his approach in turbulent times from Vimar Germany to the rise of the Nazis to exile in Scandinavia and America, and then post-war life in East Berlin, and he's since inspired dramatists around the world.

We meet to discuss Bertolt Brecht, are Laura Bradley, Professor of German and Theatre at the University of Edinburgh, David Barnett, Professor of Theatre at the University of York, and Tom Coon, Professor of 20th century German Literature and Emeritus Fellow of St Hughes College, University of Oxford. Tom Coon. Brecht was born in Augsburg in Bavaria. Can you tell us something about his early life?

Yes, of course. He was born, as you just said in 1898, it's quite worth holding on to that because he's two years older than the century always as we go on then through the 20th century. So his childhood fell before the First World War, And Augsburg then was the Augsburgers will never forgive me, but quite a sleepy, conservative sort of place. It has a great cultural and political past, but that really lies in the Renaissance period when the Fuggers, the banking house, were based there who financed the Holy Roman Empire.

He came from a middle class family, comfortable middle class family. His father was the sales director of a paper factory, and he was sent to a good grammar school. and had a good education in the classics and in religion as well. Unusually, one parent was Catholic, the other Protestant. He was brought up as a Protestant, but he also had quite a lot of exposure to the Catholic Church in Augsburg. And we see the traces of that, of an education in the Bible, and also an education in the rituals of the Christian religion in quite a few of his later works like Life of Galileo, perhaps in particular.

He was a precocious boy, wasn't he? It was a literary boy. His parents fed his literary imagination with gifts of books that would have been thought way beyond him, but he seems to have eaten them through. Absolutely, yeah. We have several accounts of him as a voracious reader reading really all sorts of stuff from the classics,

certainly through his school education, his Latin was quite good, through to all sorts of penny dreadfuls that he picked up at local bookshops in Augsburg. And his mother in particular was quite taken with the idea that her son might be a poet, although she probably had a rather different idea of what that poetry might be to what he eventually wrote.

And his father was clearly quite indulgent as well. They gave him an addition of Vedakint for one of his teen birthdays, I think it was. And Vedicint was considered pretty scandalous at the time. They nurtured his ambition, and we see it in his very early notebooks. He kept little diaries and notebooks that he wanted to think of himself as a right.

and he started practicing in the forms that were handed down to him. So, for example, there's one little poem, and underneath it says, this is my first attempt at a sonnet, I must work harder. So clearly he was very conscious of a literary tradition that he wanted to be part of as well. And already at an early age, he'd formed a group, almost a gang of people who backed each other and worked together and worked forward in that way. Yeah, it's a very characteristic side of Brecht's productivity that he liked to work, work in teams. For the most part, those teams were very collaborative. He was clearly the boss.

I don't think there's any doubt about that. But he had a gift for attracting people with complementary creative skills. He worked with a school friend who wrote music already, although Brecht himself was quite musical too. His best friend at school was a guy called Caspar Neja, who studied art and very soon became Brecht's first theatre and stage design. and designed all of his productions, I think all of his productions, or most of his productions in the period up until 1933. So these were early formed friendships, and they clearly bounced ideas off each other all the time. Is it worth mentioning at this stage that he suffered from ill health? He had a weak heart? I would say particularly in relation to his

avoidance of the First World War, it's worth mentioning. Was it avoidance or was it necessary exceptional because he was ill? He did have a weak heart, but it's also clear that his father helped him not be conscripted into the serving army. He says, Brecht himself says, that he drank loads of black coffee before he went for the medical to exaggerate the problem. So I don't know. We want to read that for certain.

He only served as a medical orderly at home in Augsburg. There's a tradition of medical orderlies becoming writers, isn't there? There is a little bit, absolutely. Laura, can we just pinpoint a little bit more because he recorded himself, as we've just been told, very manual, how he started off as a writer and what his early development was. Yes, I mean, Tom's talked about Brecht being a voracious reader, but he was also a really keen theatregoer himself in Augsburg.

And in fact, one of his school friends even claims that he personally went to the theatre with Brecht 40 times in 1915 and the early part of 1916. And so part of the way in which Brecht comes to playwriting is watching what he's seeing at the theatre and thinking he can do better. So he's somebody who thinks very, very much. creatively and is provoked by what he sees. And there's evidence of him, you know, going home and thinking, well, I've watched this and I'm going to set off and write an oratorio now. And he and his friends also got their hands on a marionette theatre and used to put on their own productions for

friends and family, actually charging friends and family entry to see these productions, and they'd reinvest the money in props. And the evidence suggests that, you know, some of these productions that they were putting on were their own takes on plays and operas that were in the repertoire at Albsburg. So it's out of that kind of spirit of contradiction partly that I think Brecht comes to playwriting, comes to writing scenes and trying them out on his friends in quite an improvisational way. And yet again with people who turn out to have what you might call genius and great influence, it started very young. Yes, and he was terribly productive and worked terribly hard at it. I think that's important. And he worked

as a theatre critic as well after the end of the First World War for a couple of years and was a really quite opinionated and provocative spectator. There's even an article in the Augsburg newspaper of somebody writing in to complain about his bad behaviour disturbing all the other spectators. Do we know it was influencing him at this time? He read voraciously, but were there any highlights or key people in that reading? Absolutely. So he knew the 18th century and 19th century German classics really well. and he was particularly interested in Bichner

and the episodic plays that he was writing Buchner had been a startlingly new voice as a playwright but also Vader Kint was incredibly important both as a playwright and as a performer Why was Vardikin so important? I think partly because of his very bold theatricality and the fact that he wasn't afraid to do something new and when Brecht watched Vadikind as a performer

it was his charisma and his energy and his vitality that came across to him and I think that impressed him far more than expressionism, which was the other, which was a dominant genre at the time. And Brecht wasn't impressed by the expressionists. He found there, he complained that their plays were too much like sort of paper ideas. He wanted to see flesh and blood characters.

He wanted to see sort of vitality and zest for life, which is what you see in his first play, Bar, for example. Approvingly, he used the word wild about Vedican and said he could be even wilder than Vedican. What was he saying there? The willingness to shock, the willingness to be exuberant, the willingness to shake up convention. And you see that, that willingness to shake up literary convention

in his play that was first premiered that he made his public theatrical debut with, a play called Drums in the Night. And that was a play that premiered in Munich at the Kamerspieler, the theatre for new writing in Munich at the time, the theatre that Vedekind had had many of his plays performed at. And Brecht invited one of John

Germany's leading theatre critics, Herbert Yerring, to the premiere. And in his review, Yerring said that Brecht had changed the poetic face of Germany overnight. That's a hell of a statement, isn't it? Absolutely. And what struck... Did it crush him or Bregt or did it encourage him? I think he was delighted. That was exactly the sort of strong impression he wanted to make.

And what impressed Yerring most... It was partly the theatricality. He said it, watching this play had been the most stirring experience. theatrically since watching Vidakint. And it was partly Brecht's language. And Yearing talked about Brecht's language, being language that you could feel on your tongue. You could feel it on your palate, in your ear and in your spine.

Thank you. David, David Barnard. What ideas was he beginning to develop for himself and how early on? He starts trying to direct plays, and he directs one of them in 1922. That is an absolute disaster. He falls out with all of the actors, someone else directs it and it all goes wrong. But he has another go in 19...

Do we know why I fell out with him? I think he just had certain ideas. They had other ideas and he was the new boy. They were the ones who had been round the block a few times. It just didn't work out. But he did direct a version of Edward II by Marlowe, which he had adapted with his friend Leon Feustwanger. And there you see some of the ideas that will start to blossom

in his own theatre ideas and theatre programmes. practice, he already has this huge focus on telling the story clearly. So he looks at naturalism and he sees clutter on stage. He just sees things that don't really mean much and he tries to pare everything down so that there is a clear movement from point to point. He also is very interested in making sure that the gestures tell the story as well. So what does you mean by gestures? Well, the physical articulations of the body. But if you to stage Judas giving Jesus a kiss. Now clearly what's underneath that is a notion of betrayal or self-enrichment or both of them. And so he was busy trying to develop ways in which a gesture

that seemed to be doing one thing was telling us more about something else. So he starts developing those ideas. But the key idea that he encounters in the mid-1920s is Marxism. He moves to Berlin and he gets exposed to Marxism. And Marxism comes to him in sort of various ways. One of them is a fairly sort of moral way about supporting the oppressed, but in a far more concrete way, he encounters dialectics. What does that mean in terms of his reception of it? Dialectics is full of complex philosophical ideas,

but we can boil it down into a belief that reality is not, harmonious, but built on contradiction. And it's important perhaps to differentiate conflict from contradiction, because you could say that the soul of drama is conflict, where people disagree about this and that, whereas contradiction is a little bit more precisely defined as two things that shouldn't be able to exist at the same time, but do. So you could say, you know, we have the capacity in this world to feed everyone, and we live in a world of mass starvation. That would be a contradiction for it, for example. But there is also contradictions between the individual and society that if you said that an individual has wants and needs and society has availability and

scarcity, you can already see that contradictions develop there too. So the exposure to Marxism and dialectics is this centrality of contradiction that whatever reality that we're in will be driven by contradictions. And he writes in, his long piece called the Threepenny lawsuit, the motto is, contradictions are our hope. And by that he means that because contradictions run through our reality, if we're not happy with that reality, we can look to the contradictions as a way of changing things.

And so if we are dissatisfied with the way that things are, we can identify the contradictions and see how do we get beyond these? And so Marxism and dialectics form a really important starting point. And a lot of his subsequent ideas are how do we make theatre dialectically? One of his earliest and most performed plays is the Threpanie Opera in the 1920s. Can you tell us something about that and why he took it up and why it was so successful? He's in Berlin in the 1920s and an owner of the Tejata Amschiffbaradam, which is the theatre that his company,

company will later move into in 1954 when he returns to Germany. The owner comes up to and says, look, we need a big show to reopen this theatre. It's going to be on my birthday, the 31st of August, 1928, and I want something big. So Brecht, as Tom was saying earlier, in collaboration with Elizabeth Hauptmann, who has a really good knowledge of English, digs up John Gay's the Beggars Opera, which is itself a satire on the opera traditions of the time. And she says, Brecht, this might be a good thing to work with. They get Kurt Vile, the avant-garde composer involved, and they head off to the south of France and knock it up in pretty short order. And so you've got this really interesting culmination of trying to write a big hit, but trying to integrate some of the

ideas of Marxism that Brecht has started to discover. So he looks at operas and he tries to have his cake and eat it of make something that will be very popular but will have some kind of edge. So this is the story of Mac the Knife, this robber, this crook, who has these bourgeois aspirations to live this life in polite society as well. So there are these contradictions, these social contradictions running through them. Thank you. Tom, Tompkum, can you tell us about his learning plays, which might have a lot to him, matter a lot to many people? The first thing to say probably is that these years, so starting really with the Threpanian Opera or even just before, sort of 1927 to 1932, and he's still in Germany and in Berlin, they're an extraordinarily productive period. He writes two operas.

He publishes his first collection of poems. He has 15 or so fragmentary projects which never actually came to fruition on the go at once. And he starts thinking about what we've come to call the learning plays. But it's a mistake to think of a single genre. So why are they called the learning plays? Well, Brecht called some of them Lechstuk. and some of them he gave other titles to.

And Lash took, when he translated, it could be translated as teaching play, but when he translated it into English, he called them Learning Plays. He wants to take the theatre into schools and factories and working places as well and attract a new audience. And he also wants to make them think,

as David and Laura have already said, about social issues. So to do this, he thinks he needs a new form of theatre. And that new form of theatre is one in which the audience to a greater expression, extent than is traditional, are part of the experience. They participate actively. Sometimes the ways in which Brecht did this were quite feeble. They included questionnaires, things like that. But they also included members of the audience singing so that the first production of the

measures taken, the whole audience performed the part of the chorus and rehearsed the part beforehand. David. These four agitators go to a chorus, a control chorus. A control chorus. us and say our revolution has been successful, but we had to kill our young comrade. And then we see in retrospect how the young comrade joins them. And he's given various tasks. He's got to do this. He's got to do that. But he feels a lot of pity and compassion for the people that he's trying to help. And as a result, he lets his compassion get in the way of their revolutionary task. And by the end of the play, he's made such a big mistake that they actually have to kill him. And so the Leicesterke are intimately associated with violence, almost exclusively,

that something violent happens. And so you've got this dialectical exploration of various ideas, but really the full stop at the end is something violent and awful that almost breaks the dialectic. And these are really his most radical experiments in the theatre. So again, just briefly, the measures take. the protagonist is dead before the play has ever started. All the action is only reported action.

The other characters report what has happened in the past to a chorus and the chorus responds. And the music is an absolutely essential part of it as well. And I think another really important thing about the Lechstuk is it really shifts the emphasis away from the audience. So the Lechstuker fulfilled their purpose really by being rehearsed and they're there for the actors to explore, debate, discuss ideas and discuss challenging content. And then if they are then performed to an audience,

that's almost a sort of by the by. That's not the main event. It's the rehearsals that are the main event. So for the measures taken, the main event, I think, really was for the singers, spending those weeks of rehearsals coming together, singing that music as a huge choir of about 400 people. It was only ever intended to be performed once. And then it was so successful, they did another night. But I think that shows you how, is kind of shifting the emphasis towards an art for the producers rather than for the audience as consumers. David.

And in a way, even the word rehearsal, I mean, it did come to a production, but these were never really intended for production. So they were more like exercises. And one of the formal features of the measures taken is that effectively the same thing happens on several occasions. And so this young comrade who is dead is played by the four protagonists,

each in turn so they can experience. what mistakes he made and compare them with each other so that they are actively learning. But I think I would still insist that there's more variety even within what we call the Lershtuk. I mean, one of them, at least one of them, was conceived as a radio play which would be performed and rehearsed in schools

with school children as well as coming. Rather like in the old days, there was music and movement and things like that when I went to school. There were radio programmes for school participation as well. And he sort of doing things. something a little bit like that. And that one, he called a Lerstuk as well.

So there's quite a lot of variety. The key thing for me is that they're experimental. Yeah, ever so briefly, if you think that he made so much money on the back of the Thruppany Opera, and then he develops a form of theatre that isn't actually designed to sell tickets, not designed to be shown, that tells us something about the way that Brecht is thinking about theatre. And it's also at a time where Brecht is engaging really seriously with Marxism,

And he's also writing plays that are designed to pull in the punters, but designed to really convince audiences that a communist revolution in Germany is imminent and that they have a real chance at making this work. I think he was always a bit mistrustful of the success of the Threpanie Opera. If the bourgeois audiences went away from this whistling the tunes, then he'd done something wrong. So he thought, I've got to do something harder hitting than this somehow. That is, I've read that in several of the others.

It's a bit mad, isn't it, to think like that? It's a success. I did it. I worked with it with a friend of mine. But everybody likes it so something's wrong with it. Where do you get the key that unlocks that? I don't think it's mad. I think there's a restless creativity about Brett. He always wants to try something new. And he has a social message that he wants to get across.

He doesn't want just to please the bourgeoisie. He's happy to provide entertainment. And entertainment is a very important part of his theatre. But it's entertainment with. something else with thought and serious reflection, particularly about social issues going on as well. What do his collaborators? What do his friends think of that? What do they think he's up to? Well, he does fall out with Kurt Valle, who possibly wanted to go on repeating that sort of formula. But he then went to work with another composer, Hans Eisler, who was much more attuned to

his way of thinking. And that was a productive collaboration which went on throughout his life then. It's no little ambition, isn't, to change the way the audience looks at plays. They've been doing it for, we can even say, thousands of years. And he says, no, no, I wanted it in a completely different way. Well, he's nothing if not ambitious. I think that's absolutely right. But I would also say that over the course of those thousands of years, the function of the theatre has also changed several times before.

And Brecht borrows elements from those earlier, from Greek theatre, for example, the choruses in Greek theatre, which was, as far as we know, a very different, sort of experience from the West End nowadays and he borrows from Shakespearean theatre as well very importantly. Laura, what did Brecht expect of his audiences?

What did you want them to do? Brecht wanted his audiences to be really active and engaged throughout the performances. So one of his criticisms of the sort of naturalistic representational theatre that he was reacting against was that it was too easy for audiences

to be spellbound by performance to be swept away by it. And to come away thinking that a performance had just shown them what they already thought about the world and that what they'd watched on stage was just natural the way things were. He wanted epic theatre, his epic theatre, to surprise spectators, to shock them, to leave them thinking that what they were watching on stage was extraordinary and needed to stop. And he wanted his audiences to be free to react differently to the heroes on stage. So there's a bit where he says this.

that, you know, he wants the spectator of epic theatre to laugh when the hero weeps and to weep when the hero laughs. And I think that's so interesting because there's a very common misconception about Brecht about him wanting to ban emotion from theatre. But there in that statement, you see how epic theatre, you know, has absolutely got a place for emotion.

But the point is that spectators should be free to feel their own emotion not simply replicate that of the, of the hero on stage. And the emotion should never be an end in itself, but it should always be part of a process of discovery, of recognition, of understanding. And David, the Marxist ideas are running through this all the time now. They're in full flow.

Does he stay with them for the rest of his career? Yes. He talks about epic theatre in the late 20s and through the 30s and 40s, but come the 50s when he's got a theatre company of his own, he says, it's time to call this what it really is, dialectical theatre. And so this idea runs through all the time. He's got a problem with the term empathy.

And empathy can be understood in perhaps two ways in our modern usages. Empathy is something that you can sort of turn on. We need to be more empathetic. But that's not really what psychologists call empathy. They would say that empathy is what we do all the time. It's a kind of mind-reading trick when we know what someone is feeling and what someone is intending without them telling us. And that is something that he is very wary of in the theatre.

He thinks that, well, if empathy is something that you can't turn off, then the theatre has to disturb it, it has to interrupt it. And so he develops a whole way of interrupting empathy with the view to making our perception of what's going on on stage more difficult. And so in your introduction, you talked about making the familiar strange, which the term fervoir. Em dong in German is used and making the familiar strange is itself a dialectical process. So in the theatre, we would recognise something and it's familiar.

The theatre then makes it strange, so we don't recognise it anymore. We see it in a strange new way. And as audience members, we then complete that dialectical process by getting a new understanding of that thing. So Mother Courage and her children, at the end of one of the scenes, Mother Courage, has just lost one of her kids, but she can't even say, I'm his mother or else that would get her arrested. And her last line is, war be damned. And I think any spectator would say, yep, of course. In the very next scene, which takes place, I know, a few years later, but really just one more minute in stage time, she comes on and her business is doing well. And the first thing she says is, I won't have anyone

spoiling my war for me. So we have something familiar. It's been made strange. And we as spectators are busy asking, what has happened? How do I reconcile that contradiction? So this idea of contradiction running through the drama is one of the things that is happening. But he also develops a whole set of approaches to making theatre that are busy working through that Marxist dialectic. Thank you. Tom, you may need to exile. First do Scandinavian in the USA. What, if anything, changed for him there? Everything changed.

1933 was a disaster. For Germany, obviously, as a whole, but for him very much personally. On the day after the Rice Tug fire, the 27th of February, 1933, he and his young family left Germany. He was worried for his own safety, with every justification. He was a wanted person. He was too notorious. He'd been anti-war.

He was a communist. He worked with Jews. He was married to a Jew. He was not the sort of person that the Nazis wanted. So he left the country and it was a complete caesar. It was a complete break with the experimental work that he'd had in Weimar, Berlin. He no longer had the audiences who were indulgent and interested in this sort of work. He no longer had the theatres and the infrastructure and the actors and the directors and everything else that the theatre needs. He lost all of that. And the language. He wasn't good at that. which is probably his Latin was best, but that wasn't that much use to him. And from that moment, he had to reconfigure what he was doing and how he was going to reach people and what sort of people he could reach.

So he stepped back to a certain extent from the extreme experimentalism of the last years in the Weimar Republic. And he started to think of more audience-friendly forms of theatre. And good came of this. After all, the famous plays, Mother Courage that we've already been talking. about Caucasian chalk circle, life of Galilea, they all fall in this period. And he had to move countries several times. In the 1930s he stayed in Denmark, but as soon as the, more or less, as soon as the war started, as German troops moved up through Scandinavia, he went first of all to Sweden and then to

Finland. And then eventually, really when there was scarcely any other option, went through Stalinist Russia right the way around the globe the wrong way, if you like. to Vladivostok and across the Pacific before he ended up in California. It was also pretty clear to him, despite his Marx's sympathies, that he wouldn't be very safe

and wouldn't be able to pursue his sort of literature under Stalin. Laura, as has been intimated, is output at that time. A plays we know about Mother Courage, the good person of Sichuan, grew, was enormous then. Why do you think that was,

and what effect did it have? I mean, Brett was writing there, you know, desperately keen, to reach a broad audience, but with his access to the stage kind of cut off, or at least very precarious. I mean, he even had a sign on his desk in exile listing the things that the Nazis had robbed him of, his home, his car and his audience. But I think you see Brecht trying to write in a more inclusive way, in the sense that there is no overt communist propaganda in plays like Mother Courage and the Life of Galileo. So there are no songs in praise of

communism anymore because Brecht doesn't have access any longer to that far left-wing audience that he had in Berlin. But is he retreating from the ideas or retreating from the idea that he can get this through as a proposition that will continue his career as a dramatist? He's not retreating from the ideas themselves. He's still writing plays that are underpinned by Marxist ideas that are underpinned by a Marxist analysis of society and with a clear. sense, I think, of how he thinks the world needs to change. But what he does is he explores

those ideas in settings that are removed from the present. So you mentioned Mother Courage, which is set in the 30 years war in the 17th century. He set another play, the good person of Zetsuan, in modern day China, but it's a parable play. It's a China where gods come down to earth from the skies. And in fact, when he was looking over these plays in his time in exile, He wrote in his journal about how they seemed to be shooting off in different directions, almost as if there had been some kind of cosmic explosion in the world of drama. But when you looked at the plays and at the principles that were underpinning them, you could see that they really were quite distinct from the works of other dramatists.

Tom, he was a prolific writer of Persian, and we were a pity to omit that from this discussion. What does he explore there? is there any general idea you can give us? Well, one thing that I'd like to get across in relation both to the poetry and the plays is variety. There is extraordinary variety in Brecht. Often when we come to a familiar writer again, we recognise the voice.

If you read a second work by Kafka or by Beckett or something, the great writers, but we recognise it immediately. If you were to read Baal and then the Threpanie opera and the measures taken and Life of Galilee, you wouldn't necessarily think they were by the same person. And the same is true of the poetry. He wrote poetry throughout his life.

An awful lot, yes, about 2,000 poems. Lots of writers who are adept in more than one genre, write poetry of their youth and then gradually drift into other forms. In his case, it's a constant, always there. And he does use it for more personal expressions, expressions of his own experience and his own thoughts about his situation. But he also writes communist marching. songs, and he also writes poems for children, and he writes love poetry, and he writes

historical poems. So there's a tremendous variety there as well. He does in his poems do some of the same things as in his plays, in that we see very often that plunge from one level to another. You've got an example of that? Yeah, I've got one little poem here that he wrote just on the eve of the Second World War. It's called Spring 1938. And in this, we do. You do. You do. You know, see that plunge in this case from the global to the personal and maybe back again. This is an emotional poem. The point is what we do with that emotion afterwards. Spring 1938. This morning, early Easter Sunday, there was a sudden snowstorm over the island. Snow lay in between the greening hedges. My young son fetched me out to a little apricot tree

against the wall of the house. Fetched me from a line of verse in which I was pointing the finger at men preparing a war in which the continent, this island, my people, my family and I, may be erased. In silence, we laid a sack over the freezing tree. Was that your translation, Tom?

Yes, it was. Laura, after the war, he went back to Berlin, to East Berlin with his wife. and founded a theatre company. Why did he go then? What sort of theatre company was it? Well, he said himself that the reason he went to East Berlin was because there people were willing to finance a theatre for him.

But obviously the move to East Berlin was also a political move. It was a move to try and help build this new socialist society, the one that he'd been hoping to see from the end of the Weimar Republic onwards. And for Brecht, it was a chance to build a company of like-minded, set designers, actors, directors, dramaturgs, and to develop a way of working in staging his own plays and also in interpreting works

from the classical heritage using his methods and to work consistently. And there are accounts by people who went on to be leading German theatre practitioners, filmmakers, of what it meant to them to watch the Bellioner Ensemble's productions for the first time. And they describe it as being absolutely revelatory.

So there's somebody who became one of Brecht's assistants, somebody called Egon Monk, and he says that when he watched Mother Courage in 1949, it was the very first time that he'd felt taken seriously at the theatre as a spectator because he wasn't being treated simply as a spectator, but as somebody who was a participant, a collaborator in making meaning of what they were watching on stage. David? Yeah, he tries to revolutionise the institution of what a theatre is, that in the late 1920s he was very critical of theatres.

He saw that, well, he writes this fantastic line, Teata, Tejata, Tejartat alas, Ayn. Theatre, theatres, everything into theatre. He says what he means by this, that in theatres that are just trying to sell tickets, you could introduce a play that was in some way a kind of foreign body, and the theatre had to deal with that in some way.

And he saw that as the theatre always neutralising, these plays. Anything sharp or angular is filed down and is made palatable. And that's what he means by theatre, theatres, everything into theatre. He wanted his theatre to be something quite different. And as a result, he wasn't focusing on productions as such. He was focusing on ways of working, ways of processing this material. And once they'd had their first night, it wasn't, let's say goodbye to that production and let it run. He would have his assistant. write arbent berichter evening reports they would have to say what was going on here did we notice something new did we notice something that had fallen into disrepair that as long as these works were

in the repertoire they were still ongoing concerns they could still be rethought restaged reconceptualized and so what we think of as a theatre that makes work and shows it was was not the way that he was thinking about the life of a production? And I think what really struck people watching his theatre for the first time was the clarity of what they were watching on stage. And if you think about the context in which people had been used to the pomp and the bombast of Nazi theatre, they walked into a theatre where the stage was bathed in bright light,

where that naturalist clutter that David was talking about earlier on had been swept away from the stage and that everything on stage carried meaning. and Brecht was directing the audience's attention to particular things. He was trying to create images on stage that would really stick in the spectator's mind so that the spectator could compare points in the action. And I think Mother Courage is a great example of that because if you look at the opening of that play,

the wagon comes on stage with Mother Courage on top of the wagon, in charge, at the peak of her strength. Her two sons are pulling the wagon. They're the labourers. She's living off their labour. her daughter is sitting on the wagon as a passenger not contributing productively to the business. This is a business we're seeing here. It's a capitalist business, but it's also a family. Contrast that with the closing image of the production, and you have Mother Courage on her own.

All three children have died because of the war, because of decisions that she's made. And the wagon is now thread bare, it's almost empty, and she's struggling to pull it because she's got so little strength left. and yet she still goes off in search of the next business opportunity because she still hasn't got the point that the way she's living her life is a dangerous one. Tom, has his reputation been challenged in any way, in any way successfully over the years? Well, maybe not so successfully. Challenged all the time, yes.

I mean, Brecht-bashing in some form is always in season, I think. for a start the common prejudice that anything by a German and by a communist must be terribly ponderous and dull whereas Brett is in fact

funny and quite light as a writer very often despite his serious purposes there was a period also in the 60s when he was more or less boycotted in Austria in particular

but in West Germany as well because of his association with communism I think as that recedes as a the Cold War recedes into history, that danger is perhaps passed. But I'm sure there are other threats as well. There was a book, well, it's actually about 30 years ago now,

which portrayed him as an exploiter of all the people he collaborated with and as two-faced and hypocritical in all sorts of ways. And of course, right-wing critics lap that up. But it's not really true. and it does pay scant respect to his collaborators who were strong men and women in their own right who made their own positive decisions to be involved in the project.

His work has survived all of that and if you look at the international performance statistics, production statistics, they're not exactly reliable, nobody really knows, especially since so much break goes on in schools and colleges and in third world countries as well.

but they show us a very positive picture. Brecht is still performed very widely, probably the second most performed playwright after Shakespeare, a long way after Shakespeare. Shakespeare's way up. But then come Brecht and maybe Ibsen more or less next to him. Laura? Part of the problem is that we've become so familiar with the look of some of Brecht's methods. And I think where problems tend to creep into productions is if directors are imitating, the look of certain elements, so using captions before scenes or a Brechtian half curtain.

And when those things were first used in Brecht's productions, they were radical. People weren't expecting them. And that really made people watch and think differently and think about why these devices were being used. And if you just imitate the look of those devices without thinking about their purpose and what they're there to do to an audience, then they're unlikely to have the same effect. Finally, David. Well, what I think is the enduring legacy of Brecht is that in all of his plays after his exposure to Marxism, he invites the audience to see the world dialectically. And that is one that is predicated on change and it's inviting people to watch the plays and to take that way of looking at the world back into their own lives and say, do you know what?

I think I can see a contradiction there. And if I see that contradiction, then maybe if I get enough people to think about this as well, we might be able to change it because contradictions are only changed by human activity. And so that idea that he is trying to refashion consciousness through his play. So to invite you to see the world with very different eyes

is perhaps the most powerful legacy that he leaves us in the theatre. Well, thank all of you very much indeed. Thanks, David Barnett, Laura Bradley and Tom Coon and our studio engineer Emma Hath. Next week, it's Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, and the spacecraft sent to reveal its secrets. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What didn't you say you'd like to have said? Go to the theatre and listen and watch, watch Brecht, as David has already seen,

said his works aren't dependent on his theoretical apparatus. And you should always start from the plays that he wrote, from the texts themselves, read Brecht and enjoy Brecht, and then let that be a way into thinking about how this might actually work. Don't start with a sort of heavy burden of politics and theory. That's what I would say. Yeah, and I think because Brecht's often sort of as somebody with a theory, but actually he had lots of theories.

And writing theory was something that came terribly naturally to him and was something that kind of went hand in hand with his practice. So some of his key theories were actually written in response to particular things he tried out in rehearsals or in productions or in responses to his plays and productions by the critics. And I think one thing we haven't talked about really is how important trying out his plays on stage was for him in the development of the plays themselves. So if you look at the German edition of his plays, then there are often multiple versions of one and the same text.

And that's one of the great things about that German edition is that it lets these different editions stand in parallel to each other, alongside each other. And there's a great moment in exile when he says, I can't really finish a play in these circumstances, and then he quotes the English saying, the proof of the pudding, dot, dot. He was very fond of that saying. I guess what I'd like to throw in is what Brechtian means or might mean in the theatre

because you'll find in so many reviews that was really Brechtian and I read it and I think oh my God that's got nothing to do with that. I mean I would say that Brechtian you could define quite simply as the dialectical interrogation of dramatic material. That if you treat that material on stage dialectically then you are engaging with Brechtian theatre and that's what I think offers a really great window into the future that what happens if you stage three sisters dialectically? That is Brecht allowing us to see a work in a totally different way. How can we open things up? I've directed my own version of the Crucible through the Brechtian

lens that absolutely latches onto the contradictions of John Proctor in that play who on the one hand, Yeah, he's the only one who's saying, this is a sham, this is a witch trial, this is none of it's real. But he does that on the back of his huge privileges as a man and a landowner. And our version of The Crucible was one unlike I've seen staged where everyone's always with Proctor. I mean, there's this horrible line in the final bit where his wife says, do you know what, it was right that you cheated on me because I'm so plain and ugly. And you can't deliver that line straight. It's a disgusting line.

So you can start setting things up like that as, this is what you want me to say to let you off the hook, isn't it, Proctor? And he gets really angry when she says that. Whereas in a conventional piece, it would be, oh, I'm glad you said that sort of thing. So I think Brecht gives us this really useful way into staging material that will give it a completely different interpretation. He says in his own work in buying brass, he says you should treat the realism of the plays as seriously as possible

and treat the playwright as likely as possible. And I think that's a good formula to... Is that never trust a tell or trust the tale? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. But then thinking about the contradictions in Brecht's works, even from the very first German edition that he published of his works, he called it the Fazouche, which translates,

as experiments. And the radical thing about that edition is that each volume contained a whole series of different works. So there might be an opera libretto in there, there might be a play, there might be some poetry, there might be an essay on a production that Brecht had tried out. And that title experiments really showcased the fact that this was an open-ended experimental process. Brecht wasn't sort of saying these are the complete works of Brecht, Volume 1.

He was presenting his work as being something much more open than that. David, how much did these plays, Mother Courage, you could be Cheshire, the Galilei, how did they come out of his own experience? Did it come out of his own experience? Or did you think, oh, that's a good idea, I'll have a go at that? It's a little hard to say. You could see Life of Galileo as being quite an autobiographical play

with himself as Galileo, making these brave new discoveries in the world of theatre rather than the world of cosmology and physics. And the kind of compromises that he had to make in the way that Galileo recants his central cosmological theories, that Brecht also had to make some compromises too. The resistible rise of Arturo Ui is this allegory of the rise of Hitler, so the source of that is very direct.

But mother courage too. The places where her three children come from, these allegorical relationships. One is Swiss. There's this sense of the Swiss you've got to get involved in this war. You can't be neutral. So even something that's set in the 30 years war is still very much rooted in the present. So there are definite strains of what's going on there. And the good person of Set Swan is really about you can't be a good person under capitalism. As he went on, as he got older, his commitment to communism, Ebb. No.

No, his criticism of some of the things that were going on within communism becomes more and more acute, I think, first of all, under Stalin, but then also when he's living in the GDR, he says he's living in a country of bureaucrats and they've lost sight of what they should really be doing. But that doesn't mean that he's not still interested in the political ideals. He's motivated from the outset, even before he discovers communism, he's motivated by a strong sense that there is social injustice and that we can do something about it. David.

I think the last recorded thing he says, which was reported to us by one of his assistants, Montred Vekvert, in the month of his death, August, Vekfurt said, Brecht, what does the theatre of the future look like? And he says, as if shooting back from the hip, he said, the measures taken. What did you mean by that? His works like Mother Courage and the like were a sort of a compromise, that they weren't as radical, they were being played, but really, if you want

theatre in its most radical form in a communist country, the measures taken was the form of play that they should have been putting on, which is ironic because he actually banned it at the same time because it was so controversial. But then I think it's always worth remembering that for all his support for communism, Brecht never actually joined the party. So he always retained his freedom to be able to criticise. He was never willing to submit to the party line to compel himself as a party member to do that. Yes, he was an orthodox Marxist. And the GDR was a small country with a relatively small elite.

They all knew each other, the political and social elite. And at the beginning, Brecht felt he could have a real influence, not just on cultural politics necessarily, but on the politics of the whole country. He turned out to be deluding himself in that, but that's definitely what he thought. Did he ever have a real influence on politics? Yes.

David. In terms of cultural policy, he did. He was a founding member of the East German Academy of the Arts. And as a result, I mean, there's this big Stalinist period that goes up until the workers' uprising of 1953. But in the thought after that, the things that he achieved,

as a member of the academy in getting rid of the Stalinist, the Stacucco, the state cultural commission for the arts, which was an absolutely awful body. He was instrumental in the founding of a Ministry of Culture that was far broader church. That's probably his biggest cultural achievement. It wasn't single-handed, but he helped to muster the forces to get rid of the Stacuco.

and to try establishing that. So in cultural policy, he did have some victories. But I think it's also worth remembering sort of the contradictions in Brett's own position in the GDR, because on the one hand, he's head of this flagship theatre company, receiving large amounts of money for his long rehearsal periods, being celebrated abroad. And at the same time, he knew that there were many people in the regime

who regarded it in with extreme suspicion. there were attempts to ensure that his theatre was not seen as the future because of the epic techniques, the distancing devices that he used, that wasn't the sort of aesthetic that the regime wanted. And there were so many people who thought that Brecht had made all of the wrong political choices throughout his career from not getting involved in the revolution at the end of the First World War through to spending his exile in the United States

rather than in the Soviet Union. Tom. One might perhaps object that literature never changes the world. world, but it may inspire people who go on to change the world. And I think it's probably fair to say that Brecht has done as much to do that as almost any other writer. I wouldn't, perhaps now look so much to Europe as to South America, where Brecht has been very important to left-wing movements. The Indian subcontinent, they've been really significant. This is a hard time to talk about it, but there have been really significant productions of Brecht in Palestine as well

and in the Far East. And everywhere he's a rallying cry against oppression and for the underdog. He sees himself as a student of change, if you like. He writes plays about moments of historical change and he tries to understand how they may work and he tries to give us the instruments to think that we could change our own world as well. And to come back to the measures taken, the last words are change the world. It needs it. And I think there are very few people who think that we live in the best of all possible worlds

and it doesn't need a bit of change. So you three of you see Brecht's work flourishing in one region or another? Yes and no. The thing is that Brecht's work, we can stage Brecht's work. I remember the first Mother Courage I saw and outside the theatre it said, a wonderfully unbrechtian mother courage,

because he didn't quite build his plays in such a way that they allowed his ideas to be staged as he envisaged them. And as a result, you know, a lot of Brecht that you will see in Britain isn't performed in the way that he, you know, might have approved because it isn't digging out the contradictions, that the directors aren't engaged, with contradiction as a dynamic force within the works. And in a way, this is to do with our own theatre system

because rehearsals are usually four weeks long. You've got actors employed who bring their usual sort of naturalist or realist approach to performance, and you don't get that articulation of contradiction on stage. And so the fact that Brecht is staged is possibly a good thing. But if it's not one that is focused on the, contradictions and giving the audience that hard work to do to follow. As Laura said earlier, Brecht is a theatre of signification.

It's not a theatre of being. So in naturalism, the actor is that character. In Brecht's theatre, the actors are always signifying relationships and behaviours and those sort of things, and that's not something you see on the British stage terribly often. Laura? So sometimes we need to change the techniques that we're using in order to achieve the sorts of ends that Brecht was going for. This is what's so great about Brecht's theories of theatre.

He never tells you how to do it. He tells you what the ends should be, but he rarely gives you the means to achieve them. And that's why this idea of sort of imitating what people have seen is so bankrupt that you have to find your own ways. You have to develop means that are appropriate to your theatre, to your society, where you are in space and time effectively. And Brecht doesn't give you very much, he doesn't tell you how to train an actor,

but he tells you what an actor should be doing. So as a director and as an ensemble, you should be teasing away these ideas of, we can see what the ends are, how do we get there? But in British theatre, there's not the time to do that kind of work. John? What I enjoy most about working with Brecht is, that you have the sensational ways of rubbing up against a very varied, multifarious intelligence.

He can be frustratingly elusive. He shifts his ground with ease in an absolutely infuriating way from time to time. But he's a clever man, and he doesn't try to be a systematic thinker, but he gives us little fragments of ideas which continue to be stimulating in all sorts of different ways. And that's what I have found most exciting

about working on him. Do you think he achieved what he set out to achieve at the beginning to change the way theatre was constructed, was received, was practised? Yeah. Well, to an extent, yes, I would say that. I mean, that's an ambitious ambition. It's asking a lot of oneself, isn't it? But I would say, in the German tradition, there's no question, but that plays and poems are written differently after Brecht. outside the German tradition, I would say that after Brecht and Beckett, two poles perhaps of the modern dramatic experience, Beckett with his stark existential fables,

and Brecht very committed to meaning, unlike Beckett, and to social reality, after those two, the theatre never really looks the same again. I think that's absolutely, I completely agree with that. It's very good to bring them two together, they yoke them together like that. Anything else? Damien?

Yeah, on this question of influence, I think there are lots of playwrights, again, sort of in the German tradition, but also beyond that, who have really taken up what he was doing. I mean, one of my favourites, well, it's not even a recent play, but Dunsonain by David Gregg,

is this sequel to Macbeth. And it is so full of open dialectics. It doesn't settle anywhere. It's a fantastic piece of post-Brestian theatre that has been written outside of the German world. It's a fantastic piece that never allows you to rest or settle because its dialectics, its contradictions are so open. Well, the man himself, Simon Tillerson, is about to enter.

Would anyone like to your coffee? Yeah, I've been drinking tea, haven't I? I'll have another cup of tea, but anybody else. I'll have a cup of tea, please. I wouldn't mind water. Water. Two, great, thank you. Three teas and water.

Thank you very much. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios audio production. I'm Kavita Puri, and in 3 million from BBC Radio 4, I hear extraordinary eyewitness accounts that tell the story for the first time of the Bengal famine which happened in British India in the middle of the Second World War.

At least 3 million people died. It's one of the largest losses of civilian life on the Allied side and there isn't a museum, a memorial, or even a plaque to those who died. How can the memory of 3 million people just disappear? 80 years on, I tracked down first-hand accounts and make new discoveries and hear remarkable stories and explore why remembrance is so complicated in Britain, India and Bangladesh. Listen to 3 million on BBC Sounds.